61
Weldon Kees and the Poetic Landscapes 
of Despair
Mirko Starčević
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the efforts to renew an interest in the poetry of 
Weldon Kees, a more or less forgotten American poet of late modernism. The main argu-
ment of this paper is that Weldon Kees, while a belated poet of modernism, successfully 
swerved away from the earlier poetics of modernism and proved capable of constructing 
a unique poetics of despair and alienation. In many ways, an heir of Hart Crane’s tragic 
sense of life, Kees’ misreading of Hart Crane was highly fertile and crucially conducive 
to the creation of his own visionary poetics. In the first part of our discussion, a more 
generalized overview of Kees’ poetry is developed, while in the second part, we analyze 
the four Robinson poems which constitute the nucleus of Kees’ existential aesthetics. 
Notwithstanding the fact that despair is a ubiquitous presence in Kees’ poetry, it does not 
manifest itself as an inhibiting force; on the contrary, while despair is inextricably linked 
to his tragic fate, it also acts as a major creative impetus, which helped Kees express his 
relationship to the world and, consequently, his place in it.
Keywords: Weldon Kees, poetry, Robinson, Hart Crane, despair, alienation
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.111(73).09-1Kees W.
DOI: 10.4312/an.55.1-2.61-72
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62 Mirko Starčević
Weldon Kees is now a mostly forgotten poet. His name occasionally graces a page 
in an anthology of 20th-century American poetry and has predominantly become 
the subject matter confined to the arcana of literary studies. During his lifetime, 
three volumes of his poetry were published, ‘The Last Man’ (1943), ‘The Fall of 
the Magicians’ (1947), and ‘Poems’ (1947-1954). Donald Justice, a poet and one 
of the Kees revivalists, points out in the 1960 ‘Preface’ to ‘The Collected Poems of 
Weldon Kees,’ of which he is the editor, that none of the three volumes aforemen-
tioned are ‘at present easily obtainable’ (xiii). 
Kees harboured high literary and artistic ambitions – as a poet, a novelist, and a 
painter – and notwithstanding the fact that his literary star has sunk into obscuri-
ty, his poetic output has never been swallowed by the ravenous tendencies of time 
to the same extent his contributions as a novelist have. It is important to men-
tion that his failing to make his novel, entitled Fall Quarter, see the light of day 
launched him into a swirling vortex of self-doubt which became his daily bread 
and, not infrequently, made him likewise question the nature of his poetic quest.
He evinced great despondency over having been thrown into the midriff of 
what may be termed late or ‘residual’ modernism, which was marked by the after-
glow of aesthetic sheen found in the works of T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Wil-
liam Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. Kees’ poetry had often been dismissed 
as a repository of imitative proclivities, as in being overly deferential towards the 
works of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Fearing, W. H. Auden, Arthur Waley, 
and others.1 Admittedly, Kees felt great reverence for the preceding generation of 
poets and wrote, in a sardonic tone innate to him, in the 1946 edition of Partisan 
Review that “If that was a Wasteland and they were the Lost Generation, then 
what is this moldy milieu, in which we find ourselves, and what are we” (qtd. in 
Siedell 86). Notwithstanding this observation, it is a facile conclusion to regard 
Kees’ poetry as a product of an indolent epigone. While Kees did share a view 
with the early modernists that poetry “must be rooted in a tragic sense of life,” 
(qtd. in Reidel 260), entrenched in the High Romantic themes of belatedness and 
the apparent lack of aesthetic expansiveness, it was the combination of the tragic 
sense of life as a poetic mode and the tragic sense of life which he endured that 
rendered his poetic output so unique.
