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Mourning melancholia: modernist poetics and the refusal of solace

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Mourning melancholia: modernist poetics and the refusal of solace

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Content Mourning Melancholia:
Modernist Poetics and the Refusal of Solace

by

Mary Traester

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Comparative Literature)

May 2014

Committee Members: Natania Meeker, David Lloyd, Peggy Kamuf, and John Carlos Rowe

Copyright 2014 Mary Traester
ii

Dedication

For my parents
and
grandparents
iii

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to many people who helped guide me toward completion of this project.
First, I would like to thank my dissertation chair, Natania Meeker, whose gracious responses to
countless drafts, faith in the project, and consistent modeling of how to connect with the joys of
scholarship allowed my project to flourish. John Carlos Rowe’s perspective on European and
American theories of Modernism helped give this project its starting point. His generous and
amazingly fast responses gave me the will to press on. David Lloyd’s incisive and inspiring
readings of my work guided me toward the heart of what I aimed to articulate in each chapter. In
considering the time and attention he gave to my drafts, I was often reminded of Jack Blum’s
reverential remark “David Lloyd is a saint.” Peggy Kamuf expertly guided me through
psychoanalytic work after Freud. I credit her painstaking readings with teaching me about clarity
of expression.
A Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the USC Graduate School provided the time
and space to produce a more reasoned and researched work than would otherwise have been
possible. I am grateful to my department for the nomination, and for the material and intellectual
assistance I was provided with through the years. I am also grateful to Katherine Guevarra,
whose tact, efficiency, and calm as Program Coordinator have been priceless.
I am thankful for my family, who provided unbelievable faith, patience, and assistance
over the years. I am thankful for my brother, who has been a true best friend. Finally, I am
thankful for my amazingly supportive friends and colleagues, including Naomi Greenwald and
Michael Malay, whose insightful readings of drafts steered my work toward increased elegance
and accessibility, and Audrey Handelman, Jessica Lipman, and Paul Levine (along with his
family). Your cheer, wisdom, and listening were such balm.
iv

Table of Contents
Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract v

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Theories of Melancholy: Premodern and Modern 11

Chapter Two: Baudelaire’s Spleen: Modernity and Melancholy 49

Chapter Three: Yeats’s Lonely Tower: Premodern Melancholy and Irish Identity after
Romanticism 89

Chapter Four: Dickinson’s Grief: Anti-Elegy and American Identity 140

Afterword: Resisting Right-Wing Melancholy 182

Works Cited 188

v

Abstract

This dissertation uncovers a markedly consistent and transhistorical critical bias that has
favored violent and melancholic responses to loss, while discrediting passive and mournful
responses. It is meant as a catalyst to reexamine the “aesthetic repudiation” of the feminized,
racialized other and the “cultural devaluation” of female grief in both poetic work and critical
responses (Forter 8, Schiesari 12). My work joins that of Judith Butler, Anne Cheng, Greg
Forter, and Ranjana Khanna, who have argued that a melancholic response to loss is the basis of
a masculinist, colonialist form of Western subjectivity in which minority identities are “uneasily
digested” by dominant culture (Cheng 10).
I reclaim an alternate strain of melancholy, the “Galenic” variety, which moves beyond
the logic of cannibalism and consumption that has otherwise occupied modernism by instead
representing objects and others in terms of apartness, concreteness, and agency. While Charles
Baudelaire’s spleen fits within the commonly-received form of melancholy, and is developed
into a radical political praxis by Walter Benjamin, I uncover two modern poets whose canonicity
has in part been established and maintained by interpreting their work through the dominant,
Ficinian theory, but who diverge from its logic. Reexamining Emily Dickinson’s and William
Butler Yeats’s poetic melancholy, I reformulate a poetics and politics based on that divergence.
Yeats employs Galenic melancholy in developing his “Irish idealism” as a counterpoint to
“English materialism.” Dickinson similarly turns away from the solace of substitution and false
lure of the “representative American” to inaugurate a new identity during Civil War.
A critical reassessment of the melancholic tradition is timely and necessary; theories
derived from psychoanalysis and the Ficinian tradition more generally continue to be reprised in
literary criticism (theories of the Romantic symbol, elegy), identity politics (Butler, Cheng) and
vi

in the theorization of relationships with others, objects, and landscapes (Brown, Khanna, Muñoz,
Gilroy). The ability to read outside psychoanalysis, and the Ficinian tradition with which Freud’s
work bears striking affinity, is necessary to the development of an open relationship to alterity
within critical literary and social theory. This study is meant as a first step in this direction.

1

Introduction
It was in modernity, which was marked by the pain of many losses—incurred through
war, industrialization, and colonization—that the personal affect of grief came to serve as an
index of public participation in one’s time.
1
But if it is in modernity that the personal becomes
political, I argue that it is also in modernity that the political becomes pathological. It is, after all,
the Freudian diagnosis of melancholy that comes to the fore in this period as the active, political
stance in which to confront the pain inflicted by historical phenomena. Modern responses to loss,
following Freud, are characterized by refusing to let what is lost go, instead figuratively
internalizing what has been lost at the center of one’s own identity. For the melancholic, then,
loss is only allowed as “internalization or incorporation,” indicating that loss is not
acknowledged, but is rather “refused or disavowed” (Butler 134). Because disavowing loss has
to do with disavowing the existence of others as separate and unique, there is what Esther
Sánchez-Pardo refers to in her own work on modernist melancholy as a “denial of alterity . . .
inscribed in the very rhetoric of ‘Mourning and Melancholia’” (43).

1
For Jonathan Flatley in his Affective Mapping (2008), melancholy is a common experience for moderns, even if it
is not always experienced in the same way. What modernity entails, for Flatley, is grappling with “a new scale,
scope, and quality” of loss (31), and melancholia “forms the site in which the social origins of our emotional lives
can be mapped out and from which we can see the other persons who share our losses and are subject to the same
social forces” (Ibid.). Loss, for Flatley, who follows Walter Benjamin here, is an historical phenomenon related to
how modernity was experienced. It occurs first in the abstract sense that modern subjects simply perceive
themselves as separate from the past: to be modern is to be different, and thus separate, from the generations that
came before.
1
Secondly, loss is experienced in “the impact of historical processes specific to modernization, such as
urbanization, industrialization, colonization and imperialism, modern warfare, the invention of ‘race,’ the advent of
the modern commodity and mass culture, the emergence of discourses of gender and sexuality, and the
pathologization of homosexuality” (3-4).

2

It might seem an historical oddity that the refusal to mourn, with its concomitant turn
against alterity, has become the basis of politically progressive theories of grief.
2
But in
considering the politics of interpretation my dissertation takes a broader view, namely that the
interpretive model derived from Freud has supported, rather than disrupted, prevailing power
relations. Insofar as my research uncovers a markedly consistent and transhistorical critical bias
that has favored violent and melancholic responses to loss, while discrediting passive and
mournful responses, it is meant as a catalyst to reexamine the “aesthetic repudiation” of the
feminized, racialized other and the “cultural devaluation” of female grief in both poetic work and
critical responses.
3

My work joins critics such as Judith Butler, Anne Cheng, Greg Forter, and Ranjana
Khanna, who have all argued that a melancholic response to grief is the basis of a masculinist,
colonialist form of Western subjectivity in which minority identities are “uneasily digested” by
dominant culture.
4
I diverge from these very important precursors by contextualizing Freud
within a much longer tradition of thinking about melancholy—the so-called Ficinian tradition—

2
Many critics have noted the way that poststructuralism embraces melancholia. See for example, Naomi Schor’s
One Hundred Years of Melancholy (1996). Eng and Kazanjian’s Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2003) is an
example of a collection recuperating melancholia. Greg Forter’s “Against Melancholia” (2003) provides a good
summary of several other scholars working in the recuperative mode: Novak’s “Circles and Circles of Sorrow”
(1999) finds melancholia a response that provides space for a distinctive culture threatened by racism. Moon’s
“Memorial Rags” (1988) suggests that gay men should respond to AIDS melancholically (137).

3
To borrow terms from Greg Forter (p. 8) and Juliana Schiesari (p. 12) respectively.
4
See Anne Cheng, p. 10. Forter takes an adversarial stance towards the “countermemorial strategies of resistance”
proposed by poststructuralism, finding that “our most influential theories of mourning . . . tend to repeat the
celebration of melancholia that characterized canonical modernism” (10). To mourn is to “succumb to a sentimental,
insufficiently rigorous response to such bereavements” (Ibid.). See also Ranjana Khanna’s Dark Continents:
Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (2003). Khanna discusses psychoanalysis, with its focus on western subjectivity in
opposition to a colonized, feminine, primitive other, as one of the master narratives of European modernity. I differ
from this last argument in finding a transhistorical basis for Freudian melancholy, and in not seeking to use
psychoanalysis “to imagine postcolonial futures ethically” (xxii).
3

in order to displace the psychoanalyst’s centrality to theories of melancholy. The task of
widening the field to include other voices is complicated by the imbrication of the commonly-
received form of melancholy in a wide swath of philosophic and poetic writing; indeed, it is
coeval with both the origins of philosophic thought and literary criticism.
5

My approach is to establish the two separate traditions of thinking about melancholy, and
then to interrogate what precipitates the sense of lost unity on a formal level in the Ficinian
tradition. In the psychoanalytic sense, melancholy results from the loss of ideals or abstractions
produced through attaching to others through narcissistic identification. In poetry, the narcissism
preceding a melancholic response to loss has to do with regarding others and objects as mere
metaphors of the self. After establishing the formal mechanism, I turn to consider an alternative
to the logic of consumption and cannibalism that otherwise occupies canonical modernism. I find
that the Galenic strain of melancholy evolves out of its anti-intellectualism and despair a more
ethical response to otherness by representing objects and others as unavailable for the
melancholic process of internalizing and devouring. Yeats, I argue, employs Galenic melancholy
in developing his “Irish idealism” as a counterpoint to what he refers to as “English
materialism.” Emily Dickinson similarly evinces a kinship with and development of Galenic
melancholy in turning away from the consolations of substitution, and maintaining a radical view
of the singularity of others, and the impossibility of their replacement, whether figurative or
actual.
A critical reassessment of the melancholic tradition is both timely and necessary, as
theories derived from psychoanalysis and the Ficinian tradition more generally continue to be

5
In my first chapter I describe the origins of Ficinian theory (so named for the philosopher Marsilio Ficino who
popularized it) in Aristotelian writing.
4

reprised in literary criticism (in theories of the Romantic symbol, elegy), identity politics (Butler,
Cheng) and in the theorization of relationships with others, objects, and landscapes (Brown,
Khanna, Muñoz, Gilroy). The ability to read outside of Freud, and the Ficinian tradition with
which his work bears striking affinity, is necessary to the development of an open relationship to
alterity within critical literary and social theory. This study is meant as a first step in this
direction.
Chapter Summaries:
In the first chapter, I unearth the obscured original strain of melancholy that was
developed in humoral medicine. I show how this materialist, Galenic tradition, which derives
from thinking about how health and temperament are influenced by the presence or absence of
so-called “humors” in the body, comes to be negated by a second strain of melancholy, the
Ficinian, which is instead associated with intellectual transcendence over the suffering body.
This shift in the tradition of melancholy represents a sea change in thinking about the disorder,
and is responsible for melancholy coming to be seen as a positive intellectual force, rather than a
passive emotional condition. It is this variety of melancholy that gains traction, as early as Kant,
but particularly with Walter Benjamin’s writings in the modern context, as the basis of a political
praxis. This development, in which melancholy becomes associated with virtue and heroic
rebellion, has proved very influential in recent literary criticism through Benjamin’s writing.
6

Sigmund Freud’s theory has been critiqued for its inherent violence insofar as it is the
turn against the materiality and embodiment of (usually) a gendered or racialized other that
characterizes the Freudian melancholic’s response to modern loss. But it, along with Benjamin’s

6
Eng and Kazanjian’s Loss: A Politics of Mourning (2003) most explicitly acknowledges this debt, but see also n. 2
above.
5

theory, has been also embraced for its transformative potential in addressing such violence
against the body, and thus remains a powerful theoretical underpinning for the positive,
liberatory aspect of the Ficinian tradition. In examining how Freud’s and Benjamin’s
understandings of mourning can be contextualized within the Ficinian tradition, I take up David
Eng and David Kazanjian’s compelling challenge to interrogate how political action—or
inaction—is conditioned by the way that losses are mourned.
7
I reexamine two equally canonical
modern poets, Dickinson and Yeats, whose canonicity has in part been established and
maintained by interpreting their work through the dominant, Ficinian theories. By reinterpreting
these poets through a restored focus on Galenic melancholy, I find their writings in fact evince a
non-dialectical belief in melancholy as ongoing and insurmountable through the violence of
intellectual transcendence over the body, or of substitution. I investigate whether these poets
institute a more ethical approach to alterity, or allow their mourning to sink them in the
reactionary politics of which they have been suspected.
In my second chapter, I draw out the complicated formal aspect of this thesis, namely that
there is an aesthetic and imaginative cause behind the perception that unity is lost through
historical change. It is, I argue, a narcissistic attachment between lover and beloved object or
person that provides the necessary first condition for the Freudian melancholic’s resolution of the
subsequent loss of that object or person through figurative internalization. I argue that it is the
narcissism involved in his attachments that leads to the overwhelming sense of collapse in
Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, rather than overwhelming external pressure. As his poetic persona

7
As Ilit Ferber mentions in her Benjamin and Melancholy (2013), the relationship between Freud and Benjamin has
been increasingly explored in recent years, and has been termed a “constellation,” “long-distance love affair,”
“mutual dependence,” or described through “intertextuality” (17).

6

absorbs what was once external and alive, his own experience becomes tomblike, grievable. I
contend that Baudelaire’s apparent poetic mourning for others and for his beloved Paris marks
merely his own aesthetic survival as a “representative man,” who rises above the fractured
particularity of the present to gather together a new community.
I examine how Walter Benjamin’s very sensitive reading of these formal aspects of
Baudelaire’s poetry, and of his sense of “spleen” in particular—which the critic relates to a sense
of collapse of distance, and thus to his own concept of aura—leads him to embrace the violence
of fragmentation in order to combat the ills of modernity. As against the mournful withdrawal of
grieving, of passive and affective victimhood, Benjamin calls for heroic and engaged resistance.
Contextualizing Baudelaire’s poetry within the longer tradition of melancholy allows it to be
read not in the light of irony or political allegory, as was very common after Benjamin’s
pioneering work, but rather as so perfectly replicating the model of hegemonic modernity as to
become unusable for its heroic overthrow.
In the next two chapters, I explore alternatives to this use of melancholy to fight
melancholy. In my third chapter, I demonstrate how critics have placed William Butler Yeats in
a Freudian and Romantic lineage by interpreting the poet as seeking to recover a lost sense of
wholeness through a spiritual marriage with a material universe conceived as inert and passive.
The poet has also been placed in a Modernist lineage, because his poetry has been read as
seeking a form or figure to substitute for a lost whole. I argue that Yeats in particular is a victim
of the Ficinian mode of reading: understanding the poet as seeking abstractions to substitute for
loss has led his poetry to oscillate uncomfortably between charges of fascism and irrelevance. I
argue that in his delving into Irish folklore and myth, Yeats was seeking not a form or abstraction
7

in which opposites could be reconciled, but rather to highlight an ongoing and insuperable
attachment to nature and the past through emotion.
I argue that the poet diverges from the English romantic tradition (with its Ficinian basis)
by evincing a premodern allegiance to the soil and to others as more than mere ciphers for
himself: to mothers, for example, as engaged in the task of ongoing resistance and mourning in
the face of tragedy. I draw out the difference between what Yeats describes as remaining rooted
in place in keeping with the Galenic tradition, and the idea of return, which characterizes the
Ficinian and Freudian theories of melancholy. The former, I argue, is related to a singular
instance. The latter is related to reunion, repetition, and the restoration of a lost union. Grieving
in these two traditions differs as well: the former involves a bodily struggle without conclusion,
while the latter produces a bodily struggle surmounted through intellectual transcendence. In
Yeats, there is no release from the bondage of uncertainty into the mastery of knowledge. His
poetic persona remains with a limited sense of self, rather than the heightened sense of
awareness, the ecstatic union with the divine, that the melancholic enjoys. Because for Yeats
there is no discernible thread leading back to unity with the divine, nature does not work like an
alphabet, as in Baudelaire. His melancholic is fettered to time, and is unable to partake of
eternity. While the Ficinian melancholic seeks to transcend loneliness and isolation through
masterful or ecstatic union in which the particularity of the other is lost, in Yeats there is
“inassimilable difference,” which refers to both the failure of reflection and of incorporation.
8

There is mourning in the resultant separateness Yeats envisions, and yet a community is present,

8
I borrow the term from J. Hillis Miller’s essay, “The Rewording Shell” (80). Miller describes the “impossible
reciprocity” desired by the narcissist between himself and another who will repeat, echo, or mirror the self exactly.
Miller also notes the failure of the figurative attempt to project human characteristics into the landscape (through
personification).
8

one that is engaged in plentiful self-expression and production. Attending to mourning in Yeats’s
work complicates the negative view of the poet as passive, sentimental, and nostalgic by
revealing how his poetry hesitates before taking the melancholic turn against the materiality and
alterity of the other. And yet, I will argue, Yeats opens a particular loophole in time, which
allows Ficinian melancholy to creep back in, threatening the ethical possibilities his work
otherwise opens.
In the final chapter, I examine what Juliana Schiesari has described as the “cultural
devaluation” of female grief by focusing on Emily Dickinson, a poet who was discounted by
early psychoanalytic, biographical, and modernist criticism as a sentimental woman in a time
when “sentimentality” was considered a cardinal sin.
9
I uncover the manner in which feminist
readings, along with reevaluations of the poet as deeply concerned with the Civil War, do not
entirely escape the formulations of the Freudian and Ficinian traditions. Rather than establishing
her work as presenting a robust alternative to the conundrums of the Ficinian tradition, these
reevaluations rely upon reversing the terms of its gendered binary.
10
Recent work on Dickinson’s
involvement in the Civil War has, for example, characterized her as transformed from the
virginal girl of psychoanalytic and biographical criticism to the national hero, a divine self or
representative American. These re-readings, clearly admirable in their aims, nonetheless remain
trapped within the Ficinian dialectic: on this reading, it is through criticism that Dickinson can
escape the feminized, victimized, particularized embodiment thrust upon her, and be released
from that singular position into eternity and the public. But I will argue that her poetry

9
I take the term “cardinal sin” from Greg Forter, who, in his Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism
(2011), refers to “sentimentality” as a “cardinal modernist sin” (5).
10
Adrienne Rich’s essay “Vesuvius at Home” is the most famous of the writings that seek to establish the poet’s
lethal power in opposition to mournful withdrawal into her family’s home.
9

consistently hesitates before this very move toward abstraction and formal closure or
transcendence.
In my discussion of Dickinson, I underline the poet’s satirical stance toward public
discourse and public grieving, particularly of the kind developed in the Ficinian tradition. The
elegiac tradition in poetry follows Freud in determining that successful mourning involves a
substitutive turn. It is because Dickinson refuses the tropological move characteristic of the
Ficinian tradition that she instead produces poems of Galenic melancholy. Her poetry does not
depict a spiritual communion with external objects as though they were parrots, empty shells,
passive recording devices, or an empty field, in which the object is taken over, materiality lost,
and self-reflection achieved. Dickinson writes about loss, but presents it in terms of a distance
that cannot be closed. The poet denies the possibility of a substitute object, which blocks the
possibility of mourning turning to hope. While this unavailability is cause for wonderment and
lament in Yeats’s poems, it is a stark and harsh fact in Dickinson’s. She confronts each arc out of
life with a tribute to the otherness that ultimately permits such a passage away and apart.
Dickinson’s unknown opens in the space between bodies, a distance that cannot be closed, and
that therefore defies language and understanding. Her poetry consistently negates the notion of
return, thereby escaping the circle of the melancholic, whose desire, along with the object of that
desire, always comes home.
Based in particular on Dickinson’s example, though also apparent throughout Yeats’s
work, I conclude with the idea that establishing Galenic melancholy in distinction to the Ficinian,
and thus making the turn back to the premodern, is essential to developing ethical relationships
to others. Regarding nature and others as passive and inert material, with no agency or resistance
to be overcome, and who instead exist to be transformed, is the precondition for oppression, both
10

for others, and oneself. It produces a hollowness that is replicated endlessly. The Ficinian
melancholic’s objects, idealized, unobtainable, are covered in “the funereal trappings of
mourning,” in Agamben’s memorable phrasing, from the moment they appear (20). These
idealized objects, which, as Freud makes clear, can include abstractions, are so tenuous that they
quickly succumb to being defended through militarized policing. We might think, for example,
of race, ethnicity, and nationality as such abstractions. The Galenic melancholic, on the other
hand, apprehends concrete objects and others in their unavailability for possession and
assimilation. She hesitates before the impossibility of attempts at incorporation or substitution.
Returning to the premodern viewpoint allows for a relationship of dialogue rather than mutual
antagonism, in which others, including nature, are viewed in terms of apartness and agency.
Reviewed in this manner, loss itself becomes a symptom, rather than a cause, of the ills of
modernity.

11

Chapter One
Theories of Melancholy: Premodern and Modern

In their influential Saturn and Melancholy (1964), Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky,
and Fritz Saxl present a history of melancholy from ancient physiological literature to the “poetic
melancholy of the modern,” whose origins they trace to Milton (231) and follow through to the
Romantics (238) and Decadents (239-40). In the long history of the term—which at times refers
to mental illness, at times to character, and at times to a fleeting mood—the authors identify two
major and oppositional valuations of melancholy, which recur and disappear, and turn on
opposed understandings of melancholy’s nature. In the positive view, which they describe as
“Ficinian” for the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino who popularized it, melancholy is
linked to genius, to a special access to truth, to superiority, and transcendence. In the negative
view, which they attribute to the physician Galen of Pergamum (or Pergamos) who popularized
humoral theory, melancholy is understood as a disease to be alleviated, if not finally cured, by
exercise and dietetic measures. Saturn and Melancholy is now a classic in the field, and the
distinction the authors make between the Ficinian and Galenic traditions is consistently
referenced in medical and literary analyses of the malady up to the present day.
11

11
Juliana Schiesari’s The Gendering of Melancholia (1992) aims to revise this foundational text: “In some respects,
this book could be said to aim at a feminist reconceptualization of Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl’s classic Saturn
and Melancholy, the thesis of which, about sadness and artistic triumph in the Renaissance, only tangentially speaks
to women” (5). Trevor Douglas, in The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (2004) also notes that
Klibansky et al. defined the way melancholy would be read through his time (5-6). Panofsky, Saxl, and Klibansky’s
book has an interesting publication history; Panofsky and Saxl had engaged Klibansky to work on expanding their
important study of Dürer, entitled Dürers ‘Melencolia I,’ eine quellen und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung
(1923). The revised and expanded work was completed in 1939, and sent to Hamburg for printing. In 1945 the
authors learned the proofs for the work had been destroyed in the war. They decided, rather than replicate that work,
to create an English edition based on the German notes they still had; this project was delayed by Saxl’s death in
1948. Saturn and Melancholy would not be published until 1964.
12

But for a topic that has a long tradition of being treated in encyclopedic fashion where the
aim is inclusiveness—and indeed Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1628), as one of the
longest works in the English language, is a preeminent example of this inclusiveness—the
tendency of treatises on melancholy has been toward breadth, with great tolerance for digression
and even contradiction, rather than consistent argumentation. In the many anthologies and
general introductions to melancholy the result of this loose argumentation has been that the
distinction between the Galenic and Ficinian traditions, while it remains entirely pervasive, has
not been rigorously maintained.
12
When the distinction is noted, it is as an historical curiosity, as
in Jennifer Radden’s selection in The Nature of Melancholy (2000), in which Ficinian or Galenic
models come to prominence during different historical periods. As Radden points out, for
example, the association of suffering with greatness and the idealization of that suffering,
returned to prominence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (15). The distinction
sometimes appears as a theme in literature, as in two of the classic surveys of melancholy in
poetry, Eleanor Sickels’s The Gloomy Egoist (1932) and Lawrence Babb’s Elizabethan Malady
(1951). Similarly to Radden, for both Sickels and Babb, “black” and “white” melancholy are
predominant at different times. These authors both show a preference for the classical “white”
melancholy.
13

12
On confusions within the many histories of melancholy, see Babb, who notes the coexistence of two contradictory
valuations of melancholy, and the attendant loose reasoning and lack of “system . . . or logical consistency” (67).
See also Bauer’s A Mind Apart: Poems of Melancholy, Madness, and Addiction (2009). Bauer offers a social theory
of melancholy, citing Foucault as an important precursor. But in his derivation of his own categories of the malady,
“melancholy,” “madness,” and “sweet melancholy,” Bauer follows only the Ficinian tradition in defining all three.
13
Sickels introduces the terms “black” and “white” melancholy. She notes the proximity of Ficinian melancholy (or
in her terms, “Aristotelian,” to “white melancholy” (11). The critic describes the basis of “white” melancholy as “an
intellectual contemplation of the instability of life and of fame, and its emotion is vague and diffuse and on the
whole not unpleasant” (11). Babb uses the terms “Galenic” and “Ficinian” to describe the two traditions rather than
adopting Sickels’s terms.

13

Seeking once again strictly to differentiate these two histories might appear misguided,
where Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham have, for example, taken Sigmund Freud to task for
creating a false dichotomy between mourning and melancholy. Indeed, the analysts argue that
melancholy is related to mourning through the similar discharge that marks the conclusion of the
grieving process: mania in the case of melancholy and increased libido in mourning.
14
I agree
with the psychoanalysts that no rigorous distinction between mourning and melancholy as
described by Freud can be made, but, I will argue, these terms do not map neatly onto the
traditions of Galenic and Ficinian melancholy. The Galenic position, I will argue, is conceived as
a physically-based malady, is understood as an ongoing (if tragic) struggle, is anti-intellectual,
and is aligned against figurative acts of internalization or substitution as curative to its pains. The
Ficinian position, on the other hand, involves dialectical oscillation between the low state of
physical suffering characteristic of the Galenic tradition, and a high point of artistic creation and
philosophical thought. It is the disease of heroes and intellectuals, and involves the subordination
of the diseased body to the transcendence and health of the intellect. As I will argue, it is
characteristic of the Ficinian tradition to retain the Galenic melancholic as a debased, excluded—
gendered and racialized—other internal to its system. In arguing for a differentiation between
these two traditions, I aim to recover the Galenic model, in which there is no vacillation between
inferior and superior positions, and which avoids a relationship of negation and subjugation with
the body.

14
See Torok’s “Maladie du deuil” (1968). See also "Introjecter—Incorporer” (1972), co-written by Torok and
Abraham, which describes mourning and melancholy as related in a continuum through their discussion of
incorporation and introjection.
14

Despite the essential conservatism of theories of melancholy produced by the constant
regurgitation of the same sources,
15
I will suggest that in theoretical and philosophical writing
there has nonetheless been a movement away from understandings of melancholy as a negative
emotional condition affecting the character and physiognomy of its victims, and toward
melancholy as the positive intellectual gift of the scholar. The movement away from Galen is
particularly salient in literary theory from the past thirty years. It is the Ficinian understanding of
melancholy that has been theorized as a formal process, and has been described as playing an
active constitutive role, for example in the construction of gender identity (Butler), racial identity
(Cheng), and postcolonial identity (Fanon, Eng/Kazanjian). The absence of the Galenic tradition
in such theories can in part be explained by the fact that research into identity formation has
relied upon Sigmund Freud’s pivotal essay, “Trauer und Melancholie” (“Mourning and
Melancholia,” writ. 1915, publ. 1917), with which, as Juliana Schiesari points out, every new
work on melancholy is “required” to begin (33). Freud’s essay famously diverges from its
predecessors in that it describes melancholy as a disease of conscience, in effect driving a wedge
between the Galenic tradition, in which melancholy results from the disequilibrium of humors,
implying physical cause; and the Ficinian tradition, which Freud interprets as the result of one
part of the ego setting itself against the other. Freud sees melancholy as both a pathological
condition requiring cure, and at the same time credits the malady with providing its victim with
insight into truth. Because of his emphasis on the oscillation between the two states, and his
belief that its origin is psychological and not physical, Freud’s theory of melancholy can be

15
See Radden p. ix, and preface above. Illit Ferber uses Benjamin’s conception of history as a “whirlpool” in order
to describe melancholy as entrenched in a “repetitive historical movement” rather than teleological progress (3), and
further notes how its concept has “remained curiously stable despite the dynamic transformation in the meanings it
has acquired” (16).
15

situated in the Ficinian tradition.
16
After Freud it appears impossible to describe melancholy in
other terms.
As the Galenic view disappears from the critical landscape, approaches to other
modernist writers who employ it—even such important national and international touchstones as
W. B. Yeats and Emily Dickinson—are articulated through the Ficinian view, which reaches a
kind of apotheosis for modernism in the work of Charles Baudelaire. Examining alternative
poetic experiences, such as Dickinson’s and Yeats’s, opens the way to a subversive reading of
modernism insofar as melancholy has so often been read as, for Kierkegaard, “the ailment of our
age” (quoted in Adorno, 60). Max Pensky in his Melancholy Dialectics (1993), similarly notes
that “Modernist literature is melancholy: conversely, melancholy writing bears within it
something disturbingly, undeniably modern” (1). Baudelaire also characterized his age as
steeped in mourning: “notre époque, souffrante et portant jusque sur ses épaules noires et
maigres le symbole d’un deuil perpétuel. Nous célébrons tous quelque enterrement” (“our era,
suffering and carrying on its thin and black shoulders the symbol of perpetual mourning. We are
all celebrating some burial” p. 134).
17
In order to understand this alternate response, I present in
this chapter a condensed survey of melancholy theories and poetry that will show the emergence
and endurance, within modernism, of Galenic thought alongside Ficinian, even as it is the
Ficinian tradition that is given development in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theory.

16
For Ilit Ferber, Freud dispenses with the “dialectic formerly believed to be inherent to melancholy” by introducing
the distinction between pathology and health (17).
17
Despite his reference to “mourning,” Baudelaire’s deflating use of “quelques” (“some”) to modify “burial”
indicates a lack of clear referent for what has been lost, revealing that what has been lost is an abstraction, and thus
we are in the realm of melancholy rather than mourning. I will return to discuss this at more length in the first
chapter.
16

Humoral Medicine
The study of melancholy begins in ancient humoral medicine. In its earliest definitions,
melancholy is a disease, a condition resulting from disequilibrium in the four basic elements of
life, the four humors: the blood, the black bile, the yellow bile, and the phlegm.
18
Humoral
theory is related to empirical medicine in identifying a physical basis for disease as well as for
mental character. As an illness, melancholy was characterized by “fear, misanthropy, and
depression to madness in its most frightful forms” (14). As a predisposition, it was linked to
physical and psychological traits; the melancholic was “lisping, bald, stuttering, [and] hirsute”
(15). Humoralism really originated, according to Klibansky et al. in their classic study, when
four qualities (heat, cold, moist, and dry) were applied to the humors. This correlation was made
in the important Hippocratean treatise On the Nature of Man (written before 400 BCE), which
outlines a noticeably cyclic schema, with each humor predominating once a year:
Humor Season Qualities [Ages of Man
Blood Spring Warm and Moist Childhood
Yellow Bile Summer Warm and Dry Youth
Black Bile Autumn Cold and Dry Prime
Phlegm Winter Cold and Moist Old Age]
(printed in Klibansky, p. 10)

From this point, melancholy would be understood as a naturally-occurring phenomenon resulting
from the disequilibrium of bodily fluids. In this view, melancholy results from the imbalance of
humoral fluid, and is strictly physical in nature. This bodily system could in turn be influenced
by the movement of the planets, or the seasons, such that, for example, “autumn-engendered
pains would be relieved by the spring” (Klibansky 9). Due to seasonal variation, the ideal of
perfect health was not met with often, and for Galen, who would revive the doctrine of

18
The classic study on melancholy, which presents a detailed discussion of humoral medicine, is Saturn and
Melancholy. See especially pp. 5-15.

17

humoralism in the second century, “temperament is already the beginning of a painful and
disordered condition” (11). In this schema, these symptoms and four humors, which once
indicated illness, came to indicate character or one of the four temperaments. Pathology and
predisposition began to lose their necessary association, although they would maintain a close
proximity and would continue to provoke further research and thought.
Galen of Pergamum
Galen of Pergamum, who wrote extensively and influentially on anatomy as well as
philosophy in the second century CE, revived humoralism, and has been credited with
establishing the doctrine’s influence over the next fifteen hundred years of thought on
melancholy.
19
While he referred to himself as a Platonist, Galen was certainly a non-traditional
one, as James Hankins points out in his “Monstrous Melancholy.” Galen does not, for example,
comment on the immortality of the soul, and goes so far as to suggest that the soul depends on
the body for its function (5-6).
Galen’s prescription for curing melancholy was the cessation of intellectual pursuits. The
doctor Constantius Africanus, who was influenced by both Galen and Hippocrates, would
similarly develop a distinctly anti-intellectual stance. He brings back the Hippocratean idea of
negativity attached to the “labor of the soul,” and the belief that the soul’s
strenuous thinking, remembering, studying, investigating, imagining, seeking the
meaning of things, and fantasies and judgments. . . can turn the soul . . . to melancholy if
it immerses itself too deeply in them. . . . The reason why their soul falls sick [disorders
of the understanding and the memory, and other disorders which affect the soul] lies in
fatigue and overexertion. As Hippocrates wrote: ‘Fatigue of the soul comes from the
soul’s thinking.’ Just as bodily overexertion leads to severe illnesses of which fatigue is
the least, so does mental overexertion lead to severe illnesses of which the worst is
melancholy. (Quoted in Klibansky et al., 84-85)

19
According to Jennifer Radden, it wasn’t until Pinel in the nineteenth century that humoralism really died out (10).
18

The so-called worst disease is caused by the strain of excessive intellectual pursuits, which are
therefore to be avoided. The Galenic tradition is thus, as Hankins points out, “deeply colored by
Epicurean and Stoic materialism and physicalism,” even as Galen rejects the Stoic’s “rigorous
physical determinism” (5, 6).
20

Astrology
It was within the field of astrology that the negative view of melancholy retained
influence through the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Klibansky et al., 127). The
astrological influence initially entered the tradition, according to Klibansky et al., by way of
ninth-century Arabic writers. Foremost among these writers was Abu Masar (d. 885), who
related the planets to the humors (128). Saturn was thought to be cold and windy, and eventually
everything cold on earth would be associated with the planet in accordance with the basic
understanding of astrology, which held that everything on earth depended on astral influence
(138). This belief is recorded in the major Renaissance work on melancholy, Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy (1628).
21
Burton maintains a “lively interest” in astrology, which
maintained an “essential connection” to medicine, mathematics, and science between 1600 and
1640 (xix). In the guise of Democritus Junior, the fictional offspring of a Democritus senior who
was interrupted in writing a treatise on melancholy, he writes: “Saturne was lord of my geniture”

20
For more on Galen’s relationship to materialist thought, Hankins directs the reader to Luis Garcia Ballester, “Soul
and Body: Disease of the Soul and Disease of the Body in Galen’s Medical Thought,” Le opere psicologiche, pp.
117-150), and to Heinrich von Staden, “Body, Soul, and Nerves: Epicurus, Herophilus, Erasistratus, the Stoics, and
Galen,” Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to
Enlightenment, Ed. J. P. Wright and P. Potter. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.
21
As the editors of the 1989 Oxford edition of the treatise note, there is evidence that Burton intended the 1628
edition to be the definitive edition of a study he worked on for much of his life (xxii). His first edition was published
in 1621 (xivn9), the second in 1624 (xxxvii), and at the time of his death in 1640, Burton left behind notes for
further changes to the third edition of 1628.
19

(4), and somewhat obscurely explains that “if Saturn’s mount be full of many small lines and
intersections such men are most part melancholy, miserable, & full of disquietnesse, care, &
trouble, continually vexed with anxious and bitter thoughts, always sorrowful, fearful,
superstitious: they delight in husbandry, buildings, pooles, Marshes, springs, woods, walks &c.”
(201). Burton doesn’t stop here with his list of causes for melancholy; he begins his final section
on causes with the title “An Heape of other Accidents causing Melancholy” (356).
After discussing possible stellar and supernatural influence – the latter of which includes
God and the fall of mankind, but also bad angels, demons, witches, and magicians – Burton turns
to the problem of the scholar, and in particular to study. Those that are “solitary by nature, great
Students, given to much contemplation, idle, lead a life out of action, are most subject to
Melancholy” (165). The problem with study is that it weakens the body, “dulls the spirits, abates
. . . strength and courage” (302). Contemplation “dries the brain,” and sitting too long produces
“gout, bad eyes, stone collick” (304). For the most part, he concludes scholars are “dry, lean,
[and] ill-colored” (304). The amount of labor they put in is extreme: “no labor in the world like
unto study” (308), and yet, “they toil and moyle, but what reap they?” (316). It is the “common
fortune of most Schollers, to be servile and poore, to complain pitifully, and lay open their wants
to their respectlesse patrons” (309). Later, in describing the pillaging of the city, he also refers to
“a Scholler [who] spent many an hours study to no purpose, his labors lost, &c.” (361). Burton’s
lively and idiosyncratic work had immense influence over later writers; Jennifer Radden notes
that it is “one of the most beloved of English books,” and despite a slight drop in popularity
during the eighteenth century, “a strong revival” occurred in the nineteenth century, which hasn’t
since declined (129-30).

20

Humors and the Poetic Tradition
Humoral theory enters into the poetic tradition at once directly, through explicit reference
to the “humor melancholic,” the “black jaundice” (“On Melancholy,” 1658), the “braines [that]
with melancholy humers swell” (Samuel Rowlands, “The Melancholie Knight,” 1615), but also
through descriptions of the way the body is materially affected by the malady. George Herbert,
in “Affliction” (1633), for example, describes the sicknesses that “clave [his] bones.” In “Upon
Some Distemper of the Body,” Anne Bradstreet refers to the “wasting pains, which best my body
knows.” In the Galenic tradition, melancholy often involves physical suffering that is only
alleviated by the intervention of divine grace, where the suffering of the body implies having
fallen out of favor with God through sin, especially original sin. This version of melancholy can
be understood as either the product of divine punishment, or is self-inflicted through sinful
acedia.
22
Acedia involves the neglect of one’s duties, or “sloth,” along with the “total breakdown
of the will” (Kuhn 72).
23
For Babb, the fall out of favor with God is closely related to personal
and physical failings:
melancholy men are sluggish, dull, and blockish . . . they are fearful and sorrowful
without apparent cause and are subject to the most terrifying and ridiculous hallucinations
. . . often they are wretched creatures who have fallen to the level of brutes . . . [and] are
more likely to be led by the Devil than by divine influence. This is the conception of
melancholy which one finds in medical works in the tradition of Galen. (58)

Bradstreet’s poem shows the suffering of the body is not to be alleviated by rebellion or political
troublemaking, but rather by the intervention of divine grace: “He eased my soul of woe, my
flesh of pain, / And brought me to the shore from troubled main.” In this version of melancholy,

22
See Klibansky et al., p. 77 for more on the connections between acedia and melancholy.
23
In his medical history of melancholy, Stanley Jackson notes that “sloth” would become the standard English term
for the affliction (71).
21

the disease so inextricably intertwined in the body can be cured through obedience to divine
authority and resumption of one’s duties.
The inexorability of divine order is closely associated with planetary motion and the
seasons, as in Galenic theories of melancholy. In “The Flower,” Herbert relates the tradition of
“black” melancholy, in which there is seasonal variation of health and illness in accordance with
a certain humor’s predominance in a certain month, to religious melancholy. He writes:
How fresh, Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasures bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.

