Beginnings That Recolor Closures: Artistic Partnership, Multimodali ty, and Autobiographical Echoes in The Death of Cock Robin
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46585/absa.2026.19.2815Keywords:
poetry, nursery rhyme, multimodality, W. D. Snodgrass, DeLoss McGrawAbstract
This paper centers on the poetry and painting collection entitled The Death of Cock Robin, a collaboration between the poet W. D. Snodgrass and the painter DeLoss McGraw, based on the nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?” On a more tangible level, it examines the intersection of text and image, outlining specific multimodal models, and discusses the formal experimentation in the poems. Attending to a more intricate layer, the analysis delves into the autobiographical dimension of Snodgrass’s poetry. It argues that through his rendition of and play on the nursery rhyme, the poet tells his own story, framing death as a symbolic closure to his earlier career and
“confessional” reputation. The paper therefore not only addresses a gap in scholarship on Snodgrass’s later work but also offers a novel perspective on his oeuvre as a whole.
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