“I’m nobody. Who are you? / Are you nobody too?”

—Emily Dickinson

“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”

—William Shakespeare

“No, no, go not to Lethe.”

—John Keats

“You do not do you do not do/ Any more black shoe.”

—Sylvia Plath

The lines above are from poems achieving their rhetorical power by beginning with some form of negatio or negation, which in simple terms means “the contradiction or denial of something.”

Recall Shakespeare on negation (or denial): “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” (Hamlet, Act III; Scene 2), as though to say “no” or “not” is to mask a deeper, perhaps fear- or guilt-riven, “yes.”

In rhetoric, negatio is considered a form of apophasis, meaning “denial.” But it is “Pretending to deny what is really affirmed. A type of Irony or Occultatio.” That last word, with its recognizable root “occult,” implies a kind of hiding.

Here is Freud on “negation”:

[T]he content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated. Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed it is already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed.

But need negatio always be ironic or an unsuccessful act of repression? A way of saying “yes” hidden beneath “no”?

I would say “No.”

You could say, “There are two kinds of negatio: the straightforward “no” and the “no-meaning-yes,” but the two, except for extreme cases, are not so easy to differentiate. They commingle. That’s the nature of ambivalence, which is more or less the nature of polysemy (or many meanings).

Let me illustrate the ambiguity of straightforward versus ironic negation. Think of Elizabeth Bishop’s refrain in “One Art”: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” (a line repeated four times) where Bishop’s struggle in draft after draft and within the final version of the poem itself is her attempt to talk herself into believing something that we know she can’t quite manage to do. The more she says it, the less true it becomes. The whole poem is motivated by Bishop’s sense of loss, starting with “lost door keys and the hour badly spent,” which are clearly straightforward, trivial losses that are easy to master. But as the poem continues, the losses become more insurmountable, beginning with “I lost my mother’s watch,” a primal loss. Here, I am always struck by the double-entendre of the physical watch (a sentimental object) standing in for the watch or look of the mother, since she was institutionalized when Bishop was only five and Bishop never saw her again. These are increasingly more difficult losses, which she casually lists, culminating in the final loss: “—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love) I shan’t have lied.” Here we know Bishop is lying to herself through the use of negatio, denial, so that the ending, through the ironic use of negation, expresses the opposite of how painful her struggle with loss has been, which is the compelling impetus for the poem. She concludes that the art of losing “is not too hard to master” “even though it looks…like disaster.” The poem’s poignancy emerges through the very negation, a failed suppression, of her feelings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom I take to be my contemporary in his use of wordplay and sprung rhythms, masterfully uses negatio in enacting his spiritual struggle between faith and doubt, the very act of which show the formidable rhetorical power of negation.

In Hopkins’s “Carrion Comfort” below, I want to focus on the first four lines.

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

 

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

Notice the use of “not” three times in the opening line, a case of Freudian negation if ever I heard one. The poet is wrestling with his own despair, his depression, and we know—as does he—that what he is denying (“Despair”), exists inside him, or he would not need to negate it so fiercely. We know Hopkins did, for a year or more, at the end of his life, feast on Despair, to the point of almost untwisting the strands of life, meaning, I think, he considered suicide. In his final years of depression, he probably more than once cried out “I can no more,” (a reference to Cardinal Newman’s poem “Gerontius”), when he was in a state of despair, doubting that God heard his prayers. But of course, the most anguished prayers are often the most moving, and, paradoxically, bring the doubting believer closer to God. Hopkins’s excruciatingly painful relationship between faith and doubt creates this magnificent tension in “Carrion Comfort,” a struggle that is figured rhetorically in negatio. By using the double negative “not choose not to be,” meaning deciding against taking his own life, Hopkins is re-enacting his agonizing struggle with doubt as a way back into belief. It is his via negativa of faith.

Consider now how William Stafford’s “Notice What This Poem Is Not Doing”  functions as a kind of ars negativa. The title is a refrain within the poem and the poem closes with its final “Notice what this poem has not done.” This is the most chutzpadik statement a poem can make. By pointing to what the poem is not doing or has not done, Stafford leaves nothing out of the frame. In Umberto Eco’s terms, this poem becomes the most open of texts. It’s as though the ghost poem resides in the white space and is left up to whatever the reader, the “you,” can imagine, which then becomes part of the poem.

In the taxonomy of negatio in poetry,  Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Do Not Be Afraid of No” is essential:

“Do not be afraid of no,
Who has so very far to go”:

 

New caution to occur
To one whose inner scream set her to cede, for softer lapping and smooth fur!

 

Whose esoteric need
Was merely to avoid the nettle, to not-bleed.

 

Stupid, like a street
That beats into a dead end and dies there, with nothing left to reprimand or                meet.

 

And like a candle fixed
Against dismay and countershine of mixed

 

Wild moon and sun. And like
A flying furniture, or bird with lattice wing; or gaunt thing, a-stammer down a
          nightmare neon peopled with condor, hawk and shrike.

 

To say yes is to die.
A lot or a little. The dead wear capably their wry

 

Enabled emblems. They smell.
But that and that they do not altogether yell is all that we know well.

