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Each chapter of Wounded Surgeon is devoted to one of the six poets under study, situating the poet biographically and thematically within modernism and then, through close reading, explaining how the poet both retained aspects of the modernist legacy and developed a new, more personally revealing style. Kirsch does a fine job interlacing historical detail, explications of poems (his strongest suit), excerpts from letters and memoirs, and his own prose constructions to trace each poet's orbit around modernism.
That the first and longest chapter is on Robert Lowell suggests that he is the linchpin of Kirsch's case. Lowell's lifelong admiration for Eliot, his studies with Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and his public role as poet-statesman place him well within the modernist pale. "Grotesque violence," intense religious symbolism, and an eclectic but obsessive sense of form remind Kirsch of Eliot, and rightly so; Lowell once described Four Quartets (the book from which the phrase "wounded surgeon" comes) as "the most remarkable and ambitious expression of Catholic mysticism in English." Kirsch's compelling readings of Lowell's early to middle writing, and especially of Lord Weary's Castle and Life Studies, support the argument that Lowell was indeed making use of the objective correlative, but doesn't the case rather make itself? In fact, Lowell employed modernist tactics at least through Life Studies, the book which, with an introductory poem about his grandfather, reveals the first sign of a new direction for Lowell.
The question of Lowell's direction really arises during and after For the Union Dead. A classic of the Confessional canon, its poems have been endlessly imitated since it was published in 1964. "Fall 1961" laments atomic war and, in the same breath, Lowell's disappointment with his father. In "Middle Age," Lowell confronts the ghost of his father. "The Scream," containing a number of Lowell's childhood memories about his mother, ends with the stanza: "A scream! But they are all gone, / those aunts and aunts, a grandfather, / a grandmother, my mother— / even her scream—too frail / for us to hear their voices long." It is a short distance from this sort of strained familial pathos to later hyper-confessional work—by Sharon Olds, for instance, whose The Father obsesses about everything from her father's death-bed to the texture of his skin. Instead of explicating For the Union Dead in terms of the objective correlative (which perhaps he cannot), Kirsch writes: "[M]ost of the poems are presented as first-person utterances in immediate reaction to experience, as though we were hearing the poet in real time. The form is correspondingly stripped down, and tries to impart a sense of drama through repeated questions and exclamations. The result is a thinner and less powerful collection."
The chapter on Elizabeth Bishop, highlighting her well-known relationship to Marianne Moore, concedes that she was "never as much under the spell of Modernist doctrine" as some of the other Confessionals. Indeed, the young Bishop idolized Moore; Bishop's early work is characterized by an objective style, with only occasional, veiled references to an emotional response. Kirsch dutifully applies his thesis to these poems, arguing that they "do not just employ symbolism—they are themselves symbols, of the kind that T. S. Eliot named objective correlatives." Checking this statement against Eliot's definition of the term—"a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of the particular emotion"—it is hard to see how one might read a poem as a standalone objective correlative. The term implies that both the "objects" and the "emotion" are present in the text. Outside drama criticism, indeed outside criticism of longer works altogether, the term begins to lose meaning. If Eliot meant the term to be applied so broadly, one would have to include William Carlos Williams' "Red Wheel Barrow" and Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" as standalone objective correlatives. A better critical description of these works, and of Bishop's early poems, is that they are imagistic. An even better description for Bishop's work, and a cause to wonder why Kirsch sticks so doggedly to his thesis, is that it is a "scream translated into a clang"—a phrase he derives from Bishop's short story "In the Village."
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