in defense of unicorns

part I

I like to buy vintage books on eBay – books on any topic, really – medicine, electronics, etc. But recently, someone was offering 7 vintage books of poems by women for five dollars, and I was excited. Maybe I'd find something I'd like, some unrecognized modernist, or some bit of women's Victorian poetry that wasn't entirely sentimental and clichéd. Instead, I found some tedious poems, pseudo-traditional sonnets and lots and lots of end rhymes. Then I came to the last book, The Unicorn and Other Poems, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

The Lindberghs had their baby stolen, everyone knows that. Not everyone knows that Lindbergh's wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was an immensely popular writer, and that she wrote one of the most effective and widely read isolationist and pro-Nazi American texts during WWII (although she was quickly forgiven after the war by the authorities – you'll see why by the end of this piece). Also not widely known: Lindbergh abandoned his wife and family for months at a time without a word, flying off to parts unknown. Lindbergh also forbade his wife from crying or being “anything less than hopeful” after their baby was kidnapped. Lindbergh also had two extra, hidden families, as his wife discovered after his death.

But when Lindbergh's public wife, Anne Morrow, met Lindbergh for the first time, she thought he was a god. In her letters, Anne reveals how she believed she was frivolous, silly and superficial (in other words, just a girl) until she met the famous pilot and married (while still worshiping) that god. Lindbergh, like an old-testament deity, was cruel, exacting and unfair – but Anne continued to submit and wait for the words of “thy will” from him for most of her life.

Not everyone knows that her book of poetry was a best-seller, selling sixty thousand copies during the first 6 months. 60K. In 6 months. Why had I never heard of her? I'm a fan of Cold War writing. I've read Plath and all her contemporary poets over a dozen times. Plath's Ariel was the only other NT-Times-best-selling book of poetry written by a woman during the 50s and 60s. The Unicorn and Other Poems was published in 1956. Plath and Sexton probably read it as they were just becoming writers, young women poets with chips on their shoulders, their mouths set in perpetual dark pouts. How did they feel about this book? Did they hurl it across their bedrooms or out their windows? Did they read it and reread it as they fell asleep each night? Plath and Sexton's poems give permission – they give angry women a cutting, furious and upsetting voice to use. They remade the genre with each verse – they stomped on tradition and ground it under their heels. But first (and most especially the young Plath), they wrote “correct” poems in neat, feminine, obedient decorous, and rhyming poetry. Here's a section of a Plath poem, written around 1952-53, when she was in college:

Oh, never try to knock on rotten wood

Or play another card game when you've won;

Never try to know more than you should.

This poem is unpublished from her course work at Smith, and titled “Never Try to Know More Than You Should.” I found it in a photograph of a lot of her work that was auctioned at Sotheby's in December 2014. Here, you can see Plath following the traditional style and tone of women's verse – contained, ordered, metered, and centered around submission.

Anne's book, published in 1956, shows a similar focus on feminine obedience and passivity. In the central poem "The Unicorn," Anne focuses on the captured Unicorn's parallels to a trapped woman:

Here sits the Unicorn;

Head in a collar cased,

Like a girdle laced

Round a maiden's waist.

And a little further on in the poem:

Here sits the Unicorn:

Leashed by a chain of gold...

Delicate as a cross at rest

On a maiden's breast.

(Wow, those clunky end-rhymes still make me wince). Anne stresses, in this poem, how the Unicorn, despite being chained and fenced in, is paradoxically free. He has freed himself by complete passivity and submission: “...unaware/ Of his wounds, of his snare, [because, for him]...the need to love/ Has replaced desire.../ He sits so still, / Where he waits Thy will.” The traditional reading of the symbol of the Unicorn in Captivity is that the Unicorn represents Christ. If Anne's poem is read that way, then, “wait[ing] Thy will” is a reference to waiting for the will of god despite pain and frustration. However, the tone, structure, and imagery of the poem connect it back to the conventions of 18th and 19th century women's poetry, which was also frequently about how women are like trapped animals (in this earlier poetry, birds in cages) and that, like these animals, the women could only find happiness through accepting the limits of their position.

When Anne connects the Unicorn to a woman with a necklace and girdle, she is sharing how women (and perhaps herself) can find freedom through submission and compliance. For “Thy will” is, in general, her husband's will.

This is why Anne's poetry was so popular. Despite being pro-Nazi for a short time during the war, she publicly apologized and became the perfect Cold War Wife. After all the Rosie the Riveter propaganda during WWII, the US government and media scrambled to convince women that they belonged back in the home, and back under their husbands' thumbs. While Plath's poetry eventually upended the propaganda machine, Anne Morrow Lindbergh's was one of the most popular and sought after parts of it.

Next part: the horses of Sylvia Plath and Anne Morrow Lindbergh compete.

Christine Hamm has a PhD in American Poetics, and is a former poetry editor for Ping*Pong. She won the MiPOesias First Annual Chapbook Competition with her manuscript, Children Having Trouble with Meat. Her poetry has been published in Orbis, Pebble Lake Review, Lodestar Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, Rattle, Dark Sky, and many others. She has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize, and she teaches English at Pace. Echo Park, her third book of poems, came out from Blazevox in the fall of 2011. As Christine was the third runner-up to the Erbacce International Poetry Prize, Erbacce published her chapbook, My Western, in 2012. The New Orleans Review published Christine's latest chapbook, A is for Absence, in the fall of 2014, and nominated her work for a Pushcart.

For more work by Christine Hamm, check out her page at our Online Sundries site.

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