On Irritation: Itching, Scratching, Swelling

Wallace Stevens’s late poem “Looking across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly” begins:

Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:

The rest of the poem presents an extensive elaboration of Mr. Homburg’s “irritating” and “minor” idea, which might best be glossed by a line from later in the poem: “The spirit comes from the body of the world.” But if the body of the world begets the spirit, we might also say that it then affects the spirit as if the spirit were a body.

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The June 1892 issue of The Atlantic Monthly closes with an anonymously written Contributors’ Club piece called “A Plea for the Minor Artist,” in which the author invokes Horace’s notion of “the irritable species of poets”:

It is, perhaps, an open question whether the genus irritabile vatum should be indulged in its irritability.

But seventy-four years earlier, we find the then-minor John Keats getting definitively irritated with the irritability of poets in the letter in which he defines “Negative Capability,” the quality he deems necessary for “Achievement, especially in Literature.” (The capitals are all his.) “When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”—that is, of course, his famous indicator of poetic fitness.

That the gerund “reaching” is modified by the adjective “irritable” at first seems a little strange, since we might initially expect “irritable” to be ascribed to an organ and not an action. But “irritable,” as Oxford has it, can also be used to describe a condition “caused by abnormal sensitivity,” as in “irritable contractions,” which means Keats is asking us to see “reaching after fact and reason” as a reflex, perhaps even a malady.

Noting that the Negative Capability letter “falls squarely within the period of Keats’s conspicuous use of medical and chemical terminology in the development of his aesthetics,” the scholar Jeanne Britton writes: “If irritability identifies the tendency for muscular contraction, then ‘irritable reaching’ describes movement that combines contraction with expansion.” In Keats’s scenario, then, “reaching after” is a kind of seizing up, which means that his prose definition creates an enigma of the very sort that he wants us to be in—rather than dwell on—when it appears in a poem. (“Always be a poet,” says Baudelaire, “even in prose.”)

Of course, Keats is not opposed to poets being abnormally sensitive; rather, he just wants them to have automatic responses that involve grabbing at things other than “fact and reason” and not letting them go, as his letter, in which he upbraids Coleridge for “let[ting] go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery,” makes clear. If irritability at first seems in line with some of the more body-oriented claims made by poets about poetry—Dickinson’s alleged “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off”; Frost’s notion that “a poem begins as a lump in the throat”—Keats’s vision of top-tier aesthetics might in fact be closer to athletics. Jack Spicer asks us to think of poets as catchers rather than pitchers, but imagine a pitcher who instinctively catches a ball that’s just rocketed off a bat: “fact and reason” would tell him to get the hell out of the way, while “Negative Capability” would have him unthinkingly thrust out his glove.

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In his recent book Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry, Brad Leithauser points admiringly to particular aspects of the opening of the first sentence of Marianne Moore’s “The Fish” that might have irritated “a gentleman of congenial if conventional tastes” in 1918, the year the poem was published:

wade
through black jade.
      Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
      adjusting the ash-heaps;
             opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.

Leithauser notes:

Jade is properly green, not black. Black is what we expect from a crow—not the blue we encounter here ... Ashes belong to a desiccated landscape rather than to this marine environment. And an injured fan? Obviously the word she was seeking is damaged. And fish don’t wade—people do.
 

Moore, Leithauser writes, was “getting things right while looking wrong, as inevitably transpires when somebody lights upon novel ingenuities of construction,” another way, I think, of saying that she caught and kept a handful of “fine isolated verisimilitude[s].” Get things too wrong, though, and the reader’s itch might become a full-blown, untreatable rash. For instance, when I read Billy Collins’s claim that “reason is a plank” in his “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes,” I feel like I’m walking barefoot through a field of poison ivy. It’s a bad poem generally, but what’s most itchy to me is the fact that the Dickinson poem to which he refers in his last stanza says that “a Plank in Reason, broke,/and I dropped down, and down.” Dickinson clearly—and brilliantly—sees reason not as a plank, but as a  floor. And Rupi Kaur’s lines “it was when I stopped searching for home within others/and lifted the foundations of home within myself” make me want to claw through my skin, as I can’t get myself to see “foundations” as anything other than dug or poured.

Though it technically denotes standoffishness, I like the word “offishness,” to which Sianne Ngai draws our attention in the “Irritation” chapter of her book Ugly Feelings, as a way to describe how poems like “The Fish”—though I can think of no other poem “like” “The Fish”—deploy a kind of distance in their manner that, while felt intensely, can also be crossed almost instantly. Writing about Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Ngai sees in that novel something akin to the simultaneous expansion and contraction of Keats’s “irritable reaching”: “Paradoxically conjoining an image of distance or emotional detachment with an image of physical contact or friction, the novel seems to summon the idiom of irritation both to ‘put us off’ and to ‘rub us the wrong way.’”

It may be that offishness is a feature of any great poem; to wit, the opening of John N. Morris’s “For Whiskey,” a poem that could never be mistaken for one of Moore’s, in which the poet’s torqued syntax, tipsy enjambment, and childish metonymy irritate the mind just enough to make it scratch itself:

Not yet usually
In the daytime
But all evening
I raise my favorite
Color to my face.

Again, what’s wrong here is exactly right, and thus irritation is our gateway to poetry’s pleasure. Morris’s speaker’s face, to borrow from another of Keats’s letters, “swell[s] into reality.”