Robert Lowell’s influence has been pervasive. Two features of his writing, in particular, have been widely adopted and adapted: photographic imagery and the practice of quoting. Lowell’s photographic realism is the central trope in his autobiographical writing, and it became a lingua franca of the confessional and post-confessional poem in general. The influence appears in such later poets as Sylvia Plath, Robert Hayden, Li-Young Lee, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, and Frank Bidart. Lowell’s practice of inserting quoted texts and conversational tidbits by others within his own imaginative structures is a second highly influential feature of his writing. His method of sampling influenced or aligns with the work of such later poets as Bidart, Henri Cole, and Claudia Rankine. Lowell’s use of mimetic repetition (the photograph, the quote) continue to resonate in the way we write poetry and read it.

Bishop recurrently returned to the topic of Cold War politics under the pressure of public events, her life experiences, and her reading in political theory. “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” initiated what might be termed her Cold War poetics, in which her poems both reflected and resisted the political discourse of containment culture. Bishop deployed her complexly entangled poetics in such later poems as “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” “The Armadillo,” “12 O’Clock News,” “A Baby Found in the Garbage,” “Pink Dog” and “Exchanging Hats.” Employing a rhetoric of irony, and at times of confession, she obliquely critiqued US foreign policy, patriarchy, militarism, racial and class hierarchy, gender containment, and sexual heteronormativity

Steven Gould Axelrod

LOWELL'S TEXTUAL SELF-MANIFESTATIONS are remarkable for their gender and sexual fluidity and their entanglement in the complexities of ethnic, racial, and class identity. The “I” repeatedly desires to be someone else, to identify as, or be associated with, a member of a less pre-ordained, less privileged collective. We can see these social projects microcosmically represented in the skunk that takes over the ending of Lowell's bestknown poem, “Skunk Hour”:

The mother skunk concludes the anxiety-ridden Life Studies volume of 1959 as an image of aggressive, if also comic, defiance. She is the speaker's ego ideal, a hopeful image of the speaker himself in the act of surviving and prevailing.

Significantly, the skunk is a female—one whose maternity is paired with a “female masculinity” (she marches, jabs, and will not scare). The image culminates not only Lowell's recurrent trans-species identifications in this volume (associating his textual immanence with a whale, a seal, a cock, a polar bear, a worm, a bird, an elephant, a fox, and a sheep), but also his persistent suggestions of transgender powers and desires. The boy who “wished I were an older girl,” who functioned as “Agrippina / in the Golden House of Nero,” and who “cuddled like a paramour” in his grandfather's bed has evolved into an adult who can change his daughter “to a boy” by the way he dresses her and who finds his own specular image in a “mother skunk.”

Lowell's poetic texts demonstrate an eagerness to complicate sexual identity as well as gender. The speaker's subject position drifts away from normativity without warning. Despite his apparently respectable social position, he is “part criminal,” as he admits.5 Beyond cuddling with his grandfather “like a paramour,” his younger self gossips with his mother about his father “with unadulterated joy,” the adjective barely suppressing its hint of adultery through Freudian negation. Even his elegy for his father, ironically titled “Commander Lowell,” begins with an extended representation of his strong-willed mother, herself an example of female masculinity, before moving reluctantly to his weak-willed father who is notable mainly for singing “Anchors Aweigh” in the bathtub and squandering his inheritance through disastrous investments.

Sylvia Plath’s torture texts are the eye of the needle though which pass various chronological and tropological threads: World War II and the ‘war on terror’, political trauma and familial abuse. In order to expose the presence of those threads in some of Plath’s most intense poems, I begin this essay in the post-9/11 era and move backwards to World War II, situating Plath’s Cold War texts, especially ‘The Jailer’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’, between the two. My examination suggests that Plath’s poems echo and swerve from the World War II torture texts that inspired them, set guidelines for interpreting the renewed torture discourse of the twenty-first century and crucially connect the representation of torture to that of domesticity.

The attacks of 9/11 precipitated in the United States an era of torture. The zeitgeist propelled a new ruthlessness. It was not so much that Christianity was endangered as that our masculinity was on trial – female masculinity as well as male, as we see in the case of Lynndie England and other women soldiers convicted of abuse at Abu Ghraib. We did not want to be ‘pansies’ or sitting ducks. We fought aggression with torture, or perhaps we decided that the shock of 9/11 permitted us to explore for ourselves what Dick Cheney famously called ‘the dark side’.

Sylvia Plath produced one of the most riveting poetic oeuvres in English. Her poems reveal a perspective and a language use that are utterly unique. Yet they are also related to the Renaissance, Romantic, modernist and Cold War rhetorics she inherited and to the postmodernism that her work helped to generate through both positive and negative example. Plath's poems seethe with anger, hope, desire and disappointment. They glow with brilliant turns of phrase: 'What is so real as the cry of a child? / A rabbit's cry may be wilder / But it has no soul' ('Kindness'). They construct breathtaking images of the injured body and psyche - the 'trepanned veteran, / Dirty girl' of 'Cut', for example. And they evoke their social and political milieu in a telling way, expressing the dilemmas of a woman enmeshed in a sexist, racist and classist social structure, yearning for affirmation, 'waist-deep in history'. Plath's poems plunge into the contradictions of mid-twentieth century Anglo-American selfhood and culture. Written within a remarkably brief timespan, they emanate a heat and light that can still combust a reader today.