The Lyric Theory Reader

A CriticalAnthology
Edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins
THE LYRIC THEORY READER
The Lyric Theory
Reader
A Critical Anthology

Edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS BALTIMORE

© 2014 johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2014
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The lyric theory reader: a critical anthology I edited by Virginia jackson and
Yopie Prins.
pagescm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4214-1199-6 (hardcover: acid-free paper)- ISBN 978-1-4214-1200-9
(pbk.: acid-free paper)- ISBN 1-4214-1199-7 (hardcover: acid-free paper)-
ISBN 1-4214-1200-4 (pbk.: acid-free paper) 1. Lyric poetry-History and criticism-
Theory, etc. I. jackson, Virginia Walker, editor of compilation. II. Prins, Yopie, editor of
compilation.
PN1356.L98 2013
2013016725

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information,
please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected].

johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials,

including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer
waste, whenever possible.
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

General Introduction 1

PART ONE: HOW DOES LYRIC BECOME A GENRE?

SECTION 1 Genre Theory 11

1.1. Gerard Genette, "The Architext" (1979; trans. 1992) 17
1.2. Northrop Frye, "Theory of Genres" (1957) 30
1.3. Rene Wellek, "Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnis" (1967) 40
1.4. Ralph Cohen, "History and Genre" (1986) 53
1.5. Jonathan Culler, "Lyric, History, and Genre" (2009) 63
1.6. Stanley Fish, "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" (1980) 77

SECTION 2 Models of Lyric 86

2.1. W. R. Johnson, "On the Absence of Ancient Lyric Theory" (1982) 91
2.2. Seth Lerer, "The Genre of the Grave and the Origins of the Middle English
Lyric" (1997) 104
2.3. Heather Dubrow, "Lyric Forms" (2ooo) 114
2-4. Helen Vendler, Introduction to The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997) 128
2.5. M. H. Abrams, "The Lyric as Poetic Norm" (1953) 140
2.6. Herbert F. Tucker, "Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of
Lyric" (1985) 144
 vi PART TWO: TWENTIETH-CENTURY LYRIC READERS

coNTENTs SECTION 3 Anglo-American New Criticism 159

3.1. I. A. Richards, "The Analysis of a Poem" and "The Definition of
a Poem" (1924) 165
3.2. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Introduction to
Understanding Poetry (1938) 177
3-3· T. S. Eliot, "The Three Voices of Poetry" (1953) 192
3-4· W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, "The Intentional
Fallacy" (1946) 201
3-5· Reuben Brower, "The Speaking Voice" (1951) 211

SECTION 4 Structuralist Reading 219

4.1. Mikhail Bakhtin, "The Problem of Speech Genres" (1953; trans. 1986) 224
4.2. Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics" (1960) 234
4.3. Michael Riffaterre, "The Poem's Significance" (1978) 249

SECTION 5 Post-Structuralist Reading 266

5.1. Harold Bloom, "The Breaking of Form" (1979) 275
5.2. Jacques Derrida, "Che cos'e la poesia?" (1988; trans. 1991) 287
5-3· Paul de Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric" (1984) 291
5-4. Barbara Johnson, "Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law" (1998) 304

SECTION 6 Frankfurt School and After 319

6.1. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1939; trans. 1969) 327
6.2. Theodor W. Adorno, "On Lyric Poetry and Society" (1957; trans. 1991) 339
6.3. Fredric Jameson, "Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: The
Dissolution of the Referent and the Artificial 'Sublime'" (1985) 350
6.4. Drew Milne, "In Memory of the Pterodactyl: The Limits of Lyric
Humanism" (2001) 361
6.5. Stathis Gourgouris, "The Lyric in Exile" (2004) 368

SECTION 7 Phenomenologies of Lyric Reading 382

7.1. Martin Heidegger, "... Poetically Man Dwells .. :' (1951; trans. 1971) 390
7.2. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Poetry as Experience: Two Poems by
Paul Celan" (1968; trans. 1999) 399
7·3· Allen Grossman, "Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in
Speculative Poetics" (1990) 418
7·4· Giorgio Agamben, "The End of the Poem" (1996; trans. 1999) 430
7-5· Simon Jarvis, "Why Rhyme Pleases" (2011) 434
PART THREE: LYRIC DEPARTURES vii

