A Transgressive History
Much of literary culture regards the Gothic genre as an archaic embarrassment—gloomy ruins and paranormal lovers that serious practitioners have learned to dismiss. Yet such dismissals neglect a basic fact of literary history. Intimations of demonic realms and spectral forces emerged in tandem with the English novel, several early examples of which featured devil pacts, reanimation, ghost ships, and homunculi. Furthermore, neither British Romanticism nor French Symbolism would have been as consequential or interesting without Gothic writings by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. Indeed, one could argue that a nascent version of European Modernism emerged in the mid-1800s when Baudelaire began publishing his translations of Poe’s fiction, an enterprise foundational to the composition of Les Fleurs du mal (first published in 1857, definitive edition posthumously in 1868).
Gothic was always a risk. In the US, a country founded on Enlightenment principles of rationalism and scientific progress, it provided a nightmarish counterpoint to the American dream. An “art of exciting surprise and horror,” as Walter Scott construed the genre, Gothic was refined in the young republic when Poe fired three shots across the bow of Victorian respectability by publishing “Berenice” (1835), “Ligeia” (1838) and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). A barrage of nineteenth-century examples followed, including Herman Melville’s most disturbing novel, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), which featured mythical stone giants, incest fantasies, and group suicide. After twentieth-century Gothic coups de maître by William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Shirley Jackson, compelling American examples dwindled. Gothic themes trans-migrated into popular genres such as radio, film, video games, and digital media. Exceptions like Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God (1973) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) only proved the rule that this genre was largely banished from the great tradition of psychological fiction, which favored protracted realism over the unreality of “hobgobliana.”
Now, the act of embracing Gothicisms has become transgressive in a Foucauldian sense. As lightning violates the night by briefly illuminating it, authors depicting haunted scenes and monstrous characters disturb contemporary literary fiction by exposing its forbidden past. Perhaps to deflect any association with popular genres, most literary novelists and short-story writers who utilize Gothic subjects do so through a mediating gesture, rarely portraying even somnambulism, for example, without undercutting it through metamodern skepticism or fabulist camp. The witchy figure looming in a dim bedroom is an oversized Mötley Crüe poster. The haunted mansion is a bouncy house.
Unlikely as it may sound to some readers, the most surprising twist in the story of Gothic fiction is that poetry, not prose, has kept this genre relevant. Innovative writers of verse narratives have reclaimed spooky atmospheres, nightmarish violence, and perverse desires, depicting these in many cases without the mediating effects of irony. (When poets use irony in Gothic narratives, they do so not to induce a sense of oddball drollery or artistic distance, but to exploit linguistic ulteriority and dramatic ambiguities.) This outcome makes more sense when we consider that the subgenre of verse narrative is itself a transgression against current literary fashion, which overwhelmingly favors lyric verse and prose fiction.
Yet poets writing Gothic narratives participate in a 250-year tradition that began with Thomas Gray’s “The Bard” (1757) and includes long poems as varied as Lord Byron’s Faustian closet drama Manfred (1817) and Seamus Heaney’s Dantesque travelogue “Station Island” (1984). Twentieth-century American examples comprise some of the best poems of the last one hundred years, with the most conspicuous being James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), a 560-page dialectic between poet and Ouija board. Briefer examples range from Robert Frost’s arch ghost story “The Witch of Coös” (1922) and Randall Jarrell’s Holocaust monologue “Protocols” (1945) to Robert Hayden’s chilling narrative lyric of white supremacy “Night, Death, Mississippi” (1962) and Elizabeth Bishop’s apologue about Brazilian water spirits, “The Riverman” (1960). Unlike contemporary prose writers, who tend to disguise or mock Gothic elements, narrative poets openly tell dark Romantic tales of horror and suspense without relying on self-conscious pastiche or speculative tricks.
Readers unfamiliar with this tradition might wonder why poets turn to Gothic. Predicated on limit and transgression, this genre strains against the constraints of plausibility. By threatening to negate the social, aesthetic, physical, and historical forces that determine such limits, Gothic provides a vehicle for testing the legitimacy of authority and norms. Verse narratives heighten this tension by further frustrating expectations about genre and form. As with any effective narrative poem, Gothic verse narratives utilize the expediencies afforded by lines and stanzas as opposed to prose paragraphs—an advantage that allows for ready access to the imagination, the expressive immediacy of prosody, and the trance-like cadences of meter.
My premise is that contemporary American Gothic stories-in-verse can be evaluated alongside the most compelling narratives of this period in any genre. Though not all are metrical, these poems include Frank Bidart’s “Herbert White” (1973), Ai’s “The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981” (1986), Patricia Smith’s “Skinhead” (1992), Jared Carter’s “Barn Siding” (1993), Mary Jo Salter’s “Frost at Midnight” (1994), David Mason’s “The Collector’s Tale” (2004), B. H. Fairchild’s “Frieda Pushnik” (2007), Marilyn Nelson’s “Millie-Christine” (2009), Ryan Wilson’s “Authority” (2016), Rhina P. Espaillat’s “Rosario on Sunday Morning” (2013), and Shane McCrae’s “The Hell Poem” (2019).
