Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America explores the relationship betweenconfessional poetry and constitutional privacy doctrine both of which emergedat the end of... » 

Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America explores the relationship betweenconfessional poetry and constitutional privacy doctrine both of which emergedat the end of the 1950s. While the public declarations of the Supreme Court andthe private declamations of the lyric poet may seem unrelated both express theupheavals in American notions of privacy that marked the Cold War era. Nelsonsituates the poetry and legal decisions as part of a far wider anxiety aboutprivacy that erupted across the social cultural and political spectrum duringthis period. She explores the panic over the death of privacy aroused bybroad changes in postwar culture the growth of suburbia the advent oftelevision the popularity of psychoanalysis the arrival of computerdatabases and the spectacles of confession associated with McCarthyism.Examining this interchange between poetry and law at its most intense momentsof reflection in the 1960s 70s and 80s Deborah Nelson produces arhetorical analysis of a privacy concept integral to postwar Americas selfdefinition and to bedrock contradictions in Cold War ideology. Nelson arguesthat the desire to stabilize privacy in a constitutional right and the movementtoward confession in postwar American poetry were not simply manifestations ofthe anxiety about privacy. Supreme Court justices and confessional poets suchas Anne Sexton Robert Lowell W. D. Snodgrass and Sylvia Plath wereredefining the nature of privacy itself. Close reading of the poetry alongsidethe Supreme Courts shifting definitions of privacy in landmark decisionsreveals a broader and deeper cultural metaphor at work. «