Weldon Kees and the Poetic Landscapes of Despair
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4312/an.55.1-2.61-72Keywords:
Weldon Kees, poetry, Robinson, Hart CraneAbstract
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the efforts to renew an interest in the poetry of Weldon Kees, a more or less forgotten American poet of late modernism. The main argument of this paper is that Weldon Kees, while a belated poet of modernism, successfully swerved away from the earlier poetics of modernism and proved capable of constructing a unique poetics of despair and alienation. In many ways, an heir of Hart Crane’s tragic sense of life, Kees’ misreading of Hart Crane was highly fertile and crucially conducive to the creation of his own visionary poetics. In the first part of our discussion, a more generalized overview of Kees’ poetry is developed, while in the second part, we analyze the four Robinson poems which constitute the nucleus of Kees’ existential aesthetics. Notwithstanding the fact that despair is a ubiquitous presence in Kees’ poetry, it does not manifest itself as an inhibiting force; on the contrary, while despair is inextricably linked to his tragic fate, it also acts as a major creative impetus, which helped Kees express his relationship to the world and, consequently, his place in it.
Downloads
References
Bloom, Harold. Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Crticism. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2019.
Cioran, Emil. On the Heights of Despair. The University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Crane, Hart. The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (Centennial Edition). Liveright, 2001.
Irwin, John T. The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence. JHU Press, 2017.
Justice, Donald. “Preface.” The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Third Edition), by Kees, University of Nebraska, 2003, pp. xiii-xvii.
Kees, Weldon. The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Third Edition). University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Kees, Weldon. Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation: Letters, 1935-1955, edited by Robert E. Knoll, University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death. Princeton University Press, 2013. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400846160
Libera, Sharon Mayer. “The Disappearance of Weldon Kees.” Ploughshares, vol. 5, no. 1, 1979, pp. 147-159.
Nelson, Raymond. “The Fitful Life of Weldon Kees.” American Literary History, vol. 1, no. 4, 1989, pp. 816-852. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/1.4.816
Reidel, James. Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees. University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Siedell, Daniel A. Weldon Kees and the Arts of Midcentury. University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Thomas, Merlin. Louis-Ferdinand Céline. New Directions Publishing, 1980.
Wojahn, David. “Introduction.” The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Third Edition), by Kees, University of Nebraska, 2003, pp. v-ix.
Yau, John. The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry. University of Michigan Press, 2006. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.147208
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Mirko Starčević

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors are confirming that they are the authors of the submitting article, which will be published (print and online) in journal Acta Neophilologica by Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani (University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Aškerčeva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia). Author’s name will be evident in the article in journal. All decisions regarding layout and distribution of the work are in hands of the publisher.
- Authors guarantee that the work is their own original creation and does not infringe any statutory or common-law copyright or any proprietary right of any third party. In case of claims by third parties, authors commit their self to defend the interests of the publisher, and shall cover any potential costs.
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.