When Weldon Kees disappeared, at the age of 41, he seemed on the verge of becoming one of the more prominent American poets of his generation. He had three collections to his name, and his work had been published in such periodicals as Sewanee Review, Poetry, Harper’s, and the New Yorker. But on July 19, 1955, his car was discovered near the Golden Gate Bridge. Although his body was never found—unless you believe the handful of people who claim to have seen him since—and he had told friends that he’d like to start a new life in Mexico, it is safe to assume that he killed himself, in part because he often seemed half in love with easeful death.
Kees’s work has maintained a small but loyal following since then. He may even have influenced the most recent Nobel laureate: The phrase “idiot wind” appears in his poem “June 1940.” Dana Gioia, one of Kees’s most prominent admirers, pointed out in 1995 that while many poets were inspired by and wrote about Kees, academics neglected him.
I’m informed by my sources deep within academe that Weldon Kees is still rarely considered by scholars, though there was a burst of interest about 15 years ago, when a collection of essays and an excellent biography, James Reidel’s Vanished Act, were published by University of Nebraska Press. John T. Irwin’s The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence is the first scholarly monograph about Kees. Although it is a flawed book, it may be an important step forward in bringing Kees’s poetry to the attention of scholars and a general audience.
Kees was born in Beatrice, Nebraska, in 1914, the only child of loving and supportive parents. His father owned a hardware factory and store; Kees’s friends teased him for being a mama’s boy. He graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1935 and, over his remaining 20 years, lived in Denver, where he got married and directed the Bibliographical Center for Research, Rocky Mountain Region; in New York City, where he wrote for Time; in Provincetown, where he organized art exhibitions and moderated cultural forums; and in San Francisco, where he got divorced, worked at a psychiatric clinic, and brainstormed a book about suicide.
His artistic talents were expansive. He painted, played and composed music, produced films, and wrote drama, fiction, and—most important—book reviews. His friends and associates included James Agee, Phyllis Diller, Pauline Kael, Hans Hoffman, Kenneth Rexroth, Conrad Aiken, and Malcolm Cowley. He had Don Draper hair and a Clark Gable mustache. But Kees was obviously a troubled person. Rexroth said that he “lived in a permanent and hopeless apocalypse,” which his poetry often reflects.
John T. Irwin provides a bracing description of Kees’s poetry when he says: “In a Kees poem it is never a question of whether we win or lose. We all lose. We all die, and death is an annihilation.” This poetry is often darkly humorous; it is occasionally beautiful; it is rarely, if ever, cheerful. For example, Kees’s strong reputation among poets rests in large part on a series of poems about an alienated man named Robinson whose aimless life we see in fragments, as in “Aspects of Robinson.”
The Robinson poems demonstrate what Irwin aptly calls “the depressing sense of meaningless repetition, of a quotidian predictability and soul-killing boredom” so often at the center of Kees’s work. Kees conveys all of this with impressive formal skill, deriving power and even humor from repetitive forms (villanelles, sestinas, and a variation on the rondeau) and phrases. The opening to the first of his “Five Villanelles” captures the frequently off-putting, but enchanting, strangeness of his repetition:
On some occasions, Kees’s darkness is trite, and his attempts to shock readers with juxtaposition and sudden changes in tone come across as pretentious cynicism. His early sonnet “For My Daughter,” for example, begins as a meditation on the subject’s mortality, devolves into a harsh consideration of her impending disappointments (the cruel / Bride of a syphilitic or a fool), and ends with a jolting couplet: These speculations sour in the sun. / I have no daughter. I desire none. Note that Kees drops a syllable in the last line to underscore the newly revealed absence. That’s the sort of technical subtlety other poets admire about him, but in this case, it does not compensate for the poem’s contrived and sudden twist.
Irwin uses Kees’s suicide as the starting point for his consideration of the poet’s work. (Some guidance for young writers: If you kill yourself, there’s a good chance that your work will only be interpreted through your suicide.) In fact, he considers the suicide itself as an aesthetic performance and seeks to understand what the poet “intended th[e] act to convey about his life and work.” It strikes me as a bit morbid to perceive suicide as an artistic statement, but Irwin insists that “Kees likely staged his death as his final aesthetic act, [and] that act provides a lens through which to detect and interpret the structures, motifs, and images that accumulate with an obsessive force in his poems.” In his first chapter, Irwin considers writers who may have inspired Kees to consider running away to Mexico or kill himself, and devotes the second to analyzing the books that Kees left in his bedroom—Dostoyevsky’s The Devils and Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life—as a suicide letter for literary sleuths, “to be read only by an act of intertextual interpretation.”
As the book progresses, however, Irwin’s emphasis on Kees’s disappearance itself vanishes, replaced by interesting but disconnected topics. For example, he offers interpretations of how Kees’s poetry treats human knowledge, but never quite relates this analysis to the poet’s “final aesthetic act.” Irwin is also very good at showing how Kees’s poetry engages with work by Hart Crane (another poet who jumped to his death), Wallace Stevens, Albert Camus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Butler Yeats, and others, but often without making strong claims about what this interaction means for our understanding of Kees or the other artists. The book also has unusual research standards: It is the first I’ve ever read from an academic press that cites Wikipedia as a source.
On the other hand, Irwin avoids academic jargon and theories du jour; calling the book “the eventual fulfillment of a lengthy admiration” for Kees, he is clearly eager to share that esteem not only to fill a gap in academic literature, but also to bring this fascinating and overlooked poet to more readers. I hope he succeeds.
Christopher J. Scalia is a writer in Washington.
