The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence

by John T. Irwin

Overview

A study in how a poet’s corpus is remembered after he vanishes.

Weldon Kees is one of those fascinating people of whom you’ve likely never heard. Most intriguingly, he disappeared without a trace on July 18, 1955. Police found his 1954 Plymouth Savoy abandoned on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge one day later. The keys were still in the ignition. Though Kees had alluded days prior to picking up and moving to Mexico, none of his poetry, art, or criticism has since surfaced either north or south of the Rio Grande.

Kees’s vanishing has led critics to compare him to another American modernist poet who met a similar end two decades prior—Hart Crane. In comparison to Crane, Kees is certainly now a more obscure figure. John T. Irwin, however, is not content to allow Kees to fall out of the twentieth-century literary canon. In The Poetry of Weldon Kees, Irwin ties together elements of biography and literary criticism, spurring renewed interest in Kees as both an individual and as a poet.

Irwin acts the part of literary detective, following clues left behind by the poet to make sense of Kees’s fascination with death, disappearance, and the lasting interpretation of an artist’s work. Arguing that Kees’s apparent suicide was a carefully plotted final aesthetic act, Irwin uses the poet’s disappearance as a lens through which to detect and interpret the structures, motifs, and images throughout his poems—as the author intended. The first rigorous literary engagement with Weldon Kees’s poetry, this book is an astonishing reassessment of one of the twentieth century’s most gifted writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421422619
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2017
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	127,942
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

John T. Irwin is the Decker Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, where he formerly served as chair of the Writing Seminars. His previous books include The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story, recipient of the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies and Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Prize.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 People Who Vanish 1

2 An Almost Invisible Note 14

3 The Excellence of Weldon Kees 27

4 "The dynamics of inferential mention": Wallace Stevens's and Hart Crane's Influence on Kees 45

5 Kees, A Learned Poet 70

6 "Relating to Robinson": Mystery and Literary Interpretation 79

Selected Bibliography 99

Index 101

What People are Saying About This

Harold Bloom

Weldon Kees is a vital American poet, still too little read. John Irwin’s study goes a long way towards reviving the aesthetic importance of Weldon Kees. Irwin, author of the definitive book on the poetry of Hart Crane, renews Crane’s legacy as he traces Crane’s influence on Kees.

James Reidel

Weldon Kees’s poetry still leads readers into a strange world, arcane but hyperfamiliar, long after he disappeared in 1955. Even so, scholarship devoted to him is rare—and entire books rarer. Irwin does Kees justice and reveals what is programmatic to this distressed, as opposed to rugged, individualist and his peculiarly American problem of presence and impresence.

From the Publisher

Weldon Kees’s poetry still leads readers into a strange world, arcane but hyperfamiliar, long after he disappeared in 1955. Even so, scholarship devoted to him is rare—and entire books rarer. Irwin does Kees justice and reveals what is programmatic to this distressed, as opposed to rugged, individualist and his peculiarly American problem of presence and impresence.
—James Reidel, author of Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees

Weldon Kees is a vital American poet, still too little read. John Irwin’s study goes a long way towards reviving the aesthetic importance of Weldon Kees. Irwin, author of the definitive book on the poetry of Hart Crane, renews Crane’s legacy as he traces Crane’s influence on Kees.
—Harold Bloom, author of Falstaff: Give Me Life

With its creative intermingling of psychobiography, literary history and criticism, and philosophical rumination, this book is well researched, original, and penetrating. Anchored by a fascinating conceit that illuminates all that follows, The Poetry of Weldon Kees is both erudite and accessible.
—Robert Niemi, coauthor of The Bibliography of Weldon Kees

Robert Niemi

With its creative intermingling of psychobiography, literary history and criticism, and philosophical rumination, this book is well researched, original, and penetrating. Anchored by a fascinating conceit that illuminates all that follows, The Poetry of Weldon Kees is both erudite and accessible.

Editorial Reviews

Although Kees remained invisible to academics, he exerted a powerful influence on young poets. The huge gap in Kees’s reputation between poets and professors came to symbolize the stark differences in literary taste among creative and theoretical thinkers who often coexist uneasily in the same English department. John T. Irwin, a poet and literary critic who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, has partially closed the gap in a brilliant new study of this neglected author. Most pioneering monographs are cautious in their approach. Irwin’s The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence is audacious and provocatively speculative. Declaring Kees ‘the most interesting poet of his generation,’ Irwin frames the author’s life and work against a backdrop of modern literature and philosophy. concise, clearly argued, and free from critical cant, the book is a model of scholarly writing; it also reminds the reader how revelatory literary criticism can be. For Irwin, the stakes are not merely academic; understanding Kees is literally a matter of life or death.
—Dana Gioia, Poet and former NEA chair, The American Scholar

Irwin's sensitive readings are consistently illuminating.
—The American Scholar

. . . Irwin insightfully opens doors into a few works an lays groundwork for further exploration of Kee's place in contemporary poetry.
—Library Journal

Irwin writes with the courtly civility and cultivation of a bygone era, which is pleasing unto itself, and the book as an object continues this pleasure; at 120 pages, it’s a categorically slim volume, which speaks not just to Irwin’s economy of style, but also to his subject’s short life, which ended (as far as we know) at 41.
—Los Angeles Review of Books