In this essay, I’ll focus on three of the most emblematic poems which represent a broader propensity for Gothic elements, a propensity largely ignored by critics. All three narratives are blank-verse dramatic monologues that devise Gothic atmospheres, characters, and plots to address concerns both ancient and contemporary: Dana Gioia’s “Haunted” (2010), Claudia Emerson’s “Irene Virga Salafia” (2013), and Matthew Buckley Smith’s “The Fell Swoop” (2024). My hope is that my descriptions, quotations, and commentary will entice readers new to these poets, poems, and approaches, encouraging further investigation. Lastly, I invite readers to dwell within the same spirit of openness with which this essay was written, suspending any pesky disbeliefs while encountering the uncanny and often terrifying mysteries below.
“A Thought to Put an End to Sleep”
I’ll begin with the most recent poem. “The Fell Swoop,” from Matthew Buckley Smith’s second book, Midlife (2024), features a narrator who has recently lost his family under suspicious circumstances. During a blind date, which serves as the dramatic occasion for the monologue, the male narrator claims that his family (“my wife and our fine boys”) were abducted by a kidnapper as recently as “last spring.” Apparently unaware of how implicating it is for him to be on a date in this context, the narrator lets slip that almost immediately after his family disappeared, he believed them to be dead, even though the “deaths had not—still haven’t—been confirmed.” It’s the timeline of events, coupled with some oddly emphatic asides (“I’m very nice”), that cause the reader to wonder if the narrator knows more than he’s letting on, or lets on more than he knows. As with Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842), the most crucial revelations in “The Fell Swoop” occur as disclosures the narrator never intends to make.
Here, for example, is Smith’s narrator describing a strangely fatalistic appeal he made to the alleged kidnapper just after his family vanished. “You” is the narrator’s blind date who sits across from him at a restaurant table:
I wish you’d caught
The TV interview I gave last spring
When I addressed the kidnapper directly:
You cannot grasp the nature of my love.
The footage is on YouTube, so I’m told.
The other week it topped a million views.
Still, in the end, it hardly made a difference.
No phone call came. No ransom note arrived.
No jogger happened on a heap of corpses.
And even that night, early in the search,
As I stood fast and faced the rolling cameras
To read the written statement of my love,
I sensed it—that my wife and our fine boys
Were all already gone, and that no words
Would ever call them home to me again.
The only snippet of the communiqué that the narrator shares with the silent auditor is the single line “You cannot grasp the nature of my love,” a curiously adversarial statement to make to a violent kidnapper whom the narrator hopes will return his family unharmed. The fact that the narrator’s “statement” of love has been “written” (crafted in advance) adds to the cold and calculated tone, which Smith further emphasizes through his strict use of blank verse; meter accentuates artifice, suggesting pretense on the part of the narrator. The nagging question that this passage raises is: Who in his right mind, so soon after such an alleged kidnapping, could describe his family as “a heap of corpses,” even hypothetically?
This suspiciousness is compounded by Smith’s allusion to Act IV, Scene iii of Macbeth: Shakespeare’s most Gothic tragedy replete with clairvoyant witches, perilous castles, murderous thanes, and vengeful ghosts. At this point in the play, an anxious Ross arrives in England with tragic news that he is hesitant to share with a recently exiled Macduff. After Ross discloses that Macbeth has had Macduff’s entire family slaughtered, Macduff delivers these famous lines:
All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam,
At one fell swoop?
In addition to the tragic content, what makes these lines doubly memorable is that they represent, rhetorically, the exact moment that Macduff comprehends what has happened to his family (“all my pretty chickens, and their dam”). Shakespeare achieves this real-time dramatic effect by deploying a rapid-fire succession of brief questions that punctuate Macduff’s speech like a stammer: All? All? All? All? Shakespeare also introduces the “hell-kite” simile in which Macduff compares Macbeth to a predatory raptor that has descended upon Macduff’s family in one “swoop” of savage action; the adjective “fell” is from Old French fel, meaning cruel, fierce, vicious.
But is the narrator of Smith’s “The Fell Swoop” Macbeth, Macduff, or some psychic conflation of the two? This question becomes even more relevant as the narrator reveals his aspiration to be an actor who might star as both heroic and antiheroic characters:
I might have made a life upon the stage,
Playing the roles that every actor longs for:
Brick and Orestes, Oedipus and Hickey,
Hamlet, Iago, Brutus, Lear, MacDuff.
