SOURCE: Breslin, Paul. “Jane Kenyon's ‘Manners Toward God’: Gratitude and the ‘Anti-Urge’.” In Bright Unequivocal Eye: Poems, Papers, and Remembrances from the First Jane Kenyon Conference, edited by Bert G. Hornback, pp. 39-45. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

In the following essay, Breslin explores Kenyon's poem “Having It Out with Melancholy” and investigates the levels and different definitions of the melancholia depicted in the poem.

Reviewing Otherwise for Poetry (July 1997), I noted how Jane Kenyon's attention to the physical world, which in her earliest work could seem mere description for description's sake, came to have deeper significance as a counter-force to the world-dissolving powers of depression. Today, I want to trace more carefully the tension between descriptive noticing and depressive obliviousness in “Having It Out with Melancholy,” her most extensive poetic engagement with the consequences of depression for her art and life. To do so requires a more nuanced...