Diagnosis, Poetry, and the Burden of Mystery

I look where no one dares,And I stare where no one stares.

—John Keats

We come into this life with nothing, and fully decked out—fingers, toes. Plus the screaming. And the shorthand mission of poetry, if not everything else, is to think through that rich double-take and dark. It’s hard. Thus sooner or later “my mind’s not right” may be what we all say. In Robert Lowell’s poem “Skunk Hour,” that sentence, “my mind’s not right,” is an honest-to-god last line in a stanza followed by silence visually rendered, the so-called “white space” on the page. A stanza break, that hold-your-fire to let the assertion hover.

This is Robert Lowell, his mind, more aptly his speaker’s mind, in this piece dedicated to his friend Elizabeth Bishop from his 1959 ground-breaking book, Life Studies. The poem orbits profound troubles of self, here a pretty pathetic self, driving around at night in a village in Maine, up “the hill’s skull” where “love-cars” have parked. (Would he be arrested these days, for such voyeurism? John Berryman, isn’t there a law against this particular Henry?) “They lay together, hull to hull,” he tells us—the cars themselves? teenagers breathless in those cars?—“where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .” The ending sad ellipsis to that sentence, its dot dot dot, keeps his not rightness going. Because his mind isn’t right, is it? He’s just offered succinct proof. Another damning declarative rounds out the next stanza: “I myself am hell; nobody’s here—” says Lowell, landing on a dash, Emily Dickinson’s famous no-more-words. Yet Lowell being Lowell—not in a million years the secret forthright Dickinson—continues.

Certainly there are other ways to do this, call it quits. Think James Wright, who closes out one of his greatest hits with “I have wasted my life,” an equally clarifying, exhausted gesture, but only after he’s ticked off the lush particulars of early evening—a “bronze butterfly,” a glorious distant view, “a leaf in green shadow.” Note this: neither poet offers any practical solution. They’re just saying, though perhaps those skunks of Lowell’s raiding the trash in the moonlit night, how they “will not scare,” suggest something more unsettling than simple hunger at the poem’s end.

Nevertheless, this not-so-idle claim: poetry—perhaps all literature—is its best self when it takes no responsibility to fix a damn thing. Not poem-as-therapy despite the fact that, as Eleanor Wilner reminded me, Ezra Pound once insisted cure its highest aim, a major part of poetry’s “cult of beauty.” Still, we agreed it’s not exactly a matter of pontificating for a better tomorrow. Suck it up, friends. The thing is you can notice trouble, even conclude, as in “my mind’s not right,” as in—you know what?—I have wasted my life—and there’s a barely discernible click inward, one of the great rewards of poetry. If there’s an arc forward—prognosis, the possible due course of diagnosis—it’s more like Cassandra forced to see the future destruction of Troy, unable to stop it. Which is to say, literature is no treatment as such. It’s bringing patterns to life. Diagnosis. Look hard, and a curiously charmed, more tentative shared intelligence lets it all sink in.

For his part, Robert Lowell has reached rock-bottom. And Wright’s struck dumb in his hammock until the summer with its cowbells and sunlight feels multiple and eternal and swallows him. We keep reading. Sometimes the page is a mirror, decent enough company however painful a pleasure, this tangled slough of life distilled to a few moments of meditation called a poem.

It can plenty unnerve, such looking. My own memorable case-in-point orbits the privilege given me to attend the Gross Human Anatomy course, the so-called “cadaver lab,” generously allowed in by anatomist James Walker of the Indiana University Medical School at Purdue University where I’ve taught in the English...