Romanticism and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Darkness Audible: Negative Capability and Mark Doty’s "Nocturne in Black and Gold"

Ellen Keck Stauder, Reed College

Notes

¹ The manuscripts are by Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Burns, Byron, Heine, Keats, Poe, Pope, Swinburne and Tennyson. The commentators, besides Doty, are McHugh, Hudgins, Kizer, Longenbach, Simic, C. K. Williams, Corn, Graham, Howard, Hollander, and Hecht.
close window

² In a 1998 essay replying to Harold Bloom, Doty argues against a notion of aesthetic autonomy: "The idea of aesthetic autonomy is a fantasy. It’s like going into a flower shop and believing that the flowers you buy have no qualities but color and shape, that they exist only to be arranged. The flowers have a local habitation and a name; they grew in specific places; they have characteristics, relations, histories. In their fields and their foliage, in their particular situations, the flowers are elements of a world. Who named them, hybridized them, grew them, sold them? Who owned the land? Who decided which were desirable? The flower arrangement is pretty, but the poetry resides in the whole complicated story, the web of relations.

The aesthetic is not now and never has been autonomous. If it were, no poetry would be possible but language poetry, which denies the validity of representation and questions the very notion of subjectivity. To represent is to enter into a pact with the devil, with the powers of this world: it is to let the world help write the poem." ("Here in Hell")
close window

³ Severn’s deathbed portrait of Keats can be seen on at least two web sites:
1) http://englishhistory.net/keats/images/death.jpg;
2) http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/keats.html#portrait.
close window

⁴ The Whistler painting can be viewed on the internet at several sites but two particularly good representations are:
1) http://www.dia.org/collections/amerart/tonalism/46.309.html [the Detroit Institute of Art site, where the painting is housed]; and
2) http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/enam312/gallerys/amart3a.html.
close window

⁵ In a 1994 interview, conducted close in time to the finishing of the Atlantis manuscript, Doty talked about Negative Capability in relation to AIDS and writing. "The real shift happened when it became not a subject for me, but a part of my subjectivity, a part of my daily life. To the point that I began to see AIDS almost not as a thing in itself. Is AIDS a thing? It means so much to me that it’s not even a word, that it’s an acronym and therefore has a larger negative capability, as Keats put it" (Klein 21).
close window

⁶ For a far-reaching discussion of the ghostly leave takings in Keats’s odes, especially their connection to Hamlet, see Kaufman, pp. 372-377. I am also indebted to this article for Kaufman’s very persuasive demonstration of the ways that "constructivism exists in dialectical tension with negative capability" (371), a notion I have tried to pursue here using a somewhat different vocabulary, and for his demonstration of the ways this claim has broader critical resonances with respect to the relationship between formalist and Frankfurt school criticism.
close window