. . . Irwin’s memoir is a nice little piece – almost more a lengthy essay which includes Kees’s art, and the writer’s life – it discusses the philosophy of Nietzsche and nihilism, Camus’ major influence on the idea of suicide and the bizarre and flat out strange nature of disappearances.
—Portland Book Review

Irwin considers Kees’s disappearance in the light of his poems and vice versa, and traces influences upon Kees’s thinking by rereading the many authors Kees mentioned in his own writings, paying particular attention to mentions of suicide and resurrection.
—Spiked

Despite my differing assessment of the value of Kees’s poetry, I have no doubt that John Irwin’s book is essential. Its conversational prose avoids jargon, and it offers both thoughtful analysis and new insights derived from difficult research. The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence will thoughtfully guide future scholars. I recommend it highly.
—Claremont Review of Books

. . . Irwin avoids academic jargon and theories du jour; calling the book "the eventual fulfillment of a lengthy admiration" for Kees, he is clearly eager to share that esteem not only to fill a gap in academic literature, but also to bring this fascinating and overlooked poet to more readers. I hope he succeeds.
—Weekly Standard

From the Publisher

. . . Irwin avoids academic jargon and theories du jour; calling the book "the eventual fulfillment of a lengthy admiration" for Kees, he is clearly eager to share that esteem not only to fill a gap in academic literature, but also to bring this fascinating and overlooked poet to more readers. I hope he succeeds.

Weekly Standard

Despite my differing assessment of the value of Kees’s poetry, I have no doubt that John Irwin’s book is essential. Its conversational prose avoids jargon, and it offers both thoughtful analysis and new insights derived from difficult research. The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence will thoughtfully guide future scholars. I recommend it highly.

Claremont Review of Books

. . . Irwin’s memoir is a nice little piece – almost more a lengthy essay which includes Kees’s art, and the writer’s life – it discusses the philosophy of Nietzsche and nihilism, Camus’ major influence on the idea of suicide and the bizarre and flat out strange nature of disappearances.

Portland Book Review

Irwin considers Kees’s disappearance in the light of his poems and vice versa, and traces influences upon Kees’s thinking by rereading the many authors Kees mentioned in his own writings, paying particular attention to mentions of suicide and resurrection.

Spiked

Irwin's sensitive readings are consistently illuminating.

The American Scholar

Irwin writes with the courtly civility and cultivation of a bygone era, which is pleasing unto itself, and the book as an object continues this pleasure; at 120 pages, it’s a categorically slim volume, which speaks not just to Irwin’s economy of style, but also to his subject’s short life, which ended (as far as we know) at 41.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Although Kees remained invisible to academics, he exerted a powerful influence on young poets. The huge gap in Kees’s reputation between poets and professors came to symbolize the stark differences in literary taste among creative and theoretical thinkers who often coexist uneasily in the same English department. John T. Irwin, a poet and literary critic who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, has partially closed the gap in a brilliant new study of this neglected author. Most pioneering monographs are cautious in their approach. Irwin’s The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence is audacious and provocatively speculative. Declaring Kees ‘the most interesting poet of his generation,’ Irwin frames the author’s life and work against a backdrop of modern literature and philosophy. concise, clearly argued, and free from critical cant, the book is a model of scholarly writing; it also reminds the reader how revelatory literary criticism can be. For Irwin, the stakes are not merely academic; understanding Kees is literally a matter of life or death.

The American Scholar - Dana Gioia

"Although Kees remained invisible to academics, he exerted a powerful influence on young poets. The huge gap in Kees’s reputation between poets and professors came to symbolize the stark differences in literary taste among creative and theoretical thinkers who often coexist uneasily in the same English department. John T. Irwin, a poet and literary critic who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, has partially closed the gap in a brilliant new study of this neglected author. Most pioneering monographs are cautious in their approach. Irwin’s The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence is audacious and provocatively speculative. Declaring Kees ‘the most interesting poet of his generation,’ Irwin frames the author’s life and work against a backdrop of modern literature and philosophy. concise, clearly argued, and free from critical cant, the book is a model of scholarly writing; it also reminds the reader how revelatory literary criticism can be. For Irwin, the stakes are not merely academic; understanding Kees is literally a matter of life or death."

The American Scholar - Dana Gioia

04/15/2017
Intended, it seems, to reintroduce Weldon Kees to the canon of 20th-century poetry, this brief book will appeal to a very limited audience. Irwin, a scholar who publishes poetry under the name of John Bricuth, has some serious things to say about the life and work of the oft unsung mid-20th-century poet Kees. He explores the disappearance of the man (who may have leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge), linking it to the earlier suicide of poet Hart Crane, and in a fascinating yet underdeveloped turn, to a pair of nihilistic characters from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Devils. What this book lacks for the general poetry lover is the focus on a particular theme or aspect of Kees's work. At times, Irwin seems overwhelmed by what he senses in a line or a poem, and his attention wanders off in search of literary connections that will leave many readers lost or exhausted. What makes this volume valuable to future scholars is the way Irwin insightfully opens doors into a few works and lays the groundwork for further exploration of Kees's place in contemporary poetry. VERDICT For specialized and academic poetry collections.—Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston

Library Journal