SECTION 8 Avant-garde Anti-lyricism 451 CONTENTS

8.1. Marjorie Perloff, "Can(n)on to the Right of Us, Can(n)on to the Left of Us:
A Plea for Difference" (1987) 460
8.2. Charles Altieri, "What Is Living and What Is Dead in American
Postmodernism: Establishing the Contemporaneity of
Some American Poetry" (1996) 477
8.3. Christopher Nealon, "The Matter of Capital, or Catastrophe
and Textuality" (2011) 487
8-4. Craig Dworkin, "Lyric and the Hazard of Music" (2oo8) 499

SECTION 9 Lyric and Sexual Difference 504

9.1. Nancy J. Vickers, "Diana Described: Scattered Woman and
Scattered Rhyme" (1981) 511
9.2. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "Gender, Creativity, and the
Woman Poet" (1979) 522
9·3· Barbara Johnson, ''Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion" (1987) 529
9-4· Thomas E. Yingling, "The Homosexual Lyric" (1990) 541
9-5· Juliana Spahr, Introduction to American Women Poets in the 21st Century:
Where Lyric Meets Language (2002) 557

SECTION 10 Comparative Lyric 568

10.1. Earl Miner, "Why Lyric?" (2ooo) 577
10.2. Jahan Ramazani, "Traveling Poetry" (2007) 589
10.3. Aamir R. Mufti, "Towards a Lyric History oflndia'' (2004) 603
10-4. Roland Greene, "Inter-American Obversals: Allen Ginsberg and Haroldo
de Campos circa 1960" (2oo8) 618
10.5. David Damrosch, "Love in the Necropolis" (2003) 632

Contributors 643
Source Acknowledgments 649
Index of Authors and Works 653
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Lyric Theory Reader is a collaborative project in every sense. It would not be possible
without the deep and lifelong collaboration of the editors, so we begin by thanking one
another. Our research assistants-LeifEckstrom, Rachel Feder, and Sara Grewal-deserve
co-editorial credit. Their wizardry in transcribing, proofing, filing, and gathering per-
missions for the essays included here literally made this book possible. Generous research
funding from Tufts University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Califor-
nia, Irvine, supported these collaborations. The editors at Johns Hopkins University
Press have also been extraordinarily supportive of our collective editorial efforts at every
step in this long process. We thank them and the Press's insightful outside reader for be-
lieving in this book.
The graduate students in our lyric theory seminars at Rutgers, New York University,
Tufts, Irvine, and Michigan have each and all contributed to making this a better book.
They test drove the anthology at high speeds and with great skill, and they did us the great
favor of figuring out what worked and what slowed them down. There are also colleagues
across many universities who have helped to shape the ongoing conversation surrounding
this project. At institutions and conferences, the agreements, disagreements, celebrations,
and discoveries we have been fortunate enough to encounter with other thinkers about
poetry and poetics are the living foundation of this book. And like all long intellectual
labors, this anthology has required not only enormous institutional and intellectual sup-
port but also the patience and help of our friends and family, including Martin Harries
and Michael Daugherty. We are grateful to all our interlocutors, near and far.
Finally, we would like to thank the lyric theorists whose essays appear in this volume.
This anthology is about them, and it is for the readers who continue to think about poetry
in the ways these theorists have imagined they might-and in ways neither the editors
nor the contributors could have foreseen.
THE LYRIC THEORY READER
General Introduction