On account of his tragic life, Kees’ name is often encountered in the company 
of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, and Hart Crane. Of these 
names here mentioned, it is Hart Crane who exerted the greatest amount of in-
fluence upon Kees the poet. Herein lies the reason why calling Kees’ an imitator 
of the earlier modernists like T. S. Eliot or W. H. Auden is erroneous, for, like 
Hart Crane, Kees envisions the world not so much as the wasteland without hope 
1 For further discussion of the multifarious influences upon Kees’ poetry, see Nelson 844.
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63Weldon Kees and the Poetic Landscapes of Despair
as the world which fails to step upon the path of self-understanding and cannot 
internalize the meaning of hope in the first place. As David Wojahn writes, in the 
world of Weldon Kees, “the apocalypse has run its course” (vii), the most tragic has 
already transpired and the course of destiny cannot ever be reversed. There is no 
place for the voice seeking for the light of “spiritual renewal” (vii). It is swallowed 
in the cacophony of limitless chaos, in the cosmos shattered into bits and pieces, 
barren from and to its ailing core.
The imaginative landscapes inherent in the poetry of Weldon Kees take on a 
form of a “slashed world” (3), as he describes it in his poem, entitled “A Salvo for 
Hans Hoffmann,” a poem which indirectly represents his affirmation of abstract 
expressionism along with its penchant for “nonhierarchical, all-over composition,” 
(Yau 29) where all images are of corresponding importance.2 The poet very curi-
ously and, I believe, quite purposefully employs the adjective slashed, for it mounts 
a powerful image of the world fragmented, not unlike a mirror which can never 
be glued back to its former faultless sheen. Thrown into existence thus to be here 
with “our rootless feet” (“Variation on a Theme by Joyce” 2), we are left to floun-
der in a perpetual transition between two levels of Being-in-the-World, that is, 
swinging eternally, as Kees understood it, between summer and fall, warmth and 
cold. Kees names the first state of Being-here as “once it was summer” and the 
other “almost Fall” (“White Collar Ballad” 21). The two adverbs, once and almost, 
imply an intransigent midway between the two finalities, incarnated in both a 
spatial and temporal dislocation from the realm of the presently present. Summer 
and fall exist for the poet only ideationally, the former as an echo reverberating 
from the past and the latter beckoning forth only as a possibility and a promise 
of an iron year. In the same poem, Kees declares that there “isn’t any season now” 
(22); it is time seasonless. Reality no longer conscripting to the ordinary claims of 
time forces Kees to ask the following question: “Where is the grave / Of time?” 
(“To the North” 12-13) The state of existential limbo, between the feast of light 
and the abyss of dusk everlasting, spells out an ominous proposition that “there 
isn’t any love” (“White Collar Ballad” 6), that “there wouldn’t be any love” (18), 
that “there won’t be any love” (24).
These is an underlying darkness in the poetry of Weldon Kees that led to 
its being labelled as bitter. One of the best-known proponents of this school 
of thought is Kenneth Rexroth, himself an accomplished poet, abstract painter, 
and Kees’, I hesitate to say, friend. Even though Rexroth praises Kees’ poetry on 
2 Weldon Kees was also an abstract painter of non-negligible reputation. Hans Hoffman to whom 
the poem is dedicated was a great European abstract painter. He held Weldon Kees’ poetry and 
artistic work in high regard: “You are as great a poet as you are a painter. I found your exhibition 
fascinating. It’s poetry in color. That it is what painting should be” (Weldon Kees and the Midcentury 
Generation 117).
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64 Mirko Starčević
account of its authenticity – while, nonetheless, regarding it as overly steeped in 
the eyeless emulation of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” – he ultimately finds a temp-
tation to call Kees a bitter poet unduly overwhelming. Rexroth proceeds along 
the same path in writing that while “others have called themselves Apocalyptics, 
Kees lived in a permanent and hopeless apocalypse” (qtd. in Justice xvi). Donald 
Justice, who to a large degree reciprocates Rexroth’s estimation of Kees’ verse 
as being bitter, attributes Kees’ purported bitterness “to a profound hatred for 
a botched civilization, Whitman’s America come to a dead end on the shores 
of the Pacific” (xv). Calling Kees’ poetry bitter is, in my view, a case of oversim-
plified mis-reading, for bitterness implies one’s emotional investment with the 
world one feels embittered about. 
