Paternity is poetical

Listen to this essay 25 minute listen Here’s an old story, often told. In Book 6 of the Iliad, Hector – dressed splendidly in bronze armour and a helmet with a horsehair crest – bids farewell to his wife Andromache. She begs him not to return to battle and hands him their newborn son. Hector raises the boy into the air, says a short prayer, and hands him back. ‘Go home, attend to your own handiwork / at loom and spindle,’ he commands, in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: ‘As for the war, / that is for men.’ Hector is a father in the heroic mode, and his parenting style has long been irresistible to artists and writers. Few were shocked when the painter Paul Gauguin left his wife and five children in Denmark to pursue fame and art in Paris, then Tahiti. Such distance, they say, is good for a child. ‘The father, from his distance, supports, protects, nourishes his child,’ wrote D H Lawrence in 1922: ‘and it is ultimately on the remote but powerful father-love that the infant rests.’ Distance is equally necessary for the father who seeks to make art. ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,’ wrote Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise (1938). This is a deeply self-serving story, of course. It’s nice for the male poet not to have to change diapers. But the argument that unsullied privacy is essential to creativity is tenacious. It surfaces when Virginia Woolf writes that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ Contemporary feminists have continued to respond to this archetype of generativity. In Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation (2014), for example, the narrator vows never to marry but to become ‘an art monster instead’. But what if domesticity – and specifically parenthood – is in fact generative for artists? What if the cliché of solitary male creativity got it wrong? We may begin with one nursing poet. In his poem ‘Frost at Midnight’, written in the winter of 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge pictures himself at home in his cottage on a frosty night. The owls cry outside and the frost rings the trees and he is alone, ‘save that at my side / My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.’ He addresses his infant son: Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, Fill up the intersperséd vacancies And momentary pauses of the thought! He is transported to memories of his own childhood, and then his hopes for his son’s future. ‘Frost at Midnight’ is a poem about caring, in both senses of the word: caring for and caring about. As such, it is a surprising poem about domestic labour, which has invited comment from scholars. ‘What is truly radical about “Frost at Midnight” is Coleridge’s self-representation as a father in the traditional maternal posture of watching over a sleeping baby,’ notes Jonathan Bate. What Bate calls ‘the traditional maternal posture’ is what Hector calls ‘your own handiwork / at loom and spindle’. But perhaps it is not so radical to picture a poet who is equally involved in the work of parenting. Perhaps it is precisely fatherhood that made Coleridge a poet. What makes ‘Frost at Midnight’ significant in Coleridge’s career is that it represents the crest of the much longer wave of his stylistic development. It is not just a great poem – it is the poem within which he becomes a great poet, and his growth as a poet can be tracked neatly against his experience of becoming a father. Coleridge was far from home when his son was born. A lost revolutionary, he was always trying to save or at least improve the world, and he was preaching in Birmingham when word came by letter: Hartley, born to his wife Sara, on 19 September 1796. He met the news with shock and a trio of sonnets. ‘My o’erwhelmed Heart / Trembled, & vacant tears stream’d down my face,’ he wrote in the first of these. He sent this to a friend, and it was published only in 1847, after his death. He wrote another on the journey home, and here imagines that he might arrive to terrible news: ‘when I reach my door, / If heavy looks should tell me thou art dead …’ They are not charming poems, but repressed; so guarded even when apparently tender, as if he is trying out how he feels in the set form of an Italian sonnet. ‘When I saw it on its mother’s arm, / And hanging at her bosom,’ he confesses in the last of these sonnets: ‘Then I was thrill’d and melted.’ This is a cautious, half-convincing expression of fatherly love. A few days later, he wrote to a friend: ‘in truth, I have seen handsomer babies in my lifetime.’ ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Christabel’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ were all begun or completed within 18 months of his son’s birth Because Coleridge narrated his moods, and wrote letters that turned into poems, he permits us to reconstruct a detailed timeline of his changing feelings towards his son. Later, it will be an unhappy story, and Hartley will live an unhappy life, but at first it did not seem to be going that way. By December 1796, Coleridge was planning to move his family to a thatched cottage in the village of Nether Stowey in Somerset. He wrote to a friend with enthusiasm: ‘I mean to work very hard as Cook, Butler, Scullion, Shoe-cleaner, occasional Nurse.’ He turned out to love nursing. By the start of February, he was writing to another friend: ‘You would smile to see my eye rolling up to the ceiling in a Lyric fury, and on my knee a Diaper pinned, to warm.’ This moment – of writing while nursing, of diapers and poetic inspiration – is the genesis of ‘Frost at Midnight’. The creation of the father is also the creation of the poet. In the spring of 1797, Coleridge was writing 50 lines of blank verse a day. He began to develop his ‘conversation poems’, which drew from his letters to friends and family: their language is intimate, domestic; their topics often autobiographical. Towards the end of that year, he turned to what are now called his ‘mystery poems’, and are those for which he is most celebrated: ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Christabel’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, all of which were begun or completed within 18 months of Hartley’s birth. This was a moment of golden invention, and Coleridge knew that something had changed. Years later, in his rambling autobiography Biographia Literaria (1817), he recalled the transformation. ‘I retired to a cottage in Somersetshire,’ he wrote, and: Here I found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in … The fontal truths of natural religion and the books of Revelation alike contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my ark touched on an Ararat, and rested. It is a biblical scene and a beautiful crisis, and suddenly all is both new and old. ‘Frost at Midnight’ was written over the winter of 1797 and completed by February 1798. It is highly structured. Coleridge’s biographer Richard Holmes calls it a ‘curve of memory and prophecy’, and, in four parts and carefully measured blank verse, it moves gently between the present moment, his own past and his hopes for the future. He thinks back to church bells – ‘the poor man’s only music’ – heard when he was a boy, and is filled with gladness that, while his own boyhood was spent in a great city, his sleeping son: shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain. The poem ends with a blessing: ‘all seasons shall be sweet to thee.’ A man becomes a father and a poetic revolution follows. Not always, but often enough. Percy Shelley’s son William was born in January 1816. According to his biographer, also Richard Holmes, ‘after 1816: no other Romantic writer learned, and changed, and developed his art so swiftly.’ A century later, William Carlos Williams began what his biographer Paul Mariani describes as his ‘poem of initiation, his early crossing, his coming to some sort of terms at last with his own imperfect, vibrant world’ when his wife was pregnant. Their son was born in January 1914, and the poem was published that spring. Eighty per cent of the men who have won the Nobel Prize in Literature or the Pulitzer Prize for poetry were fathers. Celebrated philosophers, on the other hand, tend to be childless. There are other ways to narrate poetic breakthroughs, of course. Coleridge’s development as a poet is often recounted – most powerfully by Adam Nicolson, in The Making of Poetry (2019) – as bound up with his friendship with Wordsworth, so that the two men together pioneered what we now think of as Romanticism. A pattern is not a recipe, and each of these examples has its own complications in the granular details. But the pattern is substantial enough – and counterintuitive enough – to be worth remarking upon. It is also supported by recent developments in neuroscience. As a field, neuroscience has been transformed by neuroimaging technologies: particularly functional MRIs, developed in the early 1990s, which permit researchers to track brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow. This has led to notable insights in two research fields: into creativity, and into fatherhood. Strikingly, the two may be linked. Cognitive scientists distinguish between what are popularly known as Type-1 and Type-2 mental processes. The first are quick, unconscious, associative thoughts, while the second are slower, deliberate and conscious, mediated by the frontal lobe and executive control network. A 2020 study put EEG beanies on the heads of 32 jazz guitarists and asked them to improvise riffs while their brain activity was scanned. ‘Higher-quality improvisations were associated with predominantly posterior left-hemisphere activity,’ the study found, while ‘lower-quality improvisations were associated with right temporo-parietal and fronto-polar activity.’ This suggests that the creative process takes place – or takes place best – in the automatic and unconscious left posterior part of the brain, sometimes described as the ‘default’ system, rather than the more conscious, deliberative ‘control’ system. The brain assists new fathers by encouraging the perception that fatherhood is meaningful This feels like commonsense to anyone who has experienced states of creative ‘flow’, say. But it has specific consequences for our understanding of art as a process. Artistic creation is marked by activation of the medial prefrontal cortex and by deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. A 2015 study of 30 poets found similar patterns of activity. The poets at work showed increased activity in the inferior front gyrus, left middle temporal gyrus, and superior temporal sulcus as well as in ‘mesial temporal areas, including the parahippocampal gyrus, hippocampus, and amygdala bilaterally and subcortical areas in the left hemisphere.’ These are the areas associated not just with language, but with memory and improvisation. In a 2020 study, published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, expectant fathers who were played 30-second clips of infant cries interspersed with white noise responded to the infant cries ‘with increased activation in bilateral areas of the temporal lobe involved in processing speech sounds and social and emotional stimuli.’ Heightened activity within the temporal lobe is marked in both new fathers and poets. While specific areas are activated at specific moments, it is key to see the brain as a network, and to trace patterns of connectivity between the regions. Both of these studies of creativity – of the guitarists, and of the poets – had a second step. The jazz guitarists were divided between experts and novices; and the poets, who were also compared by level of experience, were scanned twice, once while writing, then again while revising their poems. One characteristic of the experts is that they more effectively suspended the cognitive control mediated by the executive network; in the case of the revising poets, this was then re-engaged. The two processes are working together. David Rosen of Drexel University in Philadelphia, who led the study of the jazz guitarists, emphasises the importance of connectivity between the default and executive networks, which are both implicated in neuroscientific studies of creativity. He writes: ‘Increased connectivity across these networks may enable creative performance in a variety of domains, including music improvisation and creative writing.’ The clinical psychologist Darby Saxbe has surveyed recent developments in the scientific analysis of neurological – as well as hormonal and physical – changes in new fathers. In her book Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives (2026), she points out that new fathers’ brains lose volume, for example, and this is chiefly in the cortex. ‘The cortex thinks ahead, makes sense of the world, and navigates our complex social lives,’ she explains. Meanwhile, the ‘cognitive and mentalising work’ that goes into fatherhood is indicated by the changing patterns of connectivity between different regions of the brain. Saxbe studies family relationships at the University of Southern California. Discussing a study by a junior researcher in her lab on how fathers experience a new sense of meaning, she notes that those fathers who reported an increased sense of purpose and meaning in their lives across the transition to fatherhood ‘had increased connections within the temporal poles, which are key components of the mentalising network, and the right hippocampus.’ This is pragmatic, Saxbe suggests: the brain assists new fathers by encouraging the perception that fatherhood is meaningful. Such assistance can play out in surprising ways, and with surprising consequences. A study of the transition to fatherhood by Anthony G Vaccaro and colleagues at the University of Southern California, published in the journal Emotion in 2025, emphasises the impact of ‘resting-state connectivity between default mode and limbic networks’. It suggests that: Functional connections between these networks may facilitate the integration of affective aspects of the environment with a sense of self and autobiographical memory, facilitating meaning-making throughout emotionally complex times. This increased connectivity enhances the feeling of being closely attuned to the environment, and draws upon memories to help the self navigate and understand the present. Again and again, the research points to intensified cerebral connectivity, and suggests that such changes take place regardless of biological relationship. A fascinating 2014 study conducted by Ruth Feldman and Eyal Abraham and their colleagues in Israel found the familiar patterns of response in homosexual male couples raising infants who had either been adopted or born through surrogacy. Summarising the study, Saxbe wrote that the homosexual fathers performing the primary caregiver role ‘showed amygdala activation similar to the primary caregiver moms and mentalising network activation similar to the secondary caregiver dads, as well as stronger connectivity between those two parts of the brain.’ The process of becoming a father – quite literally, thinking your way into it – is itself a creative act, driven by time, proximity and a sense of responsibility. Neuroscientists tend to shy away from making direct and causal claims about the brain’s activity. They prefer the language of association, so that a brain region is described as being associated with certain habits or tendencies. That brain activity might lead to explicit changes in a poet’s style is necessarily speculative. And yet: the shifting emphases and patterns described in neuroscientific studies of the brains of new fathers are echoed in the distinctive elements of Coleridge’s remade style: his assertion of autobiographical memory and its resonance in the present; his attention to his child and sense that his own identity is formed anew; his heightened creativity evident in what we might sentimentally see as a new openness. Perhaps we can use the neuroscience to read the poetry, and the poetry to read the neuroscience, in a kind of new longitudinal study, which returns us to the familiar poetic record and in it finds new forms. Let’s take the example of confessional poetry, emerging as a group project in the late 1950s’ United States. The key characteristics of this new style – domestic details, departure from traditional poetic decorum – are shared by several poets, including W D Snodgrass and Sylvia Plath. In her essay ‘What Was Confessional Poetry?’ (1993), Diane Wood Middlebrook observes that the original four confessional poets were all recent parents of daughters when they had their poetic breakthroughs. She includes Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton as well as Snodgrass and Plath, but another candidate for the group is John Berryman, who was already a celebrated poet by March 1957, when his son Paul was born. Over the following 18 months, Berryman suffered, he said, from ‘an inability to stop writing verse’, and he remade his style and produced a great rush of the curious, brilliant poems later called his ‘Dream Songs’. These poems are no longer in set, regular patterns. Harriet was born at the start of January 1957 Of the group, Robert Lowell is perhaps the purest example of a father poet – because of his enormous skill, and the drama of his life, and because the change in his own style is so