The first chapter, “Threshold,” examines the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath. Stevens’ and Plath’s poems stall in realizations that a person’s mind and body do not themselves, even upon reflection, provide her with sufficient clues about the content and causes of the affects that move them. These poems’ speakers try, and fail, to imagine or conjure into being an audience held captive by their self-expression, in whose presence the stakes of this self-expression could clarify. The speakers’ sense of themselves, and of the genre in which they express their feelings, is undone by this inability. To bring out these poems’ broader philosophical implications, the chapter engages with the work of Charles Altieri.