One would hardly be disinclined to recognize in this description the founda-
tional principles of resignation, yet resignation just like bitterness hints at some 
form of involvement with the world, whereas Kees’ poetry evinces the mood of 
coldness, alienation, as the incipient stage of Being-here, which transpires and 
establishes itself prior to the arousal of one’s emotional surrender. Kees’ existential 
bent is that of surrendering in the face surrendering. 
He is likewise intimately preoccupied with the themes of “decay, imprison-
ment, moral and physic” (Nelson 830). In “Early Winter,” in particular, Kees in-
timates a universe that is replete with the daemon of decay and confinement, of 
alienation and of the metaphysical nothing. In the very first verse of the poem, 
he affirms the universe as being in a disjointed relationship to any form of ex-
pectation, conviction, and anticipation. The summer of life is for him a trunkless 
construct, for “memory of summer is winter’s consciousness” (1). In the rest of the 
poem, winter’s consciousness takes over the atmosphere, rendering it a servant to 
the unforgiving cold of despair and despondency:3
But the room is cold, the words in the books are cold;
And the question of whether we get what we ask for
Is absurd, unanswered by the sound of an unlatched door
Rattling in wind, or the sound of snow on roofs, or glare
Of the winter sun. What we have learned is not what we were told.
I watch the snow, feel for the heartbeat that is not there. (“Early Winter” 7-12)
3 Despair, in relation to Kees’ life and poetry, is taken as an ontological – not psychological – state 
of Being, in that it signifies the manner in which “with infinite passion the self by means of imag-
ination despairs over something earthly” (Kierkegaard 348) and is, thus, interfused with the falling 
apart within the self of the Laws of Eternity. In other words, despair projects forth the ontological 
disorientation within the innermost Being of one who despairs, which, moreover, means that de-
spair correlates with one’s inability to become the self that one was perhaps intended or expected 
to become.
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65Weldon Kees and the Poetic Landscapes of Despair
The world without a heartbeat is reminiscent of a barren canvas, of a heart spilling 
emptiness, exuding the blossoming of anguish. In other words, the central stage is 
usurped by the withdrawal of Being, an ontological mode which is closely related 
to nihilism. The rambling mind has no way of avoiding being shattered upon its 
self-generating shores of destruction, as Kees so powerfully tells us in his poem 
“Covering Two Years”:
This nothingness that feeds upon itself:
Pencils that turn to water in the hand,
Part of a sentence, hanging in the air,
Thoughts breaking in the mind like glass,
Blank sheets of paper that reflect the world
Whitened the world that I was silenced by. (1-6)
The image of pencils turning to water brings to mind John Keats’ famous epitaph 
engraved upon his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” The 
theme of failure, pre-ordained as it appears in these words, assumes a pivotal role 
in the incipient stages of Kees’ poetic career; and yet rather than focusing the eye 
on himself alone, he casts the judgment upon the society as a whole, upon the 
society that is inimical and uncharitable to the exigencies of one’s poetic calling. 
Silence regnant in the world is not pleasurable; it is profoundly deafening, devoid 
of becalming contrasts, lacking dialectical hues and shades. 
Hart Crane writes in his famous poem “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge” that “only 
in darkness is thy shadow clear” (38). Only in the dungeons beyond the reach of 
the world does the quintessence of meaning acquire genuine prominence. Al-
though hope is not what Kees is after, he nonetheless longs for the conditions 
propitious for the birth of a creative spark. It does not come as a surprise that 
he chooses a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun as an 
epigraph for his final book of verse: “Those dark caverns into which all men must 
descend, if they would know anything beneath the surface and illusive pleasure 
of existence” (87). The eye habituated to the tenebrous forms of nocturnal exist-
ence comes to appreciate the delineative and inventive force of the night. Kees, 
notwithstanding his indebtedness to Crane, goes a step further, encountering in 
the undue adulation of night a paradox, for the presence of night admits to the 
presence of day, albeit as absently present. In Kees, night becomes day and day 
becomes night, neither overruling the other which renders the middlemost point 
of their mutual essence the innate force of creative divergence.