 

It is brave to be involved,
To be not fearful to be unresolved.

 

Her new wish was to smile
When answers took no airships, walked a while.

Contrary to Hopkins, for Brooks, “[t]o say yes is to die.” The only way this speaker can assert herself is by saying no. Might there be something politicized about this negation? To being “not fearful to be unresolved”? Is negatio here a poet’s way of speaking truth to power? Of being defiant instead of quiet? This strikes me as a straightforward unironic “No.” Remember, this poem appeared in 1949, well before the civil rights movement, when there would be a lot of saying “no” going on. So, when this poem elevates a stance of “no,” it is a more radical suggestion than you might at first think.

In contemporary poetry, one remarkable use of the negatio can be found in Tonya Foster’s “t’aints,” the name she gives her haiku-like stanzas that comprise much of her book A Swarm of Bees in High Court: an attempt to situate her as a black woman in Harlem, in a series of poems that are a biography of place as much as self.

Knots of a woman
who ain’t numb with want. Who’s not
effaced by shut eyes?

 

Nots form this woman
who sugars her mustards, who’ll
want but never ask.

So much of what comes to define the “she” in these poems is what she is not. To be a black woman is to be doubly negated, but through language play and Foster’s radical use of negation, her “t’aints” make a space for presence. In summary, I’d say negatio is the Bartleby of rhetorical terms, a way for the marginalized to say “no” to those who wield hegemony in the culture.

Finally, below is a very short poem by Carl Phillips, “Thunder,” composed of three lines, three negations, inviting us to dwell in possibility, the ambiguity of negatio:

Maybe not ourselves, for once, but each other 
                                    *
                                               Not the wilder doves;
not their blurred machinery leaving the less wild doves behind

The italicized line, perhaps spoken, might be a definition of intimacy, some kind of reciprocity that requires a negation of self-interestedness. The second and third lines, in my reading, comprise another negation, this time of wildness, perhaps in reaction to the thunder. When I asked Carl Phillips about his use of negatio, he said, “It seemed a more honest approach to a quest of knowing…there’s an effort to get at something pretty much unknowable—in which case, the best one can do is narrow down what it isn’t.”

*

Once I began thinking about negatio in my own work, I realized how much I deploy it. In trying to pin down Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes of ordinary objects, in order to capture the way they have been abstracted out of usefulness, I say what they are not. It is only now that I think I must have had Wallace Stevens’s “Study of Two Pears” in my head (“The pears are not viols / nudes or bottles. / They resemble nothing else.”—a brilliant example of negatio as negative metaphor). The poem is called “Not a vase” (from my book Whirlwind) Here’s just the opening:

Not clay         pitcher             oil can          not
rectangular    solid coalescing
into
tableware
not fore/
aft of perspec-
tive not
terracotta       earthenware not       glass               porcelain not
marble not     stone
or bone not

 

useful or open to      predilections             of decay or form

“The Fountain” is an ekphrastic poem from my book Manual for Living based on Goya’s Black Paintings. These paintings convey a dark vision of life. That sense of darkness and despair, for me, found expression in the use of negatio, where I sought to have it both ways: to say what was there by saying what wasn’t, but in effect, I created the landscape against which these paintings arose.

Not in a muchedumbre of white
Not with mantillas of black lace
Not as a crone nor as an inquisitor
Nor with a carriage of fire
Nor with petitions nor looking for
Miraculous cures from the waters
Just to bathe my face and hands and feet
Just to scrub off
These persistent worries that gnaw me
Like any stray dog
Any broken guitar

And to conclude, a list and a song.

The list: five reasons why to use negatio

1. “Without Contraries is no progression,” says Willam Blake. There’s more energy in saying something is not so than that it is.
2. To state what is not is sometimes the best way to define what is.
3. Negation as denial is a way to bring into the poem unresolved emotions.
4. Negatio is also a political tool, a way to say ‘no’ to those who hold sway.
5. Finally, negatio instantiates in words the primal power of poetry: which is to use language to point to what is not said.

And now the song:

Listen to Aretha Franklin singing negatio’s theme: “Don’t Play That Song” otherwise known as “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied).” Franklin and the chorus sing: “He said ‘Darling I love you, Darling I need you, Darling I love you’ but you lie, you lie, you lie . . .” But who is lying since they sing the song within the song. In other words, she doesn’t and does want to hear that song again.

_______________________________________________________________

Notes

Gwendolyn Brooks. Annie Allen. Harper & Brothers, 1949.

Sharon Dolin. “Not a Vase.” Whirlwind. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.

Dolin. “The Fountain.” Manual for Living. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016.

Tonya M. Foster. A Swarm of Bees in High Court. Belladonna, 2015.

Aretha Franklin. 1970. Don’t Play That Song (You Lied). Song by Betty Nelson & Ahmet Ertegun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ktFUwPGWag

Sigmund Freud. “Negation.” Standard Edition, 19: 235-39.

Richard A. Lanham. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2^nd edition. University of CA Press, 1991.

Carl Phillips. Reconnaissance. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

William Stafford. Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation, University of Michigan Press, 1978.