‘All definitions of suffering’, Ato Quayson writes, ‘have to find a way of aligning two central vectors: the Self as category has to be defined in all its variegated possibilities and contradictory levels and then correlated to the category of World’. This proposed panel features three 15-minute papers by three international scholars working in different countries, across disciplines, and at different career levels, each of which considers how twentieth-century poets have drawn connections between individual and collective suffering.

Whether from within Religion & Literature, World Literature, Gender and Queer Studies, Performance Studies, or the study of so-called ‘Confessional Poetry’, scholarship on suffering has been on the rise. That the open CFP for this panel generated over 25 high-quality abstracts shows that our questions into the function (and ethics of studying) suffering in modern and contemporary poetry reverberate for many. With this panel we look to spur further discussion about the usage of suffering in poetry and literature and the arts more broadly.

Building on Aeschelus’s idea in Agamemnon – that ‘wisdom comes alone through suffering’ – Komura’s opening paper shows how, historically, suffering has been conceptualized as essential for the flourishing of individual lives and social groups alike. What role has literature played in creating wisdom or flourishing out of suffering? And what are the ethical implications of silver-lining suffering? To broach these questions, Komura examines poems that depict or embody second-hand suffering, which results from witnessing, learning about, or inheriting other people’s pain. In ‘The Death of Marilyn Monroe’, Sharon Olds presents the anguish of ambulance workers who found Monroe dead. Sylvia Plath’s war poems can be reevaluated as poems of second-hand suffering, triggered by perspectival adoption, while Lawson Fusao Inada’s Japanese American internment camp poems powerfully portray intergenerational traumatization. In a way similar to grief, suffering makes a tenuous ‘we’ of us all, to borrow a phrase from Judith Butler’s Precarious Lives. Shared suffering helps forge a relationship with people whom we don’t know well, or who are geographically or temporally distant. What these poems reveal is that empathy can be both a source of second-hand suffering and a basis for community-making, and that it engenders ambivalence precisely over this duality.

Expanding Louis Martz’s argument in The Poetry of Meditation, Valli’s paper examines the influence of Jesuit meditative exercises on the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Anthony Hecht, two American formalists writing in the wake of World War 2, to once more show how individual suffering can be a tool for negotiating collective trauma. In particular, the process of symbolic ‘mapping’ found in Bishop’s ‘Brazil: January 1, 1502’ and Hecht’s focus on detail in ‘Meditation’, suggest the revision of a specific Ignatian Exercise, the ‘composition of place’. Originally intended as the detailed restaging in one’s mind of a biblical episode to test one’s feelings against the scene, this practice becomes in Valli’s treatment a way for elaborating collective trauma after the war. In a post-Hegelian world where faith in ‘benign progress’ results in ‘a conviction of diffused and unassimilable primary suffering’ (in Peter Sacks’s words), and where God seems unresponsive to the cries of victims, these poets take issue with making the divine accessible. Tweaking a pre-existing framework to accommodate the conflicting aspects of trauma, Hecht and Bishop renew the quest for spirituality as an intellectual effort to understand violence. Through their mindscapes, history is revisited not as an impersonal force but in its punctuality: single historical happenings, superposed with biblical anecdotes, are restaged in painful detail.

‘At the end of my suffering’, the speaker in Louise Glück’s ‘The Wild Iris’ says, ‘there was a door’. The speaker is the iris itself, which asks us to ‘Hear me out’ and reassures us that ‘whatever / returns from oblivion returns / to find a voice’. Bringing the panel to a close, and posing yet more questions about the usage of suffering in modern poetry, Hadjiyiannis’s paper finds in Glück’s poems a reformulated ancient Greek and Christian discourse that, rather than fetishizing suffering and martyrdom, offers them as temporary states harbouring the hope for personal enlightenment and worldly connection – a form of understanding through which we can open ourselves to the world. Glück, in fact, links suffering to the act of writing. The suffering involved in poetry is not the ‘self-sacrifice’ that T. S. Eliot demanded of his impersonal artist but instead a blurring of boundaries between self and world. As Glück writes elsewhere (in 'Rainy Morning'): ‘We can all write about suffering / with our eyes closed.’