We will now direct our attention to the centre holding together the pivotal 
part of Kees’ opus, to the four poems which feature a protagonist named Rob-
inson. The quartet of Robinson poems is significant for two different but not 
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66 Mirko Starčević
unrelated reasons. The first and foremost reason which renders these poems re-
markable is the fact that they represent Kees’ carving out of his manifesto of 
despair, delineating and keeping aesthetically genuine the arc of his imaginative 
undertaking. The four poems were written within the span of six years: “Robinson” 
(1945), “Aspects of Robinson” (1948), “Robinson at Home” (1948), and “Relating 
to Robinson” (1951).
The poems are highly autobiographical and their protagonist has been the 
focal point of a multitude of differing opinions as to his true identity and her-
meneutic value. Most frequently and predictably, Robinson has been read as a 
Robinson Crusoe double, “the daemon of solitary existence,” (408) as Bloom elo-
quently phrases it. Still others recognize in the figure of Robinson the undertones 
of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel “Journey to the End of the Night,” where the 
protagonist, likewise named Robinson, functions as the author’s double. Merlin 
Thomas in his “Louis-Ferdinand Céline” writes that Robinson is “to be thought 
as an average, deluded human being who never really has a chance and who only 
realizes this dimly very late on” (55). This brief description aligns with the mood 
evinced by Kees’ Robinson, yet a slight misalignment between the two persists, 
and it needs to be highlighted. The surrendering of Kees’ Robinson to the heights 
of despair is so profound that the concept of chance never enters the dominion of 
his thought.4 His horizon is indeed one of uncertainty, a blank canvas deprived of 
hope, neither implied nor intimated.
In “Robinson,” Kees fronts us with a vanishing presence. In the very first line, 
Kees tells us that “Robinson has gone” (1). The verb gone is ambiguous. We are 
left guessing if Robinson has only left or died. This foreshadows Kees’ own fate, 
for just before his disappearance in 1955, he had spoken of leaving for Mexico. 
His car having been left on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, it remains 
to this day unknown whether he indeed travelled to Mexico or committed suicide 
by jumping from the bridge – though the latter version has been heavily favoured, 
bearing in mind that Kees had been obsessed with the topic of suicide and was by 
his peers deemed quite an expert on it. That the world is gray seems a statement 
independent of Robinson’s disappearance although it might have factored heavily 
4 I employ the phrase the heights of despair as a reference to the work of the Romanian essayist and 
philosopher Emil Cioran, whose work “On the Heights of Despair” explores the ontological moods 
of despair and hopelessness, of alienation and angst, of futility and decay. Cioran maintains that 
“the terrifying experience of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous,” and yet, 
talking of death, you can “save part of your self ” (4). Nevertheless, when lingering for too long upon 
the mysterious themes of death, “something of your real self dies because objectified meanings 
lose the actuality they have in consciousness” (4). The best one can hope for is to sublimate the 
death-drive in the form of creative endeavor. This very act of creative sublimation was Kees’ great 
accomplishment, for he proved at one and the same time creatively most daring, unapologetic, and 
original, when “in the throes of death” (4) and existential uncertainty.
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67Weldon Kees and the Poetic Landscapes of Despair
in his having taken off. There is a broken world imaged in “the mirror from Mex-
ico” (5), an indirect allusion to Hart Crane, who spent the last year of his life in 
Mexico and committed suicide by jumping from the stern of the steamship Oriz-
aba as it was making its way from Mexico to the U. S. 