We take it for granted that we know what a lyric is. As a term derived from ancient Greek
to designate a song accompanied by the lyre, its association with musical performance
persists today in popular "song lyrics" with instrumental accompaniment, but "lyric po-
etry" is also invoked more abstractly as a literary production that is read, not sung. Often a
poem is considered lyric when it represents an utterance in the first person, an expression
of personal feeling, according to a model of modern lyric reading that diverges from the
way poems were performed (and read) in antiquity. Or as an alternative to expressive read-
ing, a poem may be called lyric when it foregrounds the musicality of language by appeal to
the ear or to the eye. Sometimes poems are called lyrics simply because they are short;
sometimes lyric is defined in opposition to narrative, assuming a modern binary in literary
modes; increasingly, lyric is a way to describe the essence of poetry, a poem at its most
poetic. Whether we think about the lyric as ancient origin or modern imaginary, on the
page or in the air, we need to have some idea of what a lyric is (or was) in the first place. Yet
it has become as notoriously difficult to define the lyric as it is impossible to define poetry
itself. 1 How is it possible that almost all poetry has come to be read as essentially lyric and
at the same time we do not seem to know how to define the lyric? Since assumptions widely
shared are usually the ideas least and last investigated, it may be the case that because we
have come to think of all poetry as lyric, we have not really wanted a concise definition of
lyric. Perhaps the lyric has become so difficult to define because we need it to be blurry
around the edges, to remain capacious enough to include all kinds of verse and all kinds of
ideas about what poetry is or should be.
Yet such problems of definition are also always invitations to theorists. This anthology
traces a critical genealogy of the modern idea oflyric as it has emerged in Anglo-American
literary criticism of the past century. To say that the lyric is a modern idea or theory rather
than an ancient genre might surprise readers accustomed to thinking about lyric poetry as a
given in the Western tradition-indeed, as the oldest form in that tradition, the origin oflit-
erature and civilization. It is true that if we think of choral hymns or Sappho's odes or even
tribal chants or popular song as the roots oflyric, a critical genealogy oflyric as a modern
theory does not make much sense. But the concept of lyric as the oldest form of poetic
expression is actually a relatively recent notion; specifically, it is a post-Enlightenment idea,
 2 developed steadily over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Lyric
Theory Reader traces only the past century's consolidation of our current thinking about
GENERAL the lyric, though the history of that idea is a much longer story, and whoever "we" are is
INTRODUCTioN subject to change. By "our current thinking" we mean primarily literary criticism that has
proven influential for Anglo-American readers and poets both inside and outside the
academy in the past century. Although the critics included in this anthology did not in-
vent the lyric, we can trace the sources and direction of their influence by gathering the
recent history of critical thought about the lyric. The purpose of this volume is to demon-
strate how a reading of poetry as lyric that emerged by fits and starts in the nineteenth
century became mainstream practice in the development of modern literary criticism in
the twentieth century. The majority of the essays selected for this volume were written af-
ter the middle of the twentieth century; we think that by examining the most recent chap-
ter of the critical history of the lyric, we may be able to see not only where our ideas have
come from but also where they might be going.
The history of lyric reading is the history of thinking about poetry as more and more
abstract and ineffable. A resistance to definition may be the best basis for definition of the
lyric-and of poetry-we currently have. While it is still common to cite the definition of
lyric in "official verse culture" (as described by Charles Bernstein in his 1992 manifesto, A
Poetics) 2 in terms of a record of the voice or the mind speaking to itself (as in T. S. Eliot's
understanding of the "first voice" of poetry, for which see section 3), in practice the lyric is
whatever we think poetry is. Sometimes we think that the lyric is what contemporary po-
etry reacts against, as in recent avant-garde or conceptual thinking about poetics that views
lyric as a mummified remnant of Romanticism, for example. 3 And sometimes we think that
the lyric is the most fundamental and unchanging poetic form, as when Helen Vendler
writes, "the lyric remains the genre that directs its mimesis toward the performance of the
mind in solitary speech" (see section 2). These may seem like competing definitions of
the lyric in our contemporary moment, but their difference is only apparent inasmuch as
they share a general sense that the lyric is the genre of personal expression, a sense as-
sumed whenever we talk about "the lyric I." What they disagree about is the value to at-
tribute to that general sense.
The survey of twentieth- and twenty-first-century criticism offered here shows that this
general definition of the lyric (whether valued or devalued) now seems to us a given only
because twentieth-century literary criticism made it up. Reuben Brower (see section 3) was
enormously influential in creating the dramatic model of "the mind in solitary speech"
that Vendler (his student) expanded, but that was not the model for many of the other
critics included here. The many overlapping models of the lyric in the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries contribute to making our current sense oflyric poetry very large, so large that
we think we know what we mean when we refer to poems as lyric (whether we think that is
a good or a bad thing), but also too large to mean anything in particular.
This is not to say that the twentieth century invented the lyric out of whole cloth. The
modern invention of the lyric has usually been attributed to Romanticism. Mary Poovey
has gone so far as to claim that "contemporary literary criticism is organized around the
romantic lyric-both in the sense that it treats its analytic objects as if they were lyrics and
in the sense that it contains features that perform lyric functions." 4 But it does not make
much sense to talk about "the romantic lyric" as if the lyric was in fact one genre in the
nineteenth century and ever after-whether a contemporary revision of the genre does or
does not now organize literary criticism as such. It seems more accurate to describe the
lyric as a project modern literary criticism took from the nineteenth century and made its
own. In the late eighteenth century, neoclassical and popular verse genres began to merge
into larger categories, eventuating in what in 1819 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called 3
"the three natural forms of poetry": the narrative, the lyric, and the dramatic. Goethe
suggested that all poetry could be fit into these three major categories and that if one put GENERAL

