Disability Haunting in American Poetics

In medicine and rehabilitation, disability has been exclusively narrated as individual tragedy and deviance from bodily norms. As a result, humanities scholarship has only recently begun to understand disability as a foundational category of social experience, and a matter of symbolic investment. The essay examines the language of haunting used by Robert Pinsky in his analysis of American poetry as constitutive of a uniquely American memory. Poems featured in Pinsky's discussion–namely Abraham Lincoln's My Childhood Home I See Again and William Carlos Williams's To Elsie–are re-read as relying on unacknowledged representations of disability. The essay designates this spectral presence of disabled people's material circumstances in print and media as disability haunting. A disability studies approach to literary analysis can provide readers, teachers, and critics with the ability to concretize such haunting subject matter. Hence, the essay seeks to make surface a 'poetics' of disability in literary wor...