WD Snodgrass

William De Witt "WD" Snodgrass (born January 5, 1926 in Wilkinsburg , Pennsylvania , † January 13, 2009 in Erieville , New York ) was an American literary scholar , university professor and poet whose works shaped the Confessional Poetry that was created by the Confessional Movement , an interdenominational evangelical movement within mainline churches led by Thomas C. Oden , and which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Heart's Needle (1959) .

Life

Studies and university professor

Snodgrass, who grew up in Beaver Falls , studied at Geneva College after attending school before he was drafted into military service in the US Navy and served as a clerk in the Pacific War. After the end of World War II , he studied drama at the University of Iowa . However, after he discovered that the stage works he wrote during his studies were "lousy" in the opinion of the lecturers , he switched to courses in creative writing . After he obtained a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1949 , he received a Master of Arts (MA) in 1951 . At the time, Iowa had the first national university offering in the subject, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, with faculty including Robert Lowell , John Berryman , Randall Jarrell, and Paul Engle . Among the students of Snodgrass were Philip Levine , Robert Bly and Donald Justice . In 1953 he received a Master of Fine Arts (MFA).

After completing his studies, he took over a professorship at Cornell University in 1955 and then in 1957 at the University of Rochester , before he was professor at Wayne State University from 1958 to 1968 .

Heart's Needle and its influence on Confessional Poetry

Share his main work Heart's Needle was in 1957 in the pioneering anthology New Poets of England and America and the edited manuscript by Gertrude Buckman , widow of Delmore Schwartz passed to Robert Lowell, the further publication of the work at the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. initiated. To what extent the work of Snodgrass influenced Lowell's poetry collection Life Studies is unknown, but the importance of the two works led to Snodgrass receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Heart's Needle in 1960 , while Lowell's Life Studies was honored with the National Book Award in the poetry category has been. Heart's Needle was a direct story of his own life, most notably the loss of his daughter to a tough battle for custody of the first of his four wives. The poem that gave the collection its name showed most of its poetic scope and power.

With this work he had a decisive influence on Confessional Poetry , which was brought about by the Confessional Movement , a cross-denominational evangelical movement within the mainline churches led by Thomas C. Oden. Although the literary critic M. L. Rosenthal concentrated in his essay , which coined the term Confessional Poetry , on the Life Studies published by Lowell in 1959 , the work Heart's Needle , published at the same time by Snodgrass, was the cornerstone for this literary style of American poetry.

Through the Confessional Poetry the “ strictures ” of TS Eliot were shaken free and a “new poetry” was created to face the repression in the USA in the 1950s. The literary critic ML Rosenthal described this as “removing the author's mask and revealing a series of personal confidences, rather shameful that one is bound by his honor not to reveal himself” (' removing of the authorial mask and revealing a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal ').

His own ability to use formal structures influenced poets like Peter Porter , while later confessional poetry authors like Theodore Roethke , Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton wrote in less formal styles. This ultimately led to the formality being changed by the Beat Generation writers and "projective verse", while the denominational poets' free verse became the original style of the burgeoning academic creative writing industry, its quality less poetic virtuosity than emotional honesty of its revelations defined.

Teaching activities and late works

In 1968 he took over a professorship at Syracuse University and taught there until 1977. In 1977 his most controversial work The Führer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress , a cycle of poems that tells of people during the final phase of the Third Reich . One reviewer said he went too far. In 1978 he wrote an adaptation as a play that was played off-Broadway in 1981 .

Most recently he was professor at the University of Delaware from 1979 to 1994 . Even after his retirement he continued to work as an author and, in addition to 20 volumes of poetry, he also wrote the three books of eclectic criticism In Radical Pursuit (1975), De / Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong (2001) and To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry ( 2002) as well as six volumes with translations such as Gallows Songs (1967), a collection of Christian Morgenstern's gallows songs .

In 1972, Snodgrass was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2002 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Publications

• Heart's needle , 1959
• After experience , 1968
• Syracuse poems, 1969 , 1969
• Remains , 1970
• In radical pursuit: critical essays and lectures , 1975
• The Führer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress , 1977
• If birds build with your hair , 1979
• The boy made of meat , 1983
• Six Minnesinger Songs (Burning Deck Poetry Series) , 1983
• DD Byrde Calling Jennie Wrenn , 1984
• Heinrich Himmler , 1985
• The kinder capers , 1986
• Selected Poems 1957-1987 , 1987
• The midnight carnival , 1988
• WD's midnight carnival , 1988
• WD Snograss, an Interview (Contemporaries) , 1989
• The death of Cock Robin , 1989
• Each in his season , 1993
• The Führer Bunker: The Complete Cycle , 1995
• WD Snodgrass in conversation with Philip Hoy , 1998
• Selected Translations (New American Translations, No 10) , 1998
• After-images , 1999
• De / compositions , 2001
• To Sound Like Yourself , 2002
• Not for specialists , 2006

Background literature

• William White: WD Snodgrass: A Bibliography , Wayne State University Library, 1960
• Paul L. Gaston: WD Snodgrass , Boston: Twayne, 1978
• Stephen H. Haven: The Poetry of WD Snodgrass: Everything Human , University of Michigan Press, 1993
• Philip Raisor: Tuned and under Tension: The Recent Poetry of WD Snodgrass , University of Delaware Press, 1998

Web links

• WD Snodgrass in the nndb (English)
• WD Snodgrass: American poet whose works lay at the heart of the confessional movement . In: The Guardian, January 30, 2009
• Publications (openliobrary)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Quoted from Michael Carlson: WD Snodgrass . In: The Guardian , January 30, 2009. Retrieved May 17, 2015.
2. ↑ Members: WD Snodgrass. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 27, 2019 .