Glad you created the thread, Julie!
I largely agree with everything Susan says above (full stop). That being said, as a reader (and teacher) of poetry, I do get quite weary of poems that treat the writer's own experience as exceptional. From a subjective standpoint, of course it's exceptional, and should be. But from a readerly standpoint? Variations on themes of one's struggles etc. get stale after awhile. What's been interesting for me after having just finished teaching my poetry survey again this semester (sampling from the Renaissance to two years ago) is seeing when this tendency took hold. I really do think it was Plath. I'm certain that's a highly arguable assertion, and I have little doubt that twenty other posters could name twenty other poets who really set the "magnificent moi" trend in motion, but re-reading "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" after many other 20th century poets, it struck me that the dominant strain of poetry remains "Plathian." I have no particular dislike of Plath (truly), but I was thinking about the sheer gall of comparing her father to a Nazi (he wasn't) and herself to a Jew (she wasn't) because of her personal feelings toward her upbringing.
Sometimes those personal experiences are fantastic to read on the page. Reading Li-Young Lee's "Persimmons," for example, draws you into the difficulties of adaptation, and it's hard to not marvel at the difficulty of cultural assimilation (and the terminological slippages that accompany it...). And yet, it seems that compelling, original experiences like that are far less common than ones that feel pat, stale, even normal. Naturally this is a very subjective take, and I have my own preferences and biases when it comes to poetry, but I think about how Auden frames "Musee Des Beaux Arts." He manages to channel something deep and meaningful about being human (and how other artists did the same) without having to constantly refer the fact that he is walking through an art museum and he is having these insights. He takes himself out of direct sight, and the poem is all the better for it. With a lot of modern poets, I just want to shake them lightly and earnestly whisper "not everything is about you!"
Anyhow, my two cents on the matter for now.
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