《Affect, Psychoanalysis, and American Poetry》"Exploring the Relationship Between Emotion and Poetry in Affect Psychoanalysis Review"

The point of departure in John Steens Affect, Psychoanalysis, and American Poetry (2018) is that poetry contains something uncontainable, and the poetic form signifies the poems strange failure to contain its own feelings - anxiety, grief, shame, anger. By cutting into what is most insecure and untenable, poetry offers us intimate proximity as well as protective distance from these powerful feelings, which flow through our bodies toward the "open" like rivers. This does not mean, as Steen emphasizes, that in an age of affect the poetic form will be dissolved in a flux of feeling, because without poetic containing (condensing, narrating), human feelings may dry up in the hands of psychologists as a bunch of pure sensations, perceptions, tensions, and intensities. Deprived of creative, linguistic expressivity, feelings easily fall into what Walter Benjamin calls "the muted language of the affects," in which our inner emotional life becomes "no less obscure to [ourselves] than to others."

- Source: Journal of Modern Literature Book Review - https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/article/787580