The awesome rowing towards God

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The reverent rowing towards God ( English original title The Awful Rowing Toward God ) is a book of poetry by the American writer Anne Sexton . He was released in March 1975 posthumously published by Houghton Mifflin and in German translation for the first time in 1998 in the publishing house S. Fischer .

background

The reverent rowing to God is dedicated to fellow poet James Wright and monk Dennis Farrell, with whom Anne Sexton had an intensive correspondence in the 1960s. The poems contained had previously been published in the magazines American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Ms., The New Republic , The Paris Review and The New Yorker . The poems are preceded by quotes from Henry David Thoreau , Søren Kierkegaard and William Butler Yeats . A poem also bears the title of a treatise by Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death , in German The disease to death .

Sexton, representative of Confessional Poetry , also addressed intimate, biographical details, including suicide attempts and stays in psychiatry, in this volume, the last that she personally put together. The poems were written during a period of severe mood swings, accompanied by excessive alcohol consumption and repeated attempted suicide. Immediately after correcting the proofs , she committed suicide at the age of 46.

While Diana Hume George gives “less than three weeks” as the period of origin, in the words of Anne Sexton's daughter Linda Gray Sexton, working on the volume of poetry took her entire last year of life.

The title of the book refers to the search for or the longed-for encounter with God. The first poem, Rowing (Rowing) describes rowing toward God, which they last poem of the band, The Rowing endeth (Rowing ends) , finally met and ending with a common liberating laughter.

content

  • Rowing
  • The Civil War
  • The Children
  • Two hands
  • The Room of My Life
  • The Witch's Life
  • The Earth Falls Down
  • courage
  • Riding the Elevator Into the Sky
  • When Man Enters Woman
  • The Fish That Walked
  • The Fallen Angels
  • The Earth
  • After Auschwitz
  • The Poet of Ignorance
  • The Sermon of the Twelve Acknowledgments
  • The Evil Eye
  • The Dead Heart
  • The Play
  • The Sickness Unto Death
  • Locked Doors
  • The Evil Seekers
  • The Wall
  • Is It True?
  • Welcome morning
  • Jesus, the Actor, Plays the Holy Ghost
  • The God-Monger
  • What the Bird with the Human Head Knew
  • The Fire Thief
  • The Big Heart
  • Words
  • Mothers
  • Doctors
  • Frenzy
  • Snow
  • Small wire
  • The Saints Come Marching In
  • Not So. Not So.
  • The Rowing Endeth

analysis

The continuous in free verse ( free verse ) written poems share to "positive and hopeful" in and those "about failure, disappointment and frustration": "As a rowing motion commute the poems back and forth, from possibility to check, from hope to Disappointment, ”said R. Baird Shuman in Great American Writers: Twentieth Century . All are religious in the broadest sense: "They are poems of struggle, resistance and outcry, but they represent a search for God." (Shuman) Ruth Whitman specified: "The God she seeks is clearly the symbol for that what it is not itself: health, oneness, the opposite of the "rat" that frequently haunted her poems. "

Richard Morton went so far as to interpret Sexton's poetry as one of “redemption” and “conversion”, a view that Philip McGowan strongly opposed: the “difficult and desolate movement of her verses” would contradict Morton's “one-dimensional” reading. The Death Notebooks (1974) and The Awesome Rowing Towards God show sexton in an area that questions the meaning of the word salvation. In the case of Sexton, McGowan also denied Wallace Stevens ' view that after turning away from belief in God, poetry could take a position as a redeeming moment in life, because the author was dealing with both the possibilities of language and the possibility of a divine principle .

Diana Hume George interpreted The reverent rowing towards God in a feminist context as "surrender" to the "little god of an orthodox religious wishful thinking" and thus as the willingness to be satisfied with less demands than those in Sexton's earlier books: The Voice of a Woman transform into a "female petition".

Reviews

Sexton's first volume of poetry, published after her death, met with a divided response. William Heyen, who had long believed he had noticed a decline in energy and intensity in Sexton's poems, wrote in Newsday that the book was "legible and often touching, but not very good [...] it has a certain blurring and haste." The New Leader remarked to Pearl K. Bell that the book was “sad to read, not only because the poems are pervaded by the self-destruction that formed their terrible finale, but, as heartbreaking as they may be, they are no longer mediocre. [...] Her pictures are stale and flat, her words are not chosen but shouted out [...] The evil in the world that lies beyond her agonizing self-centeredness that she laments takes on the peepshow vulgarity of a horror film ”.

Joyce Carol Oates, on the other hand, attested the poems a "grandiose, unforgettable power", even if some of them are "almost too painful to read". One could dismiss Sexton “as sick and their poetry as the product of a pathological- egocentric imagination” or put forward the “daring thesis” that “poets like Sexton, Plath and John Berryman deal with the collective (and not just individual) diseases of ours with agonizing accuracy Assume time ”. Ruth Whitman praised the "richness of her images" and the inventiveness of her metaphors in Harvard Magazine , even if some of the poems testified to "negligence and redundancy".

