Not Yet Understanding

Abstract This essay explores the poetics of Isobel Armstrong's The Radical Aesthetic. Placing it within a context of feminist approaches to critical theory and elaborating on its psychoanalytic critique of Enlightenment aesthetics through a reading of D. W. Winnicott's ideas about infantile and maternal creativity, it argues that Armstrong offers the reader new ways of apprehending experimental poetry through the pleasures of affect and not-yet-understanding. The essay considers why poetry is a crucial site for Armstrong's investigations into the messy unfolding of affect in the constitution of the subject, and gestures toward some of the gaps in the cartography set out in The Radical Aesthetic. It argues that Armstrong's ludic critique can help us to build our resilience as readers, to placate the bitterness of critics who find misunderstanding intolerable, and to empathize with students who are in a panic about meaning. It concludes with a demonstration of these methods of reading, misunderstanding, and not-yet-understanding, through an analysis of a “countersonnet” by Nat Raha.