the "three main elements on a circle, equidistant from one another" one could see how INTRooucTJON

these broad categories formed a system of genres, the system ofliterature itself.S
This way of thinking indicated a shift not only in the fortunes of the lyric but also in
the conception of the form and function of literary genres-in many ways, it marked the
invention not simply of the modern lyric but of literature as we know it. Before that, Wil-
liam Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had signaled the movement of popular
genres with particular social functions toward the abstract literary lyric in their Lyrical
Ballads (1798), but the term remained adjectival rather than nominal. In the 1820s and 1830s,
G. W. F. Hegel famously elevated the name of the lyric to one of the highest places in his
Aesthetics, considering it the pure representation of subjectivity and therefore a form
likely to further the spirit of the age. Hegel cast the lyric as the most difficult of modern
genres because in it the poet must become "the centre which holds the whole lyric work of
art together," and in order to do so he must achieve a "specific mood" and "must identify
himself with this particularization of himself as with himself, so that in it he feels and
envisages himself." 6 Hegel repeated these assertions because he saw no less than the achieve-
ment of subjectivity at stake in the lyric: "In this way alone does [the poet] then become
a self-bounded subjective entity (Totalitiit)." That attainment of subjective wholeness
would in turn represent both perfect expression and the dialectical accomplishment of
historical progress, for in his expression the poet moves us all forward toward enlighten-
ment. Hegel's was an idealized version of the lyric indeed, especially in comparison to the
enormous variety of verse genres in active circulation in the nineteenth century: epistles
and hymns, ballads and elegies, drinking songs and odes. The immense social currency
of so many verse genres seems to have inspired nineteenth-century thinkers to imagine
a transcendent poetic genre ever more abstracted from that currency, a genre ever more a
perfect idea rather than an imperfect practice.
In 1833, John Stuart Mill paralleled Hegel in claiming that lyric poetry is "more emi-
nently and peculiarly poetry than any other," yet he sought in vain for an adequate repre-
sentative of a lyric poet among his British contemporaries.? Though he praised Wordsworth
and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he lamented that "the genius of Wordsworth is essentially
unlyrical," and that Shelley "is the reverse" in the sense that he had immense lyrical gifts
but "had not, at the period of his deplorably early death, reached sufficiently far that intel-
lectual progression of which he was capable" (35-38). If for Hegel the ideal lyric poet would
move civilization forward in his perfect self-expression, for Mill the ideal lyric poet would
have to be the representative of both original nature and acquired culture, something no
one yet had done perfectly. For such idealized accounts, the lyric poet could only be an
imagined figure, a hero of a poetry yet to appear (as indeed the poet became rather explic-
itly for Ralph Waldo Emerson, until Walt Whitman volunteered for the job).
It is a bit ironic that the nineteenth-century definition of the lyric as "utterance
overheard"-the construction that appears most often in twentieth-century literary
criticism-is taken from an essay in which Mill failed to find any poet who could be called
truly lyric, who could represent the "lyric" essence of poetry. Actually, in Mill's argument
the idea that "eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard" (12) is not so much a definition of
the essence of lyric as it is a distinction between discursive modes of direct and indirect
address. Popular verse such as the Corn-Law Ballads could not fit his definition of poetry
because such verse directly addressed its readers for political purposes. In contrast, "the
peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener,"
 4 as Mill famously declared: "Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of soli-
tude" (12). But of course the solitude of the lyric poet is a solitude we witness, a solitude
GENERAL exhibited in public. Mill ventured various metaphors for that predicament when he wrote