In spite of his reservations about Sexton's style, the poet and essayist Ben Howard emphasized her significant position in modern American literature: “It reduces its once elegant style to the bare, crude essentials. Whatever one thinks of these poems, it would be unwise to underestimate their importance. […] They are […] a sea of ​​shards scattered around a shattered windshield. Given its radicalism, the question arises where American poetry has been in the past decade and where it is headed. "

expenditure

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Linda Gray Sexton, Lois Ames (Ed.): Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin, New York 2004, p. 124.
  2. ↑ a b Linda Gray Sexton: Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton. Counterpoint, Berkeley 2011, pp. 177-184. (German: In search of my mother, Anne Sexton. Fischer, Frankfurt / Main 1997.)
  3. ↑ Lorna Sage (Ed.): The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English. Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 571.
  4. ^ Diana Hume George (ed.): Sexton: Selected Criticism. University of Illinois, 1988, ISBN 978-0-252-01552-6 . Online on Modern American Poetry, accessed January 11, 2013.
  5. ^ "Indeed, several of the poems in The Awful Rowing Toward God seem positive and hopeful in tone, although they are balanced by poems of failure, disappointment, and frustration. Like the movement of oars, the poems go back and forth from possibility to setback, from hope to disappointment. […] However, there is no question that the poems contained in The Awful Rowing Toward God are, in the broadest sense, religious poetry They are poems of struggle, opposition, and outcry, but they represent a search for God. "- R Baird Shuman (Ed.): Great American Writers: Twentieth Century. Marshall Cavendish Corp., 2002, p. 1373.
  6. ↑ "Clearly, the God she is searching for is the symbol to her of what she is not: health, wholeness, the opposite of the rat — which [...] has haunted much of her poetry [...]" - Ruth Whitman in Harvard Magazine, July / August 1975.
  7. ↑ "As Stevens indicates in" Adagio, "" [a] fter one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence that takes its place as life's redemption. " [...] Sexton's debate with the possibilities of language is at levels played out as an encounter with the possibility of the divine, and the Christian God-centered nature of the last two collections, The Death Notebooks (1974) and the posthumously published The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), discover Sexton in territory that questions the very meaning of redemption. The difficult and bleak movements of these verses operate in opposition to Richard Morton's reading of Sexton's writing as partaking in "the conversion narrative ... the principal American literary enterprise." Morton's chronological and one-dimensional readings of Sexton's collections collapses any perception of the deeply traumatic encounter with both the possibility of the Absolute and with language that is a mark of Middle Generation writers such as Sexton and Berryman. "- Philip McGowan: Anne Sexton and Middle Generation Poetry: The Geography of Grief. Greenwood Publishing, 2004, ISBN 978-0-313-31514-5 , p. 11; Wallace Stevens: Adagia , in: Opus Posrhumous. Faber and Faber, London 1989, p. 185; Richard E. Morton: Anne Sexton's Poetry of Redemption: The Chronology of a Pilgrimage. The Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, Lampeter and Queenston, 1988, p. 7.
  8. ^ "In thematic and tonal terms the project is less ambitious. The voice is increasingly desperate, ready to settle for less than the demands she made upon the deities or the cosmos in previous volumes. The collection ends with a capitulation to the imaginatively small God of an orthodox religious hope. In feminist terms the female voice of rebirth and transformation turns into the conservative voice of feminine supplication. "- Diana Hume George (Ed.): Sexton: Selected Criticism. University of Illinois, 1988, ISBN 978-0-252-01552-6 .
  9. ↑ "[...] readable and often touching, but it's not very good. […] There's a certain blur and rush to this book […] "- William Heyen: Holy Whispers beside the Grave , Newsday of March 23, 1975, p. 16, p. 20.
  10. ^ "The Awful Rowing Toward God [...] is sad reading, not only because the poems are haunted by the self-destruction that was to be their terrible climax, but because, however rending as cries of pain, they are never more than mediocre . [...] Her images are stale and flat, the words screamed, not chosen. The evil she decries in the world beyond her anguished solipsism turns into the peep show vulgarity of a horror movie […] ”- Pearl K. Bell in The New Leader, May 26, 1975.
  11. ↑ "The Awful Rowing Toward God" contains poems of superb, unforgettable power […] while some are almost too painful to read […] Anne Sexton, then, can be dismissed as "sick" and her poetry dismissed as the outpouring of a pathologically egocentric imagination — unless one is willing to make the risky claim, which will not be a popular one, that poets like Sexton, Plath, and John Berryman have dealt in excruciating detail with collective (and not merely individual) pathologies of our time. - Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Times Book Review, March 23, 1975.
  12. ↑ "[...] a richness of imagery tumbles off her tongue [...] she has always been astonishing and inventive in her use of metaphor. [...] There are poems, such as "Is It True ?," where one wishes the poet could have stopped and revised; there are poems full of carelessness and redundancy. ”- Ruth Whitman in Harvard Magazine, July / August 1975.
  13. ↑ "[...] she reduces a once-graceful style to its barest, crudest essentials. Whatever one might think of these poems, it would seem unwise to underestimate their importance. [...] they are a form of evidence: a field of glass around a shattered windshield. In their extremity they prompt the question of where American poetry has been during the past decade, and where it might be heading. "- Ben Howard: Shattered Glass, in Poetry, February 1976, pp. 286-292.