Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry by Ann Keniston

Abstract

Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry, by Ann Keniston. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015. 228 pages. In Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry, Ann Keniston reopens two topics that are central to thinking about poetry but that each present a number of potential snares for the scholar who aims to train a critical eye upon them: temporality and figuration. Both topics are seemingly ubiquitous; they are not only the subjects of myriad books and articles written over the past several decades, but they are also topics that have occupied poets incessantly. In a number of respects, these two issues are at the very heart of the poetic enterprise, and so taking them on is akin to taking on nearly everything that might matter about poetry. Many of the most important statements about and theories of poetry over the past several hundred years emerge out of a consideration of one or the other of these issues, whether Wordsworth's theory of the affective temporality of poetic composition spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings that is, some time later, composed as a poem, recollected in tranquility [Gill 1984, 611]) or Eliot's notion of the proper mechanism for figuring emotion in poetry (the objective correlative [1953, 107]). For the most part, Keniston's interests in the temporalities and figures of poetry aren't directly focused on the act of composition, and her goal in Ghostly Figures is not to wrestle once again with Wordsworth or Eliot (although each comes to the surface at several points). However, her framing of these central issues introduces another set of formidable critical precursors. Near the start of her introduction, Keniston provides an important gloss on her central motif: often impacted tropes and figures in postwar poems reveal their inextricability from the difficulties of (5). So, on the one hand, Keniston means to intervene in a topic over which a small cache of essays by Paul de Man still holds remarkable sway. And, on the other hand, she aims to revive a term--belatedness--that is still bound to Harold Bloom's theory of literary influence. Keniston's argument isn't dedicated to overturning these powerful theories emerging from New Haven in the 1970s, and de Man's influence in particular is evident throughout the volume. Rather, Keniston aims to reroute her central themes--figuration, lyric address, belatedness--around these influential deconstructionist accounts of them, in order to make them newly relevant and vibrant within contemporary poetry criticism. This is part of the great value of Keniston's volume: under the broad rubric of belatedness, she provides an account of postwar American poetry that manages to reenergize and complicate a series of fundamental concepts. By examining the ways in which a handful of American poets from the past sixty years have figured and have experimented with and within the temporalities of poetic form and lyric address, Keniston's volume intercedes in current debates about lyric theory in the area in which the so-called New Lyric Studies is least well developed: the relationship between theories of lyric and contemporary poetry that, in whatever way, might be said to partake of some of the energies of lyric writing. The central figures associated with New Lyric Studies--Virginia Jackson, Yopie Prins, and, in a different way, Jonathan Culler--aren't prominent figures in Keniston's volume, but it is helpful to understand her work within this larger field. More particularly, Ghostly Figures shows, implicitly if not directly, a path that might--that should--be taken by those critics interested in lyric theory and historical poetics. That is to say, her volume might help New Lyric Studies turn more productively toward the consideration of new poetry. In Keniston's account, belatedness is a multivalent term. In its more literal sense, it refers to the complex lag endemic to memory, to a broader structure of feeling (what we might call the feeling of post-), to the difficulties of representing the past and especially historical trauma, and in a more literary-critical sense to the ways that writers relate to their precursors (in a quasi-Bloomian way). …