Abstract

In his celebrated livre composé Letters to Live Poets, Bruce Beaver forged a poetry of the suffering,narcissistic self, deeply estranged from an «uglier than ugly» society and in constant danger ofdisintegrating into madness. Beaver's undisguised solipsism is remarkable even for a confessional poet.In one of his most personal collections,Life Studies, Robert Lowell could still ventriloquise a poem like «AMad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich.» [2] Beaver's subject matter, however, is entirely dominated andbounded by his self. Reading him, one feels one is reading him, unprotected by literary personae andstripped of objectivist pretensions. Other people strike him as unbearably stupid, hateful or unfeeling,while the few palliatives to his anguish only drive him further from his fellow man: «I still look up, I knowthe sky / is soiled with rubbish orbiting. / As yet it doesn't hide the stars»