This essay is an attempt to read Robert Frost’s and William Carlos Williams’ poetry from the perspective of the negative presentation and establish a new genealogy of poetic modernism. “Negativity” or “negative presentation” has been mentioned as one of the key concepts in modern aesthetics since Kant’s “negative sublime.” The only way to present the unpresentable, instead of calling it in the name of God or ‘ideas,’ will be to accept that there is something beyond the human act of represention. However, when the human representational act or symbolic system fails, the Thing, or invisibilities, comes to emerge sublimely. Emerson’s “The mind goes antagonizing on” in “Experience,” which presents a negative movement not as a step toward the dialogical affirmation but as positive in itself, can be said to represent this genealogy of the poetics of negativity. According to Emerson, the flow called life consists of resistances that help accelerate the forward motion, and we can find this Emersonian linkage of life and literary creativity in Frost’s and Williams’ poems. First of all, Frost’s “West­Running Brook” deserves to be called a direct expression of Emersonian negativity, which claims that the absolute or Utopia be identified not with the First Cause or an immovable thing but the antagonistic action itself that “runs away to fill the abyss’s void with emptiness.” Also, Williams’ greatest early achievement, “Spring and All,” presents a vividly imaged space of negativity where “everything and nothing are synonymous.” Williams’ spring, which is approaching yet not here after the annihilation of every human­willed invention and imposition, is identified with “the depth of our despair” and “Hope long asleep” at the same time. That is, spring is approaching antagonizing all previously established identities that try to fix and resolve “absolute negativity,” which is Utopia.

This essay is an attempt to read Robert Frost’s and William Carlos Williams’ poetry from the perspective of the negative presentation and establish a new genealogy of poetic modernism. “Negativity” or “negative presentation” has been mentioned as one of the key concepts in modern aesthetics since Kant’s “negative sublime.” The only way to present the unpresentable, instead of calling it in the name of God or ‘ideas,’ will be to accept that there is something beyond the human act of represention. However, when the human representational act or symbolic system fails, the Thing, or invisibilities, comes to emerge sublimely. Emerson’s “The mind goes antagonizing on” in “Experience,” which presents a negative movement not as a step toward the dialogical affirmation but as positive in itself, can be said to represent this genealogy of the poetics of negativity. According to Emerson, the flow called life consists of resistances that help accelerate the forward motion, and we can find this Emersonian linkage of life and literary creativity in Frost’s and Williams’ poems. First of all, Frost’s “West­Running Brook” deserves to be called a direct expression of Emersonian negativity, which claims that the absolute or Utopia be identified not with the First Cause or an immovable thing but the antagonistic action itself that “runs away to fill the abyss’s void with emptiness.” Also, Williams’ greatest early achievement, “Spring and All,” presents a vividly imaged space of negativity where “everything and nothing are synonymous.” Williams’ spring, which is approaching yet not here after the annihilation of every human­willed invention and imposition, is identified with “the depth of our despair” and “Hope long asleep” at the same time. That is, spring is approaching antagonizing all previously established identities that try to fix and resolve “absolute negativity,” which is Utopia.

negativity, negative presentation, the unpresentable, antagonistic, nothing, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, spring