Drag Keats: Mark Doty's Cockney Poetics. Issue 3 (4th May 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Eisner, Eric
• Is Part Of: European romantic review. Volume 28:Issue 3(2017)
• Page Start: 387
• Page End: 393
• Publication Date: 2017-05-04
• Subjects: Romanticism -- Europe -- Periodicals; European literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Europe -- History -- 1789-1900 -- Periodicals; European literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; 809.9145
• DOI: 10.1080/10509585.2017.1314664
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1050-9585

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In the American poet Mark Doty's books of the 1990s, allusions to Keats are so frequent and so pronounced as to make Keats appear a kind of presider to the poetry. Doty's lyrics may often be elegiac in tone, but his use of Keats is neither elegiac nor nostalgic. I see Doty's style in these early books as enacting a reading of the critical possibility of Keats's style, one that corroborates the insights of recent materialist scholarship on Keats. I understand Doty's queer poetics as strategically employing a kind of Cockney poetics. Where for many contemporary poets Keats functions as the icon of lyric tradition or authenticity of "experience, " Doty, working within the lyric tradition, connects Keats to drag, kitsch, and simulation. I propose D. W. Winnicott's notion of "object use" as a model for this irreverently allusive "use" of Keats.