Although Byron presented himself in Don Juan as a highly spontaneous poet with a knack for the inventive twist of rhyme, his compositional technique was in fact a combination of facility and industry, as demonstrated by the poem's many drafts and revisions. By sounding rhyming conventions in search of new linguistic and sonic structures, Byron produced a set of false starts and finished forms that revealed his taste for renunciation: a taste operative on aesthetic, cultural, personal, and political levels. As such, he bequeathed an insistent, supple, and polyvalent poetics to those who have followed in his wake.
Ostensibly an oblique commentary on the Bay of Pigs invasion, Lorine Niedecker’s brief poem “J. F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs,” first published in 1967, also serves as a reflection on the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath. The poem’s elliptical content is indirectly elucidated by its distinctive form, which pivots around a quotation implicitly attributed—though never directly traceable—to Kennedy himself. Performing a close reading of Niedecker’s poem, this essay situates “J. F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs” in its literary, historical, and political contexts while also drawing upon speech act theory in order to gain a better understanding of what is at stake in Niedecker’s “quotation” of Kennedy.
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