INTRODUCTION that lyric song "has always seemed to us like the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell, our-
selves listening, unseen in the next" or that "it may be said that poetry that is printed on
hot-pressed paper, and sold at a bookseller's shop, is a soliloquy in full dress, and on the
stage" (12). Such extravagant metaphors testify to the peculiar pressures on the notion of
the lyric ideal in the nineteenth century, yet they also indicate that even a writer like Mill,
who thought of the lyric as poetry's utopian horizon, knew that his requirement that the
lyric poet be unconscious of the audience always already posed a problem.
If nineteenth-century thinking about poetry sought to distinguish a transcendent
version oflyric from contemporary cultures of circulation and at the same time imagined
an ideal (and perhaps impossible) new culture of circulation, the twentieth-century criti-
cism that inherited these ambitions for the lyric tended to embrace it not as an ideal to be
aspired toward but as the given poetic genre already in circulation. When in 1957 Northrop
Frye (see section 1) defined the lyric as "preeminently the utterance that is overheard," he
went so far as to say that there is "no word for the audience of the lyric" because "the poet,
so to speak, turns his back on his listeners." Over a century after Mill and Hegel, the self-
absorption of the lyric poet ceased to be a utopian horizon or a problem to be metaphor-
ically solved and was assumed as a normative practice. Turning away from listeners be-
came what the modern lyric poet did for a living.
Thus what began in the nineteenth century as an aspiration became in the twentieth
century a real genre-indeed, became not only the genre to which poetry aspired but the
genre so identified with poetry that poetry became another name for it. In this progression,
the lyric first became an abstraction that could include various verse genres, then poetry
became a genre that could include lyric. In the second half of the nineteenth century, there
was an uneven progression toward that exchange of terms, but in this anthology we gather
a range of criticism that inherits those terms. In many of the essays included in this
anthology, critics struggle with this lyricized idea of poetry, working to reconcile the
theoretical self-enclosure of the lyric with the ways lyric poems are or were or could be
read. Jonathan Culler, one of the foremost contemporary theorists of the lyric, suggests
that "observing particular shifts in the lyric does not ... prevent one from maintaining a
broad conception of lyric as genre" (see section 1). Yet even if we embrace such a broad
conception (as indeed the twentieth century did) how do we account for the historical
shifts that brought it about? As Culler observes, our answer to that question will depend
on what we think a literary genre is in the first place. While Culler favors an account of
genre as "a set of norms or structural possibilities," this anthology presents a critical his-
tory of how such a broad conception of the lyric as a genre became the norm.
It has become common to credit the Anglo-American New Criticism of the middle of
the twentieth century with the elevation of the self-enclosed lyric to paradigmatic status,
but the history of twentieth-century thinking about poetry is not that simple. The late-
twentieth-century demand for a theory of Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (as the title
of an important 1985 anthology of criticism phrased it) made New Criticism seem more
monumental than it was. The New Critics were hardly a coherent group, and there were
many differences among them. While it is possible to say that I. A. Richards, Cleanth
Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, T. S. Eliot, W. K. Wimsatt, Monroe Beardsley, and Reuben
Brower (the critics included here in section 3), along with John Crowe Ransom, Yvor
Winters, R. P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, William Empson, and many others shared a lyricized
view of poetry, precisely for that reason midcentury critics did not tend to think about
"the lyric" but rather assumed that most poetry conforms to lyric protocols. As Brooks 5
and Warren wrote in the first edition of Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College
Students in 1938 (see section 3), "classifications such as 'lyrics of meditation,' and 'reli- GENERAL

