Affect, Psychoanalysis, and American Poetry: This Feeling of Exaltation by John Steen (review)

This study offers scholars and students of twentieth-and twenty-first-century American poetry an insightful and innovative approach to examining the role of feelings and affects in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell, Robert Creeley, Ted Berrigan, Aaron Kunin, and Claudia Rankine. While the first two chapters embark on the Freudian concept of anxiety as manifested in the poetry of Stevens, the greater part of the book departs from Freudian psychoanalysis to offer a reading of feelings, ranging from mourning to shame and rage, through the lenses of a diverse set of thinkers. These include D. W. Winnicott, Roland Barthes, Silvan Tomkins, Eve Sedgwick, and Lauren Berlant, who are, as John Steen points out, “all poetic thinkers in the sense that they push the boundaries of the forms they inherit” (5). Against the more recognizable formal, intellectual, political, and linguistic concerns of twentieth-century verse, the poetry examined by Steen foregrounds emotion as a leading drive toward poetic innovation, without idealizing the role of feeling in the manner of nineteenth-century lyric poetry.

For the six poets featured in this study, “feeling rises to the level of a crisis” “in their very confrontation of the difficulties associated with handling feeling poetically in the wake of Modernism’s challenges to lyric form” (2). Steen uses “feeling” as an umbrella term encompassing “emotion,” referring to a feeling consciously experienced and accounted for, and “affect,” denoting a sort of “felt unknown,” after Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of the term, “which consistently overwhelm[s] the structures of perception and expression, [and] cannot properly be said to be experienced by anyone” (4). As Steen indicates, affects “exist, but cannot, in the ‘now’ of their emergence, be named” (4). Such un-nameable, uncontainable, un-pleasurable affects permeate the poems examined in this study, making it impossible for a feeling recollected in tranquility to emerge as a healing process in the composition of twentieth-and twenty-first-century poetry. On the positive side, such negative affects present unique challenges to formal aspects of verse-writing, spurring creativity and allowing for innovations in the genre of poetry.

In his recourse to the theory of the holding environment developed by D. W. Winnicott, which proves to be particularly resonant with the challenges posed by the work of affects in modernist poems, Steen makes a case for “reading poems as dyads that consistently emerge in order to acknowledge and experience—or suffer—a gap that separates, though never absolutely, the poem and the poet, reader and poem, work of art and world” (7). Winnicott’s theory emphasizes the importance of the holding stage in an infant’s development—a particularly anxious phase that precedes speech and binds the infant intimately to her caregiver, compelling the two to share each other’s feelings of apprehension and uncertainty. Overcoming the effects of a caregiver’s insecurity can be traumatic for an individual well past the infant stage, yet the anxiety initiated henceforth can be a source of adult creative energy. That is precisely the source of poetic innovation that Steen argues for in the case of the six poets in question. Moreover, the holding stage is one of the “transitional experiences” emblematic of Winnicott’s work, which finds that the ongoing formation of subjectivity results from the inexorable interaction between internal and external stimuli. As Steen points out, “D. W. Winnicott remains particularly relevant to twenty-first-century readers . . . because he offers a theory of the transitional site of aesthetic experience that recognizes the distinction between art and world without neglecting the ways in which they are inextricably bound” (6).

Chapters 1 and 2—which readers of this journal may be particularly drawn to—situate Wallace Stevens in a middle ground between his reputation of the world-avoiding, withdrawn, confident seeker of self-knowledge and his more recently acknowledged tendencies to engage with the actual world. Both chapters reveal Stevens’s underlying uncertainty, insecurity, and anxiety in composing poems that are simultaneously and...