Living “As and Where We Are”: Feeling and the Emotions as Situated Poetics

Abstract

��� In a 1978 article, the American literary critic Albert Cook claimed that Robert Creeley’s “preconscious” poems undertook the functions of both the “I” and the “it.” Cook is cryptic about the precise meaning of these pronouns just as he never defi nes the preconscious, but he follows these terms with the claim that the “self-possessed” voice Creeley employs in many of his poems “fl attens” but still “retains” Wordsworth’s “something evermore about to be” (Cook 1978, 355). Creeley as a fl attened William Wordsworth is a curious image. Creeley was always thin, but I suspect that Cook here is referring more to the aesthetic qualities of Creeley’s work and its romantic heritage than to his physique, both in the ways that Creeley exemplifi es a prevailing modernist disposition towards language and its relation to things, and in the ways that he represents affective stances that speak to our ordinary and everyday experiences of the world, rather like Wordsworth’s own claimed fealty to “ordinary language.” The trajectories of Cook’s associations, however, are complex, linking Creeley’s “preconscious” poetry with the “I” and the “it” (the ego and the thing) and, fi nally, with Wordsworth and the Romantic transcendental ego whose activity unifi es its mental contents into a coherent representation of the external world. Cook rather assiduously skirts any specifi c references to the emotions in his analysis of Creeley’s poems, but instead suggests that the related notions of “sentiment” and feeling underpin Creeley’s “hardbitten” affective poetic poses and, perhaps, establish a thin resemblance to Wordsworth’s “overfl ow of powerful feelings” as both the source of poetry and the affect of the poetic imagination. Cook’s associations therefore minimally link signifi cant points in the aesthetic shifts from a Romantic transcendentalism in which Wordsworth’s transcendental “I” inhabits, absorbs, and discloses the emotional registers of his remembered experiences to the more primordial aesthetics of American modernist poets like Creeley, who in a more abstract poetics, extends feelings into emotions in order to invest his poetic objects with what he calls “the emotion-literal” (1970, 28). The externalization of emotion is a restoration to