Mourning Melancholia: Modernist Poetics and the Refusal of Solace

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 in the theorization of relationships with others, objects, and landscapes (Brown, Khanna, Munoz, 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.