“Hold Your Cerebral Mission”: Retrospection and the Panoptic “I” in the Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Frequently credited as the poet who inaugurated the “confessional” tradition in American poetry, W. D. Snodgrass’ place in the literary scene rests largely on this reputation. Admittedly, so does the criticism – most scholarly work on Snodgrass centers on the early period of his poetic career, especially his first poetry collection, Heart’s Needle (1959), which was dedicated to his daughter after the poet’s divorce from his first wife. The aim of this analysis, however, is to move beyond the laurels of poet’s strictly “confessional” beginnings and instead highlight the complexities inherent in Snodgrass’ lyricism, the ones that continually render his “confessional” rhetoric a highly nuanced and crafted mode of self-expression. Focusing on his 1993 poetry collection Each in His Season, this analysis examines the tensions between memory and retrospection on the one hand, and on the other, the constructed nature of the poetic “I” and the persona that both emerges through and represents the experience that is being articulated. It argues that in Snodgrass’ indisputably personal poetry, the persona can be read as functioning similarly to Jacques Derrida’s conceptualization of parergon – that is, an element that, both belonging to and standing apart from the work, frames the poem’s meaning, blurring the line between authentic, lived experience and its representation. “ I also draw on Michel Foucault’s concepts of panopticism and the panoptic gaze to show how the lyric "I" in Snodgrass’ poetry emerges through self-conscious observation, performance under imagined scrutiny, and the paradoxical tension between exposure and concealment. |
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