stark. At first, Lowell wrote like this: I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay… And like this: When we were children our papas were stout And colorless as seaweed or the floats At anchor off New Bedford. We were shut In gardens where our brassy sailor coats … The two poems quoted here are taken from his collection Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), which was published when he was 29. Young Lowell loved rhyme. He later told an interviewer that he wrote his first poems unrhymed and then put the rhymes in after, like an obedient schoolboy doing his homework. Of the 42 poems in the collection, only one doesn’t rhyme completely and this has a complex system of repeated words at the line ends. Beneath the rhymes steps a cautious measure or rhythm. Try saying ‘I saw the spiders marching through the air’ aloud, or even tapping along: the 10 syllables and five balanced feet of iambic pentameter. Lowell followed this collection with a set of dramatic monologues in rhymed iambic pentameter, sometimes known as heroic couplets, published in 1951. He was taking form seriously. Then, after the birth of his daughter Harriet in 1957, he wrote like this: Given a year, I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short enclosure like my school soccer court, and saw the Hudson River once a day. And like this, addressing his young daughter while shaving: Dearest, I cannot loiter here in lather like a polar bear. These two poems are from Life Studies (1959). If they rhyme – and many don’t – it is in a sneaky, cat-like way. The line-lengths vary; these poems are no longer in set, regular patterns. Harriet was born at the start of January 1957. At the end of that year, Lowell sent a handful of new poems to his old friend William Carlos Williams with a note: ‘At forty I’ve written my first unmeasured verse.’ He offers the intimate details of a turbulent emotional life, all bound in elegant, beautiful poems that duck in and out of traditional poetic forms Lowell knew that Life Studies was different. He explained to an acquaintance: ‘It’s all quite a different style, uses a lot of free verse, is intelligible to anyone on the surface, and heavily and directly autobiographical.’ This is a good definition of what soon became known as ‘confessional poetry’, arguably the dominant mode of US poetry of the second half of the 20th century, and which was first named in a review of Life Studies. Lowell’s volume won the National Book Award and has been celebrated ever since. Lowell himself saw the breakthrough in a humbler register. As he went on in his letter: it was only now, in ‘the years of my second marriage, and the birth of my daughter, that I have written to my mind what I really have had to say.’ What is wonderful about Lowell’s poetry from Life Studies on is the jumble of life and art. He offers the intimate, often tender, sometimes shocking details of a turbulent emotional life, all bound in elegant, beautiful poems that duck in and out of traditional poetic forms. A new set of materials alongside a new sense of poetic form: that mix is the characteristic of Lowell’s breakthrough. It is played out when he talks about his daughter and equally is the core of poems far removed from her. For him, all had changed. ‘I’m really mad about my little daughter’ Lowell wrote to the poet Elizabeth Bishop, shortly after Harriet’s birth, ‘and feel as though I had been up to now lacking some prime faculty: eyesight, hearing, reason.’ He wrote to another poet, Adrienne Rich, in November 1960. This letter – from a poet to a poet – was filled with gossip about operas and writerly encouragement, but it is also a letter from one new parent to another, and to amuse her he breaks off: ‘interruption: Harriet has just come with her toy telephone.’ Harriet and her toys were for Lowell a brilliant, productive interruption: she prompted him to change his style. He now found himself, he went on, living in and writing from a ‘queer jumbled world’. ‘Parenting involves heightened emotional and cognitive demands,’ observes the study led by Vaccaro: ‘further emphasising the brain’s role in integrating diverse experiences into a coherent sense of purpose.’ Here is T S Eliot, who was not a father, defining the poet’s task in 1921: ‘When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience.’ The coincidence of language here points to an idea that we have often overlooked: that fatherhood and artistic creation are not antagonistic but congenial; that becoming a father might, quite simply, improve a new father’s poems. But not only poems. Because poems are short and often time-stamped, they make legible the changing way a father may look upon and respond to the deep changes of fatherhood. The same forces are surely powerful, if harder to trace, in creative work by parents more widely, and echo across our cultural moment. We live, in the West, in an age of sensitive dads, dad jokes, and dad dancing: all signs of a cultural revaluation of fatherhood, freed from the stigma of patriarchy. The consequences are political as well as poetic. In The Argonauts (2015), Maggie Nelson powerfully describes the imaginative work and possibility of artistic freedom that come with parenthood, quoting the feminist thinker Susan Fraiman’s call for ‘the decline of the domestic as a separate, inherently female sphere and the vindication of domesticity as an ethic, an affect, an aesthetic, and a public.’ The poetry of fatherhood may take a thousand forms: the tender strangeness of Coleridge, the jumpy brightness of Lowell, the moving and original memoirs and novels by contemporary poets and writers including Ben Lerner and Jack Underwood as well as Nelson. But for each, the material entanglement of creativity and parenthood is a prompt, not a hindrance, to wild new work.