W.D. Snodgrass (1926-2009), American poet, is often credited, along with Sylvia Plath , Anne Sexton and John Berryman , with being one of the founders of the Confessional movement in poetry. Confessional poets present intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information and details about their personal lives, including the various joys and tragedies that they have experienced. Although Snodgrass himself did not consider his poetry to be confessional, many of his works were of a very personal nature. Snodgrass also paid careful attention to poetic form; while many of his early poems were written in a formal style, with traditional metrical structures, his later poems include both formal metre and free verse. The author of numerous collections of poetry, Snodgrass also produced two books of literary criticism and several volumes of translation. His work has appeared in anthologies and in various magazines and journals, including the Nation, the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Salmagundi, Southern Review, Southwest Review, TriQuarterly and Western Humanities Review.
William DeWitt Snodgrass was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, on 5 January 1926. The son of Bruce DeWitt Snodgrass, an accountant, and Jesse Helen (Murchie) Snodgrass, the author grew up in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and graduated from a local high school there in 1943. In the fall of that year, Snodgrass enrolled at Geneva College, also located in Beaver Falls. However, he left college in 1944 to serve with the US Navy in the Pacific towards the end of the Second World War. In 1946 Snodgrass returned to college, enrolling in the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he studied with such brilliant and illustrious poets as Robert Lowell , Randall Jarrell and Berryman . He went on to receive three degrees from Iowa -- a BA in 1949, an MA in 1951, and an MFA in 1953. After a short period working as a hotel clerk and a hospital aide in Iowa, Snodgrass began an academic career as an instructor of English at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (1955-7). In the years that followed, he had a distinguished teaching career at several universities, including the University of Rochester (1957-8), Wayne State University (1959-68), Syracuse University (1968-77), Old Dominion University (1978-9) and the University of Delaware (1979-94).
Snodgrass's poetry first appeared in literary magazines in 1951, while the author was working on his graduate degrees. Throughout the 1950s his poems appeared in a number of prestigious magazines, including Botteghe Oscure, Partisan Review, Hudson Review and Paris Review. The publication in 1957 of several of the author's poems in the anthology New Poets of England and America, edited by Donald Hall , Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, brought increased attention to Snodgrass, whose career took a remarkable turn two years later with the publication of his first full collection of poetry, Heart's Needle (1959). The volume received immense critical acclaim and garnered Snodgrass a citation from the Poetry Society of America and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. More importantly, it won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, immediately establishing Snodgrass as one of the leading young poets in America. The critic Thomas Lask, writing in the New York Times (30 March 1968), remarked that in Heart's Needle, Snodgrass spoke in a distinctive voice.
It was one that was jaunty and assertive on the surface [. . .] but somber and hurt beneath. [. . .] His poetry was appealing in that the poet stood in front of the work -- there was no need to hunt for the man in the lines. He spoke for and about himself.
Heart's Needle takes its title from a poem in the volume that deals with a father's longing for a daughter who is often absent from his life as a result of divorce. The title poem and others in the collection, all of which deal with a father's love for his daughter, are highly confessional in tone while remaining widely universal in theme. The volume received wide praise from Lowell, one of the best-known American poets of the period. Lowell lauded his former student and began to speak widely of Snodgrass's 'confessional' writing style, thus helping to popularise the term. Although Snodgrass did not initiate this type of poetry, he certainly reintroduced it to the poetic community at a time when many poets were taking a more modern approach to poetry based on anti-expressionistic principles. Heart's Needle also had a profound effect on a number of other American poets, inspiring them to write about their emotions and vulnerability, thus contributing to the re-establishment of confessional-style poetry. It even influenced Lowell, whose Life Studies (1959), one of that author's most accomplished works, is very confessional in tone.
Snodgrass's second poetry collection, After Experience (1967), also displays the formal and thematic concerns that characterise Heart's Needle . In it the author continues to mine his innermost memories and experiences, ranging from childhood to adulthood. The autobiographical sketches in the volume once again demonstrate the author's ability to turn the trials and tribulations of his interior life into enduring works of poetry. Writing in the New York Times (30 March 1968), Lask noted that Snodgrass's new book,
the first since 'Heart's Needle', takes off, for the first half, from where the other left off. The second half shows evidence of a more objective stance and occasionally 'literary' qualities. The poems at the beginning repeat again the themes of loss and sundering.
The Fuehrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress (1977), Snodgrass's third collection of poetry, displays a greater structural diversity on the part of the author than do his earlier works, while still exploring innermost feelings and emotions in a confessional style; this time, however, they are the feelings and emotions of other individuals. The work presents 22 dramatic monologues spoken by Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and the other men and women who lived with Hitler in his Berlin bunker during the final days of the Second World War. Each character, speaking in verse form, reveals his or her personality and thoughts. The Fuehrer Bunker was highly controversial, primarily because of its subject matter, and it brought Snodgrass both praise and scorn. Some literary magazines stopped publishing his work, while some critics and readers castigated Snodgrass for glorifying and humanising individuals who had committed such atrocities.
A staged version of The Fuehrer Bunker appeared at the American Place Theatre in New York City in 1981 and received more favourable reviews. Meanwhile, Snodgrass continued to work on the collection -- the 1977 publication had been just a work 'in progress'. The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (1995) contains more than 65 monologues by 15 speakers, as well as a variety of supporting poems. Each of the characters 'speaks' in a poetic form appropriate to his or her character. While still controversial, the complete cycle of The Fuehrer Bunker earned a more favourable reception, and many of the critics who reviewed the revised work realised its great power. Frank Allen commented that 'Snodgrass's masterful language is graphic; his analysis of war and defeat and his interest in historical personages pushed to extremes of pain are compelling. [. . .] To hear these voices imaginatively re-created is purgative' (Library Journal , 1 April 1995). Elizabeth Gunderson called The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle 'an astonishing work that lets us see with clarity the fall of the Third Reich -- and wonder' (Booklist , 15 March 1995).