The implication that the coming of spring, like a return of faith, or show of divine grace, could
heal the suffering, barrenness, and exile experienced by melancholics indicates proximity to
religious melancholy, and at the same time inscribes order in an inaccessible, unspeakable
position.
The inexorability of divine order leads to some despairing conclusions in the Galenic
tradition in poetry. In Fulke Greville’s poem “Despair,” for example, the fall from paradise
touches off an interminable exile:
In paradise I once
Did live and taste the tree,
Which shadowed was from all the world,
In joy to shadow me.

The tree hath lost his fruit,
Or I have lost my seat;
My soul both black with shadow is
And over-burnt with heat.

22

After the fall, the speaker is left with a blackened soul, pain, and a “forlorn estate” (51), by
which he is fully determined. As the poem concludes:
Let no man ask my name,
Nor what else I should be;
For Griev-Ill, pain, forlorn estate,
Do best decipher me.

For Greville there is finally no passage through heat out of the cold; the poem ends on a
distinctly tragic note; his estate is left “forlorn,” and even his name becomes a marker for grief
and illness. For Klibansky et al., this is the tragedy of the Galenic tradition; there can be no
consolation for original sin. Temperament irreversibly changes with the fall, and melancholy
gains its status as an “incurable hereditary evil” (80).
In the Galenic tradition, the drying out of the humors causes not only grief and sorrow,
but also limits spiritual and intellectual function. The black bile, as Lawrence Babb describes it
in his classic work, takes away the melancholic’s “wit and understanding,” and “prevents the
generation of spirits with such warmth, subtlety, and celerity as are requisite to their functions”
(31).
24
One of the most famous works of melancholy to depict this theme is Coleridge’s
“Dejection: An Ode” (1802). The speaker in this poem vainly cries out: what strength is capable
of lifting “this smothering weight from off my breast?” Afflictions, he states, “bow me down to
earth,” and “viper thoughts . . . coil around my mind.” The effect of the smothering is crippling;
the speaker’s “genial spirits fail,” his “shaping spirit of Imagination” is “suspend[ed].”
25

24
Panofsky, Saxl, and Klibansky cite Albertus Magnus as a source for the belief that facility in intellectual pursuits
is tied to the qualities of warm and moist (70).
25
See Eric Wilson’s Coleridge’s Melancholia (2004) for the argument that poems after this ode separate Coleridge
from the high romanticism of Wordsworth and Schelling, and instead draw him closer to “later psychologists of
failure, trauma, despair: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche” (xiv). One of my claims in the third chapter follows this idea
that the romantic luxuriating in woe must be differentiated from the despairing conclusions of premodern Galenic
theory.
23

Coleridge writes of his despair over his inability to write in terms that once again suggest
parched earth:
The Fish gasps on the glittering mud, the mud of this once full stream, now only moist
enough to be glittering mud / the tide will flow back, time enough to lift me up with
straws & withered sticks and bear me down to the ocean. O me! that being what I have
been I should be what I am! (N2: 2606, quoted in Wilson, 2)

For Greville in “Despair,” melancholy renders memory bereft, empty; it is “become the tomb”
where help, joy, and “spiritual wealth” “lay slain” (49). The melancholic is sluggish, prone to
“lethargic despondency” (31). Edna St. Vincent Millay picks up on the same theme in her poem,
“Sorrow” (1917), recording a stunning blockage in the abrupt suspension of metrical flow:
“People dress and go to town / I sit in my chair.”
Deprived of saving grace, even as a possibility, poems in the Galenic tradition often end
on a despairing note. The attempt to mount rebellion against suffering fails, for example in
Herbert’s poem “Affliction”:
Yet, for I threatened oft the siege to raise,
Not simpering all mine age,
Thou often didst with academic praise
Melt and dissolve my rage.
I took thy sweetened pill, till I came near;
I could nor go away, nor persevere.

Unable to control his own will, Herbert’s speaker ends by wishing he were a tree, such that he
might participate in the renewal of springtime, foster a bird’s nest, burst forth again in leaf and
bloom. This stance, which, in accord with Galenic tradition links cure to a season, will appear
again in William Butler Yeats’s poetry. This predominantly passive, obedient waiting and call
for spring rather than militant uprising is a position for which the poet drew fire.
Even as the theological underpinnings of melancholy disappear, the fascination with
melancholy as entrapment continues, as Lady Mary Wroth’s Sonnet VI emphasizes:
24

My paine still smother’d in my grieved brest,
Seekes for some ease, yet cannot passage finde,
To be discharged of this unwelcome guest,
When most I strive, more fast his burthens binde.
Like to a Ship on Goodwins cast by winde,
The more shee strive, more deepe in Sand is prest,
Till she be lost: so am I in this kind
Sunck, and devour’d, and swallow’d by unrest.
(quoted in Bauer, 61).

Wroth’s “burthens” and binding, the thick sand in which the ship is moored, sunk, swallowed is
mirrored in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s later “Grief” (1853), in which “hopeless grief is
passionless.” The lack of passion signals the inability to arise and go; the speaker is entirely
immobilized.
As Lawrence Babb states in his classic study, Renaissance poetry was likely to record
humoral thought as it was the accepted science of the day (130). But, as this brief overview has
shown, humoral theory did not disappear from poetry as science advanced. Poets such as Lady
Mary Wroth (ca. 1586-ca.1640), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Elizabeth Barrett
Browning (1806-1861), William Butler Yeats (1865-1930), and Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-
1950) remained fascinated by humoral thought long beyond its viability. To this list could be
added Herman Melville (1819-1891), whose Battle Pieces contains many references to spleen,
Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), whose Poèmes saturniens refers to a star, Saturnus, as responsible
for wretchedness, and Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945), who writes of the “leaden shadow” of
melancholy that presses down in descriptions that recall Baudelaire. The notion of “black”
melancholy in poetry is both persistent and transhistorical.
Melancholy as the Disease of Heroes
In contrast to the view of the humors leading to illness, a positive view of melancholy as
positively associated with genius, the “‘disease of heroes,’” develops in the fourth century BCE.
25

Klibansky et al. trace the origin of this revaluation of melancholy to the idea of madness in
Greek tragedy, and to Plato’s notion of “frenzy.” While in Plato’s early works melancholy was
associated with “moral insanity” and “tyranny,” in the philosopher’s Phaedrus (360 BCE),
madness, rather than being harmful, becomes the basis of the “highest spiritual exaltation”
(Klibansky 16-17). In this dialogue Plato develops the idea of “frenzy” as a divine gift, writing:
“the best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift of the god” (244A).
Without this frenzy, which is associated with Bacchus, and thus poetry and song, the poet will
fail to acquire technē, “and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who
have been driven out of their minds” (245A). Plato first proposes the “talking cure” along with
“verbal catharsis” to treat the malady.
26
In Klibansky’s gloss on the dialogue, Plato redefines
genius as not “mythical irruption,” but as nature surpassing itself; it allows for the apprehension
of the pure idea (41).
For Klibansky et al., it is in the Aristotelian Problem 30.1 that Plato’s “frenzy” is
connected with medical research into the origins of the disease (17). Aristotle famously poses the
question: “‘Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry
or the arts are clearly melancholics, and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by
diseases caused by black bile?’” (quoted in Klibansky, 18).
27
By observing that natural
melancholy results in intellectual superiority, while it at the same time involves “‘the eruption of
sores’” and “‘bodily diseases’” (quoted in Klibansky et al., p. 18-19), Aristotle’s text draws out
for the first time what Walter Benjamin would later describe as the dialectical character of

26
Hankins 5-6. See also Entralgo, The Therapy of the World in Classical Antiquity (1970).
27
For Klibansky et al. this is unquestionably the work of Aristotle; for later scholars more caution has been
exercised in asserting no more than that it is “Aristotelian” or written by “pseudo-Aristotle.” See Jackson, 100;
Babb, 59, Wilson, 20.
26

melancholy. The Aristotelian discussion follows empirical medicine in identifying black bile to
be the cause of melancholy, but it decides that the “atrabilious humor” is variable, a mixture of
heat and cold. At a cold temperature, the black bile causes paralysis, torpor, depression, or
anxiety (23). When the same humor is heated, however, cheerfulness, along with exaltation and
ecstasy, results (Ibid.).
Marsilio Ficino
Marsilio Ficino, in De Vita Triplici (Three Books on Life, 1480), is the key figure
rehabilitating Aristotelian melancholy genius for the Renaissance. As Klibansky et al. point out,
Ficino revives the idea, which had mostly been forgotten, that genius is fostered by a temperate
black bile (32). The result of melancholy, on Ficino’s view, is not sorrow and dejection, but
rather transcendence over the body. Ficino, another self-described Platonist, whose ideas on
melancholy arose from his translations of Plato and Plotinus, references the Timaeus as support
for his understanding that
the soul contemplating divine things assiduously and intently grows up so much on food
of this kind and becomes so powerful, that it overreaches the body above what the
corporeal nature can endure; and sometimes in its too vehement agitation, it either in a
way flies out of it or sometimes seems as if to disintegrate it. (115)

In the Timaeus Plato describes the bile as “black stuff” created by the “burning of wasting flesh”
(78).
28
It is as the diseased flesh is burned off in this process, which Aristotle refers to as
“adustion,” that truth and divinity can be approached.
29
Thus, alongside the purely medical
conception of melancholy, that it was a bodily disease requiring cure, the positive valuation of

28
Although Hankins points out that the Timaeus actually intimates that the soul is troubled by the body in
melancholy, and thus might propose a more physicalist view than Ficino allows (5).
29
See Klibansky et al., p. 71.
27

melancholy begun by Plato and Aristotle and concretized by Ficino entails transcendence over
materiality to approach the divine.
In this preferable “white melancholy,” rather than being one of “God’s most miserable
creatures,” the melancholic might in fact be “the happiest of men” (Babb 63). This melancholic
is the “fashionable melancholic,” or the “malcontent,” as Babb refers to him, the man convinced
of his superior abilities, likely to be a “political troublemaker” and to promote his superiority by
the affectation of certain melancholy characteristics (74). The Aristotelian version of melancholy
is associated with intelligence, happiness—recalling the cheer and ecstasy of Ficino’s reworking
of Aristotle— and the instigation “of rebellion against royal authority” (81). These claims are in
keeping with the classical philosophical tradition, and also with the turn toward figuring tyranny
in the guise of the Galenic melancholic, as occurs in the poetic tradition.
Ficino and the Poetic Tradition
A shift that is apparent in the philosophic and literary traditions is in the subordination of
Galenic to Ficinian melancholy. One of the ways this subordination happens is through the
unfortunate physical descriptions that accompany the condition. Alain Chartier’s L’Espérance;
ou, Consolation des trois vertus (1428) parts ways with the despairing conclusions of the Galenic
tradition, paving the way for the association of the Ficinian tradition with successful rebellion
against a tyrannical figure who borrows the features of the Galenic melancholic. This parting is
accomplished through the appearance of—and triumph over—a new melancholic figure: a
personified “Dame Melencholie.” In Chartier’s poem, Dame Melencholie’s demeanor changes
from the rather mild, tear-stained face of Tristesse, a character familiar from the medieval poem
Roman de la Rose (1230), to the actively menacing. Dame Melencholie’s face is pale and lean;
28

she speaks haltingly with a drooping lip, and keeps her eyes cast on the ground (263).
30
The old
woman threatens the hero with her malign smothering. As he reports, the figure:
m’enueloppa soudainement entre les bras, & me couuri visaige & corps de ce malheureux
mantel maiz de ses bras si étroit me serroit, que je sentoye mon cueur ou dedens destraint
comme en presse: & de ses mains me tenoit la tête & les yeux embrunchez & étoupez,
si que je n’auoye l’aise de veoir ne oyr.

suddenly enveloped me in her arms and covered me from head to foot with her mantle of
misfortune, and she held me so fast in her arms that I felt my heart in my breast crushed
as by a vice; and with her hands she held my head, blinded my eyes and stopped up my
ears so that I could neither see nor hear. (263)

The protagonist learns that the old woman is called Melancholy, and that “elle trouble les
pensees, defeiche le corps, corrompt les humeurs, affoiblift les fentitifz esperits,& maine home à
languour &à mort” (“disturbs thought, dries out the body, poisons the humors, weakens the
perceptions, and leads man to languor and death”) (264).
But ultimately, she is a figure that can be rebelled against. After a period of “grant
foibleffe, long ieûne, afpre douleur & eftonnement de mon ceruel” (“great feebleness, long
fasting, bitter pain, bewilderment”) (264), the speaker feels the imaginative faculty of “fantaifie”
(“phantasy”) open up (265). Reason awakens, summoning faith and hope. In this work, which
explicitly notes its connection to the Aristotelian tradition,
31
it is above all reason that is required
to overcome melancholy, which is depicted as an external, confining, and malignant restraint,
and yet significantly, it is a restraint that can be overcome by the mustering of adequate
intellectual force.
From Chartier’s poem in which reason is required to overcome the physical constraint of
melancholy, a significant shift in the Ficinian tradition is to see melancholy itself as a “positive

30
See Klibansky 221.
31
See Chartier, p. 264.
29

intellectual force,” rather than as an “emotional subjective condition” (Klibansky 241).
Melancholy is ostensibly the condition Robert Burton sets out to cure in the guise of Democritus
Junior in the Anatomy of Melancholy; he will, he declares, “anatomize this humour of
Melancholy, through all his parts and species, as it is an habite or ordinary disease, and that
philosophically, medicinally, to shew the causes, symptoms, and severall cures of it, that it may
be the better avoided” (111). At the same time, however, to “melancholize” for Burton is a
positive activity, which lends industry and thus potential cure, as “There is no greater cause of
Melancholy than idlenesse, no better cure than business” (6). He thus refers to the malady as
“my Mistris Melancholy, my AEgeria, or my malus Genius” (7), affirming the prime cause of his
disease as antidote. Now melancholy is figured as the mythical Egeria, responsible for wisdom
and prophecy. The malady at this point becomes generative of knowledge: “they get their
knowledge by Books, I mine by melancholizing” (8). Burton’s lively verse on the theme of
melancholy as intractable woe in his “Author’s Abstract on Melancholy” testifies to his attempt
to overcome the condition by, precisely, melancholizing, indulging in the very state that so
envelops him. This voluptuous sense of woe would be developed later in Baudelaire.
At this point in the history of melancholy the iconography changes, as well as its
valuation; instead of being understood as debilitating disease, melancholy would be embraced as
the cure to a wide range of ills. John Milton’s “Il Penseroso” is one of the most widely-cited
poems of this kind of melancholy. The poem depicts a personified Melancholy, who is female as
in Chartier’s example, but the figure has now become what Klibansky et al. refer to as a “tutelary
goddess” to genius and “religious ecstasy” (241). In “Il Penseroso,” which was written alongside
the companion piece “L’Allegro” around 1631 (both published in 1645), Milton develops a
concept of Melancholy that shows an overturning of Chartier’s conception; Melancholy is now
30

young and beautiful, and is clothed not in rags, but in fine robes. The speaker of the poem seeks
to “hail divinest Melancholy/Whose saintly visage is too bright/ To hit the sense of human
sight,” thus reimagining her dark complexion as unspeakable brightness. The poet’s reference to
“divinest Melancholy” returns to the Platonic connection between divinity and madness.
Klibansky et al. note this indicates a “positive, and as it were, spiritual value ascribed to
Melancholy” (229). Even as Melancholy retains the physiognomic traits from medical literature,
that drooping lip and “leaden cast” from Chartier’s poem, Milton reinterprets these in his poem
as signs of ecstasy. The proximity to the prophetic trance or visionary state referred to in “Il
Penseroso,” along with the reevaluating of the physical symptoms as signs of spiritual
superiority, indicate in Milton a debt to the traditional Ficinian understanding of melancholy. In
the Ficinian tradition, more “energetic preoccupation with intellectual studies” was encouraged
along with abstinence (86). These cures, which strongly diverge from the physical cures of the
Galenic tradition, are the sign of what Klibansky et al. refer to as an “insoluble contradiction”
between the medical theory of melancholy and the ethical or theological views (86).
Ficino and Philosophy
It is not surprising that a positive sense of melancholy would develop within the poetic
tradition, or indeed within the philosophic tradition, where proximity to prophecy and truth
heightens artistic value. More surprising, perhaps, is the development of an ethical viewpoint, in
which melancholy becomes the basis of virtuous action. In Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des
Schönen und Erhabenen (Observations on the Sense of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 1798),
Kant indicates his indebtedness to Milton, and further develops the positive view of
31

melancholy.
32
Kant makes use of the ancient doctrine of the four temperaments; the melancholic,
the sanguine, the choleric, and the phlegmatic, but instead of coming up with a psychosomatic
theory of character, the philosopher deploys them to express different orientations towards moral
virtue. He finds the melancholic to possess the greatest virtue, writing: “genuine virtue based on
principles has something about it which seems to harmonize most with the melancholy frame of
mind” (63). The sanguine character Kant associates with having a good heart, but not the
steadfastness of melancholy, which is the quality required for principled action.
33
The fixity or
persistence in ideas which was a symptom of illness in the medical literature becomes with Kant
the precondition for virtuous action. He accordingly redefines the melancholic; he is not so-
named because of his tendency to fall into a “dark dejection” but because of the persistence of
his feeling once aroused. “Above all,” for Kant, the melancholic “hat ein Gefühl vor das
Erhabene” (30) (“has a feeling for the sublime,” 64). The melancholic additionally values human
dignity, and “suffers no depraved submissiveness, and breathes freedom in a noble breast. All
chains, from the gilded ones worn at court to the heavy irons of galley slaves, are abominable to
him” (66). Klibansky et al. refer to this essay, noting the “ethical and aesthetic” interpretation
Kant gives to melancholy, and evocatively summarize: “The melancholic became in this way the
possessor of an ideal of freedom, and the chains with which the sick melancholic used to be
bound became the symbol of all the chains which free men abhor” (122). The melancholic
possesses heightened awareness and access to truth, but even more important, for Kant, the

32
Kant refers to Milton in a footnote, noting that the powerful sense of the sublime in Paradise Lost tires one out
more quickly than a pastoral poem (10).
33
Kant’s choleric possesses honor, and thus can be discussed within this study of feelings of the beautiful and the
sublime, but the phlegmatic does not possess this finer sense, so is not treated at more length (64).
32

melancholic is bound by a sense of the sublime, which leads him to break through enslavement
to freedom.
It is this politicized version of melancholy that is crucial to Walter Benjamin’s much later
development of melancholy as a radical praxis with which to confront the political situation of
his time. Because Benjamin is in conversation with Sigmund Freud’s influential theory of
melancholy, I will discuss Freud before turning to Benjamin in a final section. There is of course
a rich history of melancholy poetry between Milton and the modernist writers to whom I devote
the following chapters; rather than treat that tradition in condensed form here, I will make more
particular references to it in each chapter.
Freudian Melancholy
In the Ficinian tradition, the process of gaining melancholic self-knowledge – what
Burton refers to as “melancholizing” – is the key to overcoming loss, whereas in the Galenic
tradition intellectualizing is held directly responsible for the dejection and withdrawal associated
with melancholy. Freud’s well-known essay “Trauer und Melancholie” (“Mourning and
Melancholia”) follows in this tradition. Even as he describes melancholy as a pathological
condition, the psychoanalyst emphasizes the melancholic’s superiority over others, and his
access to truth in particular. As he writes, for the melancholic “die Wahrheit nur schärfer zu
erfassen als andere, die nicht melancholisch sind” (“the truth is only grasped more keenly than
by others who are not melancholic,” Freud, 432; Strachey, 246 translation modified), and muses,
“wir fragen uns nur, warum man erst krank muβt, um solcher Wahrheit zugänglich zu sein” (“we
only ask ourselves why a man must first be sick in order to reach truth of this kind,” Freud 432;
Strachey 246 translation modified). As examined above, the connection between this special
access to truth and the scholar or writer was a view that was popularized by Ficino during the
33

Renaissance, and that has its origins even earlier, in Aristotelian and Platonic writings. Freud’s
dependence upon Renaissance theories of melancholy is also visible in his use of Hamlet as an
avatar of the melancholic in order to reinforce the latter’s tragic and elevated status (432, 246).
Giorgio Agamben also contextualizes Freud within the Ficinian tradition for the way that the
melancholic attitude involves a turn away from the object, and the withdrawal into the self of the
contemplative tendency (19).
Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” begins with a comparison of the two quite different
reactions to loss. According to the psychoanalyst, in mourning the object is real, while in
melancholia it is abstracted and even imaginary. Mourning, for Freud, is a normal, and
melancholia a pathological response to “den Verlust einer geliebten Person” (“the loss of a loved
person”) or an “Abstraktion” (“abstraction”) that takes the place of a person, such as “Vaterland,
Freiheit, ein Ideal usw” (“country, liberty, an ideal, and so on”) (Freud 429; Strachey 243). The
symptom of melancholia that distinguishes it from mourning is self-reproach, which “bis zur
wahnhaften Erwartung von Strafe steigert” (“culminates in a delusional expectation of
punishment”) (429, 244).
34
The normal work of mourning demands the libido be withdrawn from
the object that no longer exists, a process that never occurs willingly, but that in the end leaves
the ego “weider frei und ungehemmt” (“free and uninhibited again,” Freud, 430; Strachey 245).
In melancholia, on the other hand, the loss is “von mehr ideeller Natur ist” (“of a more ideal
nature,” Freud, 431; Strachey 245, translation slightly modified;), by which Freud chiefly means
that the thing that is lost has not actually died, and thus it might be the loss of a person as an
object of love, or a loss that is “Bewusstsein entzogenen” (“withdrawn from consciousness,”

34
It is important to Freud’s theory that the self-reproach is not actually a reproach leveled against the ego, but is
rather aimed at an object that has been self-identified.
34

Freud, 431; Strachey, 245). “Ideell” could also be translated as “nonmaterial,” indicating the loss
is of an imaginary and idealized object in the realm of fantasy rather than reality.
The abstracted loss Freud describes in his theory of melancholia is very resonant in
modernist literature. F. T. Marinetti’s Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909), for example,
characterizes what is lost as both ideal and romantic. The opening of Marinetti’s manifesto
shows a group that had been engaged in “trampling . . . atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs,”
under “hanging mosque lamps,” but that is galvanized into action by the “famished roar of
automobiles” outside the window, and Marinetti’s cry: “Let’s go! . . . . Mythology and the
Mystic Ideal are defeated at last.” Other losses have been incurred: the “ideal Mistress” and the
“cruel Queen” have disappeared (186); “Time and Space died yesterday” (187). The collective
ennui of his group, which is associated here with their Symbolist and Pre-Raphaelite precursors
through the reference to the “Mystic Ideal” and cruel mistress, is defeated and turns around into
sudden energy. In Freud’s description, melancholia turns around into mania. Mania is
characterized by “gehobene Stimmung, die Abfuhrzeichen des freudigen Affekts, und durch die
gesteigerte Bereitwilligkeit zu allerlei Aktionen aus” (“high spirits, by the signs of discharge of
joyful emotion and by increased readiness for all kinds of action,” Freud 441; Strachey, 254). In
mania, the ego has gotten over the loss of the object. The manic demonstrates his liberation by
seeking like a “Heiβhungriger” (“ravenously hungry man,” Strachey 255; Freud 442) for a new
cathexis. The frenzy of liberation is apparent from Marinetti’s description of “the raging broom
of madness” that swept his group “out of themselves” (185), and in the eager joy at encountering
(and addressing) the “Maternal ditch.” After his car crashes into a ditch, he emerges to declare
exultantly:
Oh! Maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your
35

nourishing sludge, and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse . . . .
When I came up – torn, filthy, and stinking – from under the capsized car, I felt the
white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart! (186)

It is in this guise, “faces smeared with good factory muck – plastered with metallic waste, with
senseless sweat, with celestial soot,” that Marinetti intends for the Futurists to signal their
intention. The eleven numbered points of the futurist manifesto read as an embrace of
aggression, the “mortal leap, the punch and the slap,” of speed. It announces that “poetry must be
conceived as a violent attack,” and declares that Futurists will “glorify war . . . and scorn for
woman,” and “destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism,
feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice” (187). The turn to violence, and to art as
“violence, cruelty, injustice” (188), is at the same time a turn against the feminine, precursors,
and the past. Even as melancholia has turned around into mania, even as the speaker expresses
joy at discovering he is not the one who died, hatred is still directed against the lost object.
In Freud’s discussion of melancholia, the reason that sadism and hatred are directed
against the lost object is because of an “Identifizierung” (“identification,” Freud, 435; Strachey
249,) that occurs between the ego and the abandoned object. When an attachment is severed, the
melancholic does not give up, but rather internalizes, the lost object. The libido is withdrawn into
the ego, forming an identity between the lost object and the ego. The ego is from this point
judged as if it were an object, and what at the outset was object-loss now becomes a loss with
regard to the ego (Strachey 249, Freud 435). The hate and sadism that Freud identifies as part of
the melancholic condition come into play because revenge against the object takes the form of
self-punishment. For Freud, melancholia behaves like an “offene Wunde” (“open wound,”
Strachey 253; Freud, 439), emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished. This operation
cleaves the critical agency and the ego; the ego rages against itself. The melancholic’s self-
36

torment is illustrated well by Charles Baudelaire’s poem, “L’Héautontimorouménos,” which
refers to such a self-tormentor. The speaker cries, “Je suis la plaie et le couteau!” (“I am the
wound and the knife!”).
Freud’s Critical Wake
The Freudian theory of melancholy has been instrumental for later critics, who use it to
describe the mechanism by which dominant culture operates. In the area of identity formation
Freud’s theory was first applied to understand how gender is formed.
35
Judith Butler, in The
Psychic Life of Power (1997), for example, deploys Freud’s theory to explore both what she
refers to broadly as “subject formation” (19), and the construction of gender identity. In “The
Melancholy of Gender,” Butler shows that “melancholic identification” is central to the process
whereby the ego assumes a gendered character, and she refers to gender as a kind of melancholy
(133). For Butler, who follows Freud closely here, “melancholic identification” refers to the fact
that for the person suffering from melancholy, the only way to renounce a lost object is to set it
up within the ego. In his later The Ego and the Id (1923), as Butler points out, Freud expands on
his theory of melancholy to explain that in the economy of melancholy letting an object go does
not indicate a severing of attachment, but instead an incorporation of that attachment as
identification.
36
For Butler, again following Freud, letting the object go is actually not a loss, but
a transfer of the object from an external to an internal position (134). For the melancholic, then,
loss is only allowed as “internalization or incorporation,” indicating that loss is not

35
Anne Cheng notes Freud’s theory has “mostly been read in relation to gender identities” (10), citing Butler’s
Bodies that Matter (1993), Kaja Silverman’s Acoustic Mirror (1988), and Juliana Schiesari’s The Gendering of
Melancholia (1992).
36
See Butler, p. 134.
37

acknowledged, but is “refused or disavowed” (Ibid.).
37
For Butler, insofar as heterosexual gender
identifications are produced through a disavowal of homosexual attachments, they are produced
through melancholic identification (136). She gives the example of a girl who must renounce her
love for her mother before transferring love from her father to a substitute, and that of a boy who,
to become a man, must repudiate femininity (137). Heterosexuality for Butler is thus purchased
through the melancholic incorporation of a love that it disavows (140). Central to this theory of
identity formation derived from Freud’s model of incorporation is thus what Esther Sanchez-
Pardo refers to in her own work on modernist melancholy as a “denial of alterity . . . inscribed in
the very rhetoric of ‘Mourning and Melancholia’” (43).
While in Butler’s account it is clear that it is dominant culture that is melancholic, Anne
Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race (2001) expands on Butler’s insight into melancholic
identification to include subjects of racial denigration. Cheng builds on readings of the
melancholy of gender by Butler, Kaja Silverman, and Juliana Schiesari in order to discuss
sensitive moments of racial wounding. Cheng is interested in exploring how “a racially
impugned person processes the experience of denigration” (x). She looks at the way racism is
“animated through imaginative procedures” (x), and seeks a vocabulary to describe “racial grief”
as not simply a symptom, but an “analytical paradigm” (x). Grief in her account plays a
“constitutive role” in racial, ethnic, and national subject formation. The joy of the Ficinian
tradition is related to the construction of a new ideal, an enhanced or idealized self.
38
Cheng’s

37
In speaking of the incorporation of both the attachment and the object in the ego Butler is closest to Torok’s
“introjection” here.
38
I will argue that idealized forms of selfhood are predicated on the denigration of other debased forms of
subjectivity Cheng describes. In making this temporal distinction, I differ somewhat from Greg Forter, who in his
Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism (2011) argues that modernism is marked by the simultaneous
loss of a sense of selfhood and ideals. He writes that it is grieving for both “the aggressively masculine component
38

summary of Freud follows Butler in emphasizing dominant culture as melancholic (10). She
describes American racialization as “operat[ing] through the institutional process of producing a
dominant, standard, white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of
racialized others” (10). The racial other is “assimilated” or “uneasily digested by – American
nationality,” a process that is perfectly described within Freudian melancholy (10). But Cheng is
also interested in “the ontological and psychical status of a social subject who has, as a victim of
this process, been made into an ‘object,’ a ‘loss,’ an ‘invisibility,’ or a ‘phantom’” (14).
Undertaking the examination of this ontological status is something, she points out, that has not
been previously done (14).
39
While Cheng, like Butler before her, is attentive to the melancholy
of dominant culture, the focus of her study is on “racialized minorities’ melancholic responses to
dominant racial melancholia” (20). What Cheng’s expansion of the understanding of melancholy
to include minorities reveals is that, after Freud, Ficinian melancholy becomes the norm, rather
than a deviation, and describes both dominant culture’s violent response to the loss of an object
through introjection with a goal of expansion, and subjected people’s response to loss of, in a
sense, themselves, including culture, traditions, language, and land. A second point Cheng raises
is that the American “tradition of exclusion, imperialism, colonization” runs entirely contrary to
the tradition of American liberty and individualism (11). But this contradiction is consistent
within the Ficinian tradition of melancholy with its aggressive interest in expansion.
Over the past two decades, interventions in Early Modern and Renaissance literary
studies have challenged the dominance of the Ficinian tradition, and texts and approaches have

of 19
th
century white manhood . . . [and] the loss of its interior—its ‘feminine’ capacity for sympathetic
identification and abrogation of the self’s borders” that leads to melancholic response (4). For Forter, melancholy is
“blocked grieving” distinguished by “unconscious aggression” (1).

39
At the same time, Cheng is echoing Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (1967) in this passage. Fanon
notes: “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (110).
39

been uncovered to either restore the theory of the humors to literary history,
40
or to present a
directed critique of the Ficinian tradition. What this critique reveals is the underlying violence,
the disruption, dislocation, and voiding that is visited upon those with whom the melancholic
comes into contact. Juliana Schiesari’s The Gendering of Melancholia (1992) is one such
important critique. Schiesari follows Freud in noting the unequal and tyrannical relationship
between the “melancholic subject” and “an object that it seeks to dominate” (9n21). She quotes
Freud: “‘The ego may enjoy in this [relationship] the satisfaction of knowing itself as the better
of the two, as superior to the object’” (9). Schiesari’s own “feminist suspicion” is that the
“object, at once vilified, desired, and judged by a ‘superior, moral’ instance, is situated in the
same way as woman in classic phallocentrism (that is, as a devalued object, as abject and at
fault)” (9-10). In Freud’s essay, the self-torment the melancholic engages in signals the
“satisfaction of sadism and hate which relate to an object” (251).
Freudian melancholy thus describes not only an aggressive misogyny, as Schiesari
argues, but also what Frantz Fanon refers to in Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White
Masks,1967) as a “structure raciste” (“racist structure,” p. 76).
41
Fanon’s description reveals the
active nature of the structure; the man of color is “crée” (“created”) as inferior by the racist (77).
An “objectivité écrasante” (“crushing objectivity”) is forced upon him (90). “Tiens, un nègre”
(“Look, a Negro!”) cries a young white boy on a train, frightened (92). “Frightened!” the narrator
exclaims, resolving to laugh himself to tears (92). But this isn’t possible; “le schéma corporel,

40
See for example Trevor, who in The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (2004) studies the
melancholic scholar and early modern subjectivity in terms of humoral theory. He looks at how the “representation
of a disposition signals a transitional move from the Neoplatonic concept of object-oriented spirituality to more
material, Galenically-informed model of dispositionally-rooted passions” (5).
41
Cheng was aware of Fanon’s argument; she notes that Fanon was the first to view race as melancholic, even as he
doesn’t use the term (10).
40

attaqué en plusieurs points, s’écroula, cédant la place à un schema épidermique racial” (“the
corporeal schema, attacked at various points, crumbled, giving way to a racial epidermal
schema,” p. 92). “Ce-jour-là,” (“On that day”) Fanon writes, “désorienté, incapable d’être dehors
avec l’autre, le Blanc, qui, impitoyable, m’emprisonnait, je me portai très loin, me constituant
objet” (“completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who
unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made
myself an object,” p. 93). His body, his race, his ancestors, all flash to presence in the moment
they are lost: “Mon corps me revenait étalé, disjoint, rétamé, tout endeuillé dans ce jour blanc
d’hiver” (“My body was given back to me, sprawled out, disjointed, worn out, plunged into
mourning in that white winter day,” p. 93). Fanon’s description returns to the “epidermal,” the
“signe extérieur” (“outer manifestation,” p. 97), to the surface by which men are judged; his
understanding of racial grief is described as incorporation by dominant culture, thus suggesting
the real effects of the imaginary process. Fanon’s speaker is in the position of loss, being taken
“off from [his] own presence,” internalized by dominant culture, rendered hollow, “epidermal.”
Despite such critiques of the Ficinian tradition of melancholy, this understanding of the
malady remains almost universally applied to understand modernist texts, in part due to Freud’s
stature in the period, but also because of the importance of his theory of loss, which would
become central to the way modernity is understood. In Affective Mapping (2008), Jonathan
Flatley argues that Freud’s essay on melancholy is “an allegory for the experience of modernity,
an experience . . . that is constitutively linked to loss” (2). Loss is modern, for Flatley; it is the
experience of modernity that generates it (9). It is the connection to the problem of loss that
separates, for Flatley, nineteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of melancholy from
earlier theories (3), and that clearly begins to distinguish such accounts as Julia Kristeva’s Soleil
41

noir (Black Sun, 1987), and psychoanalytic accounts that preceded hers, including Freud’s, of
course, but also Abraham and Torok’s and Melanie Klein’s.
42
For Flatley, the central problem of
modernism is to attempt to grapple with the accumulation of losses, with the “fact of a new scale,
scope, and quality of loss itself” (31). And yet even Flatley’s account, which appears
unequivocal on the notion that the response to modernity is universally melancholic, leaves open
the possibility that those subjected to the melancholic’s reaction to loss might provoke mourning
rather than melancholy in return. In his reference to Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs, Flatley
confirms “mourning” as an “effect of racism” (30). Instead of reacting through the dominant
form of Ficinian melancholy, those subjected to the melancholic process could have an alternate
experience of modernity. In these alternate experiences, the way that grief is overcome differs: in
the Ficinian tradition Freud aligns himself with, the process of gaining melancholic self-
knowledge – what Burton refers to as “melancholizing” – is the key to overcoming loss, whereas
in the Galenic tradition intellectualizing is held directly responsible for the dejection and
withdrawal associated with melancholy. The way that the existence of the lost object is
conceived also differs: in Freud’s account of mourning, something is really lost, or something
has really died, whereas in the case of melancholy it is an abstraction – space and time, an ideal
woman, the past – that is lost, and then recovered through incorporation or introjection. Even as
the melancholic process of dealing with loss involves an imagined ideal and a fantasy designed
to protect the ego from harm, it could—and does, according to Schiesari, Butler, Fanon, and
Cheng—have real effects on real others.

42
Kristeva acknowledges that according to classical psychoanalytic theory depression and mourning both hide
“aggressivité contre l’objet perdu” (“aggression toward the lost object,” 20).

42

Freud’s theory of melancholy has been on the one hand critiqued for its inherent
violence, but it has also on the other been embraced for its transformative potential, and this
remains a powerful argument for the positive, liberatory aspect of the Ficinian tradition that
remains to be dealt with. David Eng and David Kazanjian’s introduction to essays collected in
Loss, for example, highlights the significance of the open-endedness of the melancholic’s
mourning. In their introduction to the collection, Eng and Kazanjian interpret the melancholic
positively, referring several times to the “enduring devotion” (3) the melancholic feels for a lost
object. As they note, “unlike mourning, in which the past is declared resolved, finished, and
dead, in melancholia the past remains steadfastedly alive in the present” (3). The melancholic
attitude, in this view, constructs a more positive relationship to the past, allowing the ghostly to
continually haunt the present. Rather than attempting to “grasp” or “hold” a fixed notion of the
past, which nostalgically traps the lost object in the past, what is dead or lost is continually
reintroduced into, and thus remains alive in, the present (3).
Walter Benjamin and Melancholy
While the authors refer to Freud, they propose from the outset of their collection to work
closely with Walter Benjamin’s writings on melancholy, and to use the critic to depathologize
Freudian melancholy.
43
Freud’s description of melancholy as invoking a past that is “never fixed
and complete” (3), for example, reread in Benjamin’s terms indicates the opening of a “hopeful”
relationship to, or “dialogue” with, the past, in which the “remains of the past remain alive in the
present” (1). The authors sustain the Freudian distinction between mourning and melancholia,
but shift the valence; as they write, mourning “abandons lost objects by laying them to rest,” but

43
This depathologization is something, the authors note, that Freud himself suggested in his essay. While in that
essay Freud describes melancholy as both “pathological” and as contrary to survival, he also suggests that if we
knew it better we would no longer insist on assigning pathological identity to it. See Eng and Kazanjian, p. 3.
43

melancholia demonstrates a “continued and open relationship to the past” (4). The priority of the
Ficinian tradition of melancholy gains new support.
In his writings on melancholy in the 1920s, Benjamin recalls the Ficinian tradition by
developing a “dialectical” view of the disease. In his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels
(Origin of German Tragic Drama, writ. 1924-25, publ. 1963), Benjamin depicts the melancholic
as oscillating between depression and manic ecstasy. As noted above, this vacillation is familiar
from the Ficinian tradition; Aristotle, for example, notes that a cold black bile will lead to
gloominess and lethargy, but when it is heated will lead to inspiration, perhaps to the level of
prophetic thought.
44
In the philosophical and poetic tradition this vacillation was commonly
embraced; periods of low mood were the price paid for eventual insight. This dual character is
illustrated well by the anonymous poem, “On Melancholy,” published in 1658:
Stand off, physician! Let me frolic
With my humour melancholic.
‘tis pleasure—it is pain likewise;
‘tis hell, and yet a paradise.