That Smith ends this brief catalog with “MacDuff” suggests that the narrator’s true identity is closer to the unremorseful predator than the bereaved father and husband; as Macbeth in life, he can only perform the role of Macduff “upon the stage” of public scrutiny, which is exactly what he does during his monologue. Smith’s anglicization of “MacDuff” emphasizes the foreignness of Macduff’s loyal and heroic character. This interpretation bears out across the entirety of the poem, which Smith peppers with revealingly narcissistic, hubristic, and sociopathic flourishes. The poem begins, for example, with the line “I guess you’ve probably googled me by now” and goes on to expose similar instances of creepy self-regard like “I caught my own reflection in the lens” and “The pain of watching other people live / A life that by all rights should be your own.”
“The Fell Swoop” works so well, however, because Smith never explicitly divulges what has happened to the family. Terror is suggested rather than stated. In this respect, Smith utilizes what might be termed Gothic innuendo: an oblique remark that contains ghastly implications only heightened by the indirection of the utterance. As in Greek tragedy, all the gory action takes place offstage. In an email exchange with me, Smith confirmed that “The Fell Swoop” is based loosely on the 2018 Watts family murders in which Christopher Lee Watts murdered his pregnant wife and their two young children. Though Smith never provides any details in his dramatic monologue that would explicitly connect his fictitious narrative with the Watts killings, the poem’s many sadistic hints suggest that similarly “fell” brutalities have taken place.
This implied insidiousness is exacerbated by the Gothic trope that Smith adopts for the poem’s dramatic occasion. The first Gothic romances, including Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796), feature mysterious disappearances and innocent heroines plagued by libidinous male villains. By attempting to minimize the mysteriousness of his family’s disappearance (“my poor dead family”), the narrator imbues the scene with additional terror. The longer his monologue continues, the more threatening the narrator becomes to the “you” whom he symbolically holds hostage, compounding the Gothic resonance of this tale.
Smith’s effective use of dramatic irony has a disturbing, clotted effect. The poem ends with a verse paragraph that suggests the narrator’s future plans for the “you” by exposing what the narrator thinks about his past crimes:
Well, I’ll be damned! We’ve made it to dessert.
This place—trust me—you really can’t go wrong.
I’ve tried it all, and nothing disappoints:
The frosted figs, the caramel meringue,
The rhubarb tart, the salted creme brulée!
If anything, you’ll want to try it all.
So take a breath, look over every choice,
And if, somehow, you don’t like what you get,
Remember that it’s not too late to change.
You know the secret to a happy life?
It’s not too late. It never is too late.
A statement that the narrator intends as a romantic carpe diem has dire implications. The psychological conflation of major life decisions with a choice between confections is chilling enough. But Smith’s suggestion that his murderous narrator equates the act of sending back a rhubarb tart to slaughtering his wife and children is Antarctic. Here is a man capable of anything except admitting the “secret” of his crimes because doing so would represent the end of “choice.” But, by defining “a happy life” as existing amid infinite choices, the narrator reveals that he does not believe in happiness, or that happiness is only possible through becoming “damned.” The narrator does not regret murdering his family as much as not realizing this “secret” sooner. Like Milton’s Satan, the narrator is a classic overreacher tangled in his own hubristic knot in which “It never is too late”; every choice is not only possible but equal, even the decision to commit filicide. The narrator is monstrous because he not only recognizes, but celebrates his monstrousness with sociopathic glee: “Well, I’ll be damned!”
“Some Entity Regathered from the Dust”
Where Smith’s narrator flaunts a gruesome past, Dana Gioia’s protagonist in “Haunted” hides his personal history beneath a monk’s cowl. Like Smith, Gioia often approaches dramatic monologue through nightmarish scenarios, working with metaphysical and paranormal themes across all six of his poetry books. Gioia considers Gothic to be one genre within a broader mode of Romance. This mode creates a world as an author might wish it to be, standing in opposition to realism, which seeks to recreate the world as it is. For Gioia, other genres of Romance include fantasy, myth, and science fiction. Gioia’s third opera, The Three Feathers (2014), for example, is an adaptation of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His fourth is a dance-opera version of “Haunted” (2019).
Though rarely noted by critics (including Gioia himself), the Gothic genre informs even his most personal lyrics. “Prayer” (1990), one of Gioia’s moving elegies to his first son, represents a deity as an eerie “footstep / in the alleyway” and “midnight /whisper traveling the wires.” In this poem, Gioia utilizes Gothic tropes as talismans to ward off evil spirits that might harm the soul of his infant son in the afterlife.
“Insomnia,” from Gioia’s first book Daily Horoscope (1986), places a half-conscious “you” within a creepy echo chamber of “voices mounting in an endless drone.” Rather than announcing an explicit preoccupation with terror, cruelty, or violence, this ghostly poem nevertheless personifies inanimate objects that force the poem’s “you” to listen to their griefs and grievances, including the plaints of a “venting furnace,” groaning floorboards, and “the steady accusations of the clock.” This spectral “clanking” culminates in the “terrible clarity” of the “unbroken dark” itself, which rebukes the narrator for overlooking his murmuring possessions “like the sounds of a family / that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore.” As with the predatory narrator of Smith’s “The Fell Swoop,” the night in Gioia’s poem holds the “you” hostage, having its dark way with this character for what threatens to be an interminable duration.
