Drag Keats: Mark Doty’s Cockney Poetics

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the American poet Mark Doty’s books of the 1990s, allusions to Keats are so frequent and so pronounced as to make Keats appear a kind of presider to the poetry. Doty’s lyrics may often be elegiac in tone, but his use of Keats is neither elegiac nor nostalgic. I see Doty’s style in these early books as enacting a reading of the critical possibility of Keats’s style, one that corroborates the insights of recent materialist scholarship on Keats. I understand Doty’s queer poetics as strategically employing a kind of Cockney poetics. Where for many contemporary poets Keats functions as the icon of lyric tradition or authenticity of “experience,” Doty, working within the lyric tradition, connects Keats to drag, kitsch, and simulation. I propose D. W. Winnicott’s notion of “object use” as a model for this irreverently allusive “use” of Keats.