File(s) not publicly available
Frank O’Hara’s ecstatic elegy: ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ in memory Wallace Stevens
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.
History
Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Published version
Journal
Blackbox ManifoldPublisher
University of SheffieldIssue
10Page range
1-43Department affiliated with
- English Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- No
Legacy Posted Date
2019-02-25First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2019-02-21Usage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedKeywords
Licence
Exports
RefWorks
BibTeX
Ref. manager
Endnote
DataCite
NLM
DC