gious lyrics' and 'poems of patriotism,' or 'the sonnet,' 'the Ode,' 'the song,' etc. are arbi- INTRODUCTION

trary and irrational classifications" that should give way to "poetry as a thing in itself
worthy of study." The emphasis on "poetry as a thing in itself" was an emphasis shared by
many critics in the twentieth century, but as this anthology demonstrates, what it meant
for poetry to be "a thing in itself" varied dramatically from critic to critic. We think it is
more productive to view New Criticism as part of a longer history of abstraction in which
various verse genres (as in Brooks and Warren's list) were collapsed into a large, lyricized
idea of poetry as such. This "super-sizing" of the lyric remained in place after the New
Criticism, and in fact critics were struggling with it before the New Criticism. It is not an
idea created and promoted by a particular school of thought but an ongoing historical
process of thinking about poetry in which we are still very much engaged.
What did characterize the New Criticism was a focus on making poetry available
to all kinds of readers. As the subtitle of Brooks and Warren's anthology suggests, in the
middle of the twentieth century (with the rise of a university system broadly accessible to
the middle class) the college classroom became the community of readers ideally posi-
tioned to resolve the contradictions evident in Mill's metaphors. Students were addressed
by poems precisely because they were taught that they could all "overhear" the poet speak-
ing to herself. Robert Lowell complained later in the twentieth century that "the modern
world has destroyed the intelligent poet's audience and given him students."8 Whether or
not an audience for poetry deteriorated in this period, the audience for what in classroom
practice came to be referred to as "the lyric I" could be generated by teaching students to
read poetry from all periods "as a thing in itself." In the middle of the century, that first-
person subject of the poem came to be called "the speaker,'' a dramatic persona considered
a fiction made for the purposes of the poem. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith has pointed out,
the advantage of thinking about (and teaching) "the lyric I" as a speaker or a dramatic fic-
tion is that "the context of a fictive utterance ... is understood to be historically indetermi-
nate."9 A fictional person of all times and all places, the first-person speaker of the lyric
could speak to no one in particular and thus to all of us.
No wonder this way of reading was so widespread in the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury if it made the teaching of such a variety of poems to such a variety of student "listen-
ers" possible. At the same time, the suspension of that fiction over any particular historical
context or sociality beyond the classroom created problems for critics like Rene Wellek,
who tried to place this lyricized version of poetry in literary history, or for later critics like
Stanley Fish, who realized that such fictions were products of the special interpretive
community of the classroom. Other critics tried to provide a context for this lyric fiction
in earlier poetic models or to posit it as an essential (perhaps even universal) experience
embedded in the phenomenology oflyric reading. Earlier in the century, Frankfurt School
literary theory had argued that the lyric fiction was itself a product of a decadent capitalist
society in which poems had become commodities, and this line of thought has produced
a critical discourse worried about the investments of New Criticism. After the middle of
the century, structuralist critics focused on how poetic fictions worked in everyday dis-
course and in the formal world of the poem itself; post-structuralist readers attended to
the ways in which these fictions did not work or broke down under sustained attention;
post-Heideggerian phenomenological readers explored the interior worlds of thought and
feeling in lyric fictions. But since the late twentieth century, critics have also pushed back
against the fiction of the lyric, whether in the interest of post-lyric textual or conceptual
 6 poetics or in the interest of sexual politics or in the interest of challenging the Western
inheritance of the lyric with other models. We have given some representative examples
GENERAL of these approaches both to give readers a survey of their diversity and to think about the
INTRooucTJON general sense of the lyric as fictional that such diverse approaches continue to share. Pre-
cisely because it has been shared for so long by such a range of readers, it is a fiction that
has remained unexamined.
The Lyric Theory Reader is neither a defense of nor an attack on lyric. How can we de-
fend or attack a moving target? Because what a lyric is or was keeps changing, this volume
invites readers to examine moments in the intellectual history of a received idea over the
past century. It is therefore both an anthology of criticism and a critical anthology that
makes an argument about the history of reading. A longer history would ideally include
earlier critics who have proven influential for twentieth-century criticism (classical trea-
tises by Aristotle and Horace and Longinus, or apologias penned by poets like Sir Philip
Sidney and Alexander Pope and Shelley, or often-quoted passages from Coleridge's Bio-
graphia Literaria and meditations from William Hazlitt's essay "On Poetry in General,"
or Mill's "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties," or Edgar Allan Poe's "Philosophy of
Composition," or Matthew Arnold's "The Study of Poetry," just to name a few obvious ex-
amples). But such a sampling of classic writing on poetry is already available in other
anthologies, while our focus is on twentieth-century literary criticism, where the rework-
ing of familiar quotations about poetry also draws attention to discontinuities and di-
vergences within only apparently continuous histories of interpretation. Rather than
proposing or pursuing a straightforward line of influence or progressive development in
discourses about lyric, we emphasize a loopier logic that attributes later ideas about lyric to
earlier moments in literary history and discovers in these historical moments the latent
possibilities of later ideas. Thus reading lyric, where lyric is the object of interpretation,
necessarily involves lyric reading, where lyric is part of the interpretive process to be
called into question. Our aim is to provoke debate about theoretical questions that re-
main unsettled: where, when, how, and why do we discover theories oflyric, and what are
the critical genealogies of such theories?
This anthology is divided into three parts, containing multiple sections, with an intro-
duction to each section explaining the critical context and theoretical implications of essays
we have selected and (in some cases) excerpted for inclusion. Part One draws a large circle
around the history oflyric reading in the twentieth century by asking an apparently simple
question: "How does lyric become a genre?" Rather than assuming that the lyric is (or has
always been) a genre, we present examples of modern genre theory that take up the ques-
tion oflyric, demonstrating how changing ideas about the form and functions of literary
genres made it possible to imagine lyric as a modern idea. A brief introduction to genre
theory (section 1) is followed by critical essays that project this idea back into literary his-
tory by identifying particular poets or poems as "models of lyric" (section 2). These two
sections offer complementary "macro" and "micro" perspectives (one broadly generic, the
other specifically historical) on the logic by which lyric has come to be identified with po-
etry as such. To lay the theoretical groundwork for the anthology as a whole, the first section
is best read in sequence (especially for teaching purposes); after this first section, readers may
select from essays in the remaining sections according to historical and critical interests.
Part Two is dedicated to twentieth-century lyric readers, featuring five major critical
trends or schools of criticism that consolidated modern thinking about poetry as lyric,
albeit with different critical investments. The techniques of close reading developed by
Anglo-American New Criticism (section 3) paved the way for structuralist and post-
structuralist readings of lyric (sections 4 and 5). In these various approaches to formalist
analysis, lyric serves as an exemplary literary artefact for critics who want to demonstrate 7
the construction of a text as organic unity or linguistic pattern or to demonstrate its de-
construction. Meanwhile, critics associated with the legacy of Frankfurt School thought GENERAL