More direct uses of Gothic conventions occur in nearly all of Gioia’s narrative poems, especially his dramatic monologues. The briefest of these, “Guide to the Other Gallery” (1991), features a demonic figure in the guise of a docent leading a tour-of-one through the mysterious wings of a museum that exhibits neglected, fragmented, and discarded artifacts. The severed limbs of statues, portraits of unknown sitters, and “shelves of unread books” haunt this space curated for an equally lost and broken patronage. The tour ends when the narrator leads the silent auditor into a room with “such a peaceful view,” coaxing him toward an objet d’art that turns out to be the patron’s own casket: “Look at that case of antique wood / Without a label. It’s for you.”
Other Gothic monologues range from “Counting the Children” (1990), a narrative about a despondent accountant who has a nightmarish vision of grotesque dolls, to “Style” (2016), a tale of financial ruin, betrayal, disfigurement, disease, and suicide by self-immolation. I’d like to focus, however, on Gioia’s ghostliest Gothic narrative, “Haunted,” which originally appeared in the Autumn 2010 issue of The Hudson Review and was expanded for Pity the Beautiful (2012), Gioia’s fourth collection.
A monologue spoken by a character who has encountered a ghost, “Haunted” begins by invoking a former Gothic verse narrative through a familiar framing mechanism. Gioia’s poem opens with three italicized lines spoken by a character who the reader soon learns is the poem’s addressee:
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said. “Such nonsense.
But years ago I actually saw one.”
He seemed quite serious, and so I asked.
Coleridge’s paranormal ballad of sin and redemption, “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798), features an older character who recounts a supernatural tale to a younger auditor at a wedding. “Haunted,” Gioia’s quasi-allegorical Gothic narrative on a similar theme, is spoken by an older man who shares a ghost story with a younger man at a bar. Both narrators claim to have directly witnessed the unexplainable events they recount. Neither auditor remains silent. Gioia’s decision to allow his auditor to speak provides his narrative with generic flexibility; the poem is and isn’t a dramatic monologue as it is and isn’t a ghost story. This opening gambit signals the skepticism of the poem’s narrator, who believes more in what he cannot see than in what he can. After these three initial lines, however, the identity of the narrator transposes; “he” becomes “I” and “I” becomes “you.”
This pronoun shift suggests the unreason lurking behind even the most reasonable act—storytelling, for example. The more orderly a work appears, the greater the sense of chaos overcome. Gioia further emphasizes this by presenting an irrational tale through the rational meter of blank verse. Though Paul Fussell claimed in 1965 that blank verse comprises “about three-quarters of all English poetry,” a poet writing in any meter during the twenty-first century defies contemporary practice; Fussell’s percentage dramatically shrank in the 1990s with the proliferation of poetry blogs and the surge of MFA programs hostile to formal verse. In other words, Gioia resurrects a conventional decasyllabic line to perform an unconventional poetic act, telling a Gothic tale. “Haunted” embodies in form what Gothic narratives accomplish through genre: the oscillation between unresolved oppositions such as secrets and revelations, crime and punishment, innocence and guilt. Matthew Buckley Smith, writing ten years after Gioia, makes a similar breach but does so with iambic pentameter even stricter than Gioia’s.
“Haunted” utilizes more Gothic elements than nearly all contemporary poems, even those mentioned above. This adherence to Gothic tradition establishes “Haunted” as an unlikely challenge to current literary tastes. By recapitulating ur-Gothic, as it were, Gioia has positioned himself as an iconoclast—a strange distinction for a practicing Catholic. In “Haunted,” an assortment of Gothic elements coheres into an uncannily familiar narrative, comprising the following Gothicisms: the antiquated setting of an unoccupied “country manor,” the haunting of present characters by secrets of the past, the presence of a female ghost who visits the protagonist within a scene both erotic and threatening, and the shattering of norms resulting from this visitation.
“Haunted” recounts a night “almost forty years ago” when the protagonist and his “rich,” “cruel,” and “slightly evil” lover, Mara (“a connoisseur of Schadenfreude”), retreat to her uncle’s summer house in late autumn. Over the course of the evening, Mara and the protagonist explore the palatial house, eat an elaborate dinner, drink too much “prewar Pétrus,” quarrel, and temporarily part. While sulking alone in a bedroom one wing away from his lover, the protagonist broods over a dusty edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, quoting the choicest Gothic lines (“What is your substance, whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?”). As if on cue, “a handsome woman in her early forties” enters the bedroom in a misty swoon. The narrator confesses:
I started to explain why I was there.
She didn’t seem to hear and turned away.
Could she be deaf? I didn’t want to scare her.
