352
STEPHEN SPENDER
There is that deluge of spermatozoa, condoms, obscenity, and hilari–
ousness which wells up from the
Urspntngen
of Henry Miller but
branches later into Norman Mailer's New York orgasmic journalism,
the obsessive homosexual manhunts of John Rechy's fictional re–
portage, and the crammed, stuffed, claustrophobic sadism of
Last
Exit to Brooklyn.
It
might be objected that a great deal of poetry is just the op–
posite of this, being subjective and private. It is true that certain
American poets, for example W. S. Merwin and James Merrill, pre–
serve a quite aristocratic distinction and sense of privacy in their
work, in which they also show strong European influences. But the
nation, with all its junk and automobiles, pours through the most
characteristic American verse. I take down a volume from my shelves
and read this by Philip Levine - material of a kind which flows
through the work in poetry magazines. It is dated
Detroit,
1968:
A winter Tuesday, the city pouring fire,
Ford Rouge sulfurs the sun, Cadillac, Lincoln,
Chevy gray. The fat stacks
of breweries hold their tongues. Rags,
papers,
hands, the stems of birches
dil'tied with
WOI1ds.
But surely the so-called confessional poetry of Robert Lowell,
Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and
others is private? Not really. In the first place the material of these
confessions is often of a clinical, psychiatric, or divorce case and there–
fore essentially public kind. Secondly, one theme running through the
confessions of these poets is: "Look, this is what America's done to
me. Driven me round the bend. Driven me to suicide." Confessional
poetry represents the democratization of the personal and private,
and often the psychotic, inner life. In this it is not religious, nor sub–
jective, but case book material.
* * *
Henry James wrote that the Americans were the most self-con–
scious people in the world. A hundred years ago this meant con–
sciousness not only of being American, but of not being European. It
was in the 1920s that the writers of the "lost generation" experienced
the inescapability of the fate of being American. The nation was the
Eumenides to which they were the pursued Orestes unable ever to