. . .

‘Tis thralldom, freedom, ‘tis express
Good company, and loneliness;
It laughs and cries all in one breath;
‘Tis wealth or want, ‘tis life or death.
A Bedlam trance, ‘tis what you will,
‘Tis as you’d have it, well or ill.

A fickle contradicting mood,
Arising from distempered blood

Stand off, physician! ‘Tis, I’m sure,
As a disease, so its own cure.

(quoted in Bauer, 78)

44
For an extended discussion, see Klibansky et al., pp. 19-30.
44

This duality, or as Eleanor Sickels describes it “the mingled roots of joy and sorrow,” is the
distinguishing characteristic of romantic melancholy (57). What Benjamin introduces is a
dialectical relation between the two states, in which they become inimical to each other, and
reflect the political situation that confronted him. What he sees in the state of disease is
repression and tyranny, Burton’s melancholic kingdom, and in the release of pleasure or mania a
revolutionary politics, or positive state of rebellion. Benjamin’s aim in introducing the dialectical
relation was, as Max Pensky describes in his remarks on the essay “Linke Melancholie” (“Left
Melancholy,” publ. 1931), to “blast apart the secret complicity between cultural expression and
political domination” (7). Benjamin takes this position in opposition to the stasis and
complacency of left politics of his time, thereby announcing his own radical political praxis. For
Pensky, the essay “does not merely direct critical writing against melancholia. In its very being it
aligns itself directly against it, negating it, attempting to overcome it” (17). In effect, Benjamin
uses one version of melancholy to critique, overcome, and negate the other.
Benjamin’s terms do not map neatly onto Freud’s. As Ilit Ferber points out, “Trauer” and
“Melancholie” are used interchangeably in Benjamin’s most extended study of melancholy, in
the Trauerspiel (66).
45
In “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“Theses on the Philosophy of
History,” writ. 1940, publ. 1950), Benjamin introduces a further term, “acedia,” which, as in
English, is a transliteration of the Greek for “non-caring state,” or in Benjamin’s understanding,
a withering of interest in life (254).
46
For Benjamin, this withering of interest in the present day

45
Benjamin does not, Ferber notes, explicitly refer to Freud in his writings on melancholy, though there is certainly
a kind of conversation or “‘constellation’” between the two writers. For Ferber’s summary of the way recent critics
have described that interchange, see p. 66.
46
Acedia was identified with melancholy as early as the Middle Ages for its connection to sin. It is, as Max Pensky
points out, the “genuinely theological conception of the melancholic” (105). See also Agamben’s “Noonday
Demon” (1993).
45

is the origin of empathy with the past, and describes the historicist’s desire to “fix” and “hold” or
“grasp” that past, a move Benjamin strongly critiques throughout the essay.
47
However, against
this sadness Benjamin musters another form of acedia, a withering of interest in time and
progress, in order to explode the continuum of history. Benjamin summons the violence of this
acedia to disrupt the fixity of the three evils he saw before him: faith in progress, belief in the
“‘Massenbasis’” (“mass basis”) and the “servile Einordnung in einen unkontrollierbaren
Apparat” (“servile integration into an uncontrollable apparatus”). For Benjamin there is
revolutionary chance in the moment of cessation of happening. His declaration is a call to arms:
“der historische Materialist . . . überläß es andern, bei der Hure ‘Es war einmal’ im Bordell des
Historismus sich auszugeben. Er bleibt seiner Kräfte Herr: Manns genug, das Kontinuum der
Geschichte aufzusprengen” (“The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the
whore called ‘once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers,
man enough to blast open the continuum of history”).
The aggressive masculinity of Benjamin’s method recalls earlier formulations of the
melancholic’s response to loss, including the Futurist embrace of masculine virtue as appropriate
to war.
48
It also recalls Baudelaire, who is Benjamin’s key literary example of a poet who
musters the necessary force to “blast” through constraint. In his notes for Das Passagen-Werk

47
These are of course the very terms that Eng and Kazanjian pick up on in their study.
48
In Poetry of the Revolution (2006) Martin Puchner writes: “The shift from revolution to war also precipitated a
notorious feature of futurism, namely, its misogyny. The celebration of war demanded ‘masculine’ virtues . . . and
thus the denigration of ‘feminine’ ones” (85). Once again, as Pensky described it, Benjamin turns melancholy
against itself. Forter also notes that between 1830 and1880 in America, to be a white man was to display “aggressive
assertiveness and competitive vigor thought of as innately male. Successful manhood was imagined, in other words,
as the realization of an instinct for domination that was rooted in the male body, the expression of which could alone
enable the economic and psychic autonomy so central to American conceptions of success” (1).

46

(The Arcades Project, begun 1927, publ. 1982), Benjamin writes that Baudelaire’s “allegory
bears traces of the violence necessary to demolish the harmonious façade of the world
surrounding him” (343). Allegorical violence, for Benjamin, serves in the destruction of false
totality. In the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, which examines German baroque mourning
plays, the agency or action proposed by the baroque Trauerspiel is a breaking through of a
reductive symbolic circle. The emphasis on breaking through, on fragmentation, on transience
and dynamic movement rather than stoppage or blockage (see p. 61), along with the emblematic
representation of the philosopher’s task as a mosaic with which his study begins, is central to
Benjamin’s method.
Benjamin’s contribution to theories of melancholy is his use of the opposed valuations of
melancholy in order to understand two different political orientations. What the critic reads in the
essentially depressive nostalgic position is the precondition for tyranny, while the opposed
position becomes heroic. Within the essentially destructive process he envisions for the historical
materialist, Benjamin ultimately envisions a route away from tyranny, meaning, and also
mourning. As he writes in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, “mourning is provoked by the
damming up of feeling, stopping in the middle of resounding” (209). It is thus meaning as the
obstacle to the effusion of language that causes mourning (Ibid.). When the soul of the work
disappears, mourning disappears; allegory becomes a hollow façade (213). Against the tyranny
of the confining circle of the symbolic, Benjamin poses freedom of movement, the withering of
meaning, and the disarticulation of form, which also allows a formerly closed circle to become
subject to death (171). The historical image becomes nothing more than a fragment or ruin for
allegorical understanding; its beauty as a symbol evaporates under the gaze of divine learning,
the cosmos it contains dries up (176). This formal maneuver is complicated, but is necessary to
47

understanding how in melancholic responses to grief allegory replaces the symbol.
49
Essentially,
Benjamin advocates what Freud calls pathological melancholy over what he refers to as the
normal process of mourning.
There is a very powerful back story behind the contemporary use of Walter Benjamin’s
theories to approach the problem of loss. The positive or negative valuation of acedia locates one
either on the side of revolution or on the side of tyranny. It is a story that poses melancholy as a
positive and active political tool. Insofar as that tool is essentially destructive, the conception
breaks with Judith Butler and Anne Cheng’s accounts, in which, as we saw, melancholy was
negatively constitutive, since it predicates identity on negation and subjection. However the
embrace of Ficinian melancholy also involves opening to the very procedure by which,
according to Butler and Cheng, racism and homophobia operate. At its most basic level, the
present study confronts and interrogates this disparity. In reconsidering the Galenic and Ficinian
traditions of melancholy and how they appear in the longer tradition of poetry, my purpose is not
to bring back outmoded scientific theories. Rather, I take up Eng and Kazanjian’s compelling
challenge to examine how the way losses are mourned conditions political action or inaction. By
returning to Benjamin’s idea of dialectical melancholy in Charles Baudelaire’s work and in

49
As I point out in the next chapter, however, symbols also represent a melancholic response to grief. For Kristeva,
the production of symbols involves an avowal of an original loss where the object has not actually died or
disappeared, a loss which is then negated through symbolization. This negation of loss through symbolic substitution
is explored as melancholic in Peter Sacks’s The English Elegy, as I discuss below in Chapter 4. For de Man, in his
early work on the Romantic symbol, symbols are produced through melancholic incorporation. This slippage on a
formal level accounts for what Torok, Nicolas Abraham, and Naomi Schor have described as the inability to
rigorously differentiate between mourning and melancholia in the Freudian account. In One Hundred Years of
Melancholy (1996), Schor thus understands mourning, melancholy, and depression to be on a continuum from the
most material to the most dematerialized (3).

48

describing Emily Dickinson and William Butler Yeats’s nondialectical—and essentially
Galenic— belief in melancholy as primarily a negative condition, a condition that cannot be
overcome by subordinating the physical or natural to the intellect, I investigate whether these
poets institute a more ethical approach to alterity, or whether their mourning and nostalgia sinks
them in the reactionary politics of which they both have been suspected.

49

Chapter Two
Baudelaire’s Spleen: Modernity and Melancholy

The critical reception of melancholy in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry bears distinctly
Ficinian marks: the melancholic genius rises above the mediocrity of his age through his capacity
to suffer. For critics and fellow writers receiving Baudelaire in this mode, the poet becomes the
representative man, forging a spatial location for the gathering of a community, which has been
fractured and particularized by the pressures of modernity. In his recent and compelling reading
of Baudelaire in terms of classical republican theory, Matthew Potolsky declares the poet a
heroic figure, whose sacrificial relationship to bourgeois modernity prepares the way for a new
community, bound by the pleasures of shared taste.
Potolsky joins critics such as Jean Starobinski, Dolf Oehler, Debarati Sanyal, and Ross
Chambers, who have, beginning in the 1970s, emphasized Baudelaire’s reasoned and political
response to France’s Second Republic.
50
Before this shift in the critical outlook, Baudelaire had
instead been associated with mournful withdrawal. Walter Benjamin’s sensitive writings on the
poet have been claimed as the major influence producing this reversal of opinion.
51
This chapter
argues that Benjamin’s own understanding of Baudelaire’s politics comes about through his
attention to Baudelaire’s melancholy poetics. I will demonstrate that what Benjamin finds as the
basis of a politicized Baudelaire is the dialectical vacillation of the Ficinian tradition. This
vacillation is between the pain and pressure of hyperembodied suffering—which Baudelaire
gives sensuous and voluptuous development to in his poetry— and a reasoned or critical

50
See Burton for a complete discussion of Baudelaire and the Second Republic.
51
See Claude Pichois’s “Baudelaire devant la socio-critique ouest-allemande” (1981) for a somewhat dismissive
overview of German criticism aiming to recover Baudelaire’s political engagement through Benjamin as their
“spiritus rector” (228). See also Burton (vii) and Starobinski (93n42) on Benjamin’s centrality to historical and
political readings of Baudelaire.
50

grasping of that suffering as the means to break through to the other side. I will also use readings
of Baudelaire’s poetry to reveal the formal considerations of the two major landscapes of
melancholy after modernism, initiated by Benjamin and Freud, and how each alternately comes
up with a turn against embodiment, and, as a consequence, against those who have traditionally
been overidentified with the body, women in particular, for Baudelaire. In a reading that traces
the formal aspects of Baudelairean melancholy, I demonstrate how the vacillation between
symbol and allegory—between a state of constraining hyperembodiment and liberating
fragmentation—follows a Ficinian schema.
Language, loss, and politics are intimately related in Baudelaire’s poetry because, as I
argue, it is a narcissistic attachment to objects and others that negates the other’s alterity, and
foregrounds a pathological response to loss. Employing a psychoanalytic lens, developed by
Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham in particular, I find that the melancholic, upon losing
abstractions, responds to that loss through incorporation and introjection, which leads to a sense
of collapse and entrapment. In Baudelaire’s poems this collapse culminates in an experience of
oneself as a crypt or tomb, existing to preserve what has been lost. I relate the sense of collapse
in Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal to Benjamin’s description of the loss of aura, and how such losses
must be met with the triumphal stab of the artist, with breaking through to freedom. The negative
side of the search for freedom are the limbs, primarily women’s, left strewn in the wake of the
melancholic’s forward progress. This chapter demonstrates how liberation in the Ficinian
tradition of melancholy bears enslavement within it, as the other is deprived of external existence
and internalized by that ever present tooth in Les Fleurs du Mal.
In his “Trauer und Melancholie,” Sigmund Freud hypothesizes that rather than mourn for
death, or the loss of real people, objects, or things, the melancholic turns his eye to the loss of
51

ideals and abstractions. Baudelaire’s poems are melancholic in this sense insofar as they extend,
according to Freud’s definition “über den klaren Fall des Verlustes durch den Tod hinaus und
umfassen alle die Situationen von Kränkung, Zurücksetzung und Enttäuschung” (“beyond the
clear loss of death and to all situations of being slighted, neglected, or disappointed” Freud 437;
Strachey 251). Baudelaire’s “A Une Passante” reveals the poet’s melancholic preoccupation with
losses of a “von mehr ideeller Natur” (“of a more ideal nature,” Freud, 431; Strachey 245,
translation slightly modified) as described by Freud.
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son œil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair... puis la nuit! — Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!
(The deafening street around me roared.
Tall, thin, in high mourning, majestic pain,
A woman passed, with an ostentatious hand
Lifting, swinging the festoon and hem

Agile and noble, with her leg like a statue.
I drank, tensed, extravagant
From her eye, livid sky in which a hurricane brewed,
The gentleness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills.

A flash . . . then night! Fugitive beauty!
Whose look suddenly revived me
Am I never to see you again but in eternity?

52

Elsewhere, very far from here! Too late! Never maybe!
For I don’t know where you flee to, you don’t know where I am going
Oh you I would have loved, oh you who knew it!)

While the woman’s high mourning invokes what Freud describes as real loss, “den Verlust einer
geliebten Person” (“the loss of a loved person”), the action of this poem turns not on the
woman’s mourning, but rather on the speaker’s. He has lost something through this encounter,
seemingly the possession of the woman in a romantic attachment. In Freud’s definition of the
precondition for melancholy, this kind of loss is of an “Abstraktion” (“abstraction”) that takes
the place of a loved one, such as “Vaterland, Freiheit, ein Ideal usw” (“country, liberty, an ideal,
and so on”) (Freud 429; Strachey 243). In idealized loss, the lost thing has not actually died, and
thus it might describe the loss of a romantic interest, or a loss that is “dem Bewusstsein
entzogenen” (“withdrawn from consciousness,” Freud 431; Strachey, 245). “Ideell” could also be
translated as “nonmaterial,” indicating the loss is of an imaginary and idealized object in the
realm of fantasy rather than reality.
Walter Benjamin’s reading of this poem in “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” (“On
Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (GSI, 1939), stresses the absent figure of the crowd (whose presence
makes the street around the pair deafening). But even more salient is the absent figure the widow
mourns, the absence that most removes the poem from the realities of mourning to the
abstraction of melancholy. Their meeting in the street arrives as a kind of blow: “Un éclair…
puis la nuit! Fugitive beauté” (“A flash... then night! – Fugitive beauty”). The poem extends in
the time between this light of recognition and the darkness of death, as the speaker asks: “Ne te
verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?” (“Am I never to see you again but in eternity?”). Then, as the
long, thin, statuesque woman remains silent and presumably passes by, he concludes “trop tard!
jamais peut-être! . . . O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!" (“Too late! Never maybe! . . . .
53

O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!”). The speaker does not attain the elusive
knowledge of this would-be interlocutor, but instead intimations about the brevity of time. The
intimations he receives are in particular of the brevity of his own time, as in a formulation that
recalls Milton and the longer Ficinian tradition, the woman’s glance revivifies him, only to kill
him.
As Baudelaire’s poetry reveals, in melancholy the object to which one would attach is
unreal or abstract because of the way in which she is perceived, rather than for any inherent lack
of history or voice. We might remark on the fact that the woman is perceived as in mourning
before the loss that matters—the speaker’s—occurs. The choice of this symbolic figure relates to
an internal state of mind. As Agamben writes, melancholy “offer[s] the paradox of an intention
to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object. It “cover[s] its object with the
funereal trappings of mourning” (21), revealing its “imaginative capacity” as one of making “an
unobtainable object appear as if lost” (20). In the speaker’s address to the woman there is what
Helen Vendler has referred to as a “vertical displacement” (97), where the “O toi,” if not
precisely evoking a deity or eliciting divine reply, departs from the specific address of an actual
woman in the street, instead creating an ideal image.
52
The woman’s exaggerated, statuesque
form becomes what Richard Stamelman describes in “The Shroud of Allegory: Death, Mourning,
and Melancholy in Baudelaire’s Work” (1983) as an “ideal emblem of mourning” (397). The
exaggerated, yet curiously silent, woman does not maintain a separate and unique existence, but
is rather pressed into service to represent the speaker’s apprehension of his own mortality.

52
For Melanie Klein, idealized images might be intended to cover over aggression, including fears of having
destroyed the object (See Ramazani, p. 51).
54

Rosemary Lloyd in “Mundus Muliebris: Baudelaire’s World of Women” (2005), finds
that this melancholic move toward abstraction exculpates Baudelaire from the charge of
misogyny by arguing that the use of the female body as a vehicle for a generalized fear of
mortality demonstrates the poet is not, after all, making remarks about a real woman, whatever
that might mean (98).
53
But I find this argument unconvincing, as it is the apprehension of the
other’s body as a cipher for the self that is at once melancholic and even dangerous, and that
illustrates the folding of the aesthetic into the psychological, as a symbol or emblem is created
based on narcissistic identification.
54

If for the melancholic objects and people have merely symbolic or abstract meaning, this
is less a function of the capacity of the things themselves, than of the melancholic’s choice. For
Freud, the love objects the melancholic chooses are based on narcissistic identification (Freud
435-36; Strachey 249), and thus will always, as in this poem, refer to the speaker, rather than
outside to an external reality. As James Strachey writes in his introduction to Freud’s “Trauer
und Melancholie,” the paper was in some ways an extension of his 1914 “On Narcissism” essay.
Narcissism is described through the substitution of identification for object-love; this represents a
regression to a preliminary stage of object-choice. In Freud’s words, “it is the first way—and one
that is expressed in an ambivalent fashion—in which the ego picks out an object. The ego wants
to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of

53
The poet is well-known for his misogynistic remarks; “la femme est naturelle, c’est à dire abominable” from Mon
Coeur mis à nu (“woman is natural, which is to say abominable”) is among the most memorably deplorable.
Rosemary Lloyd is responding specifically to a manuscript that presented Baudelaire’s poem “Un Charogne” (“The
Carcass”) as the poem to exhibit the poet’s misogyny. She finds that it does present disgust for the female body, but
that “it is also a cry of despair at human mortality and of fear faced with human desire, both male and female” (98).
Interestingly, she also rereads his negative comment about women and the church as a “yoking together of power
and the female” (99), a figurative move that calls for the violence of the response envisioned by Benjamin.
54
See also Peggy Kamuf’s “Baudelaire’s Other Woman” on the disappearance of the woman in Baudelaire.
55

libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it” (Strachey 249).
“L’Albatros,” from “Spleen et Idéal,” is another poem that depicts the narcissism of the poet’s
gaze, as the albatross of the title is described only in terms of the qualities that will highlight the
poet’s own unrecognized glory. The albatross is a king or prince of the azure skies, but when he
is dragged to earth amid the jeers and taunts of coarse sailors, he becomes “comique et laid” and
his “ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher” (“comical and ugly,” “giant’s wings impede his
walking”). Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book-length study of Baudelaire, explains the slippage
between the external reality of objects and internal self-reflection through such narcissism, which
he finds always on display in Baudelaire’s poetry. Baudelaire does not, for Sartre, turn his gaze
onto the external world as separate from, but rather as an extension of, himself: “Objects were
pretexts, reflections, screens, but they were never of any value in themselves; their only purpose
was to give him an opportunity of contemplating himself while he was looking at them” (23).
What happens in the transaction is clearly characterized by Leo Bersani, who in his Freud and
Baudelaire describes the “ontological hunger” in the poet’s transactions with his subjects. “The
poet,” for Bersani, “aspires toward other existences; he sucks them into himself” (109).
The melancholic does not grieve for another, and cannot for the reason that the mode in
which the other is apprehended is assimilative. The person, or thing, such as the albatross,
mourned in Baudelaire’s poetry and correspondence behind the screen of ideals and abstractions
is always himself. Rosemary Lloyd, in her Baudelaire’s World (2002), differentiates Baudelaire
from both Victor Hugo and Mallarmé for just this reason. What she finds absent in Baudelaire’s
poetry is the sense of “grieving for another . . . of losing a close friend or simply an admired
predecessor” (214). By contrast to Baudelaire, Lloyd notes that “Victor Hugo’s later poetry is
unthinkable without the loss of his daughter Léopoldine, just as much of Mallarmé’s thinking
56

and writing is profoundly shaped by his mourning for his son Anatole and for friends who died
before him” (Ibid.). And she adds, with a touch of chastisement: “Mallarmé’s letters show him
more deeply moved by the illness and death of Baudelaire, whom he did not know personally,
than Baudelaire seems to have been for any one” (Ibid.). As a speaker figuratively absorbs what
was once external and alive, his own experience becomes tomb-like, for Abraham and Torok a
“crypt,” in which what is lost is preserved internally in fantasy. The lack of decoration in
Baudelaire’s “Le Mauvais Moine” refers to the loss of anything beyond the speaker himself to
which to refer or to attach interest, anything beyond himself to mourn: “Mon âme est un tombeau
que, mauvais cénobite, / Depuis l’éternité je parcours et j’habite; / Rien n’embellit les murs de ce
cloître odieux.” (“My soul is a tomb, which, bad cenobite / I’ve walked and inhabited forever /
Nothing embellishes the walls of this odious cloister”). As Freud notes, in melancholy it is not
the world that grows poor and empty, but the ego itself, a situation perfectly encapsulated by
Baudelaire’s poem.
The idea that the mode by which the other is apprehended in melancholy is assimilative
relates to both narcissism and incorporation. If it is an abstract sense of loss produced by a
separation between the would-be lover from his beloved in “A Une Passante,” it is a loss that the
speaker overcomes melancholically, through internalization. The speaker convulsively drinks his
pleasure and pain from the widow’s eye. In poem after poem in Les Fleurs du Mal, the way that
the female mouth or body acts as a vase, her eye as a limpid pool, allows a male speaker to
receive his own feelings and emotions as sustenance.
55
What is preserved in the image

55
Elissa Marder reads these lines similarly, though she also reads them in relation to her focus on time. In “Semper
Eadem,” the woman’s “eyes replace that (lost) life by allowing him to become drunk with illusion and fall asleep. In
Baudelaire’s world . . . the woman’s mouth almost always opens up a temporal abyss, whereas her eyes (which must
remain open but devoid of sight) hold the world in place, outside of time” (17).
57

Baudelaire creates, in Stamelman’s evocative phrasing, is “not the woman, but her image; not the
object as loved, but the object as lost; not the thing, but its shadow” (398). In describing the way
that Baudelaire creates the image or ideal emblem in his poem through “incorporation” and
“introjection,” Stamelman invokes the psychoanalytic tradition, without making the
differentiation between the two terms that would be so important in the critical wake following
Freud.
For Maria Torok, in her “Maladie du deuil et fantasme du cadavre exquis" (1968), the
differentiation between these two terms “incorporation” and “introjection,” which had been
introduced by Sándor Ferenczi, had become obscured by the time Freud wrote his
groundbreaking essay, and had taken on confused and even contradictory meanings. Torok’s
description of incorporation provides an accurate reading of “A Une Passante,” where the
mechanism involves the denial of the external reality of the object, its internalization at the
center of the “soi,” and subsequent torture. It is a process that happens in secret, and transpires
by way of language. It is, for Torok, a language “saying the desire to introject” (723).
Baudelaire’s work evinces the self-reproach which is, for Freud, the defining
characteristic of melancholy, and involves directing sadism and hatred against the lost object
which has been internalized. In his private correspondence, Baudelaire creates an image of his
mistress Jeanne, as a female other who is threatening in her capacity to misrecognize
Baudelaire’s greatness. The formulation “je désire, je veux” (“I desire, I wish") the poet uses to
try to press his trustee Ancelle to honor his last instructions is one he later repeats in his
correspondence. In letters he wrote after 1852, when he broke with Jeanne and was no longer on
speaking terms with Ancelle, he would harangue Jeanne for her ignorance, which is actually a
thinly-veiled critique of her ignorance of Baudelaire’s own talents:
58

VIVRE AVEC UN ETRE qui ne vous sait aucun gré de vos efforts, qui les contrarie par
une maladresse ou une méchanceté permanente, qui ne vous considère que comme son
domestique et son propriété, avec qui il est impossible d’échanger une parole politique ou
littéraire, une créature qui ne veut rien apprendre, quoique vous lui ayez proposé de lui
donner vous-même des leçons, une créature QUI NE M’ADMIRE PAS, et qui ne
s’intéresse même pas à mes études, qui jetterait mes manuscrits au feu si cela lui
rapporterait plus d’argent que de les laisser publier, qui renvoie mon chat qui était ma
seule distraction au logis, et qui introduit des chiens, parce que la vue des chiens me fait
mal. (193)

To live with a being who never thanks you for your efforts, who contradicts them by a
permanent clumsiness or meanness, who considers you only as her servant and property,
with whom it is impossible to exchange a word on politics or literature, a creature who
wishes to learn nothing, even though you have proposed yourself to give her lessons, a
creature WHO DOES NOT ADMIRE ME, and isn’t interested in my studies, who would
throw my manuscripts in the fire if that would bring her more money than to allow them
to be published. Who threw out my cat who was my only distraction at home, and who
introduces dogs, because the sight of dogs makes me sick.

Baudelaire sees himself as tortured by Jeanne, which appears to be a manifestation of the self-
reproach characteristic of the melancholic, in which it is not the world that has grown poor and
empty, but the ego itself. As I have described, these reproaches are not in fact leveled against the
ego, but against a loved object that has been identified with the self.
56

In “Spleen et Idéal,” the notes of sadism and hatred indicate the action of incorporation;
the melancholic sustains a certain mastery over internalized objects until they are finally declared
dead, as in mourning, and a substitute is found. In melancholy the object is finally declared dead
when it has been killed off. Women in Les Fleurs du Mal are accordingly fractured by
description into mouths, gourds, or cisterns for the wine of either nepenthe or memory, into
breasts, hair, pupils, faces gnawed by debauchery. This in a sense justifies Benjamin’s interest in
Baudelaire’s title “Les Limbes” as “Limbs” rather than “Limbo,” even as either translation

56
See also Wendy Brown. In “Resisting Left Melancholy,” Brown argues that for Freud the melancholic’s self-
reproach is actually adopted from the beloved, who critiques the melancholic for failing to live up to his or her
idealization (459). But on my reading, which coincides with Abraham and Torok’s, what is encrypted, preserved at
the interior of the subject is not an idealized form of love as for Brown, but instead the object itself, the lost other.
59

would work. Despite the pleasure in drinking from the other’s eye, Baudelaire’s speakers reveal
the way they are simultaneously enslaved to the images reflected there. “La Chevelure” depicts
the speaker’s perfect abdication of the will, his submission to “Extase!” and loving “ivresse”
(“drunkenness”): "N’es tu pas l’oasis où je rêve, et la gourde / Où je hume à longs traits le vin du
souvenir ?" The rhetorical question that closes the poem seals his perfect enchantment.
The enchantment that results from identification with the beloved is at the same time
power, and at times Baudelaire evokes it in its rawness, without the veil of perfumed hair, the
“forêt aromatique,” and tranquil settings of “La Chevelure” with its “langoureuse Asie et . . .
brûlante Afrique” (“languorous Asia and . . . burning Africa”), even as it retains its
personification as female. Cruelty recurs in the description of women in “Spleen et Idéal”: in
sonnet XXIV the woman is a “bête implacable et cruelle” (“implacable and cruel beast”), while
in XXV she is cruel in her boredom:
. . . L’ennui rend ton âme cruelle.
Pour exercer tes dents à ce jeu singulier,
Il te faut chaque jour un cœur au râtelier.

(. . . Boredom makes your soul cruel
To work your teeth at this strange task,
Every day you need a heart on the rack.)

In Baudelaire male and female boredom are distinguished by being passive and active
alternately, and female boredom takes the active, violent role. This gendering of ennui is in fact
the reverse of what Gilbert and Gubar describe as “female ennui” in their classic Madwoman in
the Attic (1979), enduring the confinement of domesticity while waiting to be rescued, having to,
in the authors’ evocative description, “maintain polite conversation while waiting for a prince to
60

come” (113).
57
In “Le Vampire,” Baudelaire instead returns to a form of beauty that Mario Praz
describes in his Romantic Agony as “peculiar to the Romantics,” the “Beauty of the Medusa,” a
beauty that is “tainted with pain, corruption, and death” (45). The poem depicts the enslavement
of the male protagonist to the female vampire, who has thrust her knife deep into his
“humiliated” spirit:
Toi qui, comme un coup de couteau,
Dans mon cœur plaintif es entrée ;
Toi qui, forte comme un troupeau
De démons, vins, folle et parée,

De mon esprit humilié
Faire ton lit et ton domaine ;
-- Infâme à qui je suis lié
Comme le forçat à la chaine,

Comme au jeu le joueur têtu,
Comme à la bouteille l’ivrogne,
Comme aux vermines la charogne,
-- Maudite, maudite sois-tu !

(You who, like a strike of the knife
Has entered my plaintive heart;
You who came, strong as a troop
Of demons, wild and adorned,

To make my humiliated spirit
Your bed and your domain;
-- Villain to whom I’m tied
Like the galley slave to chain

Like the stubborn gambler to the game
Like the drunkard to the bottle,
Like the corpse to the worms,
-- Be damned, damned!)

57
See Buck-Morss on Benjamin’s interest in reviving the Sleeping Beauty myth for his time in Das Passagen-Werk.
61

Vampire and victim are not tied by any unidirectional power, despite the references to liberty and
enslavement, but instead by the cruel circularity and mutual dependency of addiction, the need to
eat and be eaten, which is essentially the evil that it is to live. In “Semper Eadem” the speaker
declares: “Vivre est un mal” (“To live is evil, or a sickness”). Elissa Marder, in Dead Time
(2001) glosses this line as “‘to live is (to be) in pain’” (17).
Entrapment is thus encapsulated in what it is to be alive, and perhaps justifies the sense
that the unity Baudelaire seeks is only possible after death. In the poem from Le Spleen de Paris
titled “Anywhere out of the World,” the speaker cries for release: “N’importe où! n’importe où!
pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!" (“Anywhere! Anywhere as long as it’s out of this
world!”).
58
But the implication in this section is that such release is impossible. In “Le Vampire,”
the speaker sends up a cry for liberty and is only met with a reflection of his own impotence and
unworthiness as he pleads with potentially fatal cures:
J’ai prié le glaive rapide
De conquérir ma liberté,
Et j’ai dit au poison perfide
De secourir ma lâcheté.

Hélas ! le poison et le glaive
M’ont pris en dédain et m’ont dit :
« Tu n’es pas digne qu’on t’enlève
A ton esclavage maudit,

Imbécile ! – de son empire
Si nos efforts te délivraient,
Tes baisers ressusciteraient
Le cadavre de ton vampire ! »

(I beseeched the rapid sword
To conquer my freedom,
And I asked treacherous poison

58
The English title comes from Thomas Hood’s poem “Bridge of Sighs.”
62

To relieve my cowardice.

Alas! Poison and sword
Held me in contempt and said:
“You are not worthy that we take you
From your damned slavery

Imbecile! – even if we were to lift you
From her rule, your kisses would resuscitate
The cadaver of your vampire!”)

There is no freedom to be found in exiting the world through death; the death of the vampire will
only begin the cycle over again as he kisses her back to life. The madness of his condition is such
that he will not be able to exit it, even with the knowledge he has of the pain, suffering, and
servitude the pleasure entails. What Baudelaire’s speaker realizes, in the words of the blade and
the poison, is that there is no autonomy or end to his obligation. “Le Vampire” ends after having
fully conjured the power that binds the speaker, and curiously emptying the field of future action,
the expression of any agency. The field simply folds on itself.
In his personal correspondence, Baudelaire defines his melancholy or “spleen” in terms
of such enslavement, of being smothered, and swallowed, recalling themes from the longer
tradition of melancholy in which to be melancholic is immobilized by sadness, crushed in a vice
by Dame Melancholy, or sat upon by grief that, like the snake in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Prince
Athanase” “fold by fold / Pressed out the life of life.” In an 1861 letter addressed to his mother,
Baudelaire comments on the rusting of his will that has resulted in his illness : “je passe mon
temps à réfléchir sur la brièveté de la vie, rien de plus ; et ma volonté va toujours se rouillant. Si
jamais homme a connu, jeune, le spleen et l’hypocondrie, certes, c’est moi" ("I spend my time
reflecting on the brevity of life, nothing more, and my will is always rusting over. If ever a man
knew, at a young age, spleen and hypochondria, certainly, it’s me.” Correspondance v. II, p.
63

139). The poet connects the acute awareness of mortality with spleen, and apprehends it along
with an overwhelming sense of the failure of will to combat it. In a later letter, again to his
mother, he refers to “cet état somnolent, qui ressemble beaucoup au spleen” (“that somnolent
state, which very much resembles spleen.” Correspondance: vii, 542). But unlike the Galenic
tradition, Baudelaire shows the vacillation between low points of suffering and high points of
cure as dependent upon the mastery and fracturing of the body, usually the woman’s, and the
triumph of reason.
The narcissistic attachment to objects, and a melancholic response to loss of those objects
through incorporation, has been frequently read not in terms of such pathological psychology,
but rather in terms of an allegory of modernity.
59
The transformation of streets along with the
destruction of old buildings and neighborhoods in Paris to make way for “the new” that
Baudelaire records during Haussmannization has been viewed in terms of “loss” or “wounding.”
Jean Starobinski, for example, wonders if “Les destructions et reconstructions de l’urbanisme du
milieu du siècle, avec leur mélange de monumentalité et de fonction répressive” (“urbanism’s
destructions and reconstructions in the middle of the century, with their mixture of
monumentality and repressive function”) could have been responsible for the “spleen” and sense
of exile in Baudelaire (64). Ellen Burt in her Poetry’s Appeal (1999), shows how the physical
transformation of Paris could have been experienced as pain, as “social wounds” (30). Flatley in
his Affective Mapping (2008) sees Baudelaire’s poems as providing a record of an “endless
accumulation of losses,” offering a quote from the second of Baudelaire’s spleen poems, “J’ai
plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans” (“I have more memories than if I were a thousand

59
Baudelaire’s poetic struggle with Baron von Haussmann’s transformation of Paris is a key reference point for
Benjamin’s theorization of Baudelaire’s affective experience of modernity in his Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im
Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (GS1, Charles Baudelaire: A Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, 1973).
64

years old,” p. 29). He extrapolates outward from this to define modernism itself as consisting of
a series of losses entailed by “urbanization, industrialization, colonization and imperialism,
modern warfare, the invention of ‘race,’ the advent of the modern commodity and mass culture,
the emergence of discourses of gender and sexuality, and the pathologization of homosexuality”
(3-4). In Flatley’s interpretation in particular, the origination of the very widespread use of
Baudelaire to understand how critics have come to make claims about the necessary urbanity of
modernity, about the way that language and representation work, about relations of individuals to
others and to objects, and about how to approach literature theoretically is apparent. Debarati
Sanyal has also noted the importance of Baudelaire’s formulation of modernity, writing, “Some
of the most established theoretical approaches to literature have been articulated through the
example of Baudelaire” (138). Some of these approaches, she notes, are structuralism,
psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and postmodern theories of trauma (Ibid.). But Baudelaire’s
response to modernity represents a particular outlook on modernity, replicating longstanding
power relations in the Ficinian tradition in figuring power in the capacity to subordinate or
transcend the body.
By describing how psychoanalytic melancholy and Paul de Man’s deconstructive
approach come together, I will analyze this dynamic in Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne” (“The Swan”)
from the “Tableaux Parisiens,” which has been described as the work instituting modernism.
And it has in particular been used to express Baudelaire’s allegorizing of modernity, where
Andromache has been read as an emblem of the Second Republic, which allowed itself to be
violated by Napoleon III.
Andromaque, je pense à vous! Ce petit fleuve,
Pauvre et triste miroir où jadis resplendit
65

L'immense majesté de vos douleurs de veuve,
Ce Simoïs menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit,
A fécondé soudain ma mémoire fertile,
Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel.
Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la forme d'une ville
Change plus vite, hélas! que le cœur d'un mortel);
Je ne vois qu'en esprit tout ce camp de baraques,
Ces tas de chapiteaux ébauchés et de fûts,
Les herbes, les gros blocs verdis par l'eau des flaques,
Et, brillant aux carreaux, le bric-à-brac confus.
Là s'étalait jadis une ménagerie;
Là je vis, un matin, à l'heure où sous les cieux
Froids et clairs le Travail s'éveille, où la voirie
Pousse un sombre ouragan dans l'air silencieux,
Un cygne qui s'était évadé de sa cage,
Et, de ses pieds palmés frottant le pavé sec,
Sur le sol raboteux traînait son blanc plumage.
Près d'un ruisseau sans eau la bête ouvrant le bec
Baignait nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre,
Et disait, le cœur plein de son beau lac natal:
«Eau, quand donc pleuvras-tu? quand tonneras-tu, foudre?»
Je vois ce malheureux, mythe étrange et fatal,
Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l'homme d'Ovide,
Vers le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu,
Sur son cou convulsif tendant sa tête avide
Comme s'il adressait des reproches à Dieu!
II
Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie
N'a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.
Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m'opprime:
Je pense à mon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous,
Comme les exilés, ridicule et sublime
Et rongé d'un désir sans trêve! et puis à vous,
Andromaque, des bras d'un grand époux tombée,
Vil bétail, sous la main du superbe Pyrrhus,
66

Auprès d'un tombeau vide en extase courbée
Veuve d'Hector, hélas! et femme d'Hélénus!
Je pense à la négresse, amaigrie et phtisique
Piétinant dans la boue, et cherchant, l'œil hagard,
Les cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique
Derrière la muraille immense du brouillard;
À quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve
Jamais, jamais! à ceux qui s'abreuvent de pleurs
Et tètent la Douleur comme une bonne louve!
Aux maigres orphelins séchant comme des fleurs!
Ainsi dans la forêt où mon esprit s'exile
Un vieux Souvenir sonne à plein souffle du cor!
Je pense aux matelots oubliés dans une île,
Aux captifs, aux vaincus!... à bien d'autres encor!
(Andromache, I think of you! This little river,
Poor and sad mirror where once
The immense majesty of your widow’s pains shone brightly
This lying Simois that grew with your widow’s tears

Suddenly fructified my fertile memory,
As I traversed the new Carrousel.
Old Paris is no more (the form of a city
Changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal);

I see only in memory the whole encampment of shacks
These unfinished capitals and casks
The weeds, the large blocks greened in puddle water
And, shining in the paving stones, the whole confused bric-à-brac.