In the second tercet of the poem, the motif of blankness charges across the 
poem’s canvas:
The pages in the books are blank,
The books that Robinson has read. That is his favorite chair,
Or where the chair would be if Robinson were here. (12-14)
The books whose pages are blank is a metaphor for books which kindle no interest 
in Robinson; they could easily have been books yet unwritten, a desideratum of 
the failed poet; they could also have been the books circumnavigating the rugged 
shores of Robinson’s own life. The curious switch from the ontological to the 
mundane in the poem’s reference to the anatomy of Robinson’s room yet again 
hauntingly predicts future events in Kees’ life. Following Kees’ vanishing act, his 
very good friend, Michael Grieg was informed by the California Highway Patrol 
about the finding of his friend’s car. Thereupon Grieg with another friend and 
two police officers entered Kees’ apartment, making a note of things as they were 
laid out. Grieg had visited Kees’ apartment shortly before his disappearance which 
means his was a privileged insight into Kees’ last few days, affording him, at the 
same time, an exceedingly advantageous vantage point for picking up any hints 
that might have proven valuable in making sense of his friend’s sudden though 
not wholly unexpected vanishment:
The Jack Daniel’s had not been touched. Sheet music was spread across the 
upright piano. There was a pile of reel-to-reel tape that Kees had made with his 
musician friend … Dostoevsky’s The Devils … was placed near his bed beside 
another book, Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life. A note lay on the telephone table 
… In the kitchen, beside a bookcase that Kees kept there, stood a plate of con-
gealed milk for his cat, Lonesome, which turned out to be the only living thing 
in the apartment. (Reidel 5)
“Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian,” is one of the most haunting 
lines in the entire quartet of poems. The image is that of emptiness and absence. 
All the things he left behind in his apartment are a telling reminder of that ardent 
absence, the last vestige of his presence. Robinson’s reality has changed beyond 
re-pair while the outside world takes no note of the event. It is this tragic fact 
which obsessively occupies Kees, the inability of people to fundamentally relate to 
one another, to feel another’s grief and joy alike. As the curtain of night is lifted, 
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68 Mirko Starčević
the light of day protrudes unto the scene but nothing appears changed. Kees mas-
terfully captures this sobering indifference of both nature and civilization, nay, of 
the cosmos, to the disappearance of the forlorn individual, thus prefiguring the 
dominant theme of the last Robinson poem, “Relating to Robinson”:
Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun.
Outside, the birds circle continuously
Where trees are actual and take no holiday. (17-19)
With the image of white buildings Kees apostrophizes Hart Crane again. Har-
old Bloom astutely points out that for Hart Crane “white buildings gradually 
answer day. For Kees they yellow silently” (409). However, I argue that unlike 
Hart Crane’s white buildings, Kees’ white buildings never undergo the spring of 
renewal. They do not become yellow, not even silently. What prevails is the limbo 
of blank indifference, symbolized by the trees which continue to be present, taking 
no time off, standing there resolutely, a firm signature of nature’s detachment from 
the sufferings of a tortured consciousness. 
In the second Robinson poem, entitled “Aspects of Robinson,” Kees’ fascina-
tion with Hart Crane assumes a central role less tentatively. Robinson apparent-
ly succumbs to mental torpor, designated by Harold Bloom as acedia, which he 
beautifully defines as “the malady of monks … the sin of being sullen in the sweet 
air” (408). The air is sweet, for the poet shares his mental landscape with the im-
aginative landscape of Hart Crane, a poet he looks up to. Wandering around New 
York, he comes upon places which are related to Hart Crane. Robinson stands 
on a roof above the Brooklyn Heights, a residential neighbourhood where Hart 
Crane lived in the 1920s. In one of the photographs, Crane stands on a roof of a 
building with the Brooklyn Bridge, his grandest of muses, towering ever unspent 
in the background. Crane continues to loom large in the rest of the poem, most 
prominently in the line: “Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson.” 
This is a clear allusion to Hart Crane’s suicide even though he did not end his 
life by jumping from the bridge but from the stern of a steamship. It is worth 
mentioning that the line could also be referring to Hart Crane’s proem “To the 
Brooklyn Bridge,” to a quatrain which reads like a dirge written unto the spell-
bound bedlamite gazing into the vast abyss below, unseen by the busy, mocking, 
and uncaring passers-by: 
Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft,
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan. (17-20)
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69Weldon Kees and the Poetic Landscapes of Despair
The poem is abounding in the elements of prosaic mundaneness, such as the read-
ing of a daily newspaper or visiting local restaurants. For all that, beyond the mi-
rage of such effortless preoccupations lies the hidden yet vibrating abyss of despair. 
