Snarled in my own mesh”: Radical Remembering and Inward Descent in W. D. Snodgrass’ The Fuehrer Bunker
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The topic of individual, subjective memory and experience has been one of the central concerns of poets since time immemorial. It is, however, the enterprise and eventually legacy of those belonging to the so-called “confessional” tradition that radicalized the discourse to the degree which culminated in what one of the tradition’s “founding fathers” Robert Lowell referred to as “huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience.” For as much as personal experience was the principal subject matter, W. D. Snodgrass introduced a new dimension to the practice when he started working on the cycle of poems called The Fuehrer Bunker, deviating from the confessional etiquette. With its completion taking the poet 35 years, the collection consists of dramatic monologues spoken by Hitler and his closest associates before their final surrender ending the World War II. The aim of my paper is to consider this collection—informed by and undoubtedly speaking to the aspect of the collective (past, memory, responsibility…)—through a lens that brings the reader into closer proximity with the problem. Thus, centering on the concept and the physical site of the bunker in the collection, the analysis views the descent there in a more intricate way as the descent into one’s personal history, in which process one is to face and come to terms with “the good, the bad and the ugly” both the route and the destination might uncover. In this study, Snodgrass’ choice to jolt the discourse and (re)sensitize the reader is apprehended as the antidote to the risks of historical amnesia in the “permanent present” (in E. Hobsbawm’s words) as well as an incentive and means for deeper self-reflection, with one’s personal integrity put under scrutiny against the canvas of the collective. |
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