Frank Hecker

This Sunday night: An upper-middle-class suburban housewife and mother suffers from severe postpartum depression, is hospitalized for it, and as part of her treatment is encouraged by her therapist to write. A not so unusual story, but in this case the writer is Anne Sexton, who became one of the most honored and popular poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, before her death by suicide at the age of 45. She’s best known for her confessional poetry and for Transformations, her arch take on the tales made famous by the Brothers Grimm. However, since it’s Christmas Eve today I thought I’d feature the first poem in her series “The Jesus Papers,” titled “Jesus Suckles”:

Given that last week’s post featured Emily Dickinson, it’s fitting that this week I feature the grandson of Emily Dickinson: not the Emily Dickinson we know, but the grandmother of Dr William Carlos Williams, son of an English father and Puerto Rican mother, physician to the citizens of Rutherford NJ (where he was born, lived, and died), and one of the American poets who pioneered modernist poetry in the early 20th century.

I’m skipping the oft-parodied poems “This Is Just to Say” (about the plums) and “The Red Wheelbarrow” (also about the white chickens) and instead including one of my favorite Williams poems, “The Great Figure,” which inspired one of my favorite paintings (by Charles Demuth):

This week’s poet is Emily Dickinson, who along with Walt Whitman is almost universally acknowledged as one of the two great American poets of the 19th century. For whatever reason, Dickinson has been much better treated than Whitman as far as popular culture is concerned. She’s been the subject of a one-woman play (The Belle of Amherst), two movies (A Quiet Passion and Wild Nights with Emily), and (most recently) a 30-episode TV series, Dickinson.

I did four posts on Whitman but I’m going to do only one on Dickinson, albeit with three poems. (CW: The second one appears to be based on an episode of severe depression.) Here’s the first one, from which the film Wild Nights with Emily takes its title and its inspiration:

This is my fourth and final “Sunday night poetry” post about Walt Whitman. In the post-war period Whitman, always an aggressive self-promoter, spent a lot of time revising and rearranging Leaves of Grass and putting out multiple editions of it, in an effort to make it more popular. He also added several more poems to the book, most of which are relatively minor and not considered among his best.

Here are the first two stanzas of “Passage to India,” the last major poem Whitman wrote. It celebrates the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869 (hence the poem’s title), the completion of the US transcontinental railroad in September 1869, and the earlier completion of the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable in July 1866: