The Art of Becoming

...Beauty Is Convulsive tells us how Kahlo devised her own medium for self-expression, and, in doing so, spoke of something larger than her particular self...

...we find ourselves as adolescents suffering an incomprehensible series of apparently random preferences, revulsions, divagations, and evasions...

...Moreover, the modernist period rarely took women artists seriously...

...But her pain grew ever worse, and when she died her friends wondered if she had found a secret method of committing suicide...

...Milton planned to write an epic about significant figures in English history before realizing he was more drawn to the Bible...

...she was a forerunner of the performance artist...

...Her career has been called "a life less lived than staged...

...The neophyte often must untangle conflicting impulses that bias one another...

...Unbowed by these painful handicaps, she threw herself into a whirlwind of social activity and work...

...a high sense of the historical tradition of poetry together with a conviction that poetry must belong to its contemporary moment...

...Most bloom much later, however, and there are those who seem to achieve greatness more through willpower than innate gifts—think William Butler Yeats...

...Gangrene necessitated the amputation of her injured leg in her final year...

...Vendler presents the best case I have yet seen for reading Sylvia Plath not as a troubadour of death but as one who understands how the dangerous undertow of destruction makes life all the more precious in its fragility...

...In her Introduction Vendler explains: "To the young writer, the search for style is inexpressibly urgent...

...Critics have complained that nearly all her paintings are self-portraits, and that most of the others are, in some fashion, self-centered...

...The effort to discover what we are really about is hardly unique to those engaged in creative endeavors, yet artists and poets often help the rest of us in our quest for identity...

...Milton, Keats, Eliot, and even Plath are examples...

...Nevertheless, she is also decried as a morbid exhibitionist who made a spectacle of her life in paintings that crudely imitated the retablos—those small, votive representations one finds in Mexican churches...

...Understanding good poems, she maintains, grants insight into the very language that allows us to comprehend what we feel and think and how we cultivate individuality in the face of life's vicissitudes...

...it is unlikely that readers will rush home after a long day to devour a volume of modernist or postmodernist verse, as might have once been done with the work of, say, Edna St...

...She was a childhood victim of polio and walked with a limp...

...Then the mocking and savage quality in "Colossus" freed her to communicate the true depth of her anguish, not merely point to it...

...This is frequently discovered in youth by trial and error...

...In the first, Plath tried to describe the emotional devastation her father's death caused by combining an account of a trip she took to his grave some years afterward with the mythic tale of slain Agamemnon's grief-stricken daughter, Electra...

...While Kahlo certainly possessed a dramatic nature and sometimes played up her distress, her life was in fact fraught with illnesses and accidents that not even the most hysterical person would choose to undergo...

...It was a fully mature poem, primarily about a child trapped in the shadow of a father whose looming posthumous image threatens to crush the living...

...In any event, her health inexorably deteriorated...

...Rivera's work now strikes many sensibilities as didactic, while Kahlo's folk art manner finds more favor...

...Rivera remained her great love, however...

...During a 2000 interview, Vendler noted that verse currently suffers from an academic emphasis on the social environment of literature: "Poetry is the least informative genre to the casual reader about social contexts...

...Paintings and musical compositions tend to suffer overexposure once they are taken up enthusiastically by the culture at large...

...Keats initially sought to emulate Edmund Spenser and strove for the Arcadian pastoral, then realized that what he wanted to depict was "the strife of human hearts," as he called it in "Sleep and Poetry...

...Poems that are anthologized too much experience a similar fate...

...He famously asked, "What is the relation between a sensibility so deeply captive to the idea of suicide and the claims and possibilities of human existence in general...

...Students look to poetry and don't know what you can say about it, since it seems to have no characters, plot or setting...

...But even more at fault are today's poetry critics, who tend to make their subject sound as unappealing and remote as possible...

...an intense analytic intellectuality combined with a desire for drama (even melodrama...

...The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, who made visual constellations instead, remains controversial nearly 50 years after her death in 1954...

...Through her insights, we can renew our own perceptions of "these perfect youthful constellations of words...

...Eliot, and Sylvia Plath, after producing apprentice works that mimicked their models, made breakthroughs to their own distinctive modes...

...One was the streetcar...

...A few vastly talented individuals, usually musicians or mathematicians, do show their promise when they are as young as five...

...Plath's piety at the cemetery, as she played a mourning Electra, had resulted in the stifling of...

...Nevertheless, the best of Kahlo's paintings retain a haunting mystery that speaks to the way we are molded by hardship...

...When the Mona Lisa appears on plastic dining trays or Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is used to sell luxury cars, it is hard to approach them anew...

...She is convinced that our culture undervalues what can be learned from pure esthetics, as opposed to thematic commentary...

...She has created an interior portrait, not a narrative...

...and] the other accident is Diego...

...Initially her reputation was hindered by her marriage to Rivera at his professional zenith...

...Our reverence for their achievement becomes stultifying...

...The author is at her most passionate in defending Sylvia Plath, whom Irving Howe denounced for being overly attached to death...

...the psychic energy mobilized in her by the dead father,' says Vendler...

...the sugar skulls eaten in celebration of Mexico's "Day of the Dead...

...There are some honorable exceptions, of course, and foremost among them is Helen Vendler...

...As a young man Eliot tried to sort out "a Puritanical suspicion of sex combined with romantic sexual longing...

...Maso recounts how Kahlo's lame foot gave rise to a painting of herself as a doe pierced with arrows: "In Aztec mythology and iconography the image of the deer stands for the right foot...

...Vendler is intrigued with the way writers figure out what they want to say and develop a unique manner of communicating it...

...But seven months after penning "Electra," Plath, who was nothing if not persistent, returned to the same territory with "The Colossus...

...For Eliot, the means of conveying these warring drives was, at first, to have them put forth by different characters...

...Style is to a painter what "voice" is to a poet...

...The human search for identity is conducted blindly...

...We don't at the time know why our feelings drift hither and yon on the waves of inexplicable compulsions, griefs and admirations: It is only later that we may be prepared to acknowledge...

...An ardent Communist, she married the famous muralist, political activist and notorious womanizer, Diego Rivera, who subsequently betrayed her by sleeping with her sister...

...The liberal use of painkillers and drink did nothing to stem the tide, although they allowed her to make public appearances where her maladies were not apparent...

...Probably all of us can recall the miseries of adolescence and youth—trying on roles, painful self-consciousness in our relationships, inchoate emotions intensified by the sense that the rest of life will be equally bewildering...

...Her own writing, therefore, aims to provide a vocabulary for discussing verse in depth and connecting with the writer's intentions...

...Gradually, the repetition of these symbols throughout the book takes on a collective force...

...In keeping with her determination to "get it right," though, she produced another poem of bereavement two years later, this time for a miscarried baby...

...Her appropriation of diverse symbols and modes today seems a kind of postmodern eclecticism...

...All this led finally to her most famous poem, "Edge," written in the days before her suicide...

...It is easy to see why Kahlo resonates with present-day audiences...

...Accordingly, the poet piles up certain key icons in a rather surrealistic fashion: monkeys used in the artist's pictures...

...She goes on to add, "To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become adult...

...Kahlo was influenced by the surrealists for a time...

...We tend to imagine genius is inborn and manifests itself very early...

...Vincent Millay...

...a pervasive attraction to religion without adult attachment to any church...

...Would someone who has never seen the self-portraits—showing her wearing exotic costumes and a necklace of thorns, or with Rivera's likeness superimposed on her forehead—be able to imagine them from Maso's fragmentary word pictures...

...White's poem about the illfated Rockefeller Center mural, rejected by "John D's grandson, Nelson," because it contained representations of Lenin and Stalin...

...The recent publication of Eliot's juvenilia has allowed us to see precisely how he arrived at the right technique...

...Kahlo soon learned to use a prosthetic device to walk and even dance...

...Some have speculated that when she underwent bizarre elective operations in later years—her body was encased in plaster or metal corsets—she may have been seeking to hold his attention, since he was especially solicitous at her sickbed...