Something was wrong. I couldn’t see her clearly.
She seemed at once herself and her own reflection
shimmering on the surface of clear water
where fleeting shadows twisted in the depths.
The narrator’s uncertainty as he apprehends a presence both shadow and substance, surface and depths, becomes compounded by his fluctuating between levels of disbelief; he is “a skeptic witnessing the unexplained.” Rhetorically, the narrator’s agnosticism makes the scene more credible. Humor has the same cementing effect:
I found it hard admitting what I saw.
She seemed to be a ghost, though that sounds crazy.
Oddly, I wasn’t scared—just full of wonder,
watching this thing I knew could not exist,
this woman standing by her dressing table,
translucent, insubstantial, but still there,
and utterly oblivious of me.
First to be haunted, then to be ignored!
Undressing, the ghost approaches the narrator who lies “half paralyzed” on the bed, still unsure about witnessing “some entity regathered from the dust.” Then, Gioia delivers the poem’s remarkable peripeteia:
I could have learned the secrets of the dead
if there are any secrets, which I doubt.
So how did I address this revenant,
this traveler from the undiscovered country,
who stared at me with dark, unblinking eyes?
I caught my breath, got on my feet, and said—
nothing at all. The words stuck in my throat.
We stood there face to face, inches apart.
Her pale skin shined like a window catching sunlight,
both bright and clear, but chilling to the touch.
She stared at me with undisguised contempt,
and then she whispered, almost in a hiss,
“You don’t belong here. No, you don’t belong here.”
She slowly reached to touch me, and I ran
leaving behind both Shakespeare and my shoes.
The loquacious narrator finds himself struck dumb by the “undisguised contempt” of the “revenant,” who judges him like a baroness humbling a chauffeur. Because of the narrator’s inability to act, the “secrets of the dead” haunting the narrator will remain obscure. Curiously, the narrator—who touches the ghost, or comes near enough to feel that she is “chilling”—still doubts the veracity of these secrets. Even as the existence of an afterlife is revealed, the narrator denies that any “undiscovered country” exists.
Soon, though, the narrator suggests that his dubiousness was little more than a Gertrudian protestation, a rhetorical device designed to keep the auditor listening (and the reader reading). The poem concludes with a denouement that contains additional revelations, including the identities of narrator and auditor:
And now I’m in your bar. That’s probably not
the story you expected from a monk,
delivering brandy from the monastery.
Not all of us began as altar boys.
I’ve been there fifteen years. I like the drill—
Poverty, Chastity, and Growing Grapes.
The archbishop calls my port a miracle.
Don’t tell His Grace, but I still doubt there is
an afterlife. That’s not why I stay there.
This is the life I didn’t want to waste.
Is the auditor supposed to believe that, out of all the lives the narrator could’ve chosen, his decision to serve as a monk had nothing to do with a belief in God or in “an afterlife”? Has the narrator wasted his life? Or has he lived exactly as he has wished, shaping his days within the aera sub gratia of piety and the aera sub lege of nature? Gioia leaves these issues ambiguous, but provides several tantalizing clues.
The poem’s peripeteia furnishes a further, generic reversal by rejecting the ready-made denouement of lesser Gothic tales that conclude with clunky declarations that whatever paranormal events had been described were merely a dream. Rather than learning “the secrets of the dead,” Gioia’s narrator runs from the ghost, the gaudy opulence represented by the summer house, and the empty sensuality personified by Mara, so that he may live in the godliest way he can: by practicing “Poverty, Chastity, and Growing Grapes.” After abandoning a “chilling” supernatural force that he has witnessed, he embraces a supernatural force that he doubts, choosing the Holy Ghost over a secular one. What the narrator believes in without hesitation are the laws of the natural world, specifically the vintner’s agricultural craft of growing grapes and distilling brandy. Ultimately, the Roman Catholic narrator puts his faith in three forms of sublime sublimation (brandy in Latin is sublimatum): poverty, chastity, and the art of making port.
For his faith in God, nature, and craft, the protagonist of Gioia’s most Gothic poem bears the closest resemblance to the poet himself. Gioia, who spent the first half of his career defending the felicities of meter and rhyme, has dedicated the second half to promoting the role of the sacred in the arts. Specifically, Gioia disputes the “tacit agreement” among artists, critics, and scholars that “Catholicism and art no longer mix.” As Gioia observes in his essay “The Catholic Writer Today” (2013), written during the same period as “Haunted,” most Catholic literature only indirectly touches upon religious themes while dealing directly with worldly topics, especially the actions of sinners. “What makes the writing Catholic,” Gioia claims, “is that the treatment of these subjects is permeated with a particular worldview.” Gioia summarizes this worldview succinctly:
Catholic writers tend to see humanity struggling in a fallen world. They combine a longing for grace and redemption with a deep sense of human imperfection and sin. Evil exists, but the physical world is not evil. Nature is sacramental, shimmering with signs of sacred things. Indeed, all reality is mysteriously charged with the invisible presence of God.
