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Frank O’Hara’s ecstatic elegy: ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ in memory Wallace Stevens

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-20, 14:15 authored by Sam LadkinSam Ladkin
This article engages with two key modes of modernism, abstraction and autonomy, exemplified by the figures of the hero and serpent respectively in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and with properties modernism largely disavowed, namely the rhetoric of sensibility or sentimentality. The article mediates the seminal readings of modernism of Charles Altieri and T.J. Clark. Clark’s analysis of modernism’s paradoxical dream of returning to the pre-­modern “World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity” is judged a Romantic dream; O’Hara’s dream, however, is a return to the fundament of sentimentality, the authority of feeling in the body, and in love. The performative rhetoric that supports autonomy, described by Altieri, is transformed by O’Hara’s status as a love poet. O’Hara’s poem is therefore an elegy for feelings, and for modernism, in what Jerome McGann terms the “ecstatic” tradition. Sentimental late modernism is the inability to turn back to the sensibility of love, and the ecstatic elegy for it, the “complete expenditure” that affects an alternative autonomy.

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Publication status

  • Published

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  • Published version

Journal

Blackbox Manifold

Publisher

University of Sheffield

Issue

10

Page range

1-43

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • No

Legacy Posted Date

2019-02-25

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2019-02-21

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