9 - Beyond the Great Divide: Negative Capability and Postwar American Poetics

Summary

The poets are at war. This, at least, is what a great many American poets, along with a host of scholars and critics concerned with their work, have been saying from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day. The wars in question are internecine, directed at other poets, and other kinds of poetries. Perhaps the most famous announcement of the conflict came from the mouth of Robert Lowell, speaking after his Life Studies received the National Book Award in 1960:

Two poetries are now competing, a cooked and a raw. The cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience are dished up for midnight listeners. There is a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry and a poetry of scandal.

Thirty-five years later, the scholar Alan Golding quoted those words in his study From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry, in which he claimed that the conflicts between competing groups of poets remained as fresh as ever, and that the battle for recognition and aesthetic dominance between different poetic camps had become one of the most entrenched facts of postwar American poetry. Just over twenty years after Golding's book appeared, a number of American poets, under the general direction of Kent Johnson, launched the website Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, as if to affirm the continued relevance of the kind of poetic turf war Lowell announced and Golding described. But beneath the turbulence of the wars between various poetic styles lies a peaceful calm, a deep consensus about the nature of poetry that has only rarely been challenged in postwar American poetry. And the name of this consensus is ‘negative capability’.

What I mean is this: while the conflicts within postwar American poetry have been both numerous and substantial, very few poets have actually broken with the core precept of Keats's theory of negative capability, and those that have done so have also found themselves relegated to the poetic sidelines. Michael Theune, who notes the widespread use of the term negative capability by several generations of American poets and critics, has been struck by the malleability of the term.