There, a whole menagerie once spread;
There, I saw, one morning, at the hour when under skies
Cold and clear Work wakes, when road, railway, and waterways
Push a somber hurricane in the silent air,

A swan who escaped from its cage,
And, his webbed feet rubbing the dry pavement,
Dragging his white plumage on the uneven ground.
Near a stream without water the beast opening its beak

Nervously bathing its wings in the dust,
And saying, its heart full of its beautiful native lake:
“Water, when will you rain, when will you sound, thunder?”
67

I see this unfortunate creature, strange and fatal myth,
Toward the sky sometimes, like the man in Ovid,
Toward the ironic and cruelly blue sky
On his convulsive neck extending his avid head
As if he addressed reproaches to God!

II.

Paris changes! but nothing in my melancholy
Has budged! New palaces, scaffoldings, blocks,
Old neighborhoods, all becomes allegory for me,
And my cherished memories are heavier than rocks.

And before this Louvre an image oppresses me:
I think of my great swan, with his mad gestures,
Like exiles, ridiculous and sublime
And devoured by a desire without relief! And then of you,

Andromache, the arms of a great fallen spouse,
Debased under the hand of proud Pyrrhus,
Near an empty tomb in curved ecstasy
Widow of Hector, alas! and wife of Helenus!

I think of the black woman, wasted and wheezing,
Shuffling in the mud, and seeking, eye haggard,
The absent coconut palms of proud Africa
Behind the great wall of fog.

Of whoever has lost what will never be found
Never, never! Of those who collapse in tears
And suckle Sadness like a good she-wolf!
Of thin orphans drying like flowers!

Thus in the forest where my spirit is exiled
An old Memory sounds at full blast!
I think of sailors forgotten on an island,
Of captives, the vanquished! . . . and of others still!)

The poem, which Baudelaire dedicated to Victor Hugo and included in an 1859 letter to his
fellow poet, records the subjective experience of a physically changing Paris. In a move similar
to that in “A Une Passante,” where the speaker addresses a female character as an emblem to
68

describe his own experience, Andromache in this poem does not attest to her mourning for her
husband or the city of Troy lost in battle. The figure instead evokes the speaker’s own pain at
losing the city of Paris.
60
As he traverses the new Carrousel quarter, the speaker calls to mind the
old Doyenné neighborhood between the Louvre and Tuileries Palace, which was demolished
between 1849 and 1852. “Le vieux Paris n’est plus,” he realizes, adding a parenthetical lament:
“(la forme d’une ville / Change plus vite, hélas ! que le cœur d’un mortel)" (“Old Paris is no
more (the form of a city / Changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal)”). His own
body becomes heavy and solid as everything around him turns to air.
61
Things that were once
material—and Baudelaire lingers over his description of the rough capitals and the shafts of
pillars, “the large blocks greened in puddle water” (“les gros blocs verdis par l’eau des
flaques”)—return as images.
Rather than depicting actual change in the landscape, however, once again the
melancholic relationship to loss is apparent. The speaker of the poem incorporates the material
qualities of the landscape into the center of his own ego. In his early essay, “The Double Aspect
of Symbolism” (1954/56), Paul de Man draws the psychoanalytic reading of narcissism and
incorporation into a theory of the Romantic symbol, which he finds on display in this poem. De
Man contextualizes Baudelaire as a Romantic, primarily driven by a positive, healing search for
unity, which is accomplished through the symbolic power of language.
62
When Baudelaire writes

60
Andromache is the wife of Hector. After the defeat of Troy and her husband’s death, she was placed into
captivity. The Illiad 22, 24 describes her lamentation.
61
The phrase “all that is solid melts into air” with its Shakespearean echo was supplied by Marx’s translator as a
kind of representative statement of the experience of modernity.
62
The essay was not published until 1988, transcribed from notes by Tom Pepper with the help of several other
scholars (see p. 3 n. 1). The editors note this essay was likely written between 1954 and 1956. De Man’s later
Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984) argues against this early position, where he notes that Baudelaire’s sonnet
69

those lines—“mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs”—in “Le Cygne,” for de Man,
what occurs is the conferring “upon a purely mental consciousness, by means of a mere act of
symbolic language, the very quality which one feels to be the essence of matter: weight and
opacity, eternal stability, whatever contrasts most with the fleeting transparency of a subjective
awareness such as ‘memories’” (7). This move allows an “infinite distance” that exists between
mind and nature to be closed, and for “unity [to be] restored in the spiritual and material world”
(Ibid.). De Man takes this language of union, of marriage even, de Man takes directly from the
Romantic tradition, finding this unity to be behind Baudelaire’s “correspondances” in the famous
sonnet by that name, and understands the analogical relationship—one of perfect reciprocity
between mind and nature—as underlying the “European tradition of symbolism” more generally
(74). Wordsworth’s definitional concept, which de Man mentions in the essay, is of a marriage
between a dead, material universe, and the spiritual, emotional content introduced by the poet.
De Man’s discussion of the way that material qualities of the landscape are internalized in
the poetic persona’s spirit bears close relation to Freud’s somewhat aphoristic note, in his essay
on mourning and melancholy, that the shadow of the object falls upon the ego. This debt is
perhaps even clearer in Earl Wasserman’s essay “The English Romantics,” which de Man cites
in order to describe Wordsworth’s Romanticism in terms of incorporation: his poems, the critic
notes, show “delighted responses to the discovery that the external world can move into
consciousness” (23), which presupposes the primacy of the subjective world. For Wordsworth,

“Correspondances” was responsible for Yeats’s development of the emblem in his poetry (see De Man, Rhetoric of
Romanticism, 75).

70

according to Wasserman, the object of romantic or poetic attachment disappears, much as we
saw Baudelaire’s objects and people disappear:
the object is perceived vividly, usually with great specificity. The husk is then dissolved;
and when the phenomenon has at last become ‘spiritualized’ it passes into the core of the
subjective intelligence. Lucy Gray slips away from her defining surroundings, evaporates
into footprints in the snow, which, in turn, vanish at the middle of the bridge between the
phenomenal and spiritual worlds. (25-26)

Wasserman notes that the assimilative foundation of Wordsworth’s psychology and aesthetic
was widely acknowledged by his famous contemporaries, including Coleridge, Keats, Hazlitt, De
Quincey, and Shelley, who “recognized that at the core of his thought and art is the tendency to
assimilate the outer world to the mind, to absorb object into subject” (26-27). The Romantic
project as de Man construes it here shares with the psychoanalytic discussion of melancholy the
interest in incorporation. It also shares in the vision of the process of internalization as curative.
Wasserman’s gloss connects such cure with liberation: “escape from the prison of selfhood
requires a union, through the imagination, with an object” (32).
Rather than deriving any consolation from this union, however, Baudelaire’s speaker, I
would argue, shows once again how images that return from the past become tyrannical, eliciting
desire and thereby ensuring enslavement: “Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m’opprime” (“And
before this Louvre an image oppresses me”) when it returns to his mind’s eye as a “mythe
étrange et fatal” (“strange and fatal myth”). The return of the image triggers a sense of exile in
the speaker as he encounters the past in this inaccessible, intangible form.
63
When in the poem’s
second part the speaker turns to think of others he identifies with as unwilling exiles from their

63
I will discuss below how Benjamin relates Baudelaire’s spleen to his concept of the “aura,” and thus to the process
of technological reproduction. De Man notices a rise to predominance of new figures to describe certain historical
experiences. In “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1971), the critic wonders whether romanticism is a return to
naturalism “after the forced abstraction of the Enlightenment, but a return which our urban and alienated world can
conceive of only as a nostalgic and unreachable past?” (198).
71

homes, he pictures them as also gnawed, left wasted and wheezing by their desire for return.
64

He calls to mind orphans, lost sailors, captives, the vanquished, those who have lost what can
never be found, and he dwells at more length on
la négresse amaigrie et phtisique,
Piétinant dans la boue, et cherchant, l’œil hagard
Les cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique
Derrière la muraille immense du brouillard

The description of the black woman as physically bogged down, “shuffling in the mud,” recalls
the tradition of melancholy in which the ability to move is threatened by the malady: nothing
moves, at least not freely. Baudelaire represents her loss, which is geographical and material, the
loss of spatial contiguity and coconut palms, as the dematerialization of the homeland into
idealized images. The past has been transported to the level of the static and eternal, while the
woman’s resisting body remains.
In his explicit reference to melancholy, Baudelaire creates a striking contrast between the
sense of physical entrapment and the dematerialization of the landscape around him: “Paris
change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie / N’a bougé!” (“Paris changes! but nothing in my
melancholy / has budged!”). In contrast to the human plight, the new (palaces, scaffoldings,
neighborhoods) have the freedom of movement, the possibility of moving in time, while his
“chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs” (“cherished memories are heavier than rocks”).
They weigh him down, leaving him incapable of flight, just like the impressive captive swan that
becomes emblematic of his experience. The swan’s wings trail in the dust; his webbed feet
scratch the dry pavement. While the swan’s heart is full of his “beau lac natal” (“beautiful native

64
See Suzanne Nash’s Home and Its Dislocations in Nineteenth-Century France (1993) for a discussion of themes
of exile in Baudelaire’s poem, and how it calls to mind the “dynamics of mutation, displacement, and spoliation in
early Second Empire Paris” (171). It is worth mentioning that at the time Baudelaire penned the poem, Victor Hugo
was himself living in exile.
72

lake”), he is curiously unable to fly, can do nothing but turn an avid head toward the sky, and
God, with his reproach. Baudelaire describes the power associated with the loss of materiality as
“the new” moves freely in time, while the hyperembodied speaker becomes enslaved to a space
without access to time.
Although this poem draws on the images of entrapment familiar from the Galenic
tradition of melancholy, the speaker calls attention to the way that his exile from “eternity” or
paradise is produced by a compulsively tropological relationship with the exterior world, not by
external restraint. In his poem “L’Ennemi” from “Spleen et Idéal,” an allegory, “Time,” is
responsible for the speaker’s state of oppression, his being smothered and engulfed. While the
way that time carries the speaker to the “automne des idées” (“autumn of ideas”) initially
suggests a passive dwindling away, the poem ends in a sharp cry, suggesting an urgent call for
rescue:
O douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie,
Et l’obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le cœur
Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie

(O pain! o pain! Time eats life
And the obscure Enemy who gnaws our hearts
Grows and fortifies itself on the blood we lose)

Other poems in the collection refer to Time’s abuse, its smothering quality. In “Le Fantôme” the
section entitled “Le Portrait” offers a view of time as “injurieux” (“injurious”). In “Le Goût du
Néant” the speaker complains: “le Temps m’engloutit minute par minute" ("Time engulfs me,
minute by minute"). An earlier draft of this line read “Le Temps descend sur moi minute par
minute” (“Time descends upon me minute by minute”), which again calls to mind the sense of
top-down oppression engendered by what would be called in “Le Voyage” “l’ennemi vigilant et
funeste, / Le Temps!” (“the vigilant and deadly enemy, / Time!”). In naming the allegory “Time”
73

in “Le Voyage” and in “Le Goût du Néant” as the enemy responsible for the passive state in
which he finds himself, Baudelaire’s speaker constructs a symbolic form of power against which
he rebels.
“Le Cygne” calls together bodies that lack access to circulation or freedom of movement.
They are imprisoned, oppressed, crushed, as if by that vice or snake familiar from the longer
tradition of melancholy. While in the Galenic tradition, this situation of oppression can only be
relieved by the intervention of divine grace, in the Ficinian tradition, oppression can be
countered through transcending the suffering body through an appeal to reason. Baudelaire, in
emphasizing the capacity of the city to change as against the heavy weight of sorrow and lament
assigned to the mortals left behind, depicts power as the capacity to change from material to
spirit. His understanding of power relates to the capacity to pass into abstraction.
65
In “Le
Cygne” the speaker’s memory or spirit acquires the physical properties of the landscape, thereby
becoming trapped in space, while “the new” leaves these properties behind, and is released into
time. In an important sense, Baudelaire creates his allegory for the experience of modernity
through the depiction of immobilizing concretization on the one hand, and the freeing abstraction
of the new on the other.
Baudelaire’s poetry creates the conditions in which a violent turn against embodiment is
called for. As in Baudelaire’s violent poetic obliteration of the feminine other in his attempt to
recuperate the loss of his own idealized self, melancholy leads to violence against nature in the
attempt to recuperate lost time, or eternity. “Élévation,” also from the “Spleen et Idéal” section
of Les Fleurs du Mal, demonstrates just this violence. It might appear counterintuitive to use a

65
See Conclusion, below, for Michael Warner’s claim that the capacity for personal self-abstraction has always
defined the condition of entrance into the public realm.
74

romantic sonnet to make an argument about violence in a poem ostensibly about communing
with nature in the language of flowers. But the poem is not so innocent. In “Élévation,” the
human-nature relation is forged through the intellectual or spiritual content supplied by the
human observer and the sensuous matter supplied by nature. This can be seen as, in the opening
move of the poem, the two are sundered:
Au-dessus des étangs, au-dessus des vallées,
Des montagnes, des bois, des nuages, des mers,
Par-delà le soleil, par-delà les éthers,
Par-delà les confins des sphères étoilées,

Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité,

(Above swamps, above valleys,
Mountains, woods, clouds, seas,
On the other side of the sun, the heavens,
On the other side of the borders of starry spheres,

My spirit, you move with agility,)

The ability to abstract the spiritual or intellectual aspect of being from the sensuous reveals
Baudelaire’s idealism, which Paul de Man describes as the “positing of a pure intellect . . .
entirely separated from the material world, from sensory experience” (“Kant and Schiller”
146).
66
The movement by the spirit out of nature is vertical, and is characterized as positive,
virile, even masculine. In his reading of the poem, Mario Richter notes the spirit is not “l’âme”
(the “soul”), a word Baudelaire doesn’t use very often, but rather “la faculté essentiellement
intellective, mentale” (“the essentially intellective, mental faculty” 69). Nonetheless, the
movement out of nature connects the spirit with the divine:

66
This formulation is helpful in clarifying what is generally a nebulous discussion of a departure from the real
world so common to criticism of Symbolist literature, and often described in terms of idealism. As Arthur Symons,
for example, in his classic The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) writes: “the visible world is no longer a
reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream” (4).

75

[. . . ]
Avec une indicible et mâle volupté.

Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes morbides ;
Va te purifier dans l’air supérieur,
Et bois, comme une pure et divine liqueur,
Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces limpides.

(With an indicible and virile voluptuousness.

Take yourself far away from these morbid vapors;
Go purify yourself in superior air
And drink, like a pure and divine liquor,
The bright flame that fills limpid spaces.)

While the poem begins in the separation of the spiritual and the sensual, to read this in the de
Manian and psychoanalytic vein, the distance is closed almost immediately as the narrator’s
spirit assumes the material properties that would usually be associated with the natural world and
the body he has left behind. The narrator’s spirit becomes like a swimmer who swoons in the
waves: “Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité, / Et comme un bon nageur qui se pâme dans l’onde/
Tu sillones gaiement l’immensité profonde” (“My spirit, you move with agility / And like a good
swimmer who swoons in the wave / You range exultant in profound space”). And it is as the
narrator’s spirit assumes materiality that the elements of the external landscape are rendered
insubstantial, nothing more than noxious fumes: “Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes
morbides.” It is the completion of this reversal that concludes the poem and the melancholic’s
response to loss:
Heureux celui qui peut d’une aile vigoureuse
S’élancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins ;

Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes,
Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor,
--Qui plane sur la vie, et comprend sans effort
Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes !
76

(. . . Happy are those who can with vigorous wing
Rush toward the luminous and serene fields;

Those whose thoughts, like larks,
Take free flight toward the skies,
--Who glides over life, and understands without effort
The language of flowers and mute things!)

It is through alienation from the natural world, from its “système symbolique” (Richter 71), and
a subsequent assimilation of its qualities as its own that the spirit of the narrator gains access to a
new language. The condition of understanding—of readability— depends, however, on the
ability to detach the flowers from their unity in a natural landscape and to instead assimilate them
into the poet’s expanded consciousness, which forms a new topography (“les champs
lumineux”). It is in this movement that flowers come to speak. Any preexisting “native
language” of flowers is overtaken by human language. I follow Richter in seeing this reversal as
key to Baudelaire’s understanding in Le Salon de 1846 that “La nature n’est qu’un
dictionnaire.”
67
In Baudelaire’s attempt to overcome the loss of nature by incorporating it into
his consciousness, nature becomes, effectively, lost again in human language. The idea that an
original loss is recuperated in language is in line with Julia Kristeva’s discussion in her Soleil
noir.
68
For Kristeva, all language is produced through the negation of original loss; it is a loss
that is recuperated in language and symbols. This is one of the places Baudelaire’s pathological
response to loss could be read as normative, a condition of language.

67
See Richter, p. 17.
68
See, for example, p. 48. For Kristeva, the original loss is that of the mother. Melancholy in Kristeva’s account
comes about when the original loss is avowed, but a nostalgic attachment remains to the original object. This
critique of symbol and allegory is not meant to disallow all forms of symbolization. In the next two chapters I
discuss how Yeats and Dickinson turn away from the binary of these choices, as they turn away from the binary of
the Ficinian tradition more generally.
77

But in Baudelaire’s poetry, nature’s loss is the poetic persona’s gain. Even as
Baudelaire’s speakers demonstrate the hollowing out, the tomblike or crypt-like existence
erected to preserve lost objects in fantasy, there is at the same time a quality of joy and
transcendence accompanying release in poetic production. In place of mourning for others in
Baudelaire’s correspondence and poetry is a note of personal triumph over death, the surprising
sense of survival, which Peggy Kamuf in another context has referred to as the pleasure of
discovering “I’m not the one who died.”
69
In her “Maladie du deuil” Maria Torok recalls Karl
Abraham’s indication that just as melancholy ends in a great discharge of energy, or mania,
mourning is often accompanied by a heightening of the libido (715).
70

The poet becomes, as in the Ficinian tradition, the “happiest of men” (Babb 63) in rising
above the ills of his generation to become a kind of representative figure. For both critics and his
contemporaries, the sadness that makes Charles Baudelaire the suffering offspring of a sick
generation is an indication of the poet’s achievement, and of the future admiration he will receive
for his work. As Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve writes to Baudelaire on the publication of Les
Fleurs du Mal: “vous avez dû beaucoup souffrir, mon cher enfant. Cette tristesse particulière qui
ressort de vos pages et où je reconnais le dernier symptôme d’une génération malade . . . est
aussi ce qui vous sera compté" (“you must have suffered greatly, my dear child. This particular
sadness that rises from your pages, this sadness in which I recognize the final symptom of a sick
generation . . . is also what will be esteemed in you,” 423). In his own review, Algernon Charles
Swinburne similarly praises the romantic melancholy infusing the book, capturing Baudelaire’s

69
The remark was made in a conference on Cathy Caruth’s work. Maria Torok similarly notes a positive outflow of
energy during mourning.
70
Freud quite pointedly ignored Abraham’s remarks.
78

development of the theme of the pleasure of woe through his portrayals of: “sad and strange
things—the weariness of pain and the bitterness of pleasure—the perverse happiness and
wayward sorrows of exceptional people” (419). Swinburne’s comment demonstrates
Baudelaire’s conscious development of Milton’s poetic melancholy, what his successors would
call the “‘the joy in grief,’ ‘the mournful joy,’ or ‘the sad luxury of woe’” (see Klibansky et al.,
p. 231) into an active, even a “perverse” pleasure.
In their assessments of Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve and Swinburne were—whether
intentionally or not—echoing the poet’s own understanding of the distinction conferred by
melancholy. Eugène Delacroix is, for Baudelaire in his Salon de 1846, the representative artist of
the nineteenth century because of the melancholy of his paintings. This is, according to
Baudelaire, the painter’s most remarkable contribution, "la plus remarquable [qualité] de toutes,
et qui fait de lui le vrai peintre du XIXe siècle : c’est cette mélancolie singulière et opiniâtre qui
s’exhale de toutes ses œuvres" (“the most remarkable [quality] of all, the one that makes him the
true painter of the nineteenth century: this singular and stubborn melancholy that exhales from
all of his works,” Œuvres complètes, ii, 84). In the same essay, Baudelaire sets the precedent for
referring to his generation as steeped in mourning: “notre époque, souffrante et portant jusque
sur ses épaules noires et maigres le symbole d’un deuil perpétuel. Nous célébrons tous quelque
enterrement” (“our era, suffering and carrying up around its thin and black shoulders the symbol
of perpetual mourning. We are all celebrating some burial” p. 134). Despite his reference to
“mourning,” Baudelaire’s deflating use of “quelque” (“some”) to modify “burial” indicates a
lack of clear referent for what has been lost. Baudelaire consciously cultivated the style of
mourning in his own dress, choosing to always wear black as the consummate style for his age,
even as the style of the dandy he is so often identified with called for a much more varied
79

palate—from black to “blue, court green and dragon green . . . riding or morning suits are in a
very bright green color” (Steele 83). The studied pretension of fashion was a tangible sign of
distinction, marking both heroism and leisure, but also marking a foray into modernity itself, as
the artist attempted to represent the “agitation and melancholy” plaguing contemporary youth
(OC I, p. 792).
In an age of suffering and grief the melancholic artist enjoys a privileged position from
which to accurately describe its pangs, a position that echoes the Ficinian tradition of melancholy
with its emphasis on melancholy as a sign of genius. In the concluding stanza to “Les Phares”
(“The Beacons”) the sob itself is testimony to dignity:
Car c’est vraiment, Seigneur, le meilleur témoignage
Que nous puissions donner de notre dignité
Que cet ardent sanglot qui roule d’âge en âge
Et vient mourir au bord de votre éternité !

(It’s really, Lord, the best testimony
that we could give of our dignity
This ardent sob that rolls from age to age
And comes to die on the edge of your eternity!)

For Baudelaire, following the Ficinian tradition of melancholy particularly as interpreted by the
Romantics, the genius rises above precisely through his capacity to suffer. The theme presents
itself in his poems as much as in his autobiographical writings. In the poem “Bénédiction,” for
example, it is pain and suffering that confer divinity and nobility: “Soyez béni, mon Dieu, qui
donnez la souffrance / comme un divin remède à nos impuretés” (“Be blessed, my Lord, who
offers suffering/ as a divine remedy for our impurities”), and in the next stanza: “Je sais que la
douleur est la noblesse unique” ("I know that pain is the only nobility”). The gift of suffering
carves out a special place in paradise for the poet:
Je sais que vous gardez une place au Poète
80

Dans les rangs bienheureux des saintes Légions,
Et que vous l’invitez à l’éternelle fête
Des Trônes, des Vertus, des Dominations

(I know that you keep a place for the Poet
In the happy ranks of the holy Legions
and that you invite him to the eternal feast
of Thrones, Virtues, Dominations)

What the speaker seeks is recognition of nobility in suffering so as to accede to a preferred place.
A significant issue with the melancholic’s conscious cultivation of his superiority as an
expression of the desire to break through enslavement to freedom, as Kant had it, is what Wolf
Lepenies has described as “the paradigm according to which the ruler is the prototype of the
melancholic” (31). This paradigm was of course already present in the Aristotelian question that
pondered why it is that all men who have risen to greatness are melancholics, and was given
further development in André du Laurens’s Renaissance treatise Discours de la conservation de
la vue (1599). Du Laurens writes: “‘If an ambitious man become melancholike, he straightaway
dreameth that he is a King, an Emperor, a Monarke’” (p. 98, quoted in Lepenies, p. 32). Both
Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno refer to this paradigm. Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1979),
for example, refers to how the “dignity” of boredom belongs to the classes removed from the
sphere of production. Lepenies also notes that Kierkegaard, who followed in the view of acedia
as sin, found a tyrant, Nero, to be the representative melancholic (32). Both the hero and the
tyrant are produced through suffering in this tradition, leaving somewhat ambiguous the
distinction between the two positions.
Baudelaire’s poetic recording of an experience that is structured by melancholy is
problematic insofar as it provides a path to connect what Freud finds to be a pathological
response to otherness with politics. His poetry, as in the Romantic mode, testifies to a collapse of
81

distance between inside and outside, self and other, which for Benjamin is associated with
tyranny.
71
“Au Lecteur,” the prefatory poem to Les Fleurs du Mal, opens the collection with just
this sense of collapse. The bodies of the narrator and his compatriots are worked on by “la
sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine” (“foolishness, error, sin, and avarice”). These tormenting
vices are depicted as vermin that eat away at the flesh, gaining nourishment from it at the same
time. Vice has become so deeply infested in the body that there is no recourse or escape, even in
evil acts; the will is simply too far gone. In Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” (GS1, “On Some
Motifs in Baudelaire,” 1939), Walter Benjamin cites “Au Lecteur” as an example of Baudelaire’s
far-sightedness in envisioning his audience, one that has little willpower, and no capacity for
sustained attention. It is an audience Baudelaire finally depicts as in thrall to Ennui. Ennui, who
dreams of the scaffold while smoking his hookah, swallows the world in a yawn, his eye charged
with one involuntary tear. The devil holds the strings that direct this collective, unprotesting
body, slowly, day by day, closer to hell: “et le riche métal de notre volonté / Est tout vaporisé par
ce savant chimiste” (“And the rich metal of our will / is utterly vaporized by this knowing
alchemist”). This vaporization, Chambers notes, directly refers to the tradition of melancholia
and the vapors that rise from the black bile to cloud the intellect (108). It is an intimate
recognition, or identification, that leads to collapse; by the end of the poem not only the will but
also individuality and distance have dissolved. The reader collapses into the author, host into
parasite, and the temporal extension of the process of reading the poem collapses into the at once
static and abyssal symbol, Ennui.

71
Similarly to Benjamin, Hannah Arendt finds that the space between people is a necessary precondition for politics
See On Revolution (1963), p. 76.
82

In looking specifically to Baudelaire for his theorization of the evils of modernity, and for
his route out of it, Benjamin finds the origin of servitude in such collapse, picking up on the way
that the realities of the present are turned to mystification through the symbolizing impulse.
Benjamin’s “controlling anxiety” in Hansen’s evocative description is “the nightmare vision of a
society of such thorough-going false consciousness that the representative, the mythic, the
iconic, or the fetishistic has come to reign over the actual” (677).
72
Benjamin takes Baudelaire’s
notion of spleen, enslavement, being smothered, or swallowed, and summarizes it in the idea of
collapse. For the critic, spleen entails the collapse of disparate fragments into a monad. Spleen,
for Benjamin, goes beyond Trübsinn (usually translated as “melancholy”). It is above all “that
fatally floundering, doomed flight toward the ideal, which ultimately—with the despairing cry of
Icarus—comes crashing down into the ocean of its own melancholy” (posthumously published
fragment, Writer of Modern Life, 29). For Benjamin, then, spleen describes the movement from
the flight toward the ideal into the stagnation of melancholy. What “spleen” refers to is the
collapse of the two states into each other, which he understands as coming about because of a
decline in aura. As he writes in convolute J of Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project, begun
1927, publ. 1982): “Baudelaires spleen ist das Leiden am Verfall der Aura” (“Baudelaire’s
spleen is the suffering entailed by the decline [or decay] of aura,” Eiland 343). “Aura” is also, in
“Zentralpark,” connected with an end to separation, the “renunciation of the magic of distance”
147). He represents both spleen and aura with the trope of natural decay; the change of spring
into autumn, the loss of an alluring scent. Benjamin sums up Baudelaire’s spleen by quoting

72
Compare to de Man’s “Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a
future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic” (“Rhetoric of Temporality,” 222).
83

from the poem “Le Goût du Néant” (“Taste of Nothingness”): “Le Printemps adorable a perdu
son odeur!” (“Adorable spring has lost its perfume!” J64, 5).
There is, however, an intimate connection between the way the melancholic fights
melancholy and the way that the aura was originally lost. In Das Passagen-Werk, Benjamin
employs natural metaphors, repeating the idea of “verkümmert” (“withering,” 141) he used to
describe the loss of aura in his definitional “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit” (“The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” GS7,
1935). In the earlier essay, Benjamin states that no natural object can undergo this change.
However, his description of the process by which “ein empfindlichsten Kern” (“a most sensitive
nucleus”) is deprived of its “materiellen Dauer” (“substantive duration”), readily evokes
comparison to natural and human experience because of its association with the way that
testimony along with the “geschichtlichen Zeugenschaft” (“history it has experienced”) are lost.
For Benjamin technological reproducibility entails a deprivation of voice, a jeopardizing of
authority, a loss of authenticity, and a dislocation from tradition. The connection to other areas of
oppression was clear from Baudelaire’s evocation of slaves, exiles in his poem “Le Cygne,” but
Benjamin similarly evokes that sense here.
Just as Baudelaire’s narcissistic gaze emptied the landscape of external meaning,
melancholy as Benjamin describes it in Die Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of
German Tragic Drama) causes life to “flow out of” the object. The object remains behind dead,
but in a formulation that echoes the psychoanalytic emphasis on how the melancholic
internalizes the object so as to refuse to give it up, the object thus remains “eternally secure.” In
Benjamin’s words:
84

Wird der Gegenstand unterm Blick der Melancholie allegorisch, läßt sie das Leben von
ihm abfließen, bleibt er als toter, doch in Ewigkeit gesicherter zurück, so liegt er vor dem
Allegoriker, auf Gnade und Ungnade ihm überliefert. Das heißt: eine Bedeutung, einen
Sinn auszustrahlen, ist er von nun an ganz unfähig; an Bedeutung kommt ihm das zu, was
der Allegoriker ihm verleiht. Er legt's in ihn hinein und langt hinunter: das ist nicht
psychologisch sondern ontologisch hier der Sachverhalt. In seiner Hand wird das Ding zu
etwas anderem, er redet dadurch von etwas anderem und es wird ihm ein Schlüssel zum
Bereiche verborgenen Wissens, als dessen Emblem er es verehrt. Das macht den
Schriftcharakter der Allegorie.
If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life
to flow out of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the
allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power. That is to say it is now quite unable to
emanate meaning or significance on its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from
the allegorist. He places it within it, and stands behind it, not in a psychological but in an
ontological sense. In his hands it (das Ding) becomes something different and for him it
becomes a key to the realm of hidden knowledge; and he reveres it as an emblem of this.
This is what determines the written character of allegory.
(Osborne 184-85)

And, like Freud, Benjamin relates the draining of significance and loss of ontological priority to
the operation of sadism upon the internalized, encrypted object:
Es ist ja dem Sadisten eigentümlich, seinen Gegenstand zu entwürdigen und darauf –
oder dadurch – zu befriedigen. So tut denn auch der Allegoriker in dieser von erdichteten
wie von erfahrenen Grausamkeiten trunkenen Zeit.
The sadist humiliates his object, and then—or thereby—satisfies it. And that is what the
allegorist does in this age drunk with acts of cruelty both lived and imagined. (Osborne,
184-86)

Allegory, for Benjamin, is the only pleasure the melancholic allows himself. As he wrote in
“Central Park,” “Majestät der allegorischen Intention: Zerstörung des Organischen und
Lebendigen—Auslöschung des Scheins” (“Majesty of the allegorical intention: to destroy the
organic and the living—to eradicate semblance (Scheins), Eiland, p. 147).
The melancholic emptying of material duration and historicity of the sign accounts for
the elegiac nature of language for Terry Eagleton, reading Benjamin:
For the allegorical object has undergone a kind of hemorrhage of spirit: drained of all
immanent meaning, it lies as a pure facticity under the manipulative hand of the
85

allegorist, awaiting such meaning as he or she may imbue it with. Nothing could more
aptly exemplify such a condition than the practice of writing itself, which draws its
atomized material fragments into endless, unmotivated constellations of meaning.
(quoted in Santner, 165-66n23)

For Santner, this might account for postmodern writing more generally being conceived in terms
of melancholy, or what he terms a “rhetoric of bereavement” (Ibid.). The psychological move
that becomes the basis for the way that language works also comes to describe a generic shift
from Romanticism to Symbolism. William Franke, in “The Linguistic Turning of the Symbol:
Baudelaire and his French Symbolist Heirs” (2001), has, for example, described Baudelaire’s
legacy to Symbolism in terms of how nature is lost through the denaturalization of the romantic
symbol. He writes: “Reality puts up no more resistance; it is fused into unity in an exquisite and
unrestricted universal harmony forged in and by language” (21).
Rather than look to a non-pathological response to otherness, or route away from
narcissism, Benjamin effectively aligns one version of melancholy against the other. The call to
action, the strike or the “coup” Benjamin makes, following Baudelaire, is essentially melancholic
in the Ficinian sense. What Benjamin recuperates from the melancholic is what Max Pensky has
called a “propensity toward fragmentation” (104). For Benjamin, revolutionary chance comes
about through violence, through instituting a state of emergency, blasting open configurations
“pregnant with tensions,” and through delivering “shock.” Shock and the parrying of blows, the
“fantasque escrime” or “curious fencing,” are at the very center of Baudelaire’s poetics.
73
In his
writings on Baudelaire, Benjamin develops the image of a duel, which in the poetry often has the
structure of reflexive self-torment, into a triumphal stab.

73
See “Motifs,” p. 163.
86

Because his meditations on modernity center on Baudelaire, Benjamin describes the
period as a pathological time in which the representative, mythic, and iconic come to reign over
the actual in a society of thorough-going false consciousness. This state can only be disrupted,
upended by the distance and fragmentation associated with allegory, and ultimately with
freedom. Benjamin places the symbolic and allegoric modes in opposition to one another, just as
in the Ficinian tradition of melancholy the state of suffering and release are dialectically related.
For critics following Benjamin, such as Debarati Sanyal, then, the “affective registers of trauma,
melancholy, and mourning” become opposed to “more active engagements with history”
(quoting Debarati Sanyal, p. 1). Sanyal has described contemporary criticism as hampered by a
“turn to . . . mourning and melancholy” (205n1), which she describes in terms of victimization
and abdication, which reinforces a status of passive, affective victimhood rather than heroic and
engaged reading and resistance.
Dolf Oehler and Ross Chambers, two critics who confronted these same issues in
Baudelaire, have understood his melancholy as precisely putting pressure on the violence of
modernity. For Oehler in “Baudelaire’s Politics” (2005), Baudelaire’s melancholy is always
“political and social” (24), and is mustered as a defense against a present that is understood to be
unbearable. The dissatisfaction registered in the poet’s spleen is neither ignored nor simply
indulged in, but is “grasped critically” (19). For Ross Chambers in The Writing of Melancholy
(1993), melancholy opposes “official values of order and conformism” (24). But, as I have
argued in making the connection between the melancholy of dominant culture and the
fragmentation and humiliation of the object, fighting melancholy with melancholy merely
replicates the circular system that Baudelaire’s poetry so pressingly creates. And with that
replication comes the attendant problems, namely the misogyny of Baudelaire’s poetry, which in
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Benjamin threatens to become a similar form of violence as he writes in the “Theses on the
Philosophy of History” that the historical materialist will leave others “bei der Hure ‘Es war
einmal’ im Bordell des Historismus sich auszugeben” (“to be drained by a whore called ‘Once
upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello”). It is hard to ignore the gendered terms of the comment
that the historical materialist “bleibt seiner Kräfte Herr: Manns genug, das Kontinuum der
Geschichte aufzusprengen” (“remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the
continuity of history,” p. 16). It is hard not to hear in Benjamin’s words a reproach against the
“débauché pauvre” (“the poor debauchee”) of Baudelaire’s prefatory poem “qui baise et mange /
Le sein martyrisé d’une antique catin” (“who kisses and eats / the martyred breast of an old
prostitute”), or grasping and fixing however briefly “a plaisir clandestine / Que nous pressons
bien fort comme une vieille orange” (“a clandestine pleasure / That we squeeze hard like an old
orange”).
Even as Benjamin brilliantly captures the sense of tyranny in the collapse Baudelaire
gave poetic expression to, I believe it is basically an inability to escape the Ficinian theory of
melancholy by using its own methods that leads to unpleasant social and moral consequences
being retained within the radical political praxis he develops. The other side of the development
of the allegorical viewpoint, with its emphasis on temporal distance rather than the coincidence,
simultaneity, or the spousal language proposed by romantic language, is the cultivation of a new
form of oppression: encoded within the symbolic was the smothered voice and experience of the
other, which is now turned against once again through a secondary negation. We could say that
Benjamin’s allegory, or the Ficinian melancholic’s violence, is just the negation of the negation
that occurred in the original act of symbolization. I argue that seeing outside this system, whose
88

values permeate canonical modernism, necessitates reexamining premodern understandings of
melancholy and how these are operative in poetry. I turn to this task in the next two chapters.
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Chapter Three
Yeats’s Lonely Tower: Premodern Melancholy and
Irish Identity after Romanticism

Unlike the Ficinian tradition of melancholy, whose positive associations have been
developed into a politics of liberation, the tradition of melancholy as derived from Galen has not
enjoyed the same popularity and theoretical development.
74
This is perhaps not surprising, as the
poetic developments of Galenic thought on melancholy, as I outlined in the first chapter, have
chiefly involved describing the wracking physical torments of the disease and deploring its
inexorable nature. Humoral medicine’s emphasis on materially-based cures, such as awaiting a
change in season, seeking physical exertion, and above all avoiding intellectual toil, also do not
lend themselves to political or philosophical elaboration in any straightforward way. But in this
chapter I show how William Butler Yeats constantly invokes the Galenic tradition in his poetry
and prose, fully acknowledging its anti-intellectualism and despair, and yet still enlarging it as a
political stance.
This chapter argues that Yeats employs Galenic melancholy in developing his “Irish
idealism” as a counterpoint to what he refers to as “English materialism.” This terminology is
rather confusing, as humoral medicine and its Galenic developments can be described as
“materialist” insofar as they rely upon discussions of the physically-based nature of melancholy.
But in developing his version of idealism, Yeats highlights the shift from premodernity to
seventeenth-century materialism. The seventeenth century developed a view of nature as inert
matter to pave the way for its conquest in the service of the spiritual and intellectual demands of

74
The politics of liberation derived from melancholy has most explicitly been developed in Walter Benjamin’s
writings, as I described in the previous chapter.
90

human progress. Adopting this view required a purging of a sentimental attitude toward nature.
75

The accompanying tropological shift in discussions of nature, from mother to eroticized female
other, is developed in the poetic tradition, from Milton to the Romantics and into Modernism.
76

In the previous chapter, I described how the exaggerated, threatening image of the female other
is created in Baudelaire in response to his own sense of being hollowed out, weakened through
his melancholic interactions with others, which are characterized by narcissistic identification
and incorporation. The personal and narcissistic basis of the resultant emblems in his poetry,
along with the relentless circularity of his system, has nothing to do with Yeats’s symbolism.
Again confusingly named, Yeats’s symbolism insists on the unrelentingly external and thus
elusive nature of symbolic meaning, which in part leads to the sense of an “unslaked” thirst the
poet describes as behind Celtic melancholy. But it is also behind the more robust form of
subjectivity Yeats creates in distinction to the Romantic/Baudelairean model I discussed. Yeats, I
argue, returned to premodern definitions of melancholy in order to recover a form of subjectivity
that is not changed, “changed utterly” in response to changing times, or to the melancholy gaze
of another.
Reading Yeats against a persuasive and pervasive critical grain that has contextualized
the poet within canonical Romanticism and Modernism reveals that without narcissistic
identification and incorporation in the relationship with others and objects, a more ethical form

75
Francis Bacon quotes the Bible as justification for aggressively seeking the secrets of nature: “‘The spirit of man
is as the lamp of God, wherewith he searcheth the inwardness of all secrets’” (124). And he notes the disruptive
effect of steeping the “Lumen siccum” (“dry light”) of knowledge in the humors or the affections, which produces
“Lumen madidum or maceratum” (blurred light, damaged from being steeped in liquid, p. 125).

