‘Starving for images': visual objects in the poetry of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Adrienne Rich

Thesis

This thesis explores how, in the work of three mid-century American poets – Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Adrienne Rich – acts of lyric self-disclosure are complicated by poetic engagements with visual art. My argument is that ekphrasis is central to the poets’ explorations of psychological processes of self-protection: in turning to the art object, each poet performs and explores a repression of difficult – often traumatic – memory-images. I argue that these methods of containment and evasion are staged as therapeutic failures and are often entwined with representations of mental illnesses that do not, and cannot, improve.

The self-defensive turn to ekphrasis is, for Lowell, part of a broader impulse to control and alter his mental imagery – an impulse which manifests in lengthy and extreme acts of poetic revision. For Berryman, the need to revise is first explored in a project of psychoanalytically informed self-analysis that draws heavily on his knowledge of cinema. In his published poetry, his engagement with television and cinema becomes problematically entwined with awareness of the dysfunction of racial identity in America. For Rich, cinema and photography are inextricable from the disempowerment of women: she questions what is the ideal ekphrastic object to represent female interconnectivity across social and cultural difference.

In exploring all three poets’ underpinning investments in psychoanalytic thought, this thesis urges a reconsideration of ekphrasis: it asks how much ekphrasis deals in rival forms of art, and how much it is in service to individual psychological avoidance mechanisms. Simultaneously, the thesis advances a reconsideration of ‘confession’, asking: how far was mid-century confessional poetry preoccupied by personal expression, and how far was it interested in evading self-expression – employing visual description in the service of psychological fantasy and cover-up?

Authors: Slater, E

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-obpj8nnpq
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: revision; John Berryman; Adrienne Rich; blackface; repression; ekphrasis; confessional poetry; film; self analysis; psychoanalysis; Robert Lowell; lyric poetry
• Subjects: Blackface; American poetry--20th century--History and criticism--Theory, etc.; Lyric poetry; Self-analysis (Psychoanalysis); Confession in literature; Psychoanalysis; Ekphrasis