The narrator of “Haunted,” who finds himself stumbling half-drunkenly through a fallen world of hollow wealth and loveless sex, chooses the splendeurs et misères of the monastery over those of the secular realm. Seeing nature and self-sacrifice as sacramental and sublime, the narrator renounces worldly pleasures and dedicates himself to the ancient art of fortifying wine. This labor becomes a form of penance, a way of communing with “the invisible presence of God” by producing the blood of Christ; even if the narrator does not make sacramental wine, the archbishop refers to his port as “a miracle.” The poet’s understated wit here is deliciously dry.
In the same essay, Gioia effectively argues that “Dante and Hopkins, Mozart and Palestrina, Michelangelo and El Greco, Bramante and Gaudi, have brought more souls to God than all the preachers of Texas.” The ghost, which represents the mystical link between the living and the dead that many Catholic artists observe, has brought the narrator to God. The narrator’s art in turn has brought him to the bar where he shares his tale with the auditor. If the narrator’s motives for telling this story are partly evangelical (to convert), they are primarily aesthetic (to enlighten and entertain) as are those of any great artist. Furthermore, Gioia’s sleight-of-hand pronoun shuffling underscores the authorial slippages between narrator, auditor, and poet. While I can’t picture Gioia claiming, as Flaubert did about Emma Bovary, “The narrator of ‘Haunted,’ c’est moi,” Gioia’s Catholicism and lifelong devotion to a sacred artistic calling draw a convincing parallel.
“Days Spent with the Dead”
One might not think the same claim could be made for Claudia Emerson’s historical narrator in “Irene Virga Salafia.” But Emerson’s dramatic monologue from her sixth book, The Opposite House (2015), fuses key attributes of poet and protagonist: an elegiac temperament, a preoccupation with corporeal mementos of the past, and a view of the artist as a preternatural agent of Gothic prosopopoeia, which I’m defining here as the living speaking as the dead.
Narrated by the second wife of Alfredo Salafia (1869–1933), the Sicilian embalmer most famous for preserving the body of Rosalia Lombardo (1918–1920), “Irene Virga Salafia” deals in part with the pervasiveness of nightmarish elements in waking life. Throughout this eerie monologue delivered after Alfredo’s death, the narrator characterizes her embalmer husband as Christ-like in his “passion” for “the unseen / he saw in all things.” The dead were more real to Alfredo than the living—at least according to his wife. This symbolic bride of Christ goes so far as to admit that when Alfredo returned home at night, her body was “the stranger flesh— / here-alive, yes, and half his age.”
Through macabre conflations of sex, death, and mummification, the narrator links secular science with Gothic mystery, as when she describes her husband’s profession as the “alchemy of God.” Another alchemical conflation occurs through the narrator’s perceived role of herself as a mouthpiece for her husband’s thoughts. By adopting Alfredo’s subjective views and parroting his ideas, Irene serves as his prosopopoeiac agent. Like James Merrill and David Jackson taking dictation from a Ouija board, Irene Salafia assumes her deceased husband’s inner life:
He thought it
art—far beyond balm—levitation, almost,
that immaculate a suspense, exact
and abstract, the thing itself made other,
italicized. And why not in this city
of sculptures common as the shutters and balconies—
faces on every building, horses on the rooftop
of the theater, angels in every garden,
in every fountain the water carved by stone.
Because this is a monologue, we have only the wife’s version of what her husband “thought.” Irene, preoccupied with the dead (a preoccupation inherited from her husband), sees worldly objects as otherworldly. Even “common” architecture vibrates with a ghostly life: horses graze on rooftops, human faces emerge from buildings, angels inhabit gardens. Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “hysterical” narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), Emerson’s narrator perceives her surroundings through the kaleidoscope of a mind colored by grief. But Irene Salafia is more reliable than Gilman’s “Jane.” On one hand, Irene merely reports what she sees: sculptures, balconies, fountains. On the other, she is intent on romanticizing her surroundings, like a tourist eager to view a workaday locale as “abstract” and “immaculate.”
This eagerness registers as more pathology than spiritual vision, especially in the narrator’s suspiciously idealized claims for Alfredo. This deification of the husband results from three factors: 1) Alfredo’s rare talent for Christ-like “resurrection,” 2) the emotional separation the narrator feels from her husband due to the disparity in their ages, and 3) the husband’s godlike empathic receptivity. Alfredo’s gift for the “balm” of embalming was so prodigious that his mummified cadavers look “italicized”: not more alive than they were in life, but more present. That Irene sees herself as “young as / his own daughters, younger” suggests that she views Alfredo as parental, protective, a figure of ethos rather than eros. Finally, the wife observes her husband as possessing sibylline powers through which he deciphers “the whys / of guttering candles, of wax, of prayer.” This fusion of the paternal and supernatural is conventionally Gothic and can be found in texts as foundational as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), as well as contemporary novels like Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (2005), a variation on the legend of Vlad III.