76
In Anthony Funari’s revealing summary of Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980), it was a
“tropological shift,” from “Mother Earth to sexualized female other” that allowed an aggressive turn against the
natural world, and played a role in allowing Sir Francis Bacon’s new materialist science to achieve sovereignty over
the natural world (62). The tropology of male sexual maturation is somehow recuperative for Bacon, as the
confrontation with nature as sexualized restores “humanity’s prelapsarian dominance over the natural world” (14).
91

of interaction with alterity results, as does a more resilient form of national identity. In the
Ficinian tradition Baudelaire represented, the loss of one’s own ideal self, or of one’s will and
agency can be recuperated through identification with and incorporation of another. But in
Yeats’s poetry, other people, natural objects, and symbols all fail as substitutes. Rather than
finding Yeats as condemned to the narrative of despair and desolation he draws from the Galenic
tradition, I find his tragic struggle proposes a viable alternative to the logic of consumption and
cannibalism that has otherwise occupied Modernism, even as, as I will examine, Yeats himself
turns away from this promise in his late prose work On the Boiler (1937), and in New Poems (VP
1938).
Rather than being a reaction to loss, as came to define modern accounts of melancholy,
Galenic melancholy was thought to be the result of an astral condition, or being born under the
sign of Saturn.
77
Yeats explicitly refers to this tradition of thinking about the malady in his poem
“Under Saturn” (writ. 1919, publ. 1920). The speaker of the poem claims that his melancholic
suffering is not the result of losing a romantic attachment. Instead, the speaker evokes the fixity
of the stars and of his own temperament, and the sadness that has resulted from his movement
away from home:
Do not because this day I have grown saturnine
Imagine that lost love, inseparable from my thought
Because I have no other youth, can make me pine
For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought,
The comfort that you made? Although my wits have gone
On a fantastic ride, my horse’s flanks are spurred
By childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen,
And of a Middleton, whose name you never heard,
And of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he
died
Before my time, seem like a vivid memory.

77
See Klibansky 127, 191.
92

You heard that laboring man who had served my people.
He said
Upon the open road, near to the Sligo quay—
No, no, not said, but cried it out—‘You have come
again,
And surely after twenty years it was time to come.’
I am thinking of a child’s vow sworn in vain
Never to leave that valley his fathers called their home.

In a poem with many obviously autobiographical references, it is possible to determine that
Yeats’s poetic persona is trying to soothe his new wife George (Georgie Hyde-Lees), who was
well aware of his unfulfilled longing for the fiery actress Maud Gonne, to whom he had proposed
on three separate occasions. Yeats offers the argument that it is not the loss of a romantic partner
that defines the Romantic development of the Ficinian tradition of melancholy, but rather a
separation from his native land, that instigates his suffering.
78

In another of the autobiographical references of the poem, Yeats invokes his departure
from his small, native town of Sligo to reside in Dublin, Galway, Oxford, and London. The poet
had also by this time traveled to Paris, where he had met Verlaine, and taken a four-month tour
of America.
79
The poem laments losing ties to his native soil through such travels. In Freud’s
account of melancholic mourning, the loss of “Vaterland” or “homeland” is an abstract loss that
takes the place of a beloved person. This loss is resolved through internalization, as the qualities
belonging to the lost person or thing are figuratively assimilated. Yeats’s speaker makes the
identification between his beloved Maud Gonne and his youth and the “fatherland,” but presents
this as something that has been lost and cannot be regained. In keeping with the nostalgia and

78
See Ross for a fuller description of the autobiographical references, which are to his maternal grandfather,
William Pollexfen; to a Middleton, probably the brother and business partner of William; and to his paternal
grandfather (270).
79
Ross notes he earned $3,230.40, a “staggering” sum for the time, from his sixty-four lectures (14). Verlaine’s
“Poèmes saturniens” could be alluded to in the title of his poem.
93

lament of the pastoral tradition, in which youth or the pre-sexual stage is irretrievably lost, Yeats
doesn’t in this poem propose that his new wife George is a substitute through which he can
regain the splendors of that youth. He also doesn’t propose George help him to forget his youth,
by, as in Baudelaire, drinking from her eyes as a kind of nepenthe. Rather, his sadness looms for
the impossibility of restoring that time. He cannot return to make the choice “Never to leave.”
This state of unredeemable exile was a marked feature of the Galenic tradition of melancholy
where it entered religious melancholy and acedia.
The Ficinian tradition, along with certain variants of seventeenth-century materialism,
figured its idea of progress in diametrically opposed terms: a successful return to a prelapsarian
condition and an end to exile.
80
Milton’s “Il Penseroso” is a representative text of this
development. Instead of presenting melancholy as a negative condition, the poem interprets the
malady positively, contrasting its superiority to the “jovial enjoyment of life” that is described in
the companion piece “L’Allegro.” Milton’s speaker longs to be drawn away, down “archèd
walks of twilight groves” where music might “Dissolve me into ecstasies / And bring all heaven
before mine eyes.” He expects in old age to reach “prophetic strain,” unlimited prophetic
knowledge being one of melancholy’s chief pleasures. Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), is
one of the most often-cited poems of such melancholy, where the poet longs to forget:
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,

80
See Funari, who develops this argument in regards to Bacon in particular, whose writings are filled with
references to how progress in science will lead to a restoration of dominion over nature as enjoyed before the fall (6-
7).
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Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

The speaker longs to flee his painful condition, the specificity of his position “here,” in a world
where Beauty’s eyes must fade, and the lover cannot pine for them indefinitely. Death wastes
and brings melancholy, the leaden-eyed despairs. The poetic response is flight “Away! Away!”
with the “immortal Bird,” who has not been “tread . . . down” by the passing of generations, and
whose song has remained unchanged since ancient times. There is transcendence in ecstatic
union as the bird sings and the poet achieves his blissful return.
The passage into the state of Edenic transcendence and wisdom involves a shift in the
tropes used to describe both nature and women; these become eroticized, and there is a curious
emphasis on cannibalistic metaphors. As Peter Sacks writes in his classic study of elegy, the
mourner is “beset by surviving and yet painfully altered sexuality,” and there is “a need to
deflect desire by creating a trope for the lost object, and for the original desire itself” (7). Keats
famously develops the pleasures of melancholy in this fashion in his “Ode on Melancholy” (c.
1819). The speaker urges the melancholic to
. . . glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globèd peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

Such feeding is the means of entry into the shrine of Melancholy, which appears here as a
luxurious, powerful, and young woman. Rather than “drown the wakeful anguish of the soul” in
forgetfulness or death through eating poisonous wine or berries, the melancholic consumes the
joyful, the living in order to return. With “strenuous tongue” he
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
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His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Milton’s Paradise Lost had earlier picked up on this imagery of dissolving, of passing into
another world, after Adam tastes the fruit:
As with new wine intoxicated both
They swim in mirth, and fancy that they feel
Divinity within them breeding wings
Wherewith to scorn the earth: but that false fruit
Far other operation first displayed,
Carnal desire inflaming.
(Book ix, ll. 1008-13)

Milton’s poem picks up on the connection between wine, desire, and divine thought as it was
developed by Aristotle, where eroticism and divinity blend confusedly. In Milton’s poem, of
course, the revolt against God does not go unpunished; the sentence is quickly applied and the
pair pays the price for eating the apple. While previously animals “about them frisking played,”
vines and fruit-laden boughs shaded Adam and Eve, and they were fully entwined with nature,
the pair has emerged here, clipped from the background. Through the eating of the fruit they
move from being simply joyous scenery to conscious protagonists:
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
(Book xii, lines 646-49)

Milton’s protagonists undergo a shift in consciousness, or what Klibansky et al. refer to as
“heightened self-awareness” (232), rather than a change in blood, which was how the Middle
96

Ages tended to see Adam’s sin.
81
Klibansky et al. thus suggest that the melancholic gives
“positive value” to his sorrow, knowing that he achieves a “share in eternity through it” (235).
In the poetry of Milton and Keats, there is a pendulum shift between two states: oppression on
the one hand and liberation on the other. Consumption allows a release from pain and into
pleasure and divinity.
While Eavan Boland has taken Yeats to task for following the Romantic path in
eroticizing the landscape, posing the question “What if we put women in a sensuous, rather than
erotic landscape?” (217), I will contend that his poetry rather avoids this tropological shift,
which, as Sacks points out, involves the occlusion of the mother and her replacement with a
substitute (319).
82
I will first demonstrate that the poet’s conception of time does not allow for
transcendence, and thus separation followed by return. I will then turn to examine relationships
with objects in his text, in which the attempt to project one’s own qualities onto nature fails,
whether through anthropomorphism or metaphor. All of this evinces his belief in a premodern
version of nature, in which mind and body are not and cannot be separated, and thus the body, or
nature, or pain cannot be overcome in their interaction.
Yeats’s speakers, unlike his Romantic forebears, remain fettered to planetary time, and to
pain. The relationship to time as not including a moment of redemption is on display in Yeats’s
poem “The Phases of the Moon” (1919), which explicitly cites some of the major poems of
romantic melancholy, even as his poem once again evinces the anti-intellectualism and despair
that separates his work from this strain. Yeats’s phases refer to the correspondence between the

81
The connection between original sin and melancholy was made as early as the Middle Ages; as St. Hildegard of
Bingen’s expressively notes: “‘at the same moment that Adam sinned in taking the apple, melancholy ‘curdled in his
blood’” (quoted in Klibansky et al., p. 79).
82
For Sacks, all mourners need to repeat detachment from and substitution of the mother (321).
97

moon and human personality, which shifts as the moon waxes and wanes.
83
His occult system,
which has often been dismissed as nonsense, bears comparison to the early Hippocratean text
that assigned different temperaments to the different seasons, evincing a belief in astral influence
over the body.
84

The scene of Yeats’s poem is in part set by the engraving, “The Lonely Tower,” which
was made to illustrate Milton’s famous poem of melancholy, “Il Penseroso.” Yeats also draws in
the “visionary prince” from Shelley’s poem “Prince Athanase” (writ. 1817, publ. 1824), whose
“soul had wedded Wisdom, and her dower / Is love and justice, clothed in which, he sate / Apart
from men, as in a lonely tower.” In the general introduction he wrote for an edition of his
complete works, Yeats suggests his close connection with all three of these references: “I
commit my emotion to shepherds, herdsmen, camel-drivers, learned men, Milton or Shelley’s
Platonist, that tower Palmer drew” (E&I 522). But he reveals a vexed relationship with these
antecedents; while in both Shelley and Milton’s poems gaining access to truth or wisdom is the
key to overcoming pain, the fictional Yeats in “Phases of the Moon” never achieves the state of
wisdom he seeks. In Shelley’s poem, Athanase’s friends become aware that he is withholding
“secret pain” and they come to feel “That there was drawn an adamantine veil / Between his
heart and mind.” “Adamantine” calls to mind the “adamantine chains” of John Milton’s Paradise
Lost (1667), which bind Satan to his burning lake as punishment for his revolt against God. Such
a connection between pain and sin is indeed at issue in Shelley’s description; Athanase’s friends

83
The occult system Yeats develops in this poem is given later development in A Vision, where human character is
classified in terms of the moon’s phases, a theory of reincarnation is proposed, and all of Western history is
conceived “in terms of lunar symbolism.” See Hazard Adams, who argues that the second edition of A Vision might
take a skeptical or humorous view on this system (7).
84
In this, Yeats strongly diverges from his contemporaries. Walter Benjamin writes, for example, about the Russian
writer Nikolai Leskov, whose story “The Alexandrite” (1884) documents the end of such beliefs.
98

speculate that his pain was the result of “God’s displeasure.” Prince Athanase, upon whose being
“like an eyeless nightmare grief did sit,” who was entwined as if by a snake that “fold by fold /
Pressed out the life of life, a clinging friend,” is not released until his teacher, and only friend,
Zonoras, receives wisdom, “through his age, dark, cold, and tempest-tossed / Shone truth upon
Zonoras,” who in turn bestows on his pupil “philosophic wisdom, clear and mild.” It is the
lantern of these two scholars that mariners see on stormy nights, high above, “piercing the
stormy darkness, like a star,” and that calls divine power into the world as the winter storm gives
way to a summer’s eve. After the exchange of knowledge, master and student converse freely;
the implication is that the “adamantine veil” between Athanase’s heart and mind has been, along
with gloom and pain, dissolved.
In Yeats’s poem, knowledge cannot be gained in order for separation to be overcome.
There is no release from the bondage of uncertainty to the mastery of wisdom. In this poem,
Aherne and Robartes, whom Yeats considers as having quarreled with him, stand discussing
him:
We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower,
And the light proves that he is reading still.
He has found, after the manner of his kind,
Mere images; chosen this place to live in
Because, it may be, of the candle-light
From the far tower where Milton’s Platonist
Sat late, or Shelley’s visionary prince:
The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,
An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil;
And now he seeks in book or manuscript
What he shall never find.
(ll. 10-20)
99

Fig. 1. Samuel Palmer “The Lonely Tower” (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon
Collection).

The scene is narrated not by the lonely scholar, but by the figures in the street. In the addition of
the “shepherds, herdsmen, camel-drivers, [and] learned men” as points of identification in the
poem, Yeats reveals his position to be divided between the shepherds in the foreground and the
“high lonely tower” of Milton’s and Shelley’s poems. Having Robartes and Aherne speak as the
Rückenfiguren, or figures seen from behind who stand in for the viewer’s perspective, has a
diminishing effect on the height of the tower. The split identification also complicates Yeats’s
earlier idolization of Shelley’s “Prince Athanase with his solitary lamp,” or of Alastor, whom
Yeats had chosen as his “chief of men and longed to share his melancholy, and maybe at last
disappear from everybody’s sight as he disappeared drifting in a boat” (A 80). Despite his
autobiographical remarks, his poem reveals that he cannot completely identify with these men.
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Solitary study is negatively viewed in the poem, insofar as it draws Yeats away from being able
to hear the truth spoken in the street. Aherne asks the always slightly more inimical Robartes
why he doesn’t ring at the poet’s door and “speak. . .
Just truth enough to show that his whole life
Will scarcely find for him a broken crust
Of all those truths that are your daily bread;
And when you have spoken take the roads again?
(ll. 22-25)

Robartes grumpily says he won’t give the poet a crumb of truth. He has his reasons: he claims
Yeats was rude enough to say he was dead in another poem, and that he had written to him in an
annoying and derivative Paterian style. So the truth, while it is sung between Robartes and
Aherne, doesn’t reach the man who toils late in the tower; the light is extinguished just as the
song concludes. This act mimes a curtain fall at the end of a play before the action has been
resolved. Yeats’s persona has not achieved any final answer.
85
Through the negative
characterization of what the fictionalized Yeats calls “mere images,” and the predicted failure of
his search for the truth, Aherne and Robartes suggest that there will be no final triumph over
suffering, no end to his toil.
The lonely scholars and hermits in Shelley and Milton’s poems note a contradiction
between time and eternity that, as described above, can be overcome through a figurative act of
internalization, which in psychoanalytic terms relates to a pathological response to loss. The
“enhanced self” that results from the internalization and transcendence of external objects or
others or even one’s own body is a function of incorporation, which occurs after a beloved is
lost, and internalized at the center of the ego as a self-identified object. Yeats’s melancholic
similarly notes the contradiction between time and eternity, but cannot make the identification

85
Adams, in The Book of Yeats’s Vision, takes this view as well, though for different reasons (65).
101

that could substitute for a relationship with the original object, or person. Roy Foster remarks
that Maud Gonne is for Yeats a “Shelleyan princesse lointaine, equipped with great height, tragic
beauty, and secret sorrows,” confirming the way that Gonne is identified with the lost object in a
way the poet himself is not (57).
Because for Yeats there is no discernible thread leading back to unity with the divine,
nature does not work like the fragmented parts of a lost whole that need only be internalized in
order to regain lost paradise. In A Vision (1925, 1937) Yeats writes: “Life is no series of
emanations from divine reason such as the cabbalists imagine, but an irrational bitterness, no
orderly descent from level to level, no waterfall but a whirlpool, a gyre” (42). His protagonists
remain prey to time and sorrow, barred from divine joy:
God is joy and joy is God,
And things that have grown sad are wicked,
And things that fear the dawn of the morrow,
Or the grey wandering osprey Sorrow
(I.ll. 300-303)

Against the melancholic’s “enhanced Self,” as seen above in the example of Milton, Klibansky et
al. point out that it is the humorist who posits a “limited self” (235). In his belief that he cannot
overreach the motion of stars in their direction of time and fate, Yeats reveals himself to be much
closer to the humorist’s view.
In the figurative incorporations and tropological substitutions of the Romantic
development of poetic melancholy, there is the suggestion that compensation or solace is to be
found in the aesthetic realm. Julia Kristeva’s discussion of the way that loss can be avowed but
then negated through the passage to language would be one way to describe the compensatory
function of language. In other words, for Kristeva, “I have lost my mother, but I have not lost her
because I have found her again in signs.” It is through the compensatory function of the aesthetic
102

imagination that Yeats has been contextualized among his Romantic and Victorian
contemporaries and forebears; Harold Bloom, for example, places Yeats’s early poetry among
Wordsworth’s, Keats’s, Browning’s, and Tennyson’s for the way imagination compensates for
the loss of nature (26).
86
But Yeats himself states his divergence from these antecedents, even as
his early “Wanderings of Oisin” (VP 1889) shares the themes of poetic melancholy, the
awareness of mortality in particular, or the apprehension of the “autumn of the body,” in Yeats’s
memorable phrase. The poet nonetheless turns away from the figurative substitution identifiable
in these antecedents insofar as he turns away from replacing a relationship with the original
loss—nature, the homeland, true love—with something else.
87
The failure of identification with
the beloved, her identification instead with something else, always gone (as Yeats tellingly
misspelled Maud Gonne’s name in one letter) signals that loss can’t be recuperated through
erotic union with nature in the guise of a romantic partner.
In the tradition that Bloom seeks to draw Yeats into, what has been lost, and what
subsequently launches attempts at recuperation, is a narcissistic attachment. Robert Browning’s
Asolando (writ. 1889-90), written contemporaneously with Yeats’s Wanderings of Oisin,
illustrates particularly well how what has been lost is not any concrete person or thing, but rather
a romantic attachment. In this poem, the loss is figured as an inability to supply the animating
spirit to the sensuous form of nature. The prologue to the collection, which was written to a
female mourner who would outlive the speaker, begins:

86
He also adds an American modernist, Wallace Stevens, for good measure.

87
In Autobiographies, Yeats writes that Swinburne, Browning, and Tennyson “had filled their work with what I
called ‘impurities,’ curiosities about politics, about science, about history, about religion; and that we must create
once more the pure work” (148-49). He is happier with Browning for the idea that “‘beautiful things have ‘lain
burningly on the Divine Hand’” (E&I 112).

103

“The Poet’s age is sad: for why?
In youth, the natural world could show
No common object but his eye
At once involved with alien glow –
His own soul’s iris-bow.

And now a flower is just a flower:
Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man –
Simply themselves, uncinct by dower
Of dyes which, when life’s day began,
Round each in glory ran.”
(ll. 1-10)

The lost ability to transfer consciousness into nature, to endow nature with his own soul, is then
compensated for with erotic union, as the burning flame glowing in the hills, vales, and bush that
once kept the two lovers apart is extinguished, and the two can finally consummate their
relationship:
How many a year, my Asolo,
Since—one step just from sea to land—
I found you, loved yet feared you so –
For natural objects seemed to stand
Palpably fire-clothed! No –

No mastery of mine o’er these!
Terror with beauty, like the Bush
Burning but unconsumed. Bend knees,
Drop eyes to earthward! Language?
Silence ‘t is awe decrees.

And now? The lambent flame is – where?
Lost from the naked world: earth, sky,
Hill, vale, tree, flower, –Italia’s rare
O’er-running beauty crowds the eye –
But flame? The Bush is bare.
(ll. 21-35)

And then “a Voice” speaks:

. . . “Call my works thy friends!
At Nature dost thou shrink amazed?
God it is who transcends.”
104

(ll. 43-45)

The restoration of divine authority allows the pair to be returned to paradise, and as the
consonance culminates in “The Bush is bare,” indicate their own nakedness and pleasurable
relief from separation.
Yeats certainly evokes the sense of burning divinity in his poems, and indeed it is this
quality that the poet feels relates his work to Browning’s, but divinity remains unreachable in
Yeats’s work. Once again, Maud Gonne is identified with the transcendent (or mythological) and
inaccessible figure. She is associated with a “burning” sensation (e.g. “The Folly of Being
Comforted” (1902) in which the “fire that stirs about her . . . burns,” and even with burning down
Troy, “Why, what could she have done, being what she is? / Was there another Troy for her to
burn?” (VP 227). The rhetorical questions—“Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
/ Was there another Troy for her to burn?”—hold the unconsummated relationship with the
burning queen in eternal suspension.
88
The more watery character Niamh, on the other hand, who
is a character from “The Wanderings of Oisin” (1889), becomes a kind of melancholic female
type for Yeats. The sighing and sad pearl-pale Niamh has “soft eyes like funeral tapers” (l. 69), a
“face that seemed wrought out of moonlit vapors” (ii, l. 70), a “sad mouth” (ii, l. 71), and rests
her “weeping head” (ii, l. 250) on the hero’s breast. She pines away for love: “I loved no man,
though kings besought” (l. 62). In the poem “He gives his Beloved certain Rhymes” (1896),
another sighing woman with “pearl-pale” hand binds up her tresses, leading to widespread male
swooning. She is shy and “pensively apart” in “To an Isle in the Water” (1889) (VP 89), and
retains an image of being “cold-pale,” with dim hair and eyes, not luminous but obscured,

88
Yeats also refers to Major Robert Gregory in terms of, as Peter Sacks memorably writes, consuming “the entire
combustible world” in one apocalyptic flame (Sacks 292).
105

tarnished (VP 163). The rather phlegmatic Niamh seems only to get so far as to “sighing [lay] the
pearly tip / Of one long finger on [Oisin’s] lip” (ll. 150-51).
In the first book of “The Wanderings of Oisin,” Niamh does become besotted with the
hero, whose valor in battle she has heard of, crying out in her excitement at having found this
“world-weary king”: “There was no limb of mine but fell / Into a desperate gulph of love!” (ll.
73-74). But as soon as Oisin wordlessly mounts her horse, melancholy sets in, as, in a description
that bears much in common with Dame Melancholy, Oisin reports that Niamh “bound me / With
her triumphing arms around me / And whispering to herself enwound me” (l1. 106-8). The horse
feels the “weight” and neighs, alerting Oisin’s companions, who “wept, and raised their
lamenting hands” (1. 112). Oisin’s own melancholy, which is caused by the loss of his friends, is
one of the causes of the malady described in Robert Burton’s classic The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1621).
89
St. Patrick, to whom Oisin is telling the tale, exhorts him: “Boast not, nor mourn with
drooping head / Companions long accursed and dead, / And hounds for centuries dust and air” (l.
129).
90
The impetus of the poem, which began with Oisin “sick with years” (l. 5), is to continue
telling the tale, which will “live to be old like the wandering moon,” even as he will not (l. 12).
The sorrow of man, the “human sorrow” (l. 138), which Oisin carries throughout the poem, is
related to an awareness of human mortality, thus echoing Burton again; “old age, from which
naturall Melancholy is almost an inseparable accident” (165).

89
For Burton the “parting of friends, absence alone can worke such violent effects” (356).
90
The well-known elegy for Major Robert Gregory also contains a lamentation for other friends, who “cannot sup
with us / or dine until a late hour and go to bed” (VP 323-24).
106

As the king’s sadness overcomes him, Niamh’s role becomes more closely associated
with the comforting maternal presence that George would also show in the later “Under Saturn.”
As they ride toward her home, the hero recalls:
And Niamh sang continually
Danaan songs, and their dewy showers
Of pensive laughter, unhuman sound,
Lulled weariness, and softly round
My human sorrow her white arms wound.
(I. ll. 134-38)

The heroine changes here from the malignant restraint of Dame Melancholy, which was conjured
through the binding of her arms and Oisin’s own weight on the horse, but not to the eroticized
and blinding vision of Milton or Keats, in which the speaker hails “divinest Melancholy/Whose
saintly visage is too bright/ To hit the sense of human sight.” Instead, Niamh seems transformed
back into the mild, tear-stained figure of Tristesse. And rather than leading to a relationship of
vampiric feeding, the only dubious consummation their relationship receives comes in the
womblike fantasy of a dream:
The floor of Almhuin’s hosting hall
Was not more level than the sea,
As, full of loving fantasy,
And with low murmurs, we rode on,
Where many a trumpet-twisted shell
That in immortal silence sleeps
Dreaming of her own melting hues,
Her golds, her ambers, and her blues,
Pierced with soft light the shallowing deeps.
(I. ll. 156-64)

Despite the promise that is held out by the immortal lands she takes him to, and of being “Folded
in love that fears no morrow, / Nor the grey wandering osprey Sorrow” (I. ll. 341-342), all tends
towards decay, rather than union in the poem. The would-be lovers are separated by Oisin’s tie to
his countrymen, the Fenians, as he returns to battle. While he once mocked “Time and Fate and
107

Chance” (I, l. 291), his years fall on him once again, and the moon pushes the waters to overflow
everything, covering the “fluttering sadness of earth” itself (III. l. 124). In the end, Oisin rejoins
his lost companions, saying in the final words of the poem: “I will go to Caoilte, and Conan, and
Bran, Sceolan, Lomair, / And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast”
(III. ll. 223-24). In making his reference to the Fenians, the Irish Republican Brotherhood,
dedicated to radical separation from England and the establishment of an independent republic,
and in depicting the movement away from eternity, Yeats’s speaker again evinces an allegiance
to homeland and the inexorability of time and pain. He becomes “A creeping old man, full of
sleep, with the spittle on his beard never dry” rather than depicting the continuous pleasure of
immortality (III, l. 192).
91

Yeats’s use of maternal metaphors, along with his interest in folklore have elicited two
different charges in Yeats criticism: sentimental withdrawal on the one hand, and misogyny on
the other.
92
While Yeats links his aims with the Fenians, W. H. Auden satirizes this early work in
his “The Public v. the Late Mr. William Yeats.” The fictional prosecutor Auden brings to try
Yeats’s case declares that the poet didn’t do anything to “create juster social order,” and
summarizes: “What are we to say of a man whose earliest writings attempted to revive a belief in

91
Yeats’s most sustained look at John O’Leary’s influence on his life and work is in his Autobiographies. O’Leary
was a Fenian who spent twenty years in exile for his involvement with the radical newspaper the Irish People. For
more on Fenianism, see Robert Kee, The Green Flag, II: The Bold Fenian Men. In “The Trembling of the Veil”
Yeats notes that he found O’Leary’s Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism unreadable, but solved the problem in
reviewing the book by praising O’Leary himself (E&I 178). Ellmann suggests Yeats is interested in a “vigorous
nationalism” during this time in which the Irish Republican Brotherhood is blowing up railway stations (44), and
describes O’Leary’s influence on the Yeats of this period. See Kiberd on the “commonplace” in Irish poetry of
showing the longing for death in Ireland (116).
92
See Elizabeth Cullingford for more on the maternal metaphor in Yeats. Cullingford points out that Yeats’s
autobiographical novel John Sherman reveals his interest in mothering in love (217). Eavan Boland and Joyce Carol
Oates both pick up on Yeats’s portrayal of his daughter as a voiceless, rooted vegetable rather than an animal.

108

fairies and whose favorite themes were legends of barbaric heroes with unpronounceable names,
work which has been aptly and wittily descried as Chaff about Bran?” (60).
93
Auden is
particularly vociferous about the inaction of poetry in his “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” where he
summarizes the poet’s work in his famous phrase “poetry makes nothing happen.” But I will not
follow this familiar path of reading the lack of transcendence over the body, or the lack of
heterosexual union extended as substitution for an avowed original loss, in terms of impotence or
mournful abdication. Instead, I will argue that in keeping to the trope of the other as a mother,
Yeats is working out both his nationalism and a more ethical relationship to others at the same
time. In Autobiographies he describes the cause of nationalism as “devotion to a woman, Mother
Ireland,” for example, and also negatively describes the division between body and soul as
responsible for England’s tyranny over Ireland.
In order to describe the more ethical relationship with alterity Yeats’s poetry evinces, I
will examine some of the interactions Yeats stages between objects and speakers. Part of the
melancholic’s attempt to regain lost paradise, as in the case of the Romantics, was to internalize
fragmented parts of a lost whole. In Freudian melancholy, a lost object is set up inside the ego,
thereby replacing an object attachment with identification. While I will disagree with this reading
below, Paul de Man reads Yeats in his “Image and Emblem in Yeats” (1984) as providing just
this kind of substitution for loss. I will pursue a different reading below, but de Man’s reading
helps highlight the way narcissistic perception of the landscape works. In this essay, de Man
argues that Yeats encounters objects in the landscape narcissistically. In normal perception, for
the critic, there is a symmetrical transfer of consciousness into the object, and transfer of the

93
Auden is referring to another of his own works here, and is undoubtedly paraphrasing “The Wanderings of Oisin”
in which the horse, Bran, appears.
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material attributes of shape and color into consciousness (152). In Yeats’s “Wanderings of
Oisin” (1889), de Man finds on the other hand that while consciousness is transferred into
objects, there is no symmetrical receipt of their material attributes. De Man examines the passage
that describes the shell’s dreaming, as previously quoted:
Where many a trumpet-twisted shell
That in immortal silence sleeps
Dreaming of her own melting hues,
Her golds, her ambers, and her blues,
Pierced with soft light in the shallowing deeps.
(ll. 160-64)

De Man finds that the poet’s consciousness is transferred into the shell to produce an image of
his own dreaming, but there is no concomitant receipt of the material attributes of the shell. “The
poet,” de Man writes, “is no longer contemplating a thing in nature, but the workings of his own
mind; the outside world is used as a pretext and a mirror and it loses all substance” (154). For de
Man, Yeats’s innovation in this passage follows a general shift he finds more generally in post-
romantic literature. This is the shift from the mode of the symbol to the emblem, which
necessarily entails the natural object’s loss of all “ontological supremacy” (177).
De Man’s reading fits perfectly within a larger narrative about modernism that describes
the shift to the “echo-harboring” structure of objects as the necessary outcome of modernization
and a whole range of other losses. This reading seems very apt in the case of Baudelaire’s
“Albatros,” which, as described in the previous chapter, features the giant winged creature’s
divine flight and subsequent fall to be pinned to the deck by rough and jeering sailors. In the
plight of the albatross, the poet reads his own situation: prince of the air, feet and wings unsuited
to the ground, yet unrecognized, dragged down, by the pedestrian contemporaries surrounding
him. But Yeats’s interaction with the shell could also bear relation to premodern animism, as the
110

shell dreams her own dreams, producing materiality, that of color. The view that dreaming
activity produces materiality is a feature of his idealism, and is developed in his later esoteric A
Vision (1925), where Yeats’s alter ego Aherne says: “All dreams of the soul / end in a beautiful
man or woman’s body” (V 5). It is also apparent in his Autobiographies as he writes that it is the
Anima Mundi, or “that age-long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusk
and child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest” (A 216). Yeats’s vision of
ensouled fullness contradicts the dominant account of modernism.
Yeats’s idealism involves the way that dreams or memories create matter, and if all
natural things have ideas, they are unable to be overcome by his own projections. “The Sad
Shepherd” (1886), which follows the “Song of the Happy Shepherd” in the 1889 collection
Crossways, is another early poem that depicts a shell providing just this resistance to narcissistic
identification.
94
The poem features a man “whom Sorrow named his friend.” The shepherd walks
along the beach, looking for consolation in nature for his dejected mood, attempting to tell his
story to the stars, the sea, to dewdrops glistening in a valley, and finally to a shell. But each is
already occupied in listening to its own story; the stars “among themselves laugh on and sing
alway,” the sea “swept on and cried her own cry still,” and the dewdrops couldn’t hear him “for
they are always listening, / The dewdrops, for the sound of their own dropping.” When he comes
across the shell, he thinks:
I will my heavy story tell
Till my own words, re-echoing, shall send
Their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart;
And my own tale again for me shall sing,
And my own whispering words be comforting,
And lo! My ancient burden may depart.

94
The pairing of the two poems had led J. Hillis Miller to compare the two to Milton’s companion poems
“L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.”
111

Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim;
But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone
Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan
Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.

Rather than becoming the bearer or vessel of the speaker’s story and his fear of mortality, the
shell is perceived as already engaged in its own story-telling. What J. Hillis Miller has described
in his discussion of this poem as the perfect reciprocity desired by the narcissist between himself
and another who will exactly repeat, echo, or mirror the self is denied. Instead the poet’s
encounter reveals an “inassimilable difference,” to borrow Miller’s phrase (80), where
“inassimilable” refers both to the way reflection fails and to the failure of incorporation. It also
marks the failure of the figurative attempt to project human characteristics into the landscape
(through personification). For Miller, this marks the failure of trope.
95
The failure of “trope,”
which comes from the Greek “turn,” could also be read as the failure of the healing return from
the tradition of poetic melancholy. There is mourning in the separateness Yeats envisions, and
yet a community is present, one that is engaged in plentiful self-production and expression.
The inaccessibility of divine knowledge leaves Yeats at a distinct disadvantage over his
objects: they do not work like fragments that can be reassembled or internalized to create
meaning, and he evinces little control over them. This passivity before the object appeared
earlier, in fin-de-siècle criticism, and crops up in de Man’s dismissive remark that Yeats in the
end “remains loyal to natural things and to the poetic tradition of which he is the heir, although
he fully realizes it can only lead him to narcissistic paralysis” (170). This paralysis, which as I
have argued is not narcissistic, but rather the result of the recognition of the alterity and
separateness of the other, the irreducible difference that cannot be reconciled, might lead to the

95
Miller reads the failure of trope as separating the poet from the Pre-Raphaelites (80).
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failure to break through fixity in transcendence, but it also creates a more robust form of
subjectivity, both for the poet and his objects.
Yeats’s account diverges from de Man’s by describing how personal meaning is eclipsed
by the fixed and unchanging associations that adhere to symbolic objects. These unchanging
associations have to do with time; as he writes in Autobiographies “it takes a thousand years to
create a flower” (A 350). He quotes the following “perfectly symbolical lines” (155): “The white
moon is setting behind the white wave / And Time is setting with me, O!” “When all are
together—” he writes, “moon, wave, whiteness, and setting Time and the last melancholy cry –
evoke an emotion that cannot be evoked by any other combination of colors and sounds and
forms” (156). For the poet:
all sounds, all colors, all forms, either because of their preordained energies or because of
long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call
down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call
emotions; and when sound, and color, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful
relation to one another, they become, as it were, one sound, one color, one form, and
evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion.”
(Ibid.)

