Against Vanishing: Winnicott and the Modern Poetry of Nothing

How often our major voices boldly assert and embrace their own nothingness. At the center of what has been called the “most celebrated moment of transcendence in American letters” (Hughes, 157), Emerson tells us “all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all” (6). Less transcendentally, Yeats picks up the theme: “Talk to me of originality and I will turn on you with rage. I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing” (Essays, 522). Such boldness, perhaps, reflects a more diffident precursor. In a crowd, Keats writes, “the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated”; his kind of poetical character “is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing” (279-80).

Nothingness, apparently, is a condition much to be admired. Indeed, as Anthony Libby argues, “the poetry of this post-Christian age … tends to define what it seeks as nothing: in Wallace Stevens's words [from “The Snow Man”], ‘the nothing that is’” (1). One might think of T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets seeking descent into “that which is not world, / Internal darkness, deprivation / And destitution of all property, / Desiccation of the world of sense, / Evacuation of the world of fancy, / Inoperancy of the world of spirit” (120-21); or saying to his soul, “be still, and let the dark come upon you” as, “when an underground train … stops too long between stations / … And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen / Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about; / Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing” (126). In a more contemporary mode, W. S. Merwin hears each of the dead proclaim, “I know nothing / learn of me” (51), and his translation of Antonio Porchia is also self-disclosure: “It is when I assent to nothing that I assent to all” (16). At the bottom of such a tendency lies