Given Emerson’s comparison of embalmed corpses to medieval sculpture, it’s difficult not to read “Irene Virga Salafia” as another in a career-spanning series of ars poeticas haunted by the past. In narrative poems like “Natural History Exhibits” (2003) from Emerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning third book Late Wife, and “Secure the Shadow” (2010), the title poem of her fifth, Emerson interprets portrait painting, taxidermy, photography, and storytelling as modes of memorializing life through the creation of relics. Across her eight books, Emerson’s poems consistently return to objects and sites of a phantasmal past. These range from artifacts (arrowheads, gravestones, bones); bodily alterations (scars, burns, tattoos); keepsakes (dolls, quilts, home videos); locales (ancestral properties, cemeteries, ruins); and objets d’art (antique watches, stuffed snakes, photographs of deceased children).
In a consistent and unmistakably Gothic move, many of Emerson’s finest poems—even entire books—are haunted by troubling histories of corruption, disease, violence, and decay. Emerson recognized this aspect of her work. In a 2013 Birmingham Poetry Review interview, she linked the desire to preserve both significant and insignificant moments with the memorializing impulse of poetry:
I have long thought that the urge people have to photograph and video every experience is borne of that anxiety to stop time and somehow save it, or “capture” it as though it were a wild animal. My lens happens to be language, the highly ordered language of poetry.
For Emerson and other contemporary narrative poets of the Southern elegiac tradition (Dave Smith, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Maurice Manning, Caki Wilkinson), one of the most important uses of poetry is the preservation through language of what would otherwise be lost to time. Yet Emerson also acknowledges what a precarious challenge this is for any human endeavor.
Emerson embodies this sense of precariousness in “The Taxidermist,” a dramatic monologue from her first book Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997). A precursor to “Irene Virga Salafia,” “The Taxidermist” approaches the preservation of cadavers from the perspective of the practitioner who wields “fleshing knives / and pliers” as he cures the “defining skin” of foxes, bobcats, quail, and “sleeping /fawn” until each beast appears “Good enough to shoot again.” Unlike Irene Salafia’s more idealized vision of embalming, the taxidermist realizes the limitations of his art while acknowledging its pseudo-religious implications:
This is tedious,
messy resurrection, and what I preserve
is not death or life or skill but the wounded
ghost of an old hunger that won’t be tamed
This poem makes literal use of Emerson’s captured-animal analogy above. The “old hunger” still extant within each stuffed cadaver, as well as the taxidermist’s desire to “preserve,” haunts these relics and their human creator, whose role is closer to hunter than God. Yet the taxidermist’s need to explain his position suggests the commonness of the misconception that non-experts like Irene Salafia share. In accordance with Emily Dickinson’s figuration that “One need not be a chamber—to be haunted,” the taxidermist labors to perpetuate “the wounded /ghost,” accepting the truism that to perfect a living thing is to destroy it.
Emerson articulates a less tidy attitude toward art in her later poem. Notably, Emerson does not demote Irene to the more stereotypical role of muse, which might well have been how Alfonso viewed his young wife. In demystifying the embalmer’s art by describing the process in detail (“cheeks and lips he made plump with injections / of wax”), Irene reveals herself to be more than a reverential spectator. The narrator further affirms her artistic sympathies by asking of her husband’s work, “Was this not love?” If their marital relationship lacked physical expression, Irene displays her affections through the care with which she describes Alfredo’s “love.” This is especially true in the following passage about Rosalia, whom Irene portrays as a kind of surrogate daughter:
Incorruptible, he declared her—
perfect votive, her ribboned hair a spun-gold
cold flame—and tucked her in, her cradle, lead-
lined, its lid wax-sealed glass, its clawed feet
those of an animal, as though she would be
forever borne on the back of a tamed beast.
Like Gioia’s beastly figurations of God watching over the soul of his deceased infant in “Prayer,” Irene’s “tamed beast” serves as guardian of Rosalia in the catacombs beneath Palermo where she rests to this day. Though the “votive” image of the girl injected with wax can be seen as grotesque, Irene’s portrayal of her husband’s work is artful and tender, however misplaced that tenderness may be.
At the end of the poem, Irene performs a further artistic act of homage to her husband by pressing a flower into his handwritten memoir. Undiscovered until 2007, this memoir is noteworthy because it contained the formula for the highly effective preservation method that Alfredo used on Rosalia, whose body was one of the last admitted into the Catacombe dei Cappuccini (and is one of the best preserved). This historic site has become a macabre tourist attraction consisting of roughly 1,284 mummified “corpses stacked in caskets or hung from bolts / sunk in the walls.” If we remember the etymology of “anthology,” which stems from two Greek etymons for “gather” (legein) and “flower” (anthos), Irene’s pressing begins to resemble an elegiac poem:
[Rosalia] will remain
like the odd-alone, small yellow sorrel—most
common of wildflowers—I pressed in the back
of this book, not the stuff of memory unless
I write the hour we sat on a bench of stone,
parrots making green screaming ribbons of the air
above us; I wanted something to remember it by,
some small memento I recall hesitating
to take from its one afternoon of pollen
and bees—color its one remaining trueness,
shape collapsed, thinned as paper—this preserve
a worse kind of withering, perhaps, and yet
you see how I again have turned to it
for its very failure to compare.