Yeats’s sense of continuity with the past in the present is created through emotion, which he
elsewhere describes as “great emotional intensity (A 166), or “great passions” (E&I 285).
Whatever emotions gather about becomes a symbol in the great memory (E&I 50), which leads
to continuity as emotions create symbols and symbols evoke emotions; both beauty and
individual memory share in the eternal, and cannot be lost, as an external object could be lost in
modern melancholy (E&I 73, 79). The symbol is “a living soul” (E&I 80), and it is only “by way
of the symbol that art escapes the barrenness of too-conscious arrangement into the depth and
abundance of nature” (E&I 87).
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The equally “ensouled” aspect of nature and humanity resists the possibility of separation
of mind and body or spirit and nature, and explains his negative views on education: “education
that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, has made our souls less sensitive” (A 41). The
genius, for Yeats, is not someone who stands alone, apart from his age, but is rather “the
seemingly transitory mind made out of many minds,” and who takes most after his mother (A
43). For Yeats, art shrinks from the abstract, from all that “is of the brain only, from all that is
not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of the body” (E&I 292),
and this leads to his concept of the necessity of the “thinking of the body” (Ibid). Yeats shares
with Blake the notion that humans and animals and trees share in great emotion, particularly
pain, as he quotes his fellow poet:
‘man looks out in tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast, collecting up the fragments
of his immortal body into the elemental forms of everything that grows . . . . In pain he
sighs, in pain he labors in his universe, sorrowing in birds over the deep, or howling in
the wolf over the slain, and moaning in the cattle, and in the winds.’ (E&I 139)

It is this “thinking of the body” that characterizes Yeats’s view on education, which as Frank
Kermode has it, is critical of the way education has taught rote memorization, rather than how to
grow (54).
While Yeats has been critiqued for misogyny in his views of education—he has been, for
example, called to task by Joyce Carol Oates—for his depiction of his daughter as a “vegetable,
voiceless, rooted,” rather than an animal or bird in his poem “Prayer for My Daughter” (writ.
1919, publ. 1921, quoted in Cullingford 134). But he is at the same time working out a version of
subjectivity that is based on not allowing a division between mind and body, and a nationalism
based on a tree-like rootedness in one’s native soil. This vision has some precedence, as has been
widely noted, in Edmund Burke’s notion of the rooted aristocracy and his critique of the
114

colonized in India who, he argued, capitulated too easily. The division between mind and body in
Yeats is related to evil, rather than to transcendence and return to dominion. As Declan Kiberd
writes, once natural law is transgressed, there is only pain and strife left behind, on Yeats’s
account (209). The poem is set in a room at Thoor Ballylee, where his daughter Anne sleeps
peacefully in her cradle even while a violent windstorm rages outside.
96
The poet sets a
melancholy tone from the start, noting it is the “great gloom that is in [his] mind” that inspires
him to write (VP 403). The gloom is touched off by the storm outside and fears for his
daughter’s safety, but the narrative anticipates a worse time ahead. Yeats imagines “in excited
reverie”
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
(ll. 14-16)

Unlike the present, with its full natural fury to which the sleeping child appears immune, the
future comes marching to the dizzy beat of a drum, out of an innocent sea, which allows murder
to arrive on shore. “Murder,” the unlawfulness of the killing, the drum and the dancing, all imply
human rather than natural agency. The speaker is worried about his daughter’s ability to
withstand what has been characterized as a military invasion, leading to his prayer:
May she become a flourishing hidden tree
[. . .]
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.
(ll. 41, 47-48)

Yeats understands hatred as drying one up, making one susceptible to an “old bellows full of
wind,” but

96
Ross dates the beginning of composition of the poem to April, 1919. Anne Butler Yeats was born on February 26
of the same year (203). Jeffares notes that the poem was finished at Thoor Ballylee, where the scene is set (206).
115

If there’s no hatred in a mind,
Assault and battery of the wind
97

Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.
(ll. 54-56)

The poet’s hope is that his daughter not be torn like a songbird from a leaf, that she not be
deprived of her own creative capacity, or experience a forcible division between her own thought
or soul and her body.
98
Yeats shows that it is only in one’s own response to crisis that the
division between soul and body is accomplished, and withering sets in. If the response is to give
the intellect predominance, one steps into line to march to the beat of that frenzied, murderous
drum. Instead, in this poem, innocence is achieved by driving hatred out. This active “driving” of
hatred out means that his daughter will not become subject to an alien will, to dark times. She
won’t herself come to wield the old bellows full of angry wind to disturb (or murder) another,
but will live in peace, in a “happy,” “ceremonious,” and perhaps most of all “innocent” and
beautiful time, in which the “Horn of Plenty” is neither undone nor bartered in the rough and
rowdy market of an industrializing country (VP 405, 406). Trees, towers, roots, the soil—these
material objects provide Yeats with a model of a more robust subjectivity than is available to the
English, who instead allow intellect and hatred to predominate. The poet is well-known for his
interest in Edmund Burke’s idea of the state as a tree, noting the philosopher’s idea that all states

97
For Cullingford this is an historical reference to the shrieking sisterhood. For David Lloyd, intellect is thought to
be transcendence over the feminine, and thus the hysteric comes to represent the woman who approaches male
passionate intensity.
98
In his essay “Poetry and Tradition” (1907), Yeats notes “In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style,
are the sensible impressions of a free mind, for both arise out of the deliberate shaping of all things, and from never
being swept away, whatever the emotion, into confusion or dullness” (E&I 253).
116

that are not grown slowly like a tree are tyrannies, and that England provided the opposite
example (E&I 402).
99

In keeping with premodern definitions of nature, Yeats’s idealism and Galenic
melancholy respect nature’s dominion by remaining in communion with it, and not evincing the
division between body and soul that allows for its domination. This philosophy influences his
aesthetic, his politics, and finally his construction of an Irish identity in opposition to the English.
Transcendence over pain and suffering leads to the sense of an “enhanced self,” which can be a
kind of enlarged persona, containing multitudes, to use a Whitmanian formula. Such
transcendence could be described in terms of the “representative man,” or as seeking a form or
figure that can transcend a fractured present in order to institute a new form of universality.
100

Yeats frequently presents his own work in terms of a failure to bring into being such a
transcendent symbol. He conveys the difficulty of his task through such terms as “pain,” “toil,”
and “labor.” The work of mending and building he engages in, which could be contrasted to
Charles Baudelaire’s single-handed fencing of an opponent, does not terminate in the eternal.
The poet understands that he may build, but is a “foolish laborer,” like Fergus, who laments “I
have grown nothing, knowing all” (VP 102). Instead, Yeats’s travail produces ruins. In “My
Descendants,” from the 1928 collection The Tower, for example, Yeats meditates in highly
autobiographical language about his hope of passing on his “vigorous mind” to his descendants,
but concludes “whatever flourish and decline / These stones remain their monument and mine”

99
I will return to the way that the idea of the state as a tree is linked in his mind with aristocracy and natural law
below.
100
In The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (1991), Michael North argues that the aim of post-romantic
literature was to restore a lost whole in the face of a series of breakdowns: between individual and society, part and
whole, subject and object.
117

(VP 423). By leaving behind his tower, Thoor Ballylee, what Yeats leaves behind is material that
will always be changed by time, once again imbricating his task in nature, and perhaps with a
female form of reproduction as well. He suggests that we should not deem as “great possessions
what we spin out of our guts and deride the bee that has nothing but its hum and its wings, its
wax and honey, its sweetness and light” (E&I 409).
In times of crisis—such as civil war, and the struggle for independence from England,
both of which were at issue when he wrote the poems collected in Michael Robartes and the
Dancer (1921)—Yeats’s vision of resistance, remaining firmly rooted in the soil, diverges from
Romanticism’s individual revolt and its radical break with tradition. Unlike the Romantic
melancholics, Yeats’s “melancholizing” does not allow him to transcend the material conditions
in which he finds himself. Even as impending crisis with England threatens, the insight Yeats
derives from his “melancholizing” does not become a positive intellectual force. This futility of
knowledge comes to a climax in Yeats’s philosophical poem, “Ego Dominus Tuus” (“I am Thy
Master,” 1917), as Ille asks:
What portion in the world can the artist have
Who has awakened from the common dream
But dissipation and despair?
(ll. 49-51)

“Ego Dominus Tuus,” like “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” implies an inability to break
through mourning in order to mount an active response to crisis. Unlike the Romantic
melancholics, Yeats’s “melancholizing” does not allow him to transcend the material conditions
in which he finds himself.
In his letter to Olivia Shakespear about the poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”
(writ. 1919, publ. 1921), Yeats explains that the only “brightening” his own philosophy offered
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is that “it flouts all socialistic hope if that is a brightening” (L 668).
101
The poem, which he
claimed he wrote as “lamentation over lost peace and lost hope” (L 668), was written in the year
the Anglo-Irish War (1919-1921) broke out, which dashed hopes for a peaceful resolution to the
British occupation of Ireland. Yeats depicts the arrival of evil, of nightmare, upon the very
doorstep of a family’s home through specific references to events that occurred during the
conflict:
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot free;
(ll. 26-28)
Soldiers firing in the street struck down this mother.
102
The streets become the general scene of
violence: “Violence upon the roads: violence of horses.” Michael Wood points out the
etymological connection between the days that are described as “dragon-ridden” and oppression,
through cognates such as “hag-ridden,” “devil-ridden,” “priest ridden” and “king-ridden” (39).
There is a lot of riding going on in the poem, and notably it is the mythical and abstract that has
come to ride what Wood describes as the “sensuous” and “concrete” (28): the dragon over the
horse, soldiery over the mother, and the nightmare over the dreamers:
The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half-imagined, the half-written page;
O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now

101
Its title upon first publication in The Dial was “Thoughts upon the Present State of the World.”
102
This is a reference to Ellen Quinn’s murder by British soldiers during the hostilities. See Lady Gregory, Lady
Gregory’s Journals, p. 197. See also Ross p. 435.
119

That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.
(ll. 79-88)

The multitude of dreaming souls, who looked to bring forth the eternal in beauty, in springtime
perhaps, is instead left with the melancholy of winter as these hopes dry up and blow away.
103
In
this stanza, Yeats produces the half-written, the half-imagined, that which crumbles away,
leaving behind a seemingly ruined form, and madness. This is the most personal section of the
poem; it is the only section in which the singular personal and possessive pronouns “I” and “my”
appear. Yeats accounts for his own work here, and comes up short. That mending can be undone
by mischief, that a heroic dream can be lost to madness, and that all can finally be blown away
by the winter wind exposes the susceptibility of the dream to fragmentation. This susceptibility
shows the “lack of possession of the things that are lost” (Wood 36), as in the lines “Many
ingenious lovely things are gone,” or “Man is in love and loves what vanishes.”
In the poem the dust finally settles, and the confused and nightmarish images of horses’
hooves and blind witches, evil spirits abroad resolve into one final symbol, a demon plied with
offerings. In this last disturbing image Yeats shows the result of evil, forward progress: the devil
incarnate, which could be compared to Baudelaire’s dazzling figure of Ennui in “Au Lecteur.”
Against this triumph of evil, the withdrawal of the swan, or “solitary spirit,” to “desolate heaven”
reads as resignation, and throws into question the instrumentality of human action and creativity
in the forward march of time. Events take on a kind of tragic inevitability, and lament appears
the only possible response. The solidarity of the dreaming multitude is shattered in the storm of
mockery:
Come let us mock at the good

103
Roy Foster reads this “we” as referring to the Irish Ascendancy for Yeats.
120

That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked—and where are they?
(ll. 103-107)

The despairing conclusion is fully in keeping with the tradition of Galenic melancholy. Because
it is impossible to make the decision to “ride,” or to leap into abstraction, Yeats deliberately
mourns in the face of tragedy as a mode of resistance. As the poet notes in Explorations (publ.
1962),
104
it is through the “contemplation of ruin” that he rebelled against the “myth of progress”
(392-93). In contrast, the mockers who appear and “blow” in the space left by the departure of
“honor and truth” are identified with ravaging the country:
Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of leveling wind.
(ll. 93-97)

The mockers choose the triumph of destruction, rather than Yeats’s marking and reckoning
through the contemplation of ruin. In Yeats, the violence of emancipation is eschewed; that
importantly weighted “can” in “can bring a wildness, bring a rage, / To end all things to end”
(VP 431) signals hesitancy even before an expression of rage. Two closely parallel lines in
“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”—“For triumph can but mar our solitude,” and “all triumph
would / But break upon his ghostly solitude”—speak to the false promise of winning or breaking
through the present in order to lay claim to the future. The false fruit is left on the tree.
Yeats’s contemplation of ruin is in a sense thoroughly Romantic. Peter Fritzsche, for
example, points out how in the nineteenth century the past “was an object both of mourning and

104
The collection contains essays written between 1901-1919, 1930, 1944, and selections from On the Boiler, 1939.
121

desire” (4). In the Romantic version, the past is lost, but “is also something that can be recovered
in imaginative recollection, in songs, storybooks, and dreams, and in voyages to the ruins”
(Ibid.). But while Yeats certainly shares a high valuation of folklore, I will argue that it is the
impossibility of possession and subsequent recovery that makes the present so important.
105

Rather than evincing the oscillation between brooding over the original thing lost and the
eventual triumphant turn in time as in the Ficinian tradition of melancholy, rather than
ecstatically flying “Away! away!” from the current moment with Keats’s immortal bird, Yeats’s
speakers continuously evince a lack of transcendence over the body and over time. This position
comes out in his anti-intellectual stance as outlined in “The Phases of the Moon,” and in the
negative view on withdrawal in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” It also comes out in his
negative views on heroic sacrifice, as evinced in Yeats’s major poem “Easter 1916,” also from
the collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). The poem, which was written to
commemorate the martyrs executed after the Easter Rising in Ireland, opens on the everyday
scene of the poet greeting these future martyrs on their return home from work. Their faces are
“vivid,” bright, and perhaps overheated; the talk is all “polite meaningless words,” the mood is
mocking, light as gossip is exchanged; the times themselves are the times of comedy. The poet is
certain, he writes, “that they and I / But lived where motley is worn” (VP 392, l. 14). But all is
“utterly” changed.
106

The times as casual comedy come to an abrupt and striking end as these individuals—
orators and foxhunters, schoolmasters, even drunkards—are “transformed utterly” and

105
Yeats traveled the Irish countryside, and made visits to the Aran Islands with Lady Gregory to collect stories in
1888. Yeats also edited several collections of fairy and folk tales in 1890. Yeats also annotated Gregory’s Visions
and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920).
106
For David Lloyd, this “utterly” is a complex pun on “utterance.” The talk becomes a performative speech act.
122

“enchanted to a stone” (VP 393, l. 43). The birth of sublimity in the phrase “A terrible beauty is
born,” indicates for the martyrs a new imperviousness to time, to change, or to motion, a division
or separation from nature:
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
(ll. 45-56)

The martyrs, unlike the poem’s speaker, have achieved a change in state. But Yeats does not
valorize the transformation, the vertical leap out of life, where such a change not only appears to
have no influence beyond “troubling” the living waters, but also can make no further change or
growth after this sacrifice. Unlike the positive association in Keats’s “Ode to Melancholy,”
where there is triumph in being among Melancholy’s “cloudy trophies hung,” Yeats places a
negative valuation on such sacrifice. In the concluding stanza, for example, the “vertically
directed” (Vendler 97) question “O when may it suffice?” (l. 59) evokes address to a deity but
does not lead to divine reply. No answer is provided to the question of whether the sacrifice was
worthwhile, or right. The image evokes sterility, as in “the soul has become vapor, body a stone”
(A 361), in comparison to his own role, which is “To murmur name upon name, / As a mother
names her child” (V 394, l. 61-62) and to “write it out in a verse—,” to name the names of the
dead, “MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse.” Yeats forms a clear demarcation
between himself and divinity. And in so doing he situates himself, through his speaker, alongside
123

those who suffer, and would remember, such as mothers, rather than alongside those who
sacrifice, and are “changed, changed utterly,” and reborn in stone. Rather than respond to loss
with divine frenzy or anger, Yeats calls for grieving.
By resisting the triumph of the imagination and denying the connection with divine
knowledge, Yeats also resists the turn against female reproductive power, which is so central to
Romanticism and Symbolism, and also to Decadence and Futurism.
107
He does this by
eschewing the sublimity of sacrifice, and instead naming the men who were lost.
108
MacDonagh,
MacBride, Connolly, and Pearse, all men Yeats knew, were executed for their part in the Easter
Rising. It seems fitting that Maud Gonne, who trailed her “red-rose bordered hem” all about
Yeats’s page, would condemn his poem for its negative take on such sacrifice. Her estranged
husband, John MacBride, was one of the men executed; her choice of a man of action had been
made. In a letter to the poet she wrote: “No, I don’t like your poem, it isn’t worthy of you,” and
rejects his conclusions about sacrifice: “through it [sacrifice] alone mankind can rise to God”

107
Bram Dijkstra in his Idols of Perversity (1986), for example, shows how around the turn of the century woman,
the feminine principle, became the “thief of progress,” and how shedding the “dominance of the feminine principle”
became the key to becoming elite (7). Filippo Tommaso Marinetti famously declared contempt for women in his
Futurist Manifesto (1909), and called for the demolishing of feminism, as of a ruinous violence. “To admire an old
picture,” he wrote, “is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of
creation and action.” Andreas Huyssen writes in After the Great Divide (1986) about how various women from the
turn of the century—from the pious, docile wife or virgin, the machine woman under perfect control, to the
aggressively sexual prostitute, machine vamp or femme-fatale—serve as “vehicles for the transformation of male
anxiety” (76).
108
David Lloyd emphasizes the role of gender in the distinction between the sublime and beautiful in his “The
Poetics of Politics: Yeats and the Founding of the State” (1989): “In traditional aesthetics, those two categories are
systematically distinguished . . . the sublime is referred to the masculine domain of production and transcendence
which is evoked in response to the terror of death and the potential dissolution of the self; the beautiful, on the other
hand, is relegated to the feminine sphere of reproduction, both literally and in the sense of the harmonious
reproduction of social forms” (194).
124

(quoted in Ross, 90). Yeats’s poem instead names and calls forth heroes, much as a mother,
perhaps Mother Ireland, would name and call forth her heroes.
109

Yeats’s inability to overcome mourning is related to his refusal to purge emotion, and in
particular the emotional attachment to nature, from his work. His autobiographical comments
show an anxiety about his subsequent lack of public contribution as he tries to sort out the
relationship between his work, his beliefs, and his political efficacy, while keeping emotion in a
central role. In “The Tragic Generation” (1922), the poet ruminates over the work of his own
Rhymers’ Club in comparison to revolutionary nationalists Wolfe Tone, (Robert) Emmet, and
Owen Roe (Eoghan Ruodh Ó Néill). At times, he writes, he thinks their group might have failed
due to its members’ poverty. At others, he writes, “I think that perhaps our form of lyric, our
insistence upon emotion which has no relation to any public interest, gathered together
overwrought, unstable men” (A 233). In “The Stirring of the Bones,” an essay written around the
same time and published in The Trembling of the Veil, Yeats similarly expresses ambivalence
about his role in a story that unflatteringly juxtaposes the Italian revolutionary Amilcare Cipriani
with himself. At a gathering at Maud Gonne’s “Somebody says, ‘Yeats believes in ghosts,’ and
Cipriani interrupts for a moment his impassioned declamation [in French] to say in English, and
with a magnificent movement and intonation, ‘As for me, I believe in nothing but cannon’” (A
279).
110

109
In this, Yeats evokes kinship with John Ruskin, who in Sesame and Lilies (1905) notes that it is the woman’s task
to mourn. In the course of his meditation on Shakespeare, Ruskin realizes that there are no heroes in Shakespeare’s
work, only heroines. Catastrophe is caused by the men, and redemption comes through the women (64).
110
In his letters, Yeats refers to a very similar formulation about politics. Yeats recalls remarking that he judges
politics as he judges a horse race: by the jockey’s shirts, and often changes his mind halfway through the race. In
response he is told that Lord Cromer cares for nothing but politics (L 540). In this anecdote Yeats once again
presents a contrast between himself and a figure from the international scene; first the Italian revolutionary, then the
Englishman from the House of Lords.
125

Yeats deliberately—and often—juxtaposes the heroic figure of a man, a soldier, with his
own, which is sentimentalized, cast in the weaker position of believing in ghosts, speaking only
one language, and subject to ridicule. At times, he appears to join in the melancholic’s attitude of
punishing others who are made to seem weak by virtue of expressing emotion.
111
But at the same
time, Yeats’s humor draws out the argument he tries to make in his essays, namely that action
and intellect should be the subordinated pair, not emotion and passivity. In his essay on
Shakespeare, for example, “Stratford Upon Avon” (1901), he comments that “a man’s utility to
the State cannot be determined by his actions.” As he notes, “A man’s business at times may be
revelation, not reformation” (E&I 103). Yeats also references this anti-utilitarian stance in his
discussion of Wordsworth in a 1915 letter to his father. He sees Wordsworth as destroying his
poetic experience by “yoking” his “commonplace” intellect to it. His experience becomes a
subservient “engine” in the process, an ox pulling a cart, or is even destroyed entirely. As he tells
his father, “Wordsworth strikes me as always destroying his poetic experience, which was of
course of incomparable value, by his reflective power” (L 590). The concluding line of the essay
accounts for Wordsworth’s nostalgia in terms of the poet’s lost experience: “He is full of a sort
of utilitarianism and that is perhaps the reason why in later life he is continually looking back
upon a lost vision, a lost happiness” (590). By turning against himself and his experience,
Wordsworth, on Yeats’s reading, locks the door to paradise behind him.
The poet uses these meditations on melancholy and the role of emotion to establish an
Irish identity based on this attachment. The importance of remaining in communion with nature
is a theme that spans both Yeats’s early and middle poetry, and summarizes the poet’s dream of

111
See, for example, Benjamin’s historical materialist’s response to sentimental love in “Theses on the Philosophy
of History.”
126

“unity of culture.” In his Autobiographies, Yeats suggests that he might unearth Ireland’s
mythology
112
in “The Wanderings of Oisin,” asking:
Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology that marries them to rock and
hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneducated classes knew and even
sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated classes [. . .] and
at last, it might be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet,
craftsman and day-laborer would accept a common design? (166-67)

Motivating his poetry and the new version of identity he seeks is an eternal lament, not the too-
easy overcoming of loss and fracture through return in time. Rather than seeking to restore a lost
whole through finding a substitute object or abstraction to repair the loss, Yeats insists that “great
emotions” endure. In his preface to Lady Gregory’s translation of Cuchulain of Muirthemne
(1902), Yeats describes now only the emotions remain unchanged by the “wandering lyric
moon” (14), and provide a continuity of culture from ancient to present times. In his discussion
of the Irish storyteller in the preface to Lady Gregory’s translation of Cuchulain of Muirthemne
(1902), Yeats describes how only the great emotions remain unchanged by the “wandering lyric
moon” (14). Emotions can, for Yeats, make the eternal present to the mind at any time.
Accordingly, if “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,” it is a loss he attempts to repair not through
the Romantic quest narrative of departing for the “Lake Isle of Innisfree” to plant his “nine bean-
rows,” thus re-possessing or reclaiming lost territory, and thereby writing a “radical nationalism”
that is still contained within, and readable by, the language of colonialism.
113
Instead, he writes

112
Declan Kiberd connects this idea to négritude, sharing the refusal of the notion that culture only arrives with the
colonizer (133).
113
A focus on “nationalist repossession of territory” (Howes) tends to replicate the language of conquest. It also
doesn’t confront the issue that Yeats does not use accurate markers of actual places in Ireland (D. Lloyd). Edward
Said, in his seminal essay “Yeats and Decolonization” (1988), recognizes the possession of territory as the work of
imperialism. He writes: “Imperialism is an act of geographical violence through which every space in the world is
explored, charted, finally brought under control” (77). He notes the “radical heroism” in winning the land back from
the “geographical morte-main” of imperialism” (Ibid.).
127

by “opening th[e] fountain,” “flooding” literature with the “passions and beliefs of ancient
times,” bringing “‘the vivifying spirit’ ‘of excess’ into the arts of Europe” (185). What this
involves, for the poet, is telling of “strange woods and seas” (Ibid.). Instead of responding to the
colonialist tactic of feminizing culture with a reversal of the gender binary to present a “hyper-
masculine” identity, as Declan Kiberd writes (134), Yeats draws on Irish memory to forge
continuity with the primitive imagination. The poet suggests this is a feminine position by
remarking in his Cuchulain of Muirthemne that “Women indeed, with their lamentations for
lovers and husbands and sons, and for fallen rooftrees and lost wealth, give the stories the most
beautiful sentences” (16).
This position represents a fusion between Henry More’s writings, from which Yeats in
part derives his idealism, and folklore. Humans and animals, for Yeats, along with, it would
seem, shells, derive their universals and particulars from a “supersensual source” (414). The
divine world is still the world of the “Irish country people” (15), he writes, as they are not
surprised by miracles or enchantment. Yeats concentrates on folklore and mysticism, realms
where human reason, “abstract” or “scientific” thought do not guide production or expression.
The continuity with nature he describes can be seen in the ascription of memory to nature in an
early poem, “Baile and Aillin” (1903):
……………………………………
We hold, because our memory is
So full of that thing and of this,
That out of sight is out of mind.
But the grey rush under the wind
And the grey bird with crooked bill
Have such long memories that they still
Remember Deidre and her man;
And when we walk with Kate or Nan
About the windy water-side,
Our hearts can hear the voices chide.
128

(ll. 85-94)

In his later poem “Under Saturn,” the laboring man would come to stand in for nature’s chiding
position on having forgotten (childish vows, the old stories).
114
In the early work “To Ireland in
the Coming Times” (1895) Yeats links his idealism and melancholy to his nationalism, joining
the community he calls together with Davis, Mangan, and Ferguson by describing himself “True
brother of a company / That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong.” In this poem he seeks distance
from a view that he is trapped in a local and distracting passion for a woman by linking the
flying measure of her feet to the beginning of time, to what made “Ireland’s heart begin to beat.”
This is a position he would once again repeat in “Under Saturn,” as Maud Gonne is identified
with his youth. In his expanded view of time, the poet can link his much-mocked fairies with
reality by seeing them in their particularity, having them “go / About my table to and fro.” As he
writes in the concluding lines:
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.

By moving away from romantic love and its loss as a legitimate spur to melancholy, Yeats
reformulates Irish identity as based on a struggle with a more elusive source of loss. In his essay
“The Celtic Element in Literature” (E&I 1902), for example, Yeats invigorates melancholy’s
definition by contrasting the fleeting and superficial feeling that comes from a loss of love with
the “deeper thirst” the Celt feels. In this essay Yeats responds to both Matthew Arnold’s The
Study of Celtic Literature (1883) and Ernest Renan’s La Poésie des races celtiques (The Poetry
of Celtic Races, 1896), which make separate cases for Ireland as a melancholy nation. Rather

114
This insistence on knowledge as remembrance appears to be an aspect of More’s Platonism.
129

than dispute these essentially racist assessments, Yeats more gently seeks to “restate a little
Renan’s and Arnold’s argument” (174) by claiming a tragic and heroic position for the Irish on
the basis of such feeling. He describes this heroic mood in the following:
Men did not mourn merely because their beloved was married to another, or because
learning was bitter in the mouth, for such mourning believes that life might be happy
were it different, and is therefore the less mourning, but because they had been born and
must die with their great thirst unslaked. (182)

Yeats seeks to draw a new hero from this tragic view of life in which thirst cannot be slaked
through possession or drinking: “the Celt is melancholy, not as Faust or Werther, but because of
something about him unaccountable, defiant, and titanic” (174). Against the mourning that is
based on the loss of a loved one, Yeats proposes the lament that is brought about by something
that cannot either be controlled or changed. The object in Yeats remains one of contemplation,
like God, rather than something that could be grasped or possessed.
In his late prose work On the Boiler (1938), Yeats returns to comment explicitly on the
fact that he is differentiating his conception of Irish from English identity in calling for a division
between Irish and English mourning. He once again describes the tragic struggle as being against
an “immovable” object (35), and finds the English to have lost that experience: “The English are
an objective people,” he writes, “they have no longer a sense of tragedy in their threats; pity,
which is fed by observation rather than experience, has taken its place” (21). Yeats’s idealist
belief in the Anima Mundi as the source of all vegetal existence—a view that he himself mocks
as backwards, foolish, and overly sentimental—in fact presents his counterargument to what he
describes as English materialism, and to the capitalism imposed upon Ireland.
115
It is thus

115
Idealism continues to be a not entirely satisfactory term. Yeats at times uses the term “mysticism,” calling Blake
(along with Boehme and Swedenborg) his “chief mystical influences” (L 592). He cites Blake for his understanding
of existence in terms of the “vegetal”: “‘The world of the imagination is the world of Eternity. It is the Divine
bosom into which we shall go after the death of the vegetated body. The world of the imagination is infinite and
130

integral to his nationalism and to his anti-imperial outlook. In his foreword to Hone’s biography
of Bishop Berkeley (1931), Yeats writes: “It is customary to praise English empirical genius,
English sense of reality, and yet throughout the eighteenth century when her Indian Empire was
founded England lived for certain great constructions that were true only in relation to the will”
(E&I 400). Yeats mounts his epistemological and ontological stand against an entire belief
system by aligning himself with thinkers who loudly proclaim: “We Irishmen cannot attain to
these truths” (Hone 28).
Attending to melancholy in Yeats’s work complicates the negative view of the poet as
passive, sentimental, and nostalgic by revealing how his work hesitates before taking the
common turn against the alterity of the other and female reproductive power. It also reveals a
more complicated view of his idealism as a counterpoint to English materialism. But the troubled
afterlife of his poetry testifies to the uncertainty of its value in the face of great violence. In his
late work On the Boiler (1938), the poet suggests that only institutions that embody violence
retain the loyalty of the young (30), and embraces eugenics as he gives his first explicit quotation
of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, the encyclopedic work whose treatment the poet
adheres most closely to in his poems.
116
His quotation of Burton describes how a strong nation
could be created by ensuring that only the healthy reproduce. Here is the passage from Burton:
if any were visited with the falling sickness, madness, gout, leprosy, or any such
dangerous diseases, which was likely to be propagated from the father to the son, he was
instantly gelded: a woman kept from all company of men; and if by chance, having some
such disease, she were found to be with child, she and her brood were buried alive: and

eternal, whereas the world of generation or vegetation is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the
eternal realities of everything which we see reflected in the vegetable glass of nature’” (E&I 151).
116
Yeats may have encountered the work of Kusta-ben-Luka, a ninth-century Arabic doctor and writer who appears
in the 1925 edition of A Vision, in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which would place his encounter with the
influential writer at least a decade earlier.
131

this was done for the common good, lest the whole nation should be injured or
corrupted. (Burton Part I, Sect. 2, Mem II, Subs. VI, quoted in OB 16)

The passage indicates that the population might be saved through selective reproduction and also
suggests that intelligence is a fixed inheritance. Yeats repeatedly refers to “mother-wit”
117
in this
essay, and understands it to be “hereditary like the speed of a dog or a horse” (17). In the last
year of his life the poet turns to an image of unity that comes dangerously close to an insistence
on a kind of racial purity.
118

Yeats returns in this essay to describe the possibility that Ireland will once again become
“molten wax” (18), an image he deployed in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” to describe the
descent into violence of war. Should this happen, Yeats writes, the nation should be molded from
“able men with public minds.” By emphasizing the need for “unique irreplaceable individuals”
(26), the poet seeks once again to inconvenience materialist thought that allows those unique
individuals “to be chopped and measured like a piece of cheese” (26). “How convenient,” he
writes, “if men were but those dots, all exactly alike, all pushable, arrangeable, or as Blake said,
all intermeasurable by one another” (25). Here Yeats refers to his 1897 essay on Blake, where he
had copied Blake’s deathbed musings on “‘dots and lozenges’”:
‘I know too well that the majority of Englishmen are fond of the indefinite . . . a line is a
line in its minutest subdivisions, straight or crooked. It is itself, not intermeasurable by
anything else . . . but since the French Revolution’ – since the reign of reason began, that
is – ‘Englishmen are all intermeasurable by one another; certainly a happy state of
agreement, in which I for one do not agree’

117
This seems to be Yeats’s term; Terman’s “The Measurement of Intelligence,” which the poet obtained from the
Eugenics Society, refers to “intelligence.” The term sounds Shakespearean, but is only used in Taming of the Shrew,
according to Johnson’s Dictionary. (“It is extemporore, from my mother-wit. -- A witty mother! Witless else her
son.”)
118
Yeats was not alone in this new belief; other writers of the time similarly subscribed to eugenics, including
Virginia Woolf.
132

It is possible that Blake, and Yeats following him, is meditating on what Bruno Latour has in
another context described as an instance of the multitude being subordinated to the will, or to
reason, which is figured only as an “abstract geometrical demonstration as opposed to the
many.”
119
In his early essays and poetry, Yeats evinces allegiance to the multitude, as in the
words spoken in the street in “Phases of the Moon,” and in noting in his 1903 essay, “Emotion of
Multitude” that he dislikes clear and logical structure, instead preferring Greek drama, as its
chorus calls up “famous sorrows” and the “emotion of multitude” (E&I 215). French drama, on
the other hand, “leaves out the chorus, so poetry and imagination grows less important than the
mere will” (Ibid.). But in On the Boiler, Yeats looks to disrupt both materialism and
democratization by excluding the emotion of multitude and only speaking in terms of natural
law, or nobility, against reason. In a sense the poet turns the voice of Prince Athanase against his
teacher Zonoras:
Instead of hierarchical society, where all men are different, came democracy; instead of a
science which had rediscovered Anima Mundi, its experiments and observations
confirming the speculations of Henry More, came materialism: all that whiggish world
Swift stared on until he became a raging man. (26)

Setting great individuals against abstract reason or a political system, or the reverse for Latour,
both involve seeking to stand alone against the multitude; Yeats’s vision of noble aristocracy
degenerates into the rule of force.
120
In a letter to Ethel Mannin two years prior to this work he
had expressed his lack of interest in politics as a solution to disunity, a vision which gives way to
rage and warfare: “Besides,” he asks her:

119
See James S. Bono “Introduction: Does the Body Matter?” (1997) for a helpful summary. Bono’s essay is the
introduction to a conference held at SUNY Buffalo, “Does the Body Matter?” (1997), which gathered critics,
philosophers, and scientists together to discuss the body in Western thought. The conference used work by
Hippocrates and Galen to resituate the importance of the body as against abstract reason.
120
See Latour, p. 208.
133

why should I trouble about coming fascism, liberalism, radicalism, when all . . . are going
downstream with the artificial unity which ends every civilization? Only dead sticks can
be tied into convenient bundles. My rage and that of others like me seems more
important—though we may be but the first of the final destroying horde. (L 869)
Yeats is reworking old themes here, as he once again makes use of the metaphor of the dead or
dried sticks as against the living that appeared in “Under Saturn” and “Prayer for My Daughter.”
Against the dead unity created by political systems, such as fascism, whose fasci he perhaps
refers to in the image of the bundle of dead sticks, Yeats proposes the unity that comes from
individuals: “These men, whether six or six thousand, are the core of Ireland, are Ireland itself”
(12).
121
He unites the emphasis on individuality, which is here expressed through rage, with a
call for war that is worthy of Marinetti in its sweeping away of the past:
The danger is that there will be no war, that the skilled will attempt nothing, that the
European civilization, like those older civilizations that saw the triumph of their gangrel
stocks, will accept decay. When I was writing ‘A Vision’ I had constantly the word
‘terror’ impressed upon me, and once the old Stoic prophecy of earthquake, fire, and
flood at the end of an age, but this I did not take literally. It was because of that
indefinable impression that I made Michael Robartes say in ‘A Vision’ : “Dear predatory
birds, prepare for war, prepare your children and all that you can reach . . . test art,
morality, custom, thought . . . make rich and poor act so to one another that they can
stand together there. Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed,
civilization renewed. (19-20)

What accounts for this late embrace of rage and anger? Before this, Yeats held with Cuchulain
that anger destroys the world.
122
Does adopting the symbol of the predatory bird radically break
with his earlier work in which the grey osprey Sorrow preyed upon him and those like him?

121
Despite the pronoun that suggests otherwise, Yeats doesn’t restrain himself to “men” in his list of the “able”:
Augusta Gregory makes the cut in the list he gives later: Berkeley, Swift, Burke, Grattan, Parnell, Augusta Gregory,
Synge, Kevin O’Higgins, are the true Irish people, and there is nothing too hard for such as these” (30).

122
See Kiberd, p. 401.
134

Does this represent his “late enthusiasm for conflict” as Michael Wood describes it, an interest in
violence that is part of his brief fascination with fascism (9)?
123

As usual, the story is more complicated with Yeats. His short prose work reprises old
themes in a section titled “Private Thoughts,” which returns to those early themes of love and
idealism over hatred and materialism. But in the section addressed to “politicians and
journalists,” rage comes to the fore, and the poet seems to utterly break with these early themes.
In turning to social politics the poet “lay[s] aside the pleasant paths I have built up for years [to]
seek the brutality, the ill-breeding, the barbarism of truth” (L 903). These “smiling public men”
are advised to skip the section entitled “Private Thoughts,” where the Anima Mundi appears,
along with his interest in the heroic mind waging battle to turn back aggressive foreign interests,
and he makes his case again for the national unity forged through More’s idealism. In this
section, Yeats is still working out problems seventeenth-century materialism introduced: “in
antiquity,” he writes, space was not separable from, but rather “coincident with objects, the table
not the place it occupies.” In the seventeenth century, however, space
was separated from mind and objects alike, and thought of as a nothing and yet a reality,
the place not the table, with material objects separated from taste, smell, sound, from all
the mathematician could not measure for its sole inhabitant, and this new matter and
space men were told had preceded mind and would live after. Nature or reality as known
to poets and tramps has no moment, no impression, no perception like another,
everything is unique and nothing unique is measurable. (25)

Yeats returns to a moment before Locke’s division of primary and secondary qualities; for poets
and tramps everything is unique because it isn’t divisible from the space it occupies.
124

123
Wood nonetheless reads violence in the middle Yeats as well; his Yeats and Violence (2010) provides an
exhaustive reading of the poet’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” in terms of violence, a word, Wood notes, that
Yeats only uses in three of his poems, ‘Meditations in a Time of Civil War,” “Under Ben Bulben,” and twice in
“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”
135

But in his citation of his past work in juxtaposition to current affairs (as in “I made
Michael Robartes say in ‘A Vision’: dear predatory birds, prepare for war” / “The danger is that
there will be no war” and “instead of a science which had rediscovered Anima Mundi . . . came
materialism”), he identifies with Swift’s rage in staring at a world that hasn’t been changed by
poetry. His self criticism comes to the fore as he describes this prose work as an “abominable
thing” in a letter to Ethel Mannin and expects the opprobrium of his peers (L 905). It seems, in
fact, that the poet in his last year melancholically mourns his own work, incorporating it through
citation, and blasting through it with the manic release of libido that matches the eroticism of the
tragic joy of his late poetry, “an old man’s frenzy.”
125
Or, in the Aristotelian terms that preceded
Freud’s, those with “hot bile are elated and brilliant or erotic, moved to anger, loquacious” (See
Klibansky et al., p. 24). The fire and frenzy of his late poems are matched in life; indeed in the
last years of his life, perhaps rejuvenated by a Steinach operation, the poet had several affairs
with young women, including Ethel Mannin.
The idea that a new kind of melancholy is visible in Yeats’s work through these instances
of citation is supported by Virginia Jackson’s reading of Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Chasm,”
where a “mention” of a painful experience indicates incorporation. While I will propose a
different reading of the poem in question below, Jackson’s reminder that incorporation leads to
self-splitting is very helpful. Yeats becomes set against himself through the internalization of his
past poetic experience, and through the separation of his thought into “public” and “private.” In

124
Locke claims this distinction in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Yeats disputes this idea
directly in his essay on Edmund Burke: the “idea of a physical world without color, without sound, taste, tangibility,
and proved mere category of the mind has remained the assumption of science, and every text-book” (401). He
praises Berkeley, Swift, Burke, and Goldsmith for rejecting Locke and Newton (Ibid.).
125
“An Acre of Grass” (VP 575).
136

his late poetry, Yeats in particular embraces the loss of the mourning that had been so
characteristic and ongoing in his earlier work, and that had guaranteed the integration of space
and objects he is still concerned with in On the Boiler.
For Jahan Ramazani it is a feature of modern elegy beginning around the turn of the
century that the elegist comes to mourn the death of mourning or the death of death,
126
but this is
a turn that comes about very late in Yeats, and that is regarded with joy rather than the pale face
and tears of Tristesse. In “The Gyres,” from New Poems (1938), the poet cites the terror he had
evoked in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” through naming the nightmare and the bloodied
body he described there. But he invokes the suffering of the early poem this time in a context in
which lament has died:
What matter though numb nightmare ride on top,
And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?
What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop,
A greater, a more gracious time has gone;
For painted forms or boxes of make-up
In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;
What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice;
And all it knows is that one word, ‘Rejoice!’
(ll. 9-16)

The “greater, more gracious time” in which the poet could sigh for the passing of the animated
quality of nature and poets, is gone. In “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” for example, which he
perhaps cites here, “many ingenious lovely things are gone.” But the violent events have lost
their unique, irreplaceable position in space through the disappearance of the emotion, which
once gave them continuity. All that is old is about to be swept away, and the prevailing mood is
joy.

126
See pp. 11-16 for a discussion of how the social practices surrounding mourning the dead, including ostentatious
mourning clothes, began to disappear around the turn of the century, leading to comments from Freud and others
about the “death of death.” Benjamin also describes the end of mourning as a public practice in “The Storyteller.”
137

The replacement of tragedy with gaiety, or the way that “gaiety transfigure[es] all that
dread” is once again on display in “Lapis Lazuli” (1938), the next poem in the collection. Peter
Sacks has pointed out that in the elegiac tradition ecstasy is only allowed at a “disastrous cost”
(293), and here we have a sense of loss “All men have aimed at, found and lost” (l. 18) followed
by death and ecstasy “Black out; Heaven blazing into the head” (l. 19). While the poem was
written about a statue of that stone given to Yeats for his seventieth birthday by Harry Clifton, to
whom the poem was dedicated, it was also a stone regarded as a cure to melancholy.
127
Unlike
the tragic sense that extended from “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” in “The Second
Coming,” now:
All things fall apart and are built again,
And those that build them are gay.
(ll. 35-36)

The instantaneous replacement affords joy, not mourning.

On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
(ll. 52-56)

That the “hoods and cloaks of lead” (OB 10) surrounding those living in the wrong age should be
thrown back to reveal joyful figures seems to indicate there is a melancholic structure to the
gyres, and to the phases of the moon, which involves the possibility of reaching the age for
which one is suited. The phase of “Unity of Being” is about to arrive, the Platonic year to come

127
Ficino writes of some of the pills for melancholy: “frankincense, myrrh, saffron, aloe-wood, cinnamon, citron-
peel, Melissa, raw scarlet silk, white ben and red, purple roses, red sandal, red coral.” The stronger pills included:
“peony, myrrh, Arabian stechados, Melissa, frankincense, saffron, roses, and lapis lazuli properly washed and
prepared” (149). Burton’s “Author’s Abstract on Melancholy” also makes reference to the stone (45).

