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The Poetry of Weldon Kees

Vanishing as Presence

John T. Irwin

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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...

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.

Reviews

Reviews

Irwin's sensitive readings are consistently illuminating.

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

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.

... 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.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
5.5
x
8.5
Pages
120
ISBN
9781421422619
Illustration Description
4 halftones
Table of Contents

Preface
1. People Who Vanish
2. An Almost Invisible Note
3. The Excellence of Weldon Kees
4. "The dynamics of inferential mention"
5. Kees, A Learned Poet
6. "Relating to Robinson"
Interpretation
Selected

Preface
1. People Who Vanish
2. An Almost Invisible Note
3. The Excellence of Weldon Kees
4. "The dynamics of inferential mention"
5. Kees, A Learned Poet
6. "Relating to Robinson"
Interpretation
Selected Bibliography
Index

Author Bio
John T. Irwin
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John T. Irwin

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.