Charles Altieri, "Strange Affinities:
A Partial Return to Wordsworthian Poetics After Modernism"
Wordsworth matters first because of the curse that the egotistical
sublime was to become. High Victorian poets could not be content unless
their speakers could take on personal stances dignified by Wordsworthian
high eloquence. But they could no longer marry that eloquence to processes
of sensation or to modes of symbol making. So the affective basis for
self-projection came increasingly to have little but the poet’s imaginary
identification with the role of poet as sustenance for lyric eloquence.
This essay uses a short poem by Matthew Arnold to illustrate features
of self-projection that become even more striking in overtly Wordsworthian
poems like "The Scholar Gypsy." The essay also shows how modernist rejections
of Romanticism might better be seen as repudiations of Victorian versions
of the romantic subject that had lost the possibility of keeping the
ego continuous with sensation. If we treat the poetics of immanence
as primarily an emphasis on particular ways of getting as much of mind
as possible made continuous with the senses, we can see that the anti-symbolist
moderns and their heirs had to reinvent, sans egotistical sublime, what
Wordsworth sought as his means of resisting the corrupt modes of feeling
influencing social life. Wordsworth is the godfather of at least one
strand of contemporary radical poetics because of how he enables us
to escape the lyric heritage that Victorian poetics imposed upon him.
[go to essay]
Robert Kaufman, "Sociopolitical (i.e.,
Romantic) Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics"
This essay traces the ways that Romantic poetics and aesthetics bequeath
certain problems of difficulty that emerge full-blown in Modernism proper.
The essay identifies and reconsiders a number of issues around the question
of "difficulty" that are simultaneously poetic, theoretical, and sociopolitical.
The essay's discussions range from Kant and the Romantic poets, through
the Frankfurt School and its afterlives in contemporary critical-theoretical
writings, to recent poetry and cinema. Among the questions the essay
pursues (from a perspective at once aesthetic and sociopolitical) is
whether Romantic notions of difficulty taken up by modern art can help
us evaluate whether the apparent difficulties of a given piece of contemporary
critical or theoretical writing is necessary or justified
or whether, on the other hand, it is simply obscure, over-complicated,
and/or poorly written (and hence impedes, or renders itself irrelevant
to, attempts to put literary-aesthetic materials and experiences into
engagement with social, historical, and political reality).
[go to essay]
Ellen Keck Stauder, "Darkness Audible:
Negative Capability in Mark Doty's 'Nocturne in Black and Gold'"
Beginning from Doty's commentary on Keats's "Endymion" manuscript,
this essay examines the way the poetic process is figured as a conversation
between the given and the made but also between the dark, unconscious
world and the active, intellectual world of the will. Using Blanchot's
and Tiffany's work on the role of obscurity in the lyric, the essay
considers Doty's "Nocture in Black and Gold" as an exploration of leave
taking in the form of an embodiment of shadow. Beginning with the poem's
epigraph from St. Augustine, "Shadow is the queen of colors," the article
traces how the poem investigates the color and substance of shadow or
nothingness via an engagement with three sources: Whistler's painting,
after which the poem is titled, Keats's notion of a happiness of the
moment, and the figure of the Queen of the Night from Mozart's The
Magic Flute. Doty's reading of Keats locates the origins of poetry
in the very nothingness over which Keats's things of beauty are meant
to triumph. For Doty, poetic description, like Blanchot's infinitely
eroding cadaver, marks the temporal locus of the body, even as it moves
into a nowhere, an obscurity that is, by conventional definition, beyond
language. Doty's exploration of this nowhere brings him finally to the
burnished darkness of the ordinary sublime, a place of intimacy restored.
[go to essay]
Lisa M. Steinman, "Introduction
to Romanticism & Contemporary Poetry & Poetics"
Steinman's introduces essays by Charles Altieri on Wordsworth, Arnold,
Williams and the contemporary poetry of Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino;
by Robert Kaufman on the problematics and uses of Romantic difficulty
from Kant through Bejamin, Adorno and the Frankfurt School to, finally,
the work of Barbara Guest and Michael Palmer; and by Ellen Stauder on
description and affect in Mark Doty's uses of Keats. Noting the variety
of both contemporary and Romantic practices, this introduction argues
that despite disagreements about which poetic practices exemplify the
meeting of subject, world and feeling, there is an interesting if uneasy
agreement that the difficult problem and necessity of having thought,
feeling, world and language converge in poems is Romanticism's continuing
legacy.
[go to "Introduction"]
