If we knew what the next moment held, or the next week, wouldn’t we feel differently about the future? If we knew what would happen tomorrow? But we don’t.

And where are the events of last week? Can we find them anywhere? Or that glorious summer day two years ago when we swam in the river? Where has it gone? Has it ceased to exist? “Où sont les neiges d’antan?”—“Where are the snows of yesteryear?”—the sixteenth-century French poet and outlaw François Villon asked in his lament that lists the names of celebrated beauties who, even as he wrote,...

A surprising number of scholars and teachers and even poets—people who claim to “know” what poetry is—will insist that only one aspect of poetry is crucial. Insist for instance, that the essence of poetry is formal coherence (order) or that only emotion matters (disorder). Maybe this one-sided emphasis is a temperamental thing. For some people, the need for order is so pronounced and pleasurable that order seems everything to them in the project of poetry. And for others, the destabilizing claims or threats of experience are so urgent that it would be impossible for them to talk about...

In order to carry the weight of the existential crises that torment it from without and within, the self in the personal lyric needs to be more than a stick figure “I.” It’s a pronoun whose formidable task is to incarnate and dramatize a full range of human feelings, thoughts, memories, and sensations even as it faces the past and the present or anticipates the future.

Freud tells us that the ego is “first and foremost a body Ego,” and D. H. Lawrence has provided a vivid evocation of this complicated embodiment:

Why should I look at my hand, as...

In the ceaseless interplay of disorder and order in our daily lives, it is possible (and important) to imagine that there are certain situations where this unstable interaction can be held for a moment in steady state. One such suspended moment is the poem, which freeze-frames the interplay as language so that we can contemplate it, feel it, and concentrate on it. Robert Frost once characterized poetry as “a momentary stay against confusion,” and his phrase articulates with eloquent simplicity a poem’s power to lift moments of clarified drama out of the ceaseless, discombobulating flow of experience and, by doing...

In his poem “Journal for My Daughter,” Stanley Kunitz describes his rambunctious friend—poet Theodore Roethke—as arriving “with his bags full of havoc.” There’s no better way to unpack these bags and see what varieties of chaos our poets have brought us than by quoting poems.

We could do worse than to begin by noting that most commentators since the dawn of history have felt that the great themes of the personal lyric are love and death. Once we move past the governing abstraction “love” into its multitudinous manifestations, it’s as if we snorkeled above a tropical coral reef...

Risk is involved when a lyric poet feels and expresses emotion or writes about a disturbing experience. An instability accompanies the project. But instability is built into the inner workings of our consciousness, and it is omnipresent in the external world also.

The difference between a lyric poet and a person who does not write poems is that the poet has an arena in which to focus his or her encounter with disorder. And the poet’s struggle to engage disorder with the ordering powers of imagination and the cultural tool of language leads to a sense of having mastered subjectivity...

Each culture has its own preferences or rules as to what constitutes the formal orderings of a lyric. For much of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, poetry in English was felt to be most properly constituted by accentual syllabic meter and rhyme. On the other hand, Chinese lyric poetry of the T’ang dynasty (700–950 A.D.) was defined by a whole different set of formal concepts. It not only had to have a set number of characters per line and a set number of lines (eight), but also had to exhibit an elaborate syntactical patterning: the four lines in the...

According to Genesis 32, Jacob encountered a “man” on the banks of the Jabok River. This “man” was almost certainly a supernatural creature whom God had sent. Jacob and the stranger fought all night, wrestling in a violent and intimate embrace. At a certain point, his antagonist touched Jacob’s thigh and threw his hip out of joint, but Jacob held on until the creature demanded to be freed because day was breaking. “I will not let you go unless you bless me,” Jacob replied. And the creature did bless him and gave him a new name, “Israel,” because, he said,...

Sara Hutchinson is a Cherokee Indian woman interviewed in the book Surviving in Two Worlds. The “two worlds” are the worlds of contemporary, white-dominated America and the traditional world of first Americans. In the book, she does not define the term “Overculture” quoted above, and so, in adopting it, I have given it my own definition. In my definition, Overculture refers to the ideological and institutional formations and attitudes that support a given society or culture—established religions and political, social, and economic structures, as well as the values that validate them or emerge from them. The Overculture, then, is...

More than anyone before him, William Wordsworth (1770–1850) brought poetry down out of the high-flown literary language that so subtly served the Overculture’s class interests. The language in a poem, he said, should “consist of a selection of the real language spoken by men.” With that single, simple idea, he brought poetry closer to the average person and connected it to the urgencies in people’s lives. He insisted that a poet was neither a special, divinely inspired genius nor a spokesman for the Overculture and a propagandist for its values. Instead, the poet was simply “a man speaking to...

Born in 1795, Keats was among the younger generation of Romantic poets who grew up when Wordsworth’s influence was dominant. He came from a lower-middle-class family (his father ran a livery stable), and he had no prospects of higher education. At the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon and later studied medicine at Guy’s and St. Thomas’s hospitals in London. Our contemporary notion of a surgeon as a highly trained specialist is not appropriate to Keats’s prospect. In his time, a surgeon was a medically trained person whose skills seldom went beyond setting broken bones and lancing...

It might seem odd to include Walt Whitman (1819–1892) among my hero-poets who have transformed trauma into visions of human possibility, because Whitman is so insistently and ecstatically affirmative. Where is the trauma in his work? Indeed, the philosopher and psychologist William James muttered aloud skeptically that Whitman was almost pathologically “healthy-minded” and optimistic. Can such an exuberant poet actually fit our scheme?

We need to remember that a poet’s poems are his or her selfcreation; that the self we meet in the poems is often the newly created self that has replaced the shattered and traumatized self of...

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) could well be the ultimate poet of the personal lyric. No lyric poet has been her equal for the intensity and variety of subjective states dramatized. She has written great poems of grief, longing, wonder, loneliness, fear, love, madness, joy, anger, ecstasy, solitude, despair, desire. She has written wonderfully about the great mysteries of time and death, and those imaginings that seem to cancel time and death: eternity and immortality.

It would be possible to write an eight hundred–page biography of Emily Dickinson (such a book has been written). But if that biography confined itself...

In Wilfred Owen’s time, during the First World War, they called it “shell shock.” In the Second World War, it would be called “battle fatigue.” It was only in the aftermath of the Vietnam War that the term “post-traumatic stress disorder” became established as a way to speak of the tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans whose minds and lives were permanently altered by their exposure to the violence of combat.

According to Judith Herman, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder fall into three main categories—hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction: “Hyperarousal reflects the persistent expectation of danger; intrusion reflects the...

As we approach our final trio of poets, we enter the contemporary world. These poets have read Freud and Jung and others. They know that the spiritual and emotional quests for meaning that began with such naive force in Romanticism have now been eroded by the skepticism and insights of psychoanalysis. The imagination of these three poets persists in mining what can seem at first like little more than a ribbon of neurotic themes crossing the rock face of an individual life. But as it digs down into the dark, unpromising rock, it still manages to extract what will become...

These are the final lines of a grim and lovely poem that Plath’s estranged husband, Ted Hughes, chose to place as the final poem in her posthumously published collection Ariel. It is an image that, to my mind, partakes of a double fatalism. The first fatalism is contained in the astrological rigidity the image proposes: we are ruled by our stars and have no free will. The second image is more subtle and consists of shifting those stars out of the broad and open night sky and placing them at the bottom of a well. The sense of confinement and...