Boasian Verse by Philipp Schweighauser

Author:Philipp Schweighauser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mead writes these words in her introduction to An Anthropologist at Work (1959), the volume she edited for her departed colleague and friend. Concerning Benedict’s lyrical production, Mead is wrong on at least two counts. Unlike Mead, who managed to publish only eight out of her 195 poems during her lifetime, Benedict was quite successful at placing 61 out of her 157 poems in magazines including Poetry, The Dial, The Nation, The Measure, and The New Republic. Second, as I argue in my Benedict chapter, Mead’s friend did not keep her scientific and literary pursuits as neatly apart as Mead suggests. In fact, as we have seen, she produced quite a number of ethnographic poems that engage with the subjects and issues of her anthropological research. As my preceding discussion has shown, this is also true for Mead’s own The Need That Is Left, which oscillates between the scientific and the artistic, the public and the private in ways that confuse the distinctions between the two. In her poem, then, Mead blurs the very boundaries she draws in her introduction to An Anthropologist at Work. There, at least, the public and the private belong to no separate spheres.

Perhaps, it is no coincidence that Mead challenges the boundaries between the private and the public in her poetry. For poetry is a genre that has always been in a tension between the two: between the confessional poetry of a Sylvia Plath and the radically political interventions of an Amiri Baraka; between the topos of the poet as reclusive genius to the eminently public role of the poet laureate; between the expression of feelings and cultural work. Thus, when Mead suspends the division between the private and the public in The Need That Is Left, she does what poetry has always done.

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