David Baker: Ecstasy and Irony (January 2001)

David Baker considers the opposing rhetorical stances of ecstasy and irony in two famous lyric poems: James Wright’s “A Blessing” and Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry.” While we might be inclined to think of these two stances as mutually exclusive, Baker shows how in each poem the dominant stance—whether ecstatic or ironic—works in productive tension with “its buried opposite,” suppressed and then released; it is this tension, he argues, that produces the dramatic “impurity,” and thus the power, of these poems.