“There Is Opacity Now at the Bottom of the Mirror”: The Aesthetics of Difficulty in the Long Poem

Many late modernist long poems are notoriously challenging to read. In this essay I ask whether difficulty is an integral feature of the long poem and discuss accounts and instances of poetic opacity in essays and poems by Édouard Glissant, Ann Lauterbach, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, Keston Sutherland, and others. I claim that poetic illegibility in these long poems is an instance of a widespread late modernist aesthetic of difficulty. This aesthetic works through embodied concepts of the fraught relations between known and unknown.