Each in His Season

by W.D. Snodgrass

In Each In His Season Pulitzer Prize winner W. D. Snodgrass once again demonstrates the rich versatility that has made him a major presence in American poetry for more than thirty years.

Genres: Poetry

140 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1993

About the author

William De Witt Snodgrass, pseudonym S. S. Gardons, is an American poet and a 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner.

Snodgrass's first poems appeared in 1951, and throughout the 1950's he published in some of the most prestigious magazines: Botteghe Oscure, Partisan Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Hudson Review. However, in 1957, five sections from a sequence entitled Heart's Needle were included in Hall, Pack and Simpson's anthology, New Poets of England and America, and these were to mark a turning-point. When Lowell had been shown early versions of these poems, in 1953, he had disliked them, but now he was full of admiration.

By the time Heart's Needle was published, in 1959, Snodgrass had already won the The Hudson Review Fellowship in Poetry and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Poetry Prize. However, his first book brought him more: a citation from the Poetry Society of America, a grant from the National Institute of Arts, and, most important of all, 1960's Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. It is often said that Heart's Needle inaugurated confessional verse. Snodgrass disliked the term. Still, it should be pointed out that the genre he was reviving here seemed revolutionary to most of his contemporaries, reared as they had been on the anti-expressionistic principles of the New Critics. Snodgrass's confessional work was to have a profound effect on many of his contemporaries, amongst them, most importantly, Robert Lowell.

Reviews

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first, I was unimpressed with this volume of poetry. I had been under the impression that Snodgrass was one of the first really good confessional poets, but all the didactic rhymes made me think he simply was the first. I had almost decided that the only revolutionary-ism of Snodgrass was because he expressed his opinions and wrote about his personal life. Then I read the second half of the book.

Technically, this book is divided into five sections, but for me, at least, the best poems are the ones that are influenced either by art or music. At least in terms of music and lyricism, making up words to go along with well-known classical (or simply non-lyrical) music makes sense to me, so the rhyme didn't deter me in the slightest because I hummed along as I read the poem. Also, especially with those latter poems, Snodgrass shows a keen and exact sense of rhythm and timing that blended with music really well.

My favorite poem in the collection is one of the last in the book, "Snow Drops," part of a cycle of poems concerned with flowers:


Spring's firsd whispers
Though in winter's tongue:
Frosty globes hung above green
Leaves and thawed ground like
Lamps left on all day
To tell us dark and cold
Are never far
And neither green nor gold
Nor icy white can stay
Here long. Or stay away.


My favorite qualities in Snodgrass's poems are an apt ear for internal rhyme (not necessarily end rhyme, which at times seems forced) and cadence, and these elements can be appreciated in pretty much all of the poems in this collection. But next time I read it, I might just start from the end then skip around to the poems I like most.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 S673e 1993