Bright blossom among the pale leaves of Alfredo’s notes, the sorrel pressing serves as an emblem of the afternoon Irene picked it, as well as a spiritual imperative to remember the dead; “memento” comes from the Latin “to remember” and was used in the fourteenth century as the first word in the mass commemorating the dead. The pressing is not memory, but a reminder. Like the preserved body of Rosalia, the sorrel was taken from “its one afternoon” (or two years, in the case of Rosalia, who was plucked from life by the Spanish flu).
Whether preserved cadaver, pressed flower, memoir, or elegy, this monologue recognizes that any human effort to capture life will not retain a Kantian Ding an sich. It will only represent the artifact’s shadowy “failure to compare.” Through the process of flattening and drying the blossom, Irene’s marital affections “collapsed,” “thinned,” withered; this latter modifier is particularly effective because it suggests that pressed blossom and blossom-presser wither in tandem. The preservation of Irene’s affections required that she first destroy them, render them “abstract,” “other,” “italicized”: heightened from life and therefore artificial.
Yet this is the artifice necessary for art. The only experience that a poem preserves is that which it creates within the reader. As with Smith and Gioia, Emerson evokes the enduring presence of the past through her application of blank verse, albeit a liberal one. A critic willing to risk a more impressionistic reading might claim that Emerson’s is the ghostliest use of a meter to which she only occasionally adheres in any strict sense (“you SEE | how I | a-GAIN | have TURNED | to IT”). In a 2012 podcast interview I conducted with Emerson at the AWP Conference in Chicago, she commented that, in order to achieve “tension” between lyric and narrative modes, she often turned to “a loose blank verse.” While admitting that her decasyllabic line can be “rough around the edges,” she insisted that blank verse was “usually” her goal. In “Irene Virga Salafia,” as in other dramatic monologues in The Opposite House (“The Ocularist” is another Gothic example), pentameter functions as a tonic note to which the poet consistently returns. In this way, the looseness and roughness of Emerson’s blank verse does have a spectral effect, as if iambic pentameter haunted these already macabre poems about limb factories, false eyes, amputations, smallpox, and a dying lacemaker still gripping “the needle’s lyric eye.”
Gothic Resistance
Since the earliest Gothic tales, this genre of haunted towers and mysterious deaths has reflected, like a carnival mirror, the anxieties plaguing a particular culture at a particular time. In the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), a giant stone helmet falls from the sky, crushing the protagonist’s sickly son on his wedding day, thus depriving the lord of a familial legacy. Published the same year that the Sugar and Currency Acts sparked the initial protests that would lead to the American Revolution, Walpole’s narrative embodied Oedipal tensions between fatherland Britain and its thirteen insolent colonies. Whether or not the author intended this symbolic correspondence, the coincidence of plot and history is too glaring to ignore.
A subgenre few poets have attempted and fewer critics have noticed, Gothic verse narratives continue to disquiet historical complacencies and expose primitive fears. Perhaps the inconspicuousness of American poetry has spared practitioners like Smith, Gioia, and Emerson from the pressure to conform to current tastes. Remove the marketplace as a consideration, and poets write what they please. An obscure subgenre of an already obscure art, verse narratives are even more overlooked than lyrics. This is particularly true of those concerned with subject matter beyond the poet’s autobiography or those composed in meter and rhyme. Yet narrative verse has quietly repurposed Gothic traditions, pointing a way forward for writers weary of current literary fashions and open to the possibilities of genres other than the free-verse personal lyric.
Narratives by Smith, Gioia, Emerson, and others reject the ostentatious prosody, overblown self-regard, syrupy pathos, and rote soapboxing now typical of American poetry. Remarkably, these verse narratives avoid what Coleridge rejected as the “beggarly day-dreaming” and “mawkish sensibility” of clumsier Gothic texts written merely to shock, titillate, or disgust. As in Keats’s supernatural ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1820) or Elizabeth Bishop’s sci-fi ars poetica “The Man-Moth” (1936), poets of Gothic narratives access truth while dwelling in a state of receptivity to all experience, including the unexplainable and the uncanny. Smith, Gioia, and Emerson confront risky subjects concerning religious faith, psychological trauma, historical tragedy, and other phenomena insufficiently explained by science, philosophy, theology, or pop culture. And, with the effrontery only achieved by the most iconoclastic art, these Gothic poems are also terribly fun to read.