“To be obsessed is to be modern,” writes Lennard J. Davis. Obsession, understood variously as a modern cultural value and a medical diagnosis, describes a range of poetic responses. Although scientific work on obsession grew up alongside modern poetry, the links between obsession and poetry remain unexplored. As an increasingly mechanized Western culture met Freudian psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century, obsessive tendencies became at once valued and pathologized. Modern poetry brings with it obsessions that make their way into experiments with poetic form. From the rituals described in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to W.B. Yeats’ occult fascination with numbers during the Irish Troubles, obsession underlies both the aesthetics and politics of modern poetry. Over the long twentieth century, how do elements of versification, such as meter and rhyme, encode personal and cultural memory? How do contemporary poets rework traditional forms like the elegy to remember both the dead and the literary past?

In order to facilitate both a robust and an interactive discussion, we have selected three panelists, each of whom will present 15-minute papers. Jeff Dolven will serve as respondent, with adequate time allotted to the audience for a question-and-answer period following the formal presentations.

To commence, Maggie Greaves will present “‘I Must Somehow Forget’: Obsession in Modern Poetry.” Employing cultural and biosocial history to illuminate links between obsession and poetic form in the early twentieth century, this paper will draw on examples from Harlem Renaissance and First World War poetry. The neglected framework of obsession will be brought to the fore, offering new insights into modernist experimentation, as demonstrated through Imagism, ritual, and metrical experimentation.

Next, Ariana Lyriotakis will focus on elegiac poetic forms in “‘Those we love from the first’: Galway Kinnell’s Elegies of the Domestic.” This paper will examine Kinnell’s personal poems of memorialization while addressing compulsion, meditation, and guilt, as relates to the reconciliation of human impermanence in the absence of an afterlife. Particular attention will be given to Kinnell’s poetic cosmography of grief and death vis à vis poems of mourning in What a Kingdom It Was, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, and lastly Mortal Acts, Mortal Words.

In closing, Leonard Nalencz’s paper “Suffering and Solidarity: Anne Sexton, Wanda Coleman, and the English Tradition” will deliver a close reading of Sexton’s best known (while still misunderstood) poem, “Her Kind,” which draws on tropes of male hunters and female prey from early sixteenth-century poetry. Sexton’s poem will be considered through the lens of Wanda Coleman’s, “Her Poem (after Anne Sexton)” as a means of elucidating the conversation among poets. This paper seeks to illuminate the shifting registers of predator and prey in their voices, contextualized within Coleman’s dual perspective of sympathy and independence.