...In Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo (Counterpoint, 170 pp., $24.00), Carole Maso uses fragments from her subject's diary, excerpts from biographies and meditations on her work to weave a poem about Kahlo's personality and her transformation into the artist she was...

...the dolls Kahlo loved as emblems of her miscarried fetuses...

...her pictures are collected by celebrities like Madonna and reproduced on note cards...

...how strange are the ways of identity-formation...

...The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" marks his earliest entirely successful attempt to find a suitable form and language for those battles...

...Vendler's reading cleanses the palate that has been deadened by this familiar work, and makes it fresh and exciting again...

...I'mnotsure...

...By showing how these four writers came into their own, Vendler has rendered their lyrics vulnerable and human again...

...We are afraid we will continue to teeter on the brink of becoming, never finding or feeling confident in who we really are...

...In one sense her reputation has never been better: A colorful and adulatory film about her is playing in the local art house around the corner from my apartment...

...At 18, when a bus she was riding on collided with a streetcar, she was pierced with a metal rod that damaged her pelvis and leg, preventing her from carrying a pregnancy to term...

...To rebut these claims, Vendler scrutinizes three early poems: "Electra on Azalea Path," "The Colossus" and "Parliament Hill Fields...

...A number of critics, mostly male, have condemned Plath for being self-absorbed, psychologically immature, or devoid of a "redeeming" vision for humanity...

...Vendler's new book, Coming of Age as a Poet (Harvard, 168 pp., $22.95), is concerned with how an author becomes himself or herself...

...The spare poignancy of Plath's fully developed art moves Vendler to a kind of poetry in her refutation of Howe's charge: "By embodying the living children and herself as flowers, directly in the heart of the poem, Plath sets the heartbreaking sensual beauty of flesh and blood in the garden in permanent contradiction to the immobile and sepulchral perfection of the dead...

...In the same way that Eliot needed to portray the conflict among contrary impulses, Plath had to make full use of the tension between the claims of the dead and the demands of everyday life...

...Certain aspects of Kahlo's character—especially the tendency toward self-canonization—are more than a little reminiscent of "Evita" Perón, another woman of the period intent on shaping her own image...

...In over a dozen volumes she has managed to inspire us to run out and buy the latest collection by a poet she admires...

...the book's title comes from André Breton, who wrote the Introduction to the catalog for her first art show...

...To recollect what an icon of Leftist art he once was, one need only recall E.B...

...Part of locating one's poetic voice, she observes, is determining the persona or ideas one wants to project...

...it parallels, on the esthetic plane, the individual's psychological search for identity—that is, for an authentic selfhood and a fitting means for its unfolding...

...pierced hearts in religious votives symbolizing her troubled relationship with Rivera...

...and a New England propriety struggling with a withering irony...

...A reader unfamiliar with at least the basic outline of Kahlo's life and some of her better known paintings might find it hard to follow Beauty Is Compulsive...

...Yet ultimately he sought to express how the self has within it these same conflicting strains, continually in dialogue andjockeying forposition...

...We begin to gain insight into Kahlo's enigmatic nature and her artistic vision—or at least Maso's interpretation of it...

...In Vendler's brilliant exposition of "Prufrock," she shows Eliot working through his immaturity to uncover "what his poetry—with its insidious rhythms, its hesitations, its etherized evening, its sleeping fog, its effortful confrontation of the moment's 'crisis,' its satiric sallies—is meant to do...

...The couple divorced in 1940 but soon remarried, though both then carried on numerous affairs—in Kahlo's case, with women as well as a number of wellknown men, including Leon Trotsky...

...Vendler admits the poem is "full of unassimilated thematic and stylistic echoes of other poets," including Yeats, Robert Frost and Robert Lowell...

...It is to construct the effect 'as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen': that is, to function as an EEG, an imagecoded graph of the twitches in the nerves as they respond to life's disorders, above all to the obsessive question of sexual desire...

...Vendler demonstrates that the stakes are even higher for artists—those poised to write important "letters to the world," as Emily Dickinson put it— and that, as they wrestle with identity, their works illuminate our own struggles...

...Frida once said, "I suffered two grave accidents in my life...

...She examines the poems in which John Milton, John Keats, T.S...