15 pages • 30 minutes read
Otherwise
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Background
Literary Context
Kenyon, like other pastoral poets, used the natural world as a source of inspiration. She was also a contemporary imagist whose work was informed by the association and teaching of her former professor, husband Donald Hall. Like other poets of the era, she found inspiration in the works of William Carlos Williams, American poetry’s premiere imagist. Like Williams, Kenyon concentrates on precise descriptions while using everyday speech in non-metrical lines without rhyme. This technique is present in “Otherwise” where the poet draws sharp images of common objects, as in the “flawless / peach” (Line 6-7) and the “birch wood” (Line 10). As well, Kenyon’s use of the rural New Hampshire landscape solidified her reputation as a pastoral poet. She and Hall lived at Eagle Pond Farm for twenty years.
Kenyon’s reputation as an emotionally resonant writer contains appreciation for how much she communicated in just a few short phrases. Further, her sensitive exploration of depression, mania, and suffering in Constance (1993) aligns her with such earlier poets like Sylvia Plath, who wrote honestly of her own mental illness in books like Ariel (1965). A fan of English Romantic poet John Keats, whose work she studied, Kenyon emulated his manner of depicting mortality. Although she chose to write in free verse, unlike Keats, Kenyon similarly rendered the experiences of anger, regret, hope and faith when facing life’s cruelties. While Kenyon faced the deaths of loved ones as well as her own terminal diagnosis, her poetry remained forthright in its discussion of the inevitability of death.
Biographical Context
Kenyon’s leukemia diagnosis is essential to the understanding of the context of Kenyon’s “Otherwise.” Kenyon began writing a series of poems—of which “Otherwise” was one—immediately after receiving a diagnosis of leukemia in 1994. This cancer would take her life in fifteen months.
The power of “Otherwise” is in part due to the speaker’s knowledge of encroaching death as they observe what they will leave behind. Kenyon had married Hall, who was several years her senior. According to his interview with Cramer, he had hesitated to propose because he was worried that Kenyon would outlive him. This prediction seemed to come true when he was diagnosed in 1989 with colon cancer. At that time, Kenyon detailed her grief through poetry and many of the poems in Let Evening Come (1990) featured Hall’s mortality as the subject. While Hall recovered, she faced battles of her own, which included the challenges of her own bipolar disorder, the death of her parents and Hall’s parents, and her own leukemia diagnosis, which led to a failed bone marrow transplant.
Hall posthumously collected Kenyon’s poems for Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, and the collection shows her struggles with leaving behind a world she loved. In her imagery in “Otherwise” and “The Sick Wife,” the reader experiences with the speaker of the poem the pain of letting the world go on after one’s demise. Kenyon often saw the creation of art as consolation for troubling news. As Kenyon said in an interview with David Bradt, “Poetry has an unearthly ability to turn suffering into beauty” (in Kenyon, Jane. A Hundred White Daffodils, 1999, 175).
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