ABSTRACT
What these notes say of the Baroness’s works of art – including the process of fashioning herself as a work of art – applies to Barnes’s poetry. Recalcitrant, hard to know, unapologetic about its ‘voice and constitution of iron’, outrageously
1 Djuna Barnes, Collected Poems with Notes Towards a Memoir, eds Phillip Herring and Osías Stutman (Madison: The University of Winsconsin Press, 2005), p. 254. Barnes marks a passage in Gerald Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose, selected with an introduction and notes by W.H. Gardner (London, Melbourne and Baltimore: Penguin, 1953) in which the poet replies to a criticism by Bridges by writing in a letter: ‘No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness … But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.’