During the decade after the publication of the first edition of The Fuehrer Bunker, Snodgrass published a number of poetry collections, including If Birds Build with Your Hair(1979), The Boy Made of Meat(1982), D.D. Byrde Calling Jennie Wrenne(1984), A Colored Poem(1986), The House the Poet Built(1986) and A Locked House(1986). A number of these works, most notably If Birds Build with Your Hair and D.D. Byrde Calling Jennie Wrenne, display Snodgrass's use of free verse and other poetic forms. During this period Snodgrass also began to publish works of translation, focusing on the translation of the lyrics of songs from earlier times in history. These include Six Troubadour Songs(1977), Traditional Hungarian Songs(1978) and Six Minnesinger Songs(1983).
Selected Poems 1957-1987(1987) was Snodgrass's first poetry compilation, containing a selection of works culled from earlier published collections as well as a number of poems previously available only in very limited small press editions. Writing about this volume in (Library Journal, 1 August 1987), Rosaly DeMaios Roffman noted that:
These selected poems reveal an important American poet's impressive array of dramatic powers. [. . .] In new poems, which use the gentle surrealist paintings of DeLoss McGraw as vehicles, Snodgrass returns to himself as subject -- though not in his former confessional mode. Here we find an especially good marriage of poet and painting and an imagery that is startling.
With W.D.'s Midnight Carnival(1988), The Death of Cock Robin(1989), To Shape a Song(1989) and Snow Songs(1992), Snodgrass continued to plumb the poet's art and his own creative imagination. His next collection, Each in His Season(1993), once again raised questions with critics. While some praised the work, others found the collection 'almost completely stripped of content, with a few notable exceptions' and 'lacking inspiration' (Publishers Weekly, 9 August 1993). William Pratt, writing in World Literature Today(vol. 68, no. 2; Spring 1968), expressed disappointment with the book, commenting that it had 'a promise that is never fulfilled'.
Among Snodgrass's later collections of poetry are Spring Suite(1994); Make-Believes: Verses and Visions(2004), a collection of three works done in collaboration with the artist DeLoss McGraw; and Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems(2006). Commenting in Booklist(15 March 2006) on the collection of new and previously published poems, Ray Olsen remarked,
If you think that writing primarily in rhyme and meter bespeaks equanimity, or sweetness of character, read Snodgrass. Oh, he mellows out in the face of nature, but he's prickly [. . .]. His many profoundly bemused and persuasive poems of love's tougher moments, his marvelous angry and denunciatory poems [. . .] all these might have been impossible if Snodgrass was a nice, easygoing guy. He's not that sort, and his best works seems permanent because he isn't.
Writing under the pseudonym S.S. Gardons, Snodgrass also produced a number of limited fine press editions of poetry, including These Trees Stand(1981) and Autumn Variations(1990).
In addition to his poetry, Snodgrass published two volumes of critical essays, In Radical Pursuit(1977) and To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (2002). In the latter collection Snodgrass provides an essential handbook for poets and poetry readers by attempting to analyse the various elements, including the poet's individual voice, that make some poetry great.
One of Snodgrass's more unusual works is De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong(2001). While ostensibly a book of original poetry, it is actually a collection of poems by other authors, including Emily Dickinson , William Butler Yeats , Wallace Stevens and William Shakespeare , that Snodgrass has rewritten to demonstrate how changing words and syntax but retaining metre and other elements can alter a poem. In essence a teacher's and poet's manual, De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong helps identify the elements that make poems great. Commenting on the work, Lisa J. Cihlar wrote in Library Journal(1 July 2001),
How can you tell if a poem is good? Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Snodgrass would put it next to a bad one and let the reader judge. To that end, he has taken 101 great poems and rewritten them wrong. The bad ones are sometimes so bad as to be funny, but they give readers a chance to see the difference even a small change can make in a poem. [. . .] What will this book do for readers? Make them laugh maybe, but it will also show them what makes a good poem and possibly help them to write some.
Snodgrass won numerous awards in addition to his Pulitzer Prize, including fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He retired from teaching at the University of Delaware in 1994, but he remained a distinguished professor emeritus there. Among the works published after his retirement were two additional volumes of translations: Selected Translations (1998), for which he won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and Five Folk Ballads(1999). He also published a collection of autobiographical essays, After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches(1999), offering a frank and revealing look at his life as a student, son, husband and poet. W.D. Snodgrass died from lung cancer on 13 January 2009.
Snodgrass is recognised as one of leading American poets of his generation. From his auspicious debut with Heart's Needle in 1959, he produced an impressively diverse body of work and had a long and distinguished academic career. His reputation as a founder of the Confessional movement, together with the calibre of his work and the controversy that sometimes surrounded it, has generated significant scholarly interest. Among the works that examine the author and his poetry are 'The Poetics of W.D. Snodgrass' by Lewis Turco , in Twayne Companion to Contemporary Literature in English (2002); W.D. Snodgrass , a biography by Paul Gaston (1978); Tuned and Under Tension: The Recent Poetry of W.D. Snodgrass by Philip Raisor (1998); The Confessional Poets by Robert Phillips (1973); and W.D. Snodgrass, A Bibliography (1960), compiled by William White.
from Literature Online biography