Robinson, well-dressed as he is, in “Glen plad jacket, Scotch-grain shoes / Black 
four-in-hand and oxford button down” (21-22) is shattered by the blandness with-
in, where “his sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf ” (25) lingers on unheard and 
unseen; a possible allusion to Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory,” 
whose protagonist appears not to be possessed by a single agonizing thought, 
while the final truth does not correspond to the impression of appearance, which 
the tragic end of the poem so poignantly showcases.
In the third Robinson poem, “Robinson at Home,” our hero inhabits the land of 
mental oblivion. This mental state appears to be his true home, inferno and heaven 
all at once. This is where “the moonlight and the odors of the street / Conspire 
and combine toward one community” (3-4), the community of light mingled with 
darkness, and vice versa. The rooms which keep Robinson in concealment from 
the world are “Bleached, wan, and colorless this light, as though / All the blurred 
daybreaks of the spring / Found an asylum here” (6-8). The meaning of the place 
transcends its immediate physical dimensions, projecting forth an overwhelming 
ontological mood of indifference. And while “his old desire / To die like this has 
known a lessening,” he has not shed the “coldness that he has to wear” (13-14). 
He is caught between the extremity of a frenzied dream and silence which meets 
him upon awakening. Even silence in Robinson’s world becomes white noise, the 
cause of inner strife. It is anything but comforting for, like a disturbing presence of 
the other, “it drones like wires far beyond roofs / And the long curtains blow into 
the room” (26-27). The movement of air beyond the walls heralds the fore-knowl-
edge that he has forfeited the self-within, in the sense that he is gripped by the 
prepossessing drive to be rid of the self. The curtains, introducing and concluding 
the poem, are indicative of Fate’s cruel decrees. At first, the curtains stand aside, 
“drawn back” (1), and are then transformed into the very shadow which blocks the 
shining of the light of life into Robinson’s rooms and the voice which so desires to 
express this razing anguish. The rooms close for Robinson, the final refuge from 
indifference become its unalterably powerful progenitor.
In the last Robinson poem, “Relating to Robinson,” the poet takes to the streets 
again, following Robinson, who is constantly a dozen steps ahead of him. The two 
share a brief interval of spatial reciprocity: “We were alone there, he and I, / Inhab-
iting the empty street.” (7-8) Together they are working out the kernel of the jigsaw 
of emptiness. Soon enough the poet, in a rare spell of lucidity, is disabused of his 
hallucination, realizing that it is not Robinson he sees, as he is “out of town” (14). 
In spite of knowing that Robinson “summers at a place in Maine / Sometimes on 
Fire Island, sometimes the cape,” he cannot resist the urge to call out “Robinson!” 
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70 Mirko Starčević
(15- 17). Seamlessly, the poet is submerged anew in his pursuit of the seemingly 
familiar silhouette. This time the doppelgänger is uncannily rendered even more 
indecipherable in spite the unprecedented proximity of his facial features:
Turning my head to search is face,
His own head turned with mine,
And fixed me with dilated, terrifying eyes
That stopped my blood. His voice
Came at me like an echo in the dark. (19-23)
The poet apparently becomes the unknown other as the delimiting bounds be-
tween the two passing entities emerge as seemingly inseparable. As he turns to-
wards Robinson, he meets himself in the eyes of the other, over-hearing his own 
voice which is telling him that “an empty paper floats down at the last” (27). In 
an overt yet fragmentary reference to Emily Dickinson’s poem “The First Day’s 
Night,” the poet confesses to finding unbearable the curtain of despair having 
been made potent by the veil of hallucination. The fragment is broken by the 
poet’s descent deeper into a hallucinatory state. “I had not certainty / There in 
the dark, that it was Robinson, / Or someone else” (32-35). Uncertainty, as Nor-
ris Getty observed, is the poem’s strength, and Kees himself in a letter expresses 
gratitude to Getty for having revised one of the final lines in an early draft of the 
poem, thus singling and crossing out the line, “The man had looked / Enough like 
Robinson to be his twin.” The last version of the poem refrains from making a 
pronouncement as to the man’s true identity which consequently ameliorates the 
overall essence of the poem. Indeed, Kees’ ability to be at one with uncertainty is 
one of the main strengths of his poetry. 