138

full circle; parts will be subordinated to the whole, and “religious, aesthetic, and practical life
[will be] one” (quoted from A Vision in Ross, p. 573).
128

To the end, Yeats maintains a belief in the inexorability of planetary movement, of one’s
necessary fettering to time, but after 1919, when he first published his idea of both the “unity of
being” and his exposition of the phases of the moon, his temporal system includes a moment of
return and renewal.
129
In “The Gyres,” accordingly, the heroic Greek age comes around again,
and “a light goes on in Troy.”
130
It is this capacity of redemption in time that allows for
melancholic incorporation and transcendence over one’s own past, even as this can only happen
once in Yeats’s occult system, namely, just before Phase seventeen of the lunar cycle. This
singularity makes it possible that almost his entire oeuvre can be read without sign of Freudian or
Ficinian melancholy, until this phase appears. At the end of his life, Yeats waits with joy for an
end to the “scattering . . . the seeding of the poppy, bursting of pea-pod” (A 227) in reconciling
unity. This brief moment of transcendence finally leads to the violent, melancholic release from
many years of passive struggle, and the Galenic form of melancholy is overcome by the Ficinian.
In the end, Yeats has it both ways. The poet spent his career seeking an organic unity
created through shared values and stories, through both culture and emotion, in order to resist the
separation of mind from body, of object from space, and individual from context that allows
individuals to be “chopped” like bits of cheese. But if, as Michael North points out, a
reinvigorated sense of “history was the alternative to the liberal separation of individual from

128
The “Platonic year” describes the cycle of the stars, comprising approximately 26,000 years for Yeats. He
mentions this in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”

129
The year does not seem coincidental; this was the year in which the Anglo-Irish War erupted.
130
He writes of the idea of unity of being for the first time in Explorations (1919), written when he was 54 (280).
His “Phases of the Moon” (1919) records the system of the lunar phases.
139

context” (13-14), Yeats’s concept of history becomes in the final account the means for the most
radical separation he evinces; between poet and work, man and his time, and man and his
community, as his sharp self-criticism over On the Boiler reveals. If conservatism shares with
Marxism an interest in attacking “industrial capitalism and liberal democracy as atomizing,
demeaning, and dehumanizing” (North 5), his work finally gives way to that scattering as a
means to new unity, allowing that forcible division, evincing melancholy in the Ficinian sense,
and compromising his politics. In the next chapter, I will return to the consideration of the
temporal aspects involved in melancholy in investigating Emily Dickinson, a poet, I will argue,
who remained firmly rooted in the spatial, thus going further than Yeats in her poetry and
politics.

140

Chapter Four
Dickinson’s Grief: Anti-Elegy and American Identity

This chapter argues that Emily Dickinson’s poetry presents a non-consolatory form of
mourning that diverges from the Ficinian tradition of melancholy and its afterlife in Freudian
psychoanalysis. This is apparent from Dickinson’s dismantling of traditional elegy, which shares
the psychoanalytic emphasis on a strong relationship between loss and figuration. In both
Freud’s description of mourning and in the elegiac tradition extending from Milton, any mourner
must perform an act of substitution in order to move on from loss. As I describe, however, the
elegiac tradition urges the mourner to perform a figurative substitution or tropological transition
as a path to recovery, even as in Freud it is just such substitutions that create the precondition for
melancholy, as abstractions come to stand in for a loved one. On my account, this explains what
otherwise presents a conundrum: that the Freudian mourner, similarly to the melancholic,
oscillates between mania and depression, or between restoration and destructive aggression. I
will suggest that Emily Dickinson creates a very different poetics in relation to this picture,
refusing the figurative move whereby others, along with nature, can be successfully replaced and
consolation achieved.
While Dickinson thus shares with the melancholic the outward symptom of a blockage in
the conversion of mourning to hope, her poetry comes up against a formal impossibility, rather
than a temporal inconvenience, in the attempt to resolve grief. In the case of the Freudian or
Ficinian melancholic the blockage is temporary, and can be successfully overcome in time. The
formal difficulty loss presents links Dickinson to William Butler Yeats, whose poetry also
evinced a hesitation before the symbolizing move in the Romantic mode. But unlike Yeats,
Dickinson’s non-consolatory lamentations do not include a possibility for ongoing continuity
141

with nature through retaining emotional attachments, and do not allow for the eventual
overcoming of nature through transcending time. In keeping with the despair and anti-
intellectualism of the Galenic tradition of melancholy, in Dickinson’s poems intellect remains in
exile and sentimentality gains no purchase on pain. Her poetry paradoxically suggests that
understanding death and loss requires abandoning systematicity and order.
I begin by contextualizing grief, and in particular so-called feminine forms of grieving, in
the nineteenth century. Critical approaches to Dickinson, I will argue, have followed in the
longer tradition of thinking about melancholy by seeking to overturn the poet’s mournful
withdrawal into private grief with a heroic and public form of melancholy. I will not follow in
this prevailing critical trend of reversing the gender binary to show that Dickinson’s verse is
active, where it has been read as passive, or that she creates a “divine self” where she has been
read as withdrawn. Instead, I use an investigation of the elegiac tradition to show that the poet
eschews the logic of domination and victimization inherent to Freud’s supposedly binary pair of
melancholy and mourning, or health and pathology. Dickinson’s poetry breaks with narcissistic
attachments in the romantic and psychoanalytic sense. Because objects cannot be substituted,
through repetition, doubling, or trope language, intellection, and sentiment necessarily fail the
would-be mourner in the face of suffering. In choosing not to create or attach to abstractions,
such as an idealized loved one, or more broadly the “nation,” or “representative American,”
which could heal a splintering, wounded American nation in a time of civil war, Dickinson’s
poetry radically turns away from abstractions and toward, simply, nature. Susan Howe’s
pioneering My Emily Dickinson (1985) applies a similar argument to Dickinson’s work in her
aphoristic comment: “Dickinson takes sovereignty away from God and bestows it on the Woods”
(80). And Dickinson herself applies it to her concept of national belonging: “My Country ‘tis of
142

thee—has always meant the Woods” (L 509 ca. 1877). Dickinson, I argue, creates a more
rigorous ethic in regards to others and objects in her non-consolatory, non-elegiac poetry by
relentlessly turning away from the logic of substitution, and she at the same time critiques the
hollowness of a national ideal, instead turning toward the plenitude, proliferation, and freedom of
nature.
Dickinson’s poetry has been classified as “sentimental” for its testimony to pain. Early
biographic and psychoanalytic studies typically examined the poet through the lens of her
withdrawal from society and through what Martha Nell Smith has criticized as “the standard
heterosexual plot of women helplessly in love,” a plot that hinges on how “the Poetess often
robed herself in white, was reclusive, and harbored some ‘secret sorrow’ quietly as she wrote
poems at home” (65).
131
Dickinson has also been caricatured as a “little home-keeping
person,”
132
and sentimentalized as a girl in need of rescue from her father’s house. There is
certainly biographical information that supports Dickinson’s self-imposed burial at home. At the
age of twenty-four, the poet was already mentioning in her correspondence her strong preference
not to venture out of her house. What is commonly referred to as the “myth” adhering to the poet
is that after the autumn of 1865—when she went to Amherst for eye treatments—she never left
the town again, and only rarely left her family’s grounds (Sewall, 1: 23-24). She might have
walked down the narrow wooded path separating her home from her brother’s, The Evergreens,

131
Smith refers to Cheryl Walker’s designation of female suffering as “secret sorrow” in The Nightingale’s Burden
(99). Walker herself notes that Dickinson offers the “enduring form” of the secret sorrow, offering her “Mirth is the
Mail of Anguish” as an example (89).
132
See John Crowe Ransom, “Emily Dickinson: A Poet Restored.”
143

several times after this date, but failed to do so when Emerson came to visit.
133
While this
anecdote of her missed chance to meet the famous transcendentalist is most often repeated as
exemplifying the acuteness of her condition, it seems altogether more surprising that Dickinson
had portions of the funeral music of her beloved friend Samuel Bowles repeated at home, since
she wouldn’t leave her house to attend religious services, and that she listened to the funeral
service for her own mother from upstairs.
134
John Cody’s After Great Pain is the best-known of
the psychoanalytic approaches to the poet, and examines her agoraphobia as a sign of her
“helplessness, vulnerability, and infantile dependence” (47). He refers to her withdrawal as
“compulsive self-entombment” (Ibid.).
135
The analyst hypothesizes that Dickinson’s “failure . . .
to achieve complete fulfillment socially and sexually and the anxiety and ambivalence which
subverted her ambition to reach the reading public she merited are ultimately traceable to
psychological determinants rooted in her transactions with her mother” (41). This private
anguish, other critics have joined Cody in asserting, may have made her a stronger writer, but did
little to provoke her participation in history.

133
Aife Murray notes that her social isolation was not as extreme as this mere fact would leave one to assume in
confronting the “myth” surrounding Dickinson. In her “Architecture of the Unseen” (2008), an essay that explores
the physical space of class in both Dickinson’s home life and her poetry, Murray writes: “Even when Dickinson
swept herself from the view of Yankee Amherst and into the confines of the Homestead property, traders and
tinsmiths knocked at her door, the gardener brought clippings, her maid addressed her envelopes, stablemen daily
brought in warm pails of milk, and she dried the plates her maid washed. She was affected by the changing race and
class issues of her time and theirs. In large and subtle ways her servants and working-class figures people the fabric
of her poems and letters” (34).

134
See Cody 20-21. The psychoanalyst also notes that she had to have her dresses fitted to her sister, and doctor’s
visits completed by proxy, since she would not see either seamstresses or doctors (46).
135
The psychoanalytic approach to Dickinson has not been entirely abandoned; as recently as 2000 John McDermott
writes in The Emily Dickinson Journal of the possible relationship between her “nervous prostration” or panic
attacks and her poetry.
144

“Sentimental” was not a laudatory label at the end of the nineteenth century. Greg Forter,
for example, in his Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism (2011), refers to
sentimentality as the “cardinal modernist sin” (5). Peter Sacks adds that the modern poet sought
to disentangle himself from the “excesses of Victorian sentimentality” through impersonality
(261). Cheryl Walker, in The Nightingale’s Burden (1982), describes it as “that badge of failed
politics” (99). In her discussion of the emergence of the lyric genre in Dickinson’s Misery
(2005), Virginia Jackson similarly characterizes the nineteenth century as “discomfit[ted] with
feminine lyric sentimental excess” (218). Jackson notes a prevailing tendency to “align private
suffering with a simultaneously feminized and infantilized version of the masculine self,” and
critiques the anti-sentimental moderns for the argument that transcending private pain is
necessary to culture (pp. 217-18). Cheryl Walker has described how suffering in the nineteenth
century was often portrayed as what she terms the “secret sorrow” (88) and how the suffering
subject was “forced—by circumstance or by her own modesty—to bear her burden of affection
and pain in a private world” (Jackson 210).
136
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out in their
classic work The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) that early commentators on Dickinson, such as
John Crowe Ransom and John Cody, “assume that the art of a woman poet must in some sense
arise from ‘romantic’ feelings (in the popular, sentimental sense), either in response to real
romance or as compensation for a missing one” (543). Cody, for example, writes in After Great
Pain (1979) that “desolation, hopelessness, and a fierce and frustrated longing arise from nearly
every page” of Dickinson’s poetry (23). Poets of the time were well aware of the negative
associations of the label of sentimentality. Matthew Arnold suppressed his poem “Empedocles
on Etna” from his 1853 edition of Poems for the reason that “‘the suffering [it depicts] finds no

136
See Jackson, p. 210. Jackson glosses this passage as the thesis of Walker’s study.
145

vent in action . . . a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope
or resistance . . . there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done’” (quoted in Jackson, pp.
216-17). In order to be taken seriously, a poet thus had to prove her verse was active, not stymied
by excessive feeling.
Juliana Schiesari has described such denigration of female grief in terms of a gendering
of melancholia. For Schiesari, an inert form of feminine grief has been unfavorably compared
with the masculine stance, which is both active and resistant (pp. 3-12). Melancholy and male
depression, according to Schiesari, have been historically understood as a specific form of
creativity, elite status, and genius, “a position that is denied to women, who are instead
associated with depression” (12). She refers to this as the “cultural devaluation” of female
suffering (Ibid.). While Schiesari’s study centers on Renaissance texts, the effects of these earlier
formulations of melancholy can still be felt in nineteenth-century American attitudes toward
sentimentalism in literature. One example of this attitude is Samuel Bowles’s article “Why We
Should Write” (1860). The article describes “the literature of misery,” which is chiefly authored
by women, “gifted women may be . . . but poor, lonely and unhappy.” The suffering this
literature depicts is, for Bowles, “so seldom healthful” (Sewall 2: 489-90).
137
The suffering
female body “clouds, withers, distorts” reality, obscuring truth (Ibid).
138
The imagery Bowles
employs is familiar from humoral medicine, where it is the onset of winter that carries with it the
melancholic complaint. Even the cloudiness in his description recalls the dampness of the humor
that obscures the dry light of reason. In the Ficinian tradition of melancholy, once the light of

137
Jackson reprints all but the first two lines of the article, p. 215.
138
Bacon’s Great Instauration contains remarks to the effect that the “human understanding is not a dry light, but is
infused by desire and emotion, which give rise to ‘wishful science’” (Funari 19). Bacon’s project is to purge those
emotions.
146

truth is perceived, the suffering, gendered and racialized body is overcome. In keeping with the
dialectical oscillation of the Ficinian tradition, it is not only the contagion of female depression
that must be overcome for successful literary expression, but the unruly body itself.
It is this need to transcend the body that connects the study of melancholy with identity
politics. As Virginia Jackson describes in her study of the lyric, a poet attempts to disentangle
subjective representation from personal interest, as well as gendered and sexualized interest, by
seeking to “extricate first-person expression from the referential claims of singular bodies”
(219). The “lift[ing],” “elevat[ion],” “transcendence” (Ibid.), and “abstraction” (236) over
embodiment can be read as attempting to find a universal position from which to speak. Arnold,
Griswold, and Bowles all find this universalizing move necessary to overcome the limitations of
sentimental lyric poetry. For Schiesari, it is the female body that is situated as “abject and at
fault” (10) in order for the male body/phallus to rise to predominance. Analyzed from the point
of view of melancholy, the subordination of the female body can be described in terms of
incorporation, the assimilation of difference into a dominant (usually male, white, heterosexual)
body. This is the process that produces the “representative American,” denying, subjugating
otherness in its rise to predominance. For Cheng, the racialized/gendered other is “assimilated”
or “uneasily digested by – American culture” (10), thereby being rendered “an ‘object,’ a ‘loss,’
an ‘invisibility,’ or a ‘phantom’” (14). But in Cheng’s study, as in those of the critics described
above, feminized or “racialized minorities” also respond melancholically to loss, meaning that
they repeat the same process of internalization in order to give rise to their own version of
representativeness (20). Such reversal, as the circularity of Baudelaire’s system demonstrated,
allows no escape from the relations of victim and victimizer.
147

Early charges that suggest Dickinson lived “‘outside/apart from any existence in history’”
(Keller, 23, 104, 110) take off from such views of the poet as figuratively incorporated by
masculine culture, or as actually inhumed in the family home. This is a position that has not been
entirely abandoned by feminist re-readings of the poet. Even as Gilbert and Gubar, for example,
critique the “romantic” readings of Dickinson in their classic Madwoman in the Attic (1979),
their writing seems to reconfirm this bias. For instance, they describe Dickinson as a “nun . . .
buried alive in her own society” (620). The nineteenth-century predisposition toward viewing a
female poet through gender has been most frequently countered through a reversal of the gender
binary. Adrienne Rich, for example, famously reverses the idea of the shy, reclusive poet in her
classic essay “Vesuvius at Home” (1979), aiming to expose the “lethal power” of the
feminine.
139
Gilbert and Gubar join in critiquing the masculinist point of view that lyric poetry is
“inherently incompatible with the nature or essence of femaleness” by arguing that Dickinson
eschews “the symbolic castration implicit in female powerlessness” in order to embrace a
typically masculine form of creativity in her work (541).
140
Critics have thus used a reversal of
the gender binary in order to explain the power of Dickinson’s verse.
141

139
It seems the poet might actually have been referring to her father in the line “Vesuvius at Home.” In his
biography of the poet, Sewall notes that “Vesuvius at home” was a nickname for Dickinson’s father (1: 62).
140
Virginia Jackson points out that Sharon Cameron, without aligning herself with Rich and Gilbert and Gubar’s
feminist readings, nonetheless finds a “‘dialectic of rage’” in this iconic poem, that has “similar utopian
possibilities” (See Jackson, p. 233 and Cameron, Lyric Time 55-90).
141
An exception to the general trend of viewing Dickinson in terms of a victimized sexuality or progressive political
presence has been Domhnall Mitchell, who has found Dickinson to be a reactionary, or, in his terms, “contemptuous
of progressive politics.” Mitchell finds evidence of Dickinson’s class privilege and outlook both in the poems, and in
incidental biographical details, such as her being able to work alone by lamplight at night (194). See also Bennett,
194. On the issue of race and class, see Miller and Juhasz, 219-20 and Mitchell’s essay in A Companion to Emily
Dickinson, which assesses racism and classism in Dickinson’s poetry.
148

The reversal of the gender binary has also structured how critics treat the issue of
Dickinson’s involvement in the Civil War, as the poet is turned from virginal girl or spinster—
both often represented as empty vessels—to national hero. By far the most lasting and
provocative charge in Dickinson criticism is that the poet never referred to the contemporaneous
Civil War in her writing. David Porter states the case most baldly in Emily Dickinson: The
Modern Idiom (1981): “there is no Civil War in the flood of poems from the war years” (115).
142

Important inroads have since been made in the scholarship in regards to Dickinson’s
responsiveness to the war; attention to the productivity of her writing during the war years
(1861-65) has grown since Shira Wolosky’s path-breaking Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War
(1984).
143
Wolosky’s study has been followed by the collection of essays in Pollak’s A Historical
Guide to Emily Dickinson (2004), and Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz’s A Companion
to Emily Dickinson (2008). Such studies depict her as a writer who completed approximately half
of her 1,789 poems during the war, and who sought to work out a new poetic system with which
to confront the collapse of traditional structures that serve to make the world meaningful.
Wolosky finds, following George Frederickson’s classic The Inner Civil War (1965), that a
confrontation with suffering is one of the most significant aspects of the experience of the Civil
War, an experience that was characterized by the collapse of design and purpose, and the failure
of religious response (24).
Recent scholarship has followed Wolosky’s lead in reconsidering Dickinson’s distress in
terms of the “religious anguish” and “collapse of faith” brought about by the breakdown of belief

142
Shira Wolosky mentions this assertion in her article “Emily Dickinson’s War Poetry,” (1984), p. 23.
143
In her article “Emily Dickinson’s War Poetry,” Wolosky recognizes Thomas Ford as the sole predecessor to her
own work. Ford’s “Emily Dickinson and the Civil War” appeared in 1965 (23). Wolosky shares with Ford the view
that Dickinson’s vast poetic production during the war years signals her engagement with history (33).
149

and coherence associated with civil war. Wolosky’s intervention in Dickinson’s critical wake
hinges on finding a public persona for the poet, and her collected essays go so far as to make of
Dickinson “a representative American” (10), a phrase that is repeated in Pollak’s recent
collection of essays, A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson (14, 2004). Betsy Erkkila follows
Wolosky in arguing against the view of Dickinson as “an essentially ‘private’ and isolated poet”
(137). Erkkila instead situates her as “a witty and articulate spokesperson for an essentially
conservative tradition” (Ibid.).
144
Critique and reassessment of Dickinson thus depend on
establishing a public persona for a writer who, it should be mentioned, did not even have the
right to vote during her lifetime.
The historical choices critics have thus imagined to be available to Dickinson as a poet
involved in history are circumscribed within a binary of effeminate withdrawal or heroic
transcendence.
145
Reevaluations of the poet’s participation in the Civil War—like Gilbert and
Gubar’s feminist revision—have relied on overturning the positions of high and low in binaries
such as male/female, public/private, sentimental/active, hero/victim. This critical intervention
does little to address the underlying power relations through which women and others have been
marginalized by these very terms, however, and does little to address the way that Dickinson
employs an alternative aesthetic and imaginative process in her work. Dickinson’s non-

144
The idea of the “representative American” is adopted from Frederickson’s The Inner Civil War (1965), although
his book importantly establishes representative American intellectuals, following Emerson, as characterized by
“privacy and detachment” (10).
145
For Jackson, sentimental poetry is the most symbolic production of the “double logic of power and victimization”
(211).
150

dialectical response to loss, as in the Galenic tradition of melancholy, avoids the dichotomy by
avoiding positions of mastery and victimhood.
146

To write anti-elegiac poetry, as I will claim Dickinson does, is to reclaim a grieving
position that differs from both Freudian mourning and melancholia, both of which have been
used to describe the genre. Peter Sacks’s classic The English Elegy (1985), for example,
proposes that the genre can be read in terms of Freud’s normative mourning, which involves
finding and attaching to a substitute after one’s beloved has died. In making use of Freud’s
psychoanalytic account of mourning, however, Sacks blends the cure to mourning with that of
melancholy, as he suggests that the figurative substitutions in the genre of elegy work in the
same way as the act of finding a new beloved after the original has died does in psychology. He
describes the way that a lover can recast his beloved into organic form, such as a tree, so as not
to have to lose her, and comments: “It is this substitutive turn or act of troping that any mourner
must perform” (5). More recently, Jahan Ramazani has, in his Poetry of Mourning (2005), picked
up on the way that Sacks actually describes Freudian melancholy in his study of elegy. Ramazani

146
Several critics have been cognizant of the way that Dickinson creates a new non-dialectical system of belief.
Mary Loeffelholz points out in her Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory (1991) that reading Dickinson
as undoing binary oppositions was the productive result of new approaches to the poet after the New Criticism,
namely feminism and deconstruction. Loeffelholz names Margaret Homans’s Women Writers and Poetic Identity
(1981) along with Helen McNeil’s Emily Dickinson (1986) and Cristanne Miller’s Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s
Grammar (1987) as combining the two approaches. Joanne Feit Diehl’s Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination
(1981) also shows, according to Loeffelholz, Dickinson’s unconventional language. Her unconventionality takes on
a gendered meaning as her “words are now credited with deconstructing binary gender oppositions and rewriting the
conventionally gendered relationship between the poet and his muse, the poet and his literary tradition” (pp. 1-3).
Gary Lee Stonum argues in The Dickinson Sublime (1990) that Dickinson’s poetry “register[s] discomfort about the
heroic poet’s mastery” (13). For Stonum, her rejection of this mastery has to do with how the category carries the
slave with it as a necessary corollary: the cost of the writer’s success is “dominion over the reader” (15). He notes
that in “Four Trees – upon a solitary Acre –” Dickinson instead envisions the trees as having “monarchical dominion
over the scene” (16).

151

uses the symptoms of Freudian melancholy to define melancholic elegists, who display in their
poetry “fierce resistance to solace, their intense criticism and self-criticism” (4). But once again,
there is a problem in defining the elegist’s melancholy in terms of Freud’s definition as he notes
that modern melancholics “‘mourn’ specific deaths, not the vague or unconscious losses of
melancholia” (Ibid.). Peter Sacks’s study would have it that the consolatory “organic
metamorphosis” of the elegiac tradition is the same as consoling oneself with a concrete
substitute and Ramazani’s study would have it that melancholy could be produced by mourning
real people rather than abstractions. My own study will insist on the importance of this slippage.
I will keep to the psychoanalytic account in suggesting that melancholy requires attachment to
abstractions, and requires an act of figuration or internalization in response to that loss. This
overcoming happens twice in melancholy, first as the external object or person is transferred to
an internal position, and second as that internalization is overcome in manic transcendence.
To write anti-elegiac poetry, as Dickinson does, is to reclaim a mourning position that
diverges from both Freud’s description of normative mourning and of the melancholic refusal to
mourn. Dickinson’s radical writings on grief show a refusal of both kinds of substitution:
To fill a Gap
Insert the Thing that caused it –
Block it up
With other – and ‘twill yawn the more –
You cannot +solder an Abyss
With Air.

+ Plug a Sepulcher

c. 1862 (Fr 753, J 546)

To borrow a phrase from Mitchell Breitwieser, who reads these lines in a similar fashion,
Dickinson’s poetry shows that the “conversion of mourning into hope” (259) is obstructed by the
152

impossibility of finding a substitute object; the original has been perceived with far too much
specificity and clarity.
147
In refusing both forms of substitution, Dickinson diverges from this
oscillating pair of health and pathology in Freud.
In order to examine Dickinson’s divergence from the picture of elegiac mourning created
through both Sacks’s and Ramazani’s accounts, I will compare her work with John Milton’s,
which has represented the classical locus for theories of elegy, and Walt Whitman’s, Dickinson’s
contemporary. Whitman, who served as a nurse during the Civil War, published both his “The
Wound-Dresser” and his famous elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” in the same
year as Dickinson’s “This Chasm” (1865). All of these works appeared in the year of the war’s
conclusion.
148
But Whitman’s poems remain within Freudian melancholy, as the narcissistic
identification between mourner and mourned is the means to survival, at least in the aesthetic
form. The final stanza of the second section of “The Wound-Dresser” presents this fantasy as the
speaker, who is closely identified with Whitman, describes walking along the rows of soldiers’
beds, and longs to trade place with one:
I onward go, I stop,
With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds
I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable,
One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never
knew you,

147
Breitwieser writes: “A dead thing is removed from the field of the possible, and longing can posit a future object
as a sufficient resolution of lack only if it can distract memory from the particular features of the lost thing; but if the
lost thing is remembered sharply and in its particularity, the substitution of longing for grief is not a compelling
option” (260). Although Freud only writes sparingly on what he describes as the normative condition of mourning,
the psychoanalyst might well have been aware of the difficulty in choosing a substitute object. It is possible he
recognized the difficulty that confronted his melancholic and mourner equally. In his correspondence he notes: “‘No
matter what fills the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else’” (quoted in Sacks,
p. 7).
148
“The Wound-Dresser” first appeared under the title “The Dresser” in Drum-Taps in 1865. It would be reprinted
under its current title in the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass.
153

Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that
would save you.

Whitman’s speaker remains, though, in order to present the experience of the wounded soldiers,
which would otherwise be lost to history. With remarkable mobility through time, the speaker
returns “to the long rows of cots up and down each side” to collect that experience, which is
represented here as fragmented parts: “The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the
bandage away),” the “neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet,” the eye, the “stump of the arm,
the amputated hand . . . the bloody stump,” the “perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-
wound.” While Sacks notes that synecdoche was always part of the elegiac tradition, as the
mourner “isolates a part of the body as locus of pain” (102), the synecdochic relationship here is
not that between the self and the divine, but rather between a lost beloved and the mourner’s own
body.
149
Whitman’s poetic persona provides the survival of the soldiers’ memory, or at least their
parts, in his own form: “I am faithful, I do not give out.”
150
And in the final couplet Whitman
parenthetically presents the entwining that in Dickinson’s terms keeps the tomb open: “(Many a
soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, / Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on
these bearded lips.).” In keeping with Freudian melancholy, the fractured limbs and body parts of
the soldiers come to take on meaning in relation to Whitman’s own enhanced self, as external
existence is incorporated into the ego of the mourner. One thinks of Henry James’s review of
Whitman’s persona in Drum Taps as a “self-absorbed seducer.” Cavitch quotes this review, and
comments that “Americanness” for Whitman came to be “a kind of erotic consolation for what

149
Agamben reads the fetish in synecdoche along with its close relative, metonymy. As he writes “The substitution
of part for whole or contiguous object for another corresponds, in fetishism, to the substitution of one part of the
body for the whole partner (32).
150
Compare to J. R. Bagby’s “The Empty Sleeve” (1864): “Bravely your arm in battle strove, / Freely for Freedom’s
sake you gave it; / It has perished—but a nation’s love / In proud remembrance will save it” (Bennett, 2005, p. 153).
154

are otherwise ‘indistinguishable’ and therefore otherwise ungrievable privations of his own
American life” (283). Whitman’s body is metaphorized and there is also a turn toward an
abstraction, Americanness, to substitute for loss, whether that loss refers to an unmournable
private sorrow or to the public problem of mass death in the war.
151

In contrast to Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser,” Dickinson’s “This Chasm, Sweet, opon
my Life” could effectively be read as the wounded soldier’s protest at the absurdity of being
entombed in the experience of another. The poem seems to cite a painful experience, which, in
accord with the psychoanalytic and gendered bias described, above critics have long interested
themselves in deciphering, both in this poem and elsewhere in her work.
152
Instead of reading
this poem in terms of the “secret sorrow,” however, I will demonstrate how it disparages the
romantic attachment and narcissistic identification that characterizes Whitman’s “Wound
Dresser.” Rather than disclosing a painful experience, such as the loss of a loved one or painful
awareness of the Civil War, I will argue that this poem critiques the sentimental attachment and
narcissistic identification that keeps the lost loved one alive through mourning, and the burden
this creates.
This Chasm, Sweet, opon my life
I mention it to you,

151
Wolosky points out that the violence of the Civil War was “cataclysmic”; in a population of thirty million,
500,000 died (1984, p. 91). It was, she notes, proclaimed the “Holy Destruction” (Ibid.). Frederickson, in The Inner
Civil War, calls on Henry James’s reflection that consciousness changed in the war, and that many writers figured
the change in terms of eating of the Tree of Eden (1).
152
See McDermott, who attempts to determine the foundation of Dickinson’s “nervous prostration” by locating a
specific crisis in her life, noting that 1862 is the “period of her greatest turmoil [and ] . . . also the period of her
highest output” (76). Faith Barrett determines it might have been the death in this year of Frazer Stearns, the
substitute her beloved brother Austin hired to replace him in the war, that so unraveled her (109). Gilbert and Gubar
try to locate the referent for the “chasm” in this particular poem, and find generally Dickinson is parodying love
poetry here (628). Virginia Jackson reads the speaker as “mention[ing]” a painful experience, and then proceeding to
“its internalization, its incorporation” (222).
155

When Sunrise through a fissure drop
The Day must follow too.

If we demur, it’s gaping sides
Disclose, as ‘twere a Tomb
Ourself am lying straight wherein
The Favorite of Doom –

When it has just contained a Life
Then, Darling, it will close
And yet so bolder every Day
So turbulent it grows

I’m tempted half to stitch it up
With a remaining Breath
I should not miss in yielding, though
To Him, it would be Death –

And so I bear it big about
My Burial – before
A Life quite ready to depart
Can harass me no more –

ca. 1865 Fr 1061

Dickinson criticism is full of references to self-splittings or cleavings, and the separation
between “I” and “Him” in the penultimate stanza could certainly be such a splitting.
153
But if
Dickinson’s poem is read against this critical grain as instead a rebuke to the narcissistic
identification that seeks to stay death through the fantasy of substitution and perfect reciprocity,
the picture becomes more complex. The poem’s complicated syntax deserves some unpacking.
Even as the poem begins with a sense of time moving forward, as sunrise betokens the coming
day, the poem’s action extends in a hesitation: “if we demur.” If we hesitate to walk by, or even,
perhaps, if we hesitate to speak, we will perceive a tomb by the light of sunrise dropping through

153
This is how Virginia Jackson reads the poem, though the self-splitting, she argues, is a riddle posed by lyric
reading in general, and is ultimately a sign of the breakdown of the genre. For Jackson, the “division of the proper,
of the self from itself is . . . perhaps the signature characteristic of the subjectivity Dickinson bequeaths to literary
history—it has, in fact, often been understood as the sign of Dickinson’s modernity (223).
156

the fissure. Surprisingly, “ourself,” a collective pronoun referring to each other, one another, is
found within the tomb. The unlucky pair has been chosen “the Favorite of Doom.” When the
chasm has “just contained a Life” it will close. “Just” has somewhat indeterminate meaning. It
could refer to the temporal sense of its immediate closing upon containing a life, but given the
oddity of the pronoun use, this phrasing also calls attention to the possibility that the tomb will
only close when it contains a singular life, rather than the bound, reflexive “ourself.” The speaker
could stitch up the fissure by yielding, by exhaling a last breath, but has not done so because it
will “kill” the other half of “ourself.” So instead, the speaker bears (in all the senses of the word:
carries, discloses, withstands, contains, maintains, identifies with, endures, tolerates, exalts,
mothers, engenders, gives birth to)
154
“it,” or his chasm, burial, funeral. The speaker painfully
hesitates until the other can accept his death, until the “I” and “He” can end their relationship of
harassment, and accept separation.
155

What is upon first reading so disturbing in Dickinson’s poem, the idea that life is
grieving, an open chasm, and death the absence of such harassment, becomes more
understandable when we note that claiming to know what the other is feeling risks occluding that
experience. Whitman’s speaker’s empathetic representation of the soldiers’ pain is indissociable
from his own pain. The lines from the second stanza above demonstrate this very well: “the
pangs are sharp yet unavoidable” could refer to either the physical duress of bearing a wound, or
the psychological trauma of bearing witness to such suffering: “Yet I think I could not refuse this
moment to die for you, if that would save you.” In the third section of the poem, the attempt to

154
See Emily Dickinson Lexicon, “bears.”
155
Cristanne Miller writes about “ourself” as presenting a “symbolic one,” or unity between self and lover or self
and reader (62).
157

represent the soldier’s experience once again could refer to the speaker’s own discomfort: “he
dares not look on the bloody stump.” And the “gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so
offensive” again seems to present the nurse’s reaction rather than the soldier’s. The sudden urge
“(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death! / In mercy come quickly)” expresses a
desire to outlive the other. The vertically-directed vocative expresses the speaker’s own desire
for immortality through lament. This speaks to what Max Cavitch in American Elegy: The
Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (2007) calls the “reflexive position of the
elegist, setting out to fill the emptiness of the memorial frame with an adequate image not only
of the departed but also of the mourner himself” (250). This reflexive position presents the
obverse perspective of Dickinson’s speaker, who bears loss fruitlessly, without the potential gain
of self-aggrandizement or survival.
Whitman’s speaker’s melancholic inability to let the loved one go is resolved through
remembrance, or by bringing the fullness of the past into the present, by stopping to tell of it. But
the continuity is ultimately produced by the speaker’s establishment of his body as a substitute
object for lost loved ones: he speaks in the present to idealized “maidens and young men I love
and that love me” about how “many a soldier’s kiss dwells on [his] bearded lips.”
156
Like
Dickinson’s fissure, Whitman’s open lips keep the soldiers—and love—alive. In Dickinson’s
poem, meanwhile, the demurring to speak or wait keeps the chasm—and the wound—painfully
open. While Whitman’s speaker achieves unity in transcending time and others, “I am the poet of
the Body, and I am the poet of the Soul,” Dickinson’s remains “afraid to own a body,” which in

156
In Yeats’s use of folklore to bring the past into the present, it was instead the body of a flower, or rock and hill,
that the “great passions” would collect around.
158

this context speaks to her refusal of possession of any body, and her acceptance of the result:
parts do not cohere in her poetry.
While Dickinson “eschews a visionary grasp of the whole,” instead remaining fettered to
the present, Whitman’s poem more nearly follows the elegiac tradition, in which an idyll is lost,
but consolation is achieved by the restoration of unity (Wolosky, 2004, p. 113). This restoration
guarantees the speaker’s own survival. Peter Sacks describes the work of consolation as
reconstituting the “figure of the diurnal round, healing, in fact, the ‘heavy change’ which
suddenly comes to rob the inset, recollected pastoral of its perfection” (99).
157
In Milton’s
“Lycidas,” which provides the classic model of elegiac mourning, the loss of a loved one is
portrayed as a loss of continuity in nature that can only be redeemed by mastering time.
Continuity in Milton’s scene is created both by the integration of the two shepherds with nature
and time’s imbrications in the natural:
For we were nursed upon the self-same hill,
Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill.
Together both, ere the high lawns appeared
Under the opening eye-lids of the morn,
We drove afield, and both together heard
What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,
Batt’ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night,
Oft till the star that rose at ev’ning bright
Toward Heav’n’s descent had sloped his westering wheel.
(ll. 23-31)

If sunset is marked by the beetle’s (gray-fly’s) song, and the duration of night both by the dew
and by the path of the star, Venus, in orbit, the death of one shepherd is represented as a breach
in this cyclical continuity of nature and time. Death marks a rupture in time, as the season is

157
For more on elegy as aimed at consolation through the mastery of time, see Alexandra Socarides and her
discussion of elegy in “The Poetics of Interruption: Dickinson, Death, and the Fascicles” (2008), p. 317.
159

curtailed too early. The speaker of the poem likens his companion’s death to the loss of an
unripened fruit; before either can
. . . think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorrèd shears
And slits the thin-spun life. (…)
(ll. 74-76)

This unprovoked violence justifies violence in response: “Lycidas” begins with the speaker
apologizing for disturbing the vine’s season of growth:
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude
And with forced fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
(ll. 3-5)

The speaker implicitly compares his own unseasonable approach to the killing effect of the “frost
to flow’rs, that their gay wardrobe wear, / When first the white thorn blows—” (ll. 47-48). If the
mastery of time is key to consolation, Milton’s poem reveals this is indissociable from the
mastery of nature.
Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865), the famous elegy
penned after President Lincoln’s assassination, follows the elegiac genre in presenting nature’s
cyclical return, and the way the lost loved one has dropped out of that continuity, a difficulty the
poem will formally resolve. The poem begins somewhat unconventionally; the recollected
pastoral is already a scene of mourning, which death itself interrupts in the second section.
1
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
160

2

O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.

Despite its unconventionality in beginning with mourning, the first section of the poem follows
the genre closely by conjuring an organic continuity both rhetorically and thematically as
Whitman describes a pastoral scene through images of sunset, the perennial bloom of lilac
flowers, and the repetition of “ever-returning spring.” The repetition of the sonorous
“droop’d/drooping,” “bloom’d/blooming,” “mourn’d/mourn” also works rhetorically to reinforce
a feeling of stasis, a stasis that is underlined by the linking of the past tense of the verbs to the
future tense. Sonorous repetition is replaced in the second section by death, and by the
accompanying jarring vocative “O;” the use of the coordinating conjunction “and” gives way to
the ellipsis of long dashes and the suspension of the closing exclamations. It is a present in which
Lincoln’s body is, in Fritzsche’s words, “stranded in the present,” estranged from the “diurnal
round” as the funeral cortege leads to his grave. In the fifth section, the body passes the natural
markers of time, the violets, wheat, and apple blossoms just blooming, as though in its own orbit:
5
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep’d from the
ground, spotting the gray debris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.

