To return to Atherton’s bright idea: she identified the absence of a serious study of the significance of the pseudonymous poetry that was a major feature of Harwood’s prolific publishing during 1960–64. Certainly, anyone with some knowledge of Harwood’s career and a taste for schadenfreude knows that, under the synonym Walter Lehman, she slipped past the eyes of Bulletin editor, Donald Horne, a pair of love sonnets bearing acrostic messages, one frivolous and one much ruder in 1961 than in these expletive-riddled days. Probably, the synonyms Francis Geyer and Miriam Stone are also familiar, especially since feminist critics have given attention to the significance of the latter name. It is true that no one undertaking a study of Harwood has felt it possible to ignore the pseudonyms, but Atherton’s work makes us realise how much they have been seen as something to be disposed of before tackling the ‘real’ business of Harwood as poet. Disposal has offered two possibilities: the masks, wigs and masquerades camp saw them as an overflow of creative energy, a self-configuration of the poet shaped by the witty playfulness best studied in the poems; the pragmatist camp accepted the idea that it was hard to get editors to take numerous poems from the same relatively unknown person (with a feminist addendum of ‘especially if that person is a woman’).

Both rationales emanate from Harwood-as-interviewee. Atherton has an advantage over earlier critics beguiled by the apparent forthcomingness of that particular mask. The accumulation of Harwood’s interviews makes it easier to perceive the extent to which certain motifs are well rehearsed, certain areas of personal life barred against trespassing and, most seriously in Atherton’s view, certain readings of her poetry given authority. Dubbing Harwood ‘Queen of obiter dicta’ is the culminating moment of Atherton’s postmodern resistance to privileging the author as an expositor of the work. ‘Authorial obiter dicta ... should not be used as a device for analyzing poetry because these comments return control over interpretation to the author rather than empowering the reader’; they also ‘promote misreadings’ by predetermining the experience of readers. Atherton’s severe view of critics who rely on Harwood’s word extends to the present reviewer, but since I am also praised on at least one occasion for not doing so, I plead a degree of equanimity in what follows.

In general, I found Atherton a thorough, by no means ungenerous, often discerning reader of the existing body of Harwood criticism. And I frequently found her readings persuasive in their going ‘against the grain’ of Harwood’s own utterances. But I remain unpersuaded that authors have no light at all to shed on the meaning of what they have written, and the initial vehemence with which Atherton asserts ‘Harwood’s deathless grip on her verse’ and her own determination to ‘initiate [its] loosening’ aroused an uneasiness that recurred on occasions, as when a categorical generalisation such as ‘Harwood invalidates any analysis she finds unpalatable’ was attached to the latter’s objection (reasonable in my view) to a ‘quite wrong’ reading of ‘In the Park’ as ‘an account of a battered wife’. Surely there are sometimes readings of a poem that can legitimately be rejected as wrong: Atherton herself is not beyond instructing us that, despite other suggestions, the image of ‘The shadow of a hand’ at the end of Geyer’s ‘On the Death of My Mother’ ‘should [my italics] be read as a final goodbye’.

Uneasiness came too with the categorical assertion that ‘Harwood’s aversion to psychoanalysis demonstrates a fear of the unconscious’. It could just as well demonstrate a desire to protect the unconscious as a source of creative energy. For someone who identified herself, as Atherton suggests through her title and argues at pp. 200–01, with the Romantic seer of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, a psychoanalyst might very well prove to be the person from Porlock, rupturing forever the poetic dream.

That some claims may be excessive does not, I think, invalidate the psychoanalytic approach that is central to the originality of Atherton’s project as she sets out to do what nobody has done to date: to consider the poems written under each pseudonym as a group, so as to determine their characteristics and through this to define psychoanalytically each pseudonym as constituting a ‘subpersonality’ or ‘subself’ or ‘alternative self’ of the public entity Gwen Harwood. These subpersonalities are seen as ways of expressing desires that the conscious self either cannot or will not recognise. Atherton is thus moving beyond Barthes: ‘In my analysis the author is not dead; instead, she is unconscious.’   To attempt a full explanation of Atherton’s complex use of the psychoanalytic theory of subpersonalities within the constraints of this review would necessarily oversimplify and make it sound like no more than a sophistication of multiple voices. I will select one point she stresses: a subpersonality in literature announces its presence through a set of preoccupations, a word that therefore recurs in Atherton’s discussion and that draws me into it irresistibly, because ‘preoccupations’ have always seemed to me to describe exactly the point in a writer’s work where the conscious shaping mind meets the energy of unconscious drives. Atherton’s psychoanalysis of subpersonalities through the texts published under their names does indeed open up some interesting readings of the poems and of Harwood. This is especially true of the chapters on Geyer and Stone, even if I think that Atherton overstates in the latter the extent to which the representation of children is negative, not just in Stone’s poems, but also in Lehman’s, in the letters and indeed throughout Harwood’s work. But much of the difference of emphasis here depends on readings of tone, that most subtle and compelling poetic component. And thinking this made me wonder whether the analytic process that Atherton exerts on Harwood should not be turned on the reader. Are not our readings also coloured by desires and conflicts of which we may be only partly conscious? Some need in Atherton that sensitises her to negative references to children; some need in Strauss that makes her soften the edges?   Having wandered into inconclusiveness, I confess that it was just that quality that disappointed me in Atherton’s chapter on the otherwise little-discussed Timothy Kline, who published 1968–70. Atherton’s idea that he gives voice to an angry subpersonality already present in the letters of Blessed City (1990) is intriguing but not coherently sustained by her analysis of the individual poems. Nor am I convinced that ‘Harwood’s failure to publish any of the Kline poems under her name or include them in her Selected Poems was the way in which she chose to retrospectively manage his anger’. If she could acknowledge Stone’s bitterness, why silence Kline’s anger? Perhaps part of the problem is that the Kline poems just don’t seem very good.  I would rather hear what Atherton has to say about her posited integration of the other subpersonalities into the post-1964 poet. In what relation, for instance, do ‘An Impromptu for Ann Jennings’ (which Atherton curiously dismisses) or ‘The Violets’ stand to ‘Burning Sappho’ or ‘A Kitchen Poem’? There is room for another book from this talented critic.