The poet as Robinson’s double closes in on the water, and Harold Bloom, who 
suggests that “Death by water … haunted Kees” (411) offers a natural dénoue-
ment to the poem, providing us with another reference to Hart Crane and with 
the plaintive portents of Kees’ own tragic fate. John T. Irwin writes that the ending 
of the poem seems to display “the return of the speaker’s consciousness to a mel-
ancholy if precarious equilibrium after the crisis of his ventriloquizing the words 
of his double” (94). The poet, in the same fashion as Kees, hurries West, where he 
sees the boats that move “silently” and “the low whistles” (“Relating to Robinson” 
39-40) blowing hauntingly. This signifies the movement from the personal to the 
impersonal, from the human to the inhuman, towards the shadowy elements be-
longing to the cruel sea.
The four Robinson poems round off Kees’ preoccupation with the language of 
dejection and solitude and, as Sharon Mayer Libera points out, with “an unbearable 
tension between the insistent presence of things and their unsubstantiality” (156). 
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71Weldon Kees and the Poetic Landscapes of Despair
Nothing in these poems yearns to understand anything beyond itself. And though 
Kees looked “to build a quiet city in his mind: / A single overwhelming wish” 
(“To Build a Quiet City in His Mind” 1-2), he ultimately fails to achieve the goal, 
succumbing to the dread of disquietude and to the loss of his ontological identity. 
He has ultimately learned only “to speak to silences of altered rooms, / Shaken by 
knowledge of recurrence and return” (“Covering Two Years” 12-13). The recurrence 
he speaks of is the recurrence of the invariably identical, of that which is devoid 
of its genuine haecceitas, hence failing to insert colour into life, colour which he so 
craves for but ever eludes him. The image Robinsonian in the end triumphs over 
the false sense of hope and takes for its own the idiom of despair.
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Irwin, John T. The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence. JHU Press, 2017.
Justice, Donald. “Preface.” The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Third Edition), by 
Kees, University of Nebraska, 2003, pp. xiii-xvii.
Kees, Weldon. The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Third Edition). University of 
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vol. 1, no. 4, 1989, pp. 816-852.
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72 Mirko Starčević
Mirko Starčević
Kranj
mirko.starcevic@gmail.com
Weldon Kees in pesniške pokrajine brezupa
Namen pričujoče razprave je prispevati k naporom, ki si prizadevajo obuditi zanimanje za 
poezijo Weldona Keesa, bolj ali manj pozabljenega ameriškega modernističnega pesnika. 
Glavna teza članka je, da se Weldon Kees, navkljub temu, da je zapozneli pesnik modern-
izma, uspešno odkloni od predhodne poetike modernizma in ustvari edinstveno poetiko 
brezupa in odtujenosti. V prenekaterem pogledu je Kees naslednik tragičnega občutja 
življenja, ki ga najdemo pri Hartu Cranu, vendar se njegovo mimo-branje Crana izkaže 
za plodovito in ugodno pri ustvarjanju njemu lastne vizionarske poetike. V prvem delu 
razprave opredelimo splošne zakonitosti Keesove poezije, medtem ko v drugem delu ana-
liziramo štiri pesmi in njihovega protagonista Robinsona, ki predstavljajo jedro Keesove 
eksistencialne estetike. Kljub dejstvu, da se brezup v Keesovi poeziji vzpostavlja kot vse-
prisotna prezenca, se le-ta ne manifestira kot inhibirajoča sila. Nasprotno, ne glede na to, 
da je brezup neločljivo zvezan s pesnikovo tragično usodo, se v njem razgrinja silno ust-
varjalni vzgib, ki je Keesu omogočil ubesediti lasten odnos do sveta in posledično njegovo 
lastno umestitev v njem.
Ključne besede: Weldon Kees, poezija, Robinson, Hart Crane, brezup, odtujenost
Acta_Neophilologica_2022_FINAL.indd   72 12. 12. 2022   09:29:02