“Full / of Endless Distances”:Forms of Desire in Poetic Attention

Abstract

This essay explores desire as one mode of poetic attention. Through readings of poems by Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Robert Hass, and Wallace Stevens, Ishow how desire is given form through the formal orchestration of attention. In thesepoems, desire emerges as a mode of attention brought into tension by inflections ofinterest and lack. This reading gives us a new way of thinking about the poetics ofdesire and a new language for exploring how desire is not only described but also produced and embodied in poetic form.