While that book's revelations of mental illness and familial strife opened the floodgates to poems about madness, marital grief and emotional dysfunction, he argues, Lowell's best work was not catalyzed by therapeutic or penitential motives, but by more purely aesthetic ends.
"What gives the poems of Life Studies their enduring value," Kirsch writes, "is not their honesty about Lowell's personal life, but their artistic form; the poet's experiences are not simply revealed but shaped through rhythm and symbol and tone, into works of art. Lowell could not have written poems like Waking in the Blue and Sailing Home From Rapallo without the formal mastery he acquired during his rigorous New Critical training."
Kirsch makes a similar argument about John Berryman's harrowingly intimate Dream Songs, the strongest of which did not so much transcribe his own traumatic experiences as transform and ironize them.
Because of the dramatic evolution of Lowell and Berryman's poetry (which moved from imitative Modernist formality to dramatic and vernacular self-exposure) and the comparative weight of their literary achievement, Kirsch's essays about them stand as the centerpiece of this volume.
Some of the other chapters in The Wounded Surgeon are decidedly less illuminating. The argument can be made that Elizabeth Bishop does not really belong in the group of writers Kirsch has selected: Her poetry, after all, was less explicitly autobiographical than that of the others and far more reliant on symbols. Sylvia Plath, too, seems like something of an anomaly in this literary constellation. She belongs to a younger generation, and the complex mythologizing dynamic between her life and work eludes the somewhat narrow and didactic analysis presented in these pages.
These, however, are quibbles. In The Wounded Surgeon, Kirsch has not only succeeded in communicating the achievement of six remarkable American poets, but in doing so, has also established himself as a poetry critic of the very first order.
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