161

The restless coffin relentlessly moves toward the “last bloom,” in distinction to the enduring
quality of the “endless grass” and the violets that intermingle with debris. The poignancy of the
closing couplet in the sixth section, “Here, coffin that slowly passes, / I give you my sprig of
lilac,” is created by the attempt to attach the body once again to time, to the springtime, to the
morning, to “blossoms and branches green,” and to the “lilac that blooms the first,” rather than
the last.
This attempt at attachment bears some of the violence of Milton’s “Lycidas,” as the
speaker fragments a whole, plucking the sprig of lilac as berries might be plucked. This
fragmentation paves the way for attachment to an abstraction, rather than a concrete replacement,
as the lost Lycidas is metaphorically transformed into the sun:
Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the wat-ry floor!
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed
And yet anon repairs his drooping head
And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high
(ll. 165-72)
. . . . . . . . . . .
Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more!
Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood.
Thus sang the uncouth swain to th’oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out with sandals gray.
He touched the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay.
And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay.
At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
(ll. 182-93)
162

Successful mourning, the drying of tears, is achieved in Milton’s poem by calling all of nature to
witness the resurrection of Lycidas in the figure of the sun. This is where the “dramatic relation
between loss and figuration” becomes visible, and “organic metamorphosis” is revealed as
central to consolation (4). Peter Sacks describes how the myth of Apollo and Daphne exemplifies
this process; Daphne becomes a laurel tree and Apollo accepts the substitute: “‘Since thou canst
not be my bride, thou shall at least be my tree. My hair, my lyre, my quiver shall always be
entwined with thee, O laurel’” (5). Successful mourning in poetry, Sacks suggests, depends upon
a “substitutive turn or act of troping” (5), which is again evidenced in Milton’s poem in the
relationship of simile.
Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” involves such a substitutive act,
although it is the speaker’s own body that comes to stand in for Lincoln’s. The speaker is visited
by the dark cloud of death and receives “the sacred knowledge of death.” It is the speaker’s soul
that dissolves with natural images in the beautiful, ecstatic, final couplet: “Lilac and star and bird
twined with the chant of my soul, / There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.”
Unlike Keats, Whitman is not dying his own death in this poem, but rather surviving it, by
surviving Lincoln’s. His body is reborn in metaphor, and he retains a spiritual attachment to the
beloved.
Dickinson creates a very interesting distinction to elegy in presenting a view of natural
time that isn’t sundered by loss.
She went as quiet as the Dew
From an Accustomed flower.
Not like the Dew, did she return
At the +Accustomed hour!

She dropt as softly as a star
From out my summer’s eve –
163

Less skillful than Le Verriere
It’s sorer to believe!

+ a familiar

ca. 1860 Fr 159

In the first stanza, the speaker’s friendly voice satirizes the attempt to recover losses figuratively.
The attempted simile fails, as does the effort at consolation; nature persists as expected, and the
idea that one need only figure the beloved in the sun seems absurd. Between the first and second
stanzas Dickinson tries out the move from the terrestrial to the celestial that characterizes elegy’s
attempted mastery of time. But unlike Le Verriere, who discovered Neptune through
mathematical calculations, she is unable to find her lost woman again. Repetition only highlights
the disappearance: the word “Accustomed,” for example, repeated twice in the first stanza,
invokes tradition, conformity, familiarity, and natural and celestial order. But all of these
supposedly stable referents are disrupted by the failure of the lost woman to return at the
appointed hour. The “Dew” returns, and can be said again and again, but meaninglessly, as the
woman does not come and does not speak. The last word of the poem, “believe,” is cruel; if
something can be so cleanly lost from the supposedly coherent natural and celestial order, it is
precisely the poet’s ability to believe in an affinity between the natural and the human that has
been corrupted.
What separates Emily Dickinson from her female contemporaries, for Alexandra
Socarides in her “Poetics of Interruption” (2008) is that she did not produce the consolation
typical of the genre, as in Amelia B. Welby’s “On the Death of a Friend.” Welby’s poem, in
keeping with the conventions of elegy, provides closure by means of recognizing that “Each year
June will return, her heart will become full, and the dead friend will be remembered” (317).
164

Socarides’s description does accurately portray Dickinson’s divergence from her
contemporaries; Whitman links his mourning to “ever-returning spring” just as Welby does. I
would, however, point out that this doesn’t separate Dickinson from her female contemporaries
only; clearly Whitman’s verse provides this version of consolation.
158
I would also restate
Socarides’s assessment, in the same essay, that Dickinson’s poetry is melancholic for its inability
or unwillingness to move on: as seen in “This Chasm,” moving on is the only thing to do. At the
same time, Socarides draws out the way that Dickinson does not allow “formal closure” in her
poems (329). The problem Dickinson comes up against in attempting to resolve loss is formal,
rather than temporal.
The Freudian melancholic does have formal means at her disposal to reconcile loss, even
as there might be deferral. And Socarides reads Dickinson in these terms, as registering a
melancholic “deferral, and possible rejection, of [the] closure” rendered viable by such
substitution (329). I will argue that this is to misread Dickinson’s distances and fractures. Again,
“This Chasm” presents a counterargument to the idea that Dickinson is interested in hesitation or
delay. Rather than referring to the melancholic “experience of death and mourning as one that
does not end” (Ibid.), I will argue that her distances and fractures describe not time or delay, but
instead a spatial distance, which cannot be closed so as to allow for incorporation or
replacement. There are a few different kinds of distances or fractures in Dickinson’s poetry—
between people, especially when a loved one dies, between people and nature, and between
people and God. Rather than attempt to overcome these separations, Dickinson critiques the
different possibilities for their overcoming, whether through the self-identification in narcissistic

158
A possible difference is that, like Wordsworth, Whitman records powerful feelings that are restrained, or
“recollected in tranquility.”
165

sentimentality, appeals to intellect or order, or attempts at replacement. All of these efforts
represent blocking up the space with “Air.”
In her displeasure with “Air,” Dickinson seems to critique the notion that there could be
anything abstract and spiritual that could unite people with each other, with God, or with nature.
In “I tried to think a lonelier Thing,” the poet engages in the thought experiment of the title, and
comes up with the image of an isolated speaker and “one other Creature / Of Heavenly Love –
forgot – .” The two share only their separation:
I plucked at our Partition
As One should pry the Walls –
Between Himself – and Horror’s Twin –
Within Opposing Cells –

I almost strove to clasp his Hand,
Such Luxury – it grew –
That as Myself – could pity Him –
+Perhaps he – pitied me –

He – too – could pity me –

ca. 1863 Fr 570

The poem presents a vertiginous doubling; the speaker tries to “pluck” a partition, just as a man
might pry walls between himself and his twin in another cell. To “pluck” is a word usually
reserved for fruit or flowers, but is here applied to the cold grey walls of a cell. Given
Dickinson’s knowledge of geology, it seems possible that she was aware of the lesser-known
definition: “Chiefly of glacier ice: to break loose and bear away (pieces of rock) by mechanical
force; to erode (rock) by this process.”
159
This mechanical, impersonal force is the only one
certainly acting in the poem, as pity or sympathy between the twins is only possible, not certain.

159
OED definition “pluck.” On Dickinson’s knowledge of geology, see Sewall, who notes that she has more
“geologic lore” in her poems than Keats, Emerson, Browning, and Shelley combined (2: 345).
166

The “Haggard comfort” that “springs” from the image of another creature out there, somewhere,
similarly affected by God’s forgetful withdrawal, has nothing to do with what Jed Deppman calls
the “misery-loves-company-logic” of the Romantics. The kind of loneliness Dickinson describes
“precludes . . . solace,” on Deppman’s reading (68-69). The lack of consolation is tied to the fact
that there is no overarching emotional or rational truth that can be used to dissolve the
boundaries between self and other. Pity and agency seem “Luxury” in the grey backdrop of
impersonal and inhuman forces. Relations remain relentlessly spatial, as in “Behind Me – dips
Eternity” (Fr 743). Absent in Dickinson’s poetry is the blissful, Romantic union of self and other
that comes from the dissolution of the material to reach a purely spiritual eternity.
The sense of partition is relentless in Dickinson’s poetry. Her speakers confront each arc
out of life with a tribute to the otherness that ultimately permits such a passage away and apart.
In “Frigid and sweet Her parting Face – ” (c. 1874), for example, Dickinson shows the absolute
divergence between the Face of the departed and the Feet of the one who remains:
Frigid and sweet her parting Face –
Frigid and fleet my Feet –
Alien and vain whatever Clime
Acrid whatever Fate.

Given to me without the Suit
Riches and Name and Realm –
Who was She to withhold from me
+Penury and Home?

+Hemisphere

ca. 1871 Fr 1231a

Unlike Whitman’s wound-dresser, who contains both the spirit and the bodies of those he
memorializes “(. . . my breast a fire, a burning flame),” Dickinson’s speaker is instead aligned
with inert, fractured limbs. Without the loved one, the mourner becomes bereft of meaning,
167

rather than rising to become its chief guarantor. The original manuscript shows that the variant
Dickinson provided for the surprising “Penury” was “Hemisphere,” emphasizing the spatial
metaphor (Frost Archives). By departing, this frigid and sweet face withholds an entire world
from the speaker, one that encompasses both poverty and home, leaving behind an alien, acrid,
and meaningless landscape.
160
The off-rhymes Dickinson creates with consonance (“Face/Feet”)
and assonance (“Face/Fate”) accentuate the sense of dislocation and not-belonging in the
poem,
161
as parts cannot cohere rhythmically. No amount of time, walking, or effort will restore
the singularity of this lost person. Unlike Milton’s emphasis on the temporal, dating the time of
loss, and then repeating it, Dickinson writes as if there is no time in loss, only space: “Because
that you are going / And never coming back” (J 1260), she writes, and: “Dear Friend, you go
away and where you go we cannot come” (683). A soft “Where is she,” she notes, is all that is
left of her dear mother (719c). Even in a reference that appears to invoke time, “From Us She
wandered now a year,” the operative action is the lost woman’s wandering, which is not
presented as redeemable in time.
Dickinson’s poems show the lack of return to the poet’s individual memory, and also its
limitation as a representative space. She shows this in using metonymy to invoke a woman
whose situation is compared unfavorably to the Daisy’s:
Glowing is her Bonnet,
Glowing is her Cheek,
Glowing is her Kirtle,
Yet she cannot speak.

160
In the description of the way the world has become empty there is a connection to Freud’s differentiation
between mourning and melancholy; “Bei der Trauer ist die Welt arm und leer geworden, bei der Melancholie ist es
das Ich selbst.” (“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself,”
Freud 431; Strachey 246).
161
My thanks to David Lloyd for pointing this out.
168

Better as the Daisy
From the Summer hill
Vanish unrecorded
Save by tearful rill –
Save by loving sunrise
Looking for her face.
Save by feet unnumbered
Pausing at the place.

ca. 1859 Fr 106a

The woman’s inability to speak and the accretion of metonymic objects in place of a coherent
speaking subject highlight the irrelevance of human mourning in the face of loss; consolation is
to be found in space, not in the temporal void of memory. The figure of the woman corresponds
to nothing, stands for nothing, precisely because we seek her correspondence with speech rather
than a unique position in the natural world. After the daisy’s death, on the other hand, natural
objects correspond: Daisy/rill, Sunrise/face, feet/place. Human perspective and memory are
themselves exiled in nature’s successful mourning. This is a contrast to Wordsworth’s
thematically-related poem, “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” (1800):
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

In Wordsworth’s poem, Lucy is transformed into an internal symbol and disappears from the
landscape in her death. The poem is framed by the speaker, who is closely identified with the
poet, and who becomes the vessel of the poetry and of the persistence of Lucy’s memory.
162

Unlike Wordsworth’s speaker, who is able to find common ground with nature through

162
For an alternate reading of Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems and their relationship to Dickinson’s poetry, see
Loeffelholz, who provides a Lacanian reading of how Wordsworth’s “father text” becomes “an alien/familiar Other
within the (m)Other,” Dickinson’s own text (pp. 91-97).
169

mourning Lucy, Dickinson’s speakers can only bear (with all the extended meanings of the
word) their own losses.
The sense of meaninglessness and lack of cohesion Dickinson’s poems evince are only
applicable to the human, not the natural world. In nature, there is both coherence and persistence.
In his biography of the poet, Richard Sewall points out that Dickinson “almost definitely read”
Hitchcock’s Religion of Geology (1851), in which he notes: “Nay, there is no reason whatever to
suppose one particle of matter has been annihilated since the world began” (7, quoted in Sewall,
2: 345). The idea of nature as indestructible does not, however, apply to the fact of human loss:
The Chemical conviction
That Nought be lost
Enable in Disaster
My fractured Trust –

The Faces of the Atoms
If I shall see
How more the Finished Creatures
+Departed me!

+Entrusted

c. 1865 Fr 1070a

The consonance in the first lines conveys the scientific truth that matter is not lost as definitive,
not open to question. The off-rhymes in “Nought” and “lost” meanwhile register the emotional
truth that “Finished Creatures” constantly pass, not just generally away, but from her. The
syntactically problematic second stanza suggests the comfort that comes from having a fractured
faith restored, as the faces of the departed creatures can almost be seen in the atoms that are left
behind. But the inscrutability of what the face of an atom might be, even seen through a
microscope, which makes those departed creatures apparent once more, the inscrutability of the
sentence itself, and the fact that it ends again on the emotional level with “Departed me!” does
170

not lead in the direction of comfort, but rather accentuates the irrationality, the unscientific basis
for affect, its irrelevance, its excess. In the literature of consolation, feeling the emotion of
another as in the line “Departed me!” allows for a vicarious experience that leads to a resolution
of grief in a moment of understanding. Dickinson, on the other hand, plays with the idea that it is
the attempt to understand or feel the effect of interactions with objects that produces the
vertiginous sense of the unknown.
That the distance between people and nature cannot be closed presents a clear menace to
knowledge. In “‘Nature’ is what we see – ,” Dickinson suggests that voided knowledge with
disarming cheer:
Nay – Nature is +Harmony –
Nature is what we know –
+Yet have no art to say –
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her +Simplicity.

+ Melody But Sincerity

ca. 1863 Fr 721

This anti-intellectual position once again confirms Dickinson’s resistance to a relationship of
mastery over nature. Natural objects cannot be used or transformed in the service of knowledge
or order. As her widely-discussed poem “Four Trees upon a solitary Acre” describes, the
interaction of poet and landscape is not the use and transformation of objects in the production of
self-knowledge. Rather than serving as a passive, instrumentalized field for the project of
constructing a stable self, nature becomes an active agent that is not amenable to order. In My
Emily Dickinson (1985), Susan Howe for example reads Dickinson’s concept of nature in “Four
Trees” as a force of chaos and destruction: “This is waste wilderness. Nature no soothing mother,
171

Nature is annihilation brooding over” (21). To look at the poem in its entirety is to see these trees
as evoking the dynamical sublime:
Four Trees – upon a solitary Acre –
Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent +Action –
+Maintain –

The Sun – upon a Morning meets them –
The Wind –
No nearer Neighbor – have they –
But God

+signal do reign

The trees “meet” the Sun, and God is a “near Neighbor.” This poem has been widely read as
expressing the speaker’s emotional isolation after the collapse of divine order.
163
Rachel Stein, in
her Shifting the Ground: American Women Writers’ Revisions of Nature, Gender, and
Race (1997) goes so far as to gloss this poem as a “modernist lament for God’s retreat” (34). But
there is no temporal or spatial marker of such an event as divine order collapsing, and God
remains a lasting, if confusing, presence in this poem. Instead, what collapses are such markers
of intellection as design, order, and action, all of which are negated in the first stanza (“Without
Design, / Or Order, / or Apparent Action”). For Susan Howe, it is not divine order, but the order
within nature that has collapsed. But this reading, too, is challenged by the persistence of the
relation of Sun and Trees in the first stanza. And it is challenged again as order appears as a
function of nature in the third stanza:

163
See Christine Gerhardt’s reading in her “‘Often seen – but seldom felt’: Emily Dickinson’s Reluctant Ecology of
Place” (2006). Gerhardt mentions Joanne Feit Diehl’s “Ransom in a Voice: Language as Defense in Dickinson’s
Poetry” (1983), which links a sense of absence of meaning to dislocation; Shira Wolosky’s “A Syntax of
Contention” (1999), which notes the poem belongs to a world of radical disorder (163); E. Miller Budick’s Emily
Dickinson and the Life of Language: A Study in Symbolic Poetics (1985), which references fragmentation (16-17);
and Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s Emily Dickinson (1987), which describes a world that has been evacuated of meaning
(459). Rachel Stein also finds “formal fragmentation” and “the slippage of meaning that occurs once transcendent
certitude disappears” in the poem (33).
172

The Acre gives them – Place –
They – Him – Attention of Passer by –
Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply –
Or Boy –

Sublimity in the poem is not the result of a thunderous abyss or nature as a chaotic menace.
Sublimity instead arises from nature’s stability, persistence, and solidity that allow no purchase:
What deed is Their’s unto the General Nature –
What Plan
They severally – +retard – or further –
Unknown –

+promote – or hinder –

c. 1863 Fr 742

For Weiskel in The Romantic Sublime (1976), the sublime is “‘organized as some form of sudden
encounter with otherness, usually as incarnated in some specifically sublime object which the
subject apprehends as grand, dreadful, majestic, authoritative, and so on’” (quoted in Stonum, p.
69). Dickinson’s unknown opens in the distance between bodies. It is a distance that cannot be
closed; there is not a similar godlike/satanic rise/fall as in Baudelaire. And it finally defies
mastery and control.
Dickinson’s poetry frustrates the logical desire for order, control, knowledge or
consolation as a product of the interaction with others or nature. Unlike the elegiac tradition, in
which nature gives voice to human sentiment, Dickinson’s nature resists speaking the words of
comfort the mourner wants to hear. In Milton’s “Lycidas,” nature was pressed into service to
sing for the speaker’s departed friend (“Who would not sing for Lycidas?”), and flowers are
called to leave their own lives to lie upon his grave:
Throw hither all your quaint enameled eyes
That on the green turf suck the honeyed show’rs
Bring the rath primrose that forsaken dies,
173

The tufted crow-toe, and pale gessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet,
The muskrose, and the well attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head
And every flower that sad embroidery wears:
Bid amaranthus all his beauties shed,
And daffodillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid’ lies.

But in Dickinson’s poetry, the thorn presses into the wordless flesh of the fruit. In “The Black
Berry – wears a Thorn in his side –,” for example, the mourner maintains silence in the face of
loss:
The Black Berry – wears a Thorn in his side –
But no Man heard Him cry –
He +offers His Berry, just the same
To Partridge – and to Boy –

He sometimes holds upon the Fence –
Or struggles to a Tree –
Or clasps a Rock, with both His Hands –
But not for Sympathy –

We tell a Hurt – to cool it –
This Mourner – to the Sky
A little further reaches – instead –
Brave Black Berry –

+spices

ca. 1863 Fr 548

In nature’s grief there is no song, no relief, and no elevation above pain.
164
Dickinson again
seems to politely point out the peculiarity of the elegiac tradition, which frequently made use of
pathetic fallacy to assuage loss. Peter Sacks provides the example of a vine that is poetically

164
This lack of sentimental identification with nature contradicts ecofeminist Rachel Stein’s discussion of Dickinson
as a poet who uses “the positive sentimental identification of women and nature” in order to “reinscribe” or
“reappropriate” the natural as feminine (148).

174

described as withering and mourning as an expression of the human loss of connection with the
divine (20). Through this “mimed death,” man creates a fiction “whereby nature and its changes,
the occasions for his grief, appear to depend on him” (Ibid.). One hears again Agamben’s
description of melancholy: projecting the funereal clothes of bereavement upon nature and others
to describe a personal sense of loss. Dickinson’s “Brave Black Berry” deflects this withering
glance.
Dickinson creates a more rigorous ethic in regards to alterity by not figuratively
projecting her own sentiments and experience onto others or nature as though they were empty
vessels or inert matter. In that kind of psychological or aesthetic interaction, the object is taken
over, its materiality and ontological priority lost, and self-reflection achieved. Dickinson instead
writes about the distance between bodies that cannot be closed. As in “I tried to think a lonelier
Thing,” the impossibility of closing the distance between bodies, between “Hesitating Fractions,”
such as the Sea and Tide (643) or the Sun and Moon (640) is a basis of despair in Dickinson’s
poetry, but this despair is not mentioned in order to be overcome. An example is the concluding
stanza of “I cannot live with You”:
So We must meet apart –
You there – I – here –
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer –
And that White +Sustenance –
Despair –

+exercise

c. 1863 Fr 706

In a poem that likely plays on the poet’s own habit of greeting people from the other side of a
closed door, access to the place beyond despair is not gained by opening the door wide, or
175

figuratively opening the mouth so as to internalize or incorporate the distant other. The impetus
for the violence of the melancholic tradition, against nature, against the other, is obviated by this
unrelenting distance. The harsh pressing of the grape into the inspired, divine wine of Milton or
Keats is absent: Dickinson’s substitute of “Sustenance” for “exercise” plays in a disturbing way
on the lack of nourishment available to the mourner.
165
Her version of identity is not predicated
on incorporation of the lost or abject, but on the recognition of the particularity of others who
necessarily move apart and away. The sense of ongoing exile Dickinson creates, along with the
reference to unheeded prayer, more nearly fits the Galenic tradition of melancholy than the
Ficinian tradition, with its successful consolation.
Recent scholarship has followed Shira Wolosky’s lead in reconsidering Dickinson’s
distress in these poems from the war years in terms of the “religious anguish” and “collapse of
faith” brought about by the breakdown of belief and coherence associated with the Civil War.
Wolosky finds a “metaphysical crisis” (xvi) behind Dickinson’s work, and sees the poet as
working to overcome the “disjunction of earth from heaven, of language from the Word,” which
“constitutes for Dickinson the problem, not the solution” (158). It is a “trauma” she argues
Dickinson overcomes through a theistic turn. Wolosky’s reading of Dickinson as working to
suture a lost relationship with God suggests a comparison with the Galenic tradition of acedia, in
which intense suffering can only be relieved by the intervention of divine grace, an intervention
that can be prompted by the resumption of one’s duties toward God, rather than lapsing into
idleness and despair. But instead, Wolosky contextualizes Dickinson within the Ficinian tradition
for her “assertion of a divine self in the collapse of metaphysical structures once secure” (xvi).

165
This is in contradiction to a poet such as Whitman, where distance is overcome through absorption: “Absorb
them well / O my earth / Lose not an atom” he writes in “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing.”
176

This is one of the places where it becomes clear that Dickinson’s canonical status has relied on
reading her work in terms of Ficinian melancholy: Wolosky further links Dickinson’s aim to her
American contemporaries, Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Whitman, and to “later
movements”: “symbolism, surrealism, Dadaism, futurism, and concrete poetry” (Ibid.).
But there is no divinity or wisdom to be gained through adopting the melancholic position in
Dickinson’s poetry; nature, along with the law that produces it, remains elusive.
I can wade Grief –
Whole Pools of it –
I’m used to that –
But the least push of Joy
Breaks up my feet –
And I tip – drunken –
Let no Pebble – smile –
‘Twas the New Liquor –
That was all!

Power is only Pain –
Stranded, thro’ Discipline,
Till Weights – will hang –
Give Balm – to Giants –
And they’ll wilt, like Men –
Give Himmaleh –
They’ll Carry – Him!

ca. 1862 F 312

Grief is routine; joy disrupts and surprises with its uncontrolled effects. Suffering creates
strength, as pain is disciplined into power. In the second stanza accordingly, if giants are given a
pleasurably healing balm they will “wilt.” If they are instead handed the Himalayas
(“Himmaleh” is an alternate spelling for the mountain range), they will bear up and carry them.
In the less torturous syntax of the final couplet there is simplicity of motion, but there is no
exultation to be gained through this ease of motion, as it is a strength from which weights are
hung. Both stranded and isolated, the sufferer can wade through pools of grief, but cannot drink
177

from the cup of Joy for fear of falling and wilting. In the manner of Milton’s Il Penseroso,
Dickinson dispenses with the laughable frivolity of joy in favor of leaden-weighted, earth-bound
melancholy.

But unlike Milton’s poem, there is no wisdom or transcendence to be gained by
adopting the melancholic position; there is no movement across boundaries into a new sphere of
operation, but rather a strengthening of already-existing fortifications. Gary Stonum, in his
Dickinson Sublime (1990), finds that delight is not “condemned” by this poem; instead, it:
maintains a humorous, even giddy tone that sets it apart from Dickinson’s normally grim,
clinical investigations of psychic states. The comically wilting giants, the tipsy
admonition to the pebble, and the bathetic, nearly nicknaming reference to Himmaleh as
‘Him’ conspire against soberly binding oneself to a discipline of pain endured and hence
controlled. (57)

For Stonum, both things that are normally thought of as conscious and inanimate objects are
“comparably if minimally endowed with sentience” (17). But the position of playful self-
command the pebble enjoys is inaccessible in Dickinson’s poem; that animate playfulness cannot
be achieved. Her speaker’s choices are rather circumscribed by intoxication on the one hand and
the harsh imposition of discipline on the other.
166

Dickinson writes constantly of grief, agony, and mourning as inevitable and ongoing,
divorced from romantic melancholy by being unrelated to the ties of affection. Instead, her
poems suggest that the difficulty both for rationality and sentimentality is related to the tension
between the space and circumference one possesses while in life, and the vacuum left behind
when loss occurs.
None can experience stint
Who Bounty – have not known
+The Fact of Famine – could not be
Except for Fact of Corn –

166
Juhasz, in her Undiscovered Continent, finds the poem to be a celebration of discipline, where delight cannot be
controlled (see also Stonum’s discussion of Juhasz, p. 59).
178

Want – is a meagre Art
Acquired by Reverse –
+The Poverty that was not Wealth –
Cannot be Indigence.

+Nor fact of Famine could exist –
It is that Poverty was Wealth –
Enables Indigence –

ca. 1864 Fr 870a

In this poem, which begins by noting the absence or “stint” and then the presence that came
before it, “Bounty,” Dickinson explains how “Want” is “Acquired by Reverse.” Desire moves in
reverse as “Indigence,” which is defined in her Webster’s Dictionary as “want of estate or means
of comfortable subsistence; penury; poverty,” follows only after riches.
167
What has been lost has
a definite shape and size. The correspondences between life and death create a symmetry that is
tame, domesticated, unlike Blake’s “fearful symmetry.” In one poem, Dickinson comfortably
describes a coffin as a “small domain” (J 943). The speaker of another 1863 poem attempts “To
fill the awful
+
Vacuum / Your life had left behind” by subjecting herself to “Severer Service.”
168

The variant Dickinson offers in the place of “Vacuum” is “Longitude,” which specifies even
more clearly how the loss can be tracked with navigational coordinates.
On the reverse side of the sheet on which “None can experience stint” was copied, and
written so faintly as to suggest the malnourishment of the foregoing, Dickinson suggests that
reverencing difficult or high things comes at a cost:
The hallowing of Pain

167
The dictionary entry suggests a social backdrop for her overriding concern with poverty: “A large portion of the
human race live in indigence, while others possess more than they can enjoy.”
168
Vivian Pollak reads the “severer service” of the poem as a “disciplined regimen designed to extinguish her
memory of loss” (200).

179

Like hallowing of Heaven,
Obtains at a corporeal cost –
The Summit is not given

To Him who strives severe
At +middle of the Hill –
But He who has achieved the +Top –
All – is the price of All –

+bottom / center Crest

ca. 1864 Fr 871a

The poem’s difficult lesson (“All – is the price of All – ”) reads like a controlled rejection of
Nietzsche’s description of the ascetic ideal in which worshipping the divine is tantamount to
worshipping pain.
169
Both negate the body, demanding a sacrifice that is too great. Dickinson
shares in Yeats’s discomfort before the sacrifice of life for ideals:
It feels a shame to be Alive –
When Men so brave – are dead –
One envies the Distinguished Dust –
Permitted – such a Head –

The Stone – that tells defending Whom
This Spartan put away
What little of Him we – possessed
In pawn for Liberty –

The price is great – Sublimely paid –
Do we deserve – a Thing –
That lives – like Dollars – must be piled
Before we may obtain?

Are we that wait – sufficient worth –
That such enormous Pearl
As life – dissolved be – for Us –
In Battle’s – horrid Bowl?

169
Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal arrives from the protective and curative instinct of a life that is degenerating and yet
fighting tooth and nail for its preservation. It shows that man would rather will nothing than have no purpose
Genealogy of Morals (280).
180

It may be – a Renown to live –
I think the Men who die –
Those unsustained – Saviors –
Present Divinity –

ca. 1863 Fr 524

There are no abstract ideals worth fighting for in Dickinson’s poetry; indeed, the poet doesn’t
understand life—or conflict—in those terms. The fight in this poem is undertaken by individuals
for other individuals, even though “Those who “do life’s labor / To hold our Senses - on” (ca.
1863, Fr 522), like those who “wait” in this poem, or severely strive halfway up the hill, are not
worth the sacrifice.
Dickinson’s poems create a view of a world in which individual relationships prevail.
Like Yeats, Dickinson disputes the idea of nature as an objective vacuum, purged of sentiment.
But unlike Yeats, Dickinson creates a sense of natural embeddedness that doesn’t have to do
with history or sympathy. The story of nature she offers doesn’t lead to truth or power, although
it may lead to kind and civic feeling:
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me –
The simple News that Nature told –
With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see –
For love of Her – Sweet – +countrymen
Judge tenderly – of Me

+country / men

ca. 1863 Fr 519a

Dickinson’s poetry abandons abstract ideas, and instead advances a notion of individuality and
citizenship predicated on a natural embeddedness that is as incapable of being spoken or
181

represented as it is to be lost. If objects fail to return home in Dickinson’s poetry, it is only
because they are unique, unrepeatable, and incapable of being doubled in the interior space of
intellection or memory. If nature’s diversity cannot be assimilated or mastered, however, as
Dickinson suggests, this is only a guarantee of its proliferation, and even the freedom that
inheres within it.

182

Afterword:
Resisting Right-Wing Melancholy
It has long been acknowledged that regarding nature and others as passive and inert
material, possessing no agency or resistance to be overcome, and whose existence is defined as
destined for transformation, is the precondition for oppression, both for others, and oneself.
170
It
produces a hollowness that is replicated endlessly. I have argued that it is the narcissistic
understanding of others and nature as hollow vessels or inert matter waiting to be overtaken by
meaning that creates this voiding or hollowing of others, and as a result, oneself. Freud’s
interpretation of melancholy is useful in explaining how narcissism sets up a relationship of
identity or reciprocity with external objects, which leads to dematerialization as suffering is
overcome through transcendence over the body. Others and nature are figuratively internalized;
material is overcome. The melancholic’s objects, idealized and unobtainable, are covered in “the
funereal trappings of mourning,” from the moment they appear (Agamben 20). Baudelaire’s
memorable mourning woman in “A Une Passante” is one of these idealized others, whose
characteristic feature is never to have existed—never breathed, spoke, in a word, lived—so as to
be lost. The melancholic approaches nature and other people as though they are already poor and
empty, creating the paradox, for Giorgio Agamben, “of an intention to mourn that precedes and
anticipates the loss of the object” (20). It is this interaction that is recorded in Frantz Fanon’s
record of the encounter with the melancholic gaze: “Mon corps me revenait étalé, disjoint,

170
Donna Haraway, for example, reveals science as consisting of a rhetorical practice aimed at control and enforcing
the split between nature and culture. See also Carolyn Merchant, who has drawn out the way domination over nature
is enforced through its gendering as female.
183

rétamé, tout endeuillé dans ce jour blanc d’hiver” (“My body was given back to me, sprawled
out, disjointed, worn out, plunged into mourning in that white winter day,” p. 93).
In the elegiac tradition, Peter Sacks notes that it is “by the sacrifice or mimed death of the
personification of nature [that] man ‘causes’ nature’s death, or at least brings on her deathlike
mourning” (21). In taking a broad view of the Ficinian tradition of melancholy, I have argued
that the response to the imposed death of others or of nature involves a double-negation, either as
a fetish comes to substitute for what has been lost, or as the “representative” or “central” man
incorporates lost fragments into a new whole. From an examination of the longer Ficinian
tradition, it became clear that such incorporation was the means to a transcendental form of
unity; it is through feeding on the other that paradise is regained. This aesthetic and
psychological process and the social sphere are related where Michael Warner has noted how it
is a capacity for personal abstraction that is a “major source of domination” and has “always
been an unequally available resource” (382). There have always been those with the power to
suppress the body, and others unable to “suppress the body, to transcend their specific
corporeality in the abstract realm of citizen, and whose hyperembodiment therefore serves as a
continual obstacle” (Flatley 128).
171
By bringing forward an alternate strain of melancholy, I
have demonstrated how the positive association with abstraction and subordination of the body
can itself be overturned.
As I have shown, melancholy as a source of domination is not confined to a particular
historical moment, such as modernity, but is rather persistent and transhistorical. Paul Gilroy’s
Postcolonial Melancholia (2005), for example, demonstrates how melancholy defined the post-
9/11 landscape in the U.K. and the U.S. For Gilroy, the integrity of “homogeneous, monolithic

171
See also Lauren Berlant, “National Brands/National Bodies: Imitation of Life,” p. 176.
184

entities [such as these countries] is simply assumed, but, in the case of the West, it is telling that
even when armed to the teeth, its fortified wholeness is imperiled, subject to anxiety about the
prospect of its durability and tormented by the knowledge of its inevitable decline” (19). This
particular anxiety leads to a “fascination” with the “marginal and infrahuman status of
noncitizens inside the EU and States” (ibid.). The dehumanizing rhetoric Gilroy identifies
continues to figure in contemporary media outlets. A preoccupation with the infrahuman is
apparent in repeated references to “enemy combatants,” “terrorists,” “illegals,” “gays,” and most
recently in remarks about the “browning of America.” The “American” way of life is perceived
as under threat from a relentlessly dehumanized other. Jon Stewart on The Daily Show has
pointed out how dominant culture’s mourning for the loss of the traditional family, of traditional
marriage, or of religion is produced by the “constant barrage of apocalyptic paranoia and
outrage” circulated by the media outlets.
In this study I have focused on bringing forward a new language of bereavement, one that
draws back from the impossibility of incorporation or substitution, thereby denying the fetishistic
attachment to something that cannot be possessed. As Freud pointed out, the melancholic
attaches to abstractions rather than concrete objects and others. These can include the
“homeland,” “freedom,” or an ideal, “democracy,” perhaps. The borders of these ideas, once
grasped, are so tenuous that they demand vigilance, anxiety, and force in their defense. If it is an
idealized form of manhood, or white Americanness, for example, to which the melancholic has
attached, the gendered, racialized body of the other already lies incorporated, debased at the
center of the melancholic self. Several critics have described the “anxious, melancholic mood” of
185

dominant culture.
172
In order to draw a comparison to Walter Benjamin’s “left-wing
melancholy,” I will refer to this mood as “right-wing melancholy.” Right-wing melancholy
involves the fear of contamination and invasion by the other, which leads to the militarized
policing of abstractions, such as freedom, nationality, ethnic, or gendered identity.
If, as I am suggesting, this dehumanizing rhetoric can be described as “right-wing
melancholy,” the best means of combating it might seem to be “left-wing melancholy.” But in
using the term “right-wing melancholy,” I aim to draw a comparison between Gilroy’s and
Walter Benjamin’s work. And Benjamin castigates “left-wing melancholy” for its complicity
between cultural expression and political domination. His essay “Linke Melancholie” (1931)
takes “left-wing melancholy” to task for its complicity with political domination. Benjamin
critiques the brooding and withdrawal that defines the left, where “die Hohlform” (“the hollow
forms”) left behind by the evaporation of feelings such as love, nature, humanity, and
enthusiasm, “liebkost man geistesabwesend (“are mindlessly caressed”). The inert form of
brooding he critiques is explicable in Kristevan terms. Melancholics disavow the negation of loss
“they cancel it out, suspend it, and nostalgically fall back on the real object (the Thing) of their
loss” (quoted in Flatley, p. 44). Right-wing rhetoric today is characterized both by this nostalgia
for lost American values, and by the violence of subordination of the other. In an interview with
Anderson Cooper about the controversial Arizona bill (SB1062), for example, a bill that
essentially provided businesses the legal option to refuse service to customers based on religious
objections, gubernatorial candidate Al Melvin defended what has also been referred to as an
“anti-gay bill,” by noting that both “religious freedom” and the “American family” are under
attack. He comments that “all of the pillars of society are under attack in the United States, the

172
See, for example, Paul Gilroy (14) and Anne Cheng (10).
186

family, the traditional family, traditional marriage, mainline churches, the boy scouts, you name
it. All of the pillars of society as we know it today are under attack, including religious freedom.”
At the same time, the senator was unable to give a specific example of religious freedom being
under attack in Arizona when asked, providing only the vague response that it is “all over
America.” A vague sense of the loss of abstractions prompts infringement on civil liberties.
Ficinian melancholy oscillates between a mournful brooding over fetishistic substitutions
and the violent transcendence required for political change. Against the negative form of
melancholy, which involves taking pleasure in a time when action is called for, and that has more
to do with “gequälten Stupidität” (“tortured stupidity”) than anything else, Benjamin proposes
incisive action. His critique apprehends the “Hartleibigkeit” (“constipation,” also
“stubbornness,” “obduracy”) of a system oscillating between two different forms of melancholy,
both having to do with the loss of ideals, and calls for its radical critique and violent
overthrow.
173
But in turning to this violence, Benjamin risks replicating the aesthetic repudiation
of the feminine and of sentimentality, as the mournful brooding over loss is unmistakably
gendered as feminine in his work.
Returning to the premodern viewpoint afforded by Galen allows for a relationship of
dialogue rather than mutual antagonism, in which others, including nature, are viewed in terms
of apartness and agency. Given the very real threat of violence, which surrounded Benjamin, but
also presses today, the call is urgent to develop non-dialectical, non-consolatory form of
mourning, which, while it is still bracing in its refusal of solace, recognizes that others and nature

173
Benjamin notes that such constipation has always been part of the tradition of melancholy. Indeed, for Aristotle,
the fluctuation between the divine madness and “flatulence and disease” of the malady is explained through their
shared connection to producing air. The production of air also explains the connection to sexual desire, as for
Aristotle the sexual act is concerned with inflation. See Klibansky et al. pp. 21-22.
187

cannot be possessed so as to be lost. This rhetoric of bereavement undoes narcissistic fantasies of
unity to understand loss itself as a symptom, rather than a cause, of the ills of modernity.

188

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Asset Metadata

Creator Traester, Mary (author)

Core Title Mourning melancholia: modernist poetics and the refusal of solace

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 04/09/2014

Defense Date 03/03/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Charles Baudelaire,Emily Dickinson,melancholy,modernism,OAI-PMH Harvest,psychoanalysis,Walter Benjamin,William Butler Yeats

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Meeker, Natania (committee chair), Kamuf, Peggy (committee member), Lloyd, David C. (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member)

Creator Email mary.traester@gmail.com,traester@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-375255

Unique identifier UC11296241

Identifier etd-TraesterMa-2334.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-375255 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-TraesterMa-2334.pdf

Dmrecord 375255

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Traester, Mary

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA