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170 Gender and Suicide The women poets in Lowell’s circle, as well as their male contemporaries , were all shaped by World War II and the subsequent postwar period. The 1940s and ’50s were their formative climate. By all the standards of that time, they couldn’t measure up. The oppressive restrictions of that period, the insistent drive for conformity, crushed them all, and very clearly drawn gender roles and definitions may also have contributed to the pressure these poets felt. Not only women poets committed suicide; so did many of the men. Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and others were killing themselves at an alarming rate. Why? Perhaps the men and women writers who committed suicide were mirror images of each other, of the pressures that each faced. Many of the male poets seemed to come from a milieu where masculine roles were strictly defined . Hunting, shooting, fishing, fighting, and most of all, drinking, were seen as essential to the stereotype of the red-blooded American man. If we look at the histories of the male poets of the late ’50s and early ’60s, as documented in their own work, we can see that most of them came from families in which their fathers had been alcoholic and abusive. The mothers could not protect their sons. And the male poets, by the fact of being poets, could not fit themselves into this seemingly orthodox masculine role. They were resented and belittled by their fathers, but also by the outside society at that time. They could not meet the “masculine” standard—except for the drinking part. This they managed quite well. Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke: all of Lowell’s contemporaries seemed to came from a similar family pattern. Later, the poet Robert Bly would document this more fully and address the subject in hisworkonwhathetermedthe“wounded”male.ButatthetimeofLowell’s breakdowns, and the various suicides of both men and women poets, men had to be “real men,” and women had to be “real women”: and there were strict definitions of what each term meant, and how to live it out correctly. If we adopt a Jungian interpretation of creativity—and this is not antithetical to a Freudian interpretation, but seems more applicable here—we might frame these ’50s poets’ conflicts in a larger context. Jung wrote of the animus and anima, meaning the masculine or feminine spirit that infuses • Gender and Suicide 171 all human beings and endeavors. A full human being had to harness both, in Jung’s terms. As I observed the poets around me in the period following the ’50s, this seemed a useful way to look at creativity. Male artists always referred to their “muse,” that is, the inspiration for their creative selves, as feminine. Robert Graves, particularly, named this “theWhiteGoddess.”Themalepoetscravedbeing“immortal”;butwomen, the men pointed out, were able to give birth to children. The male poets had to assert their egos to appear important. Otherwise, how would they know they existed? Often in their poetry readings it seemed the male poets bred in the ’50s tried—too hard—to appear as “real men” in their public personas. They drank heavily and bragged about that; they fought, they swaggered; and they boasted about their sexual conquests and potency. All this to camouflage their tender and receptive feminine side—the inner self that feels things, writes poetry, creates. Some poets, such as Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and Stanley Kunitz, did not seem to feel the need to posture about. They did not need to hide their education nor their nobility of bearing with pseudomacho displays. Products of the “East Coast establishment,” they had been able to integrate their poetry-making “feminine/anima” side. Somehow, in their work and being, they allowed themselves to be whole. But for many other of the male poets of the macho/masculine ’50s, and the generation just after, to fully admit the “feminine” in their nature was perhaps unbearable. A part of them was tempted to destroy, to silence forever that essential core of poetic being, or they tried to dull it to death with drink or maybe drugs. Society, as exemplified in their fathers, could not accept the feminine/creative/artistic/poetry-making side in its men; so neither could they. But being artists, they could not deny this part of themselves: they had to create. Their inner core cried out to be expressed. Later, poets like Robert Creeley, Galway Kinnell, and others were able to reconcile different sides of themselves...

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