Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (review)

In the last chapter of Poetry after Auschwitz, Susan Gubar reads Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces as a kind of "retort" to Adorno, which expresses Michaels's belief, as well as that of the other Holocaust writers Gubar discusses, that after Auschwitz "it is barbaric not to write [poetry]" (242). Gubar's book can itself be read as such a retort, a Defence of Poetry no less passionate and intelligent than that of the poet whom she quotes: "To be 'greatly good,' according to Shelley, people 'must imagine intensely,' putting themselves 'in the place of another and of many others' so that the 'pains and pleasures of [the] species become [their] own.'. . . 'Poetry strengthens that facility which is the organ of the moral nature of [humanity], in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb'" (242).

Gubar's faith in poetry as an instrument of the moral imagination is hard-won. Unlike many critics of Holocaust literature, Gubar does not limit herself to the thematics of the texts she discusses, or to the historical realities they invoke. Rather, she employs all the strategies of literary criticism at her disposal in order to talk about her texts as specifically literary constructions, which do their work (often quite brilliantly) through the words, images, rhythms, rhymes, and other structural devices poetry typically employs. Rather than defeat what Gubar acknowledges must be one clear goal of such writings —entering into the historical record and collective memory the genuine, perhaps unutterable suffering of real human beings —the poetic devices her texts mobilize deepen both the readers' knowledge of what occurred and their sense of anguish and horror. Just as importantly, perhaps, given the representational challenges the Holocaust poses, the poems Gubar discusses also bring to bear a consciousness of the inadequacy of all our attempts to comprehend the catastrophe, including those of the poem itself.

Take the following analysis of a poem by Jacqueline Osherow, who, as Gubar puts it, "eschews a poetics of ruin" through her employment of a "formalism," which Auden once defended as a dependence on "metrical rules that forbid automatic responses" and "force us to have second thoughts, free from the fetters of self (16). "Villanelle from a Sentence in a Poet's Brief Biography" ends with the following two lines: "In '42 he was conscripted to work on trains. / In '42. In Czechoslovakia. Trains," about which Gubar has this to say: "Although the villanelle conventionally exploits two rhymes (in its first and third lines) that are repeated alternatively until they join at the conclusion . . . Osherow's final couplet makes explicit her bleak awareness of the impoverishment of the poetic imagination through her refusal to find a sufficient word to rhyme with 'trains,' even if the absent rhymes of 'brains' and 'drains' and 'strains' may persist in some readers' ears. . . . Because the villanelle draws attention to the end word of each line, especially the end words of the last two lines, 'Trains,' following 'trains,' marks 'The station [which] is not a railroad station' but instead . . . 'the end of the line.'" (18).

I present this very detailed fragment from a single reading of a poem because the force of Gubar's study is contained in just this attention to detail. This precision emulates a similar specificity and concreteness in the poems as well —an attempt to figure forth not only large, almost cosmic events but the individual human beings who endured them. It is not that Gubar does not lift up off her readings into more theoretical matters. "Bafflement," she goes on to say a few pages later, "the need to find words to express feelings about events that must be transmitted even though they cannot be understood, a resistance to closure with respect to consideration or judgment of the events that transpired during the Shoah: here resides the mandate of Holocaust poetry" (20). Gubar demonstrates this mandate again and again in her study. But how that mandate is interpreted by different poets, what kinds of poetry it...