(section 6) have pursued a Marxist reading of lyric as exemplifying the social contradic- INTRooucTION

tions of modernity. Other critics have been more interested in tracing a phenomenology
of lyric reading (section 7) to describe an experience of lyric not as an object of thought
but as a mode of perception and an instrument for thinking. What these different ap-
proaches to lyric reading have in common is the idea that lyric is an important category
for modern critical thought. For all of these critics, for all sorts of different reasons, the
lyric is a fiction in which they find ways to believe.
Given the ambitious claims for lyric made by critics in the first two parts of the anthol-
ogy, Part Three explores a series of critical disclaimers that we call "lyric departures." Here
we present critics who depart, in both senses, from an idea of lyric that they seek to call
into question. The essays included in section 8 mark a radical break from an expressive
model of lyric in order to explore avant-garde poetics that do not revolve around the as-
sumption of lyric subjectivity or the figure of voice. By placing this argument within, rather
than outside, a history of lyric reading that it seems to reject, our anthology makes it pos-
sible to see how readers and writers committed to this strain of anti-lyricism are part of
the very tradition they critique. The essays included in the last two sections challenge
traditional lyric reading in another way, not through refusal of history but through an
insistence on alternate histories. We include several examples of gender criticism and
queer theory that generate different histories of lyric reading by foregrounding questions
of sexual difference (section 9). These histories are further expanded by critical explora-
tions in comparative poetics, where modern lyric reading is brought into dialogue with
poetry from non-Western traditions (section 10). Looking ahead to more diverse modes
of lyric reading necessarily involves looking back on a critical framework that has been
consolidated in the course of the twentieth century, a framework that continues to serve
many different purposes.
Our anthology provides an overview of the modern consolidation of lyric as a genre
of critical reading; our central argument is that the lyricization of poetry is a product of
twentieth-century critical thought, and our purpose is to make available some exemplary
instances of that thought and its many variations. In this respect, The Lyric Theory
Reader is a companion to Theory of the Novel, edited by Michael McKeon and also pub-
lished by The Johns Hopkins University Press (2ooo). In his anthology, McKeon argues
that "modernity conjoins several, seemingly contradictory elements: the emergence of the
novel genre, the decay of the genre system, and the movement to replace the historical
theory of the novel by the transhistorical theory of narrative" (71). The same may be said,
mutatis mutandis, of the modern emergence of lyric as a genre, the decay of the genre sys-
tem, and the movement to replace historical poetic genres by a transhistorical theory of
lyric. Like McKeon's anthology, our anthology highlights these only apparently contradic-
tory elements. The introductory essays provide an interpretive framework for the selected
readings in each section and together make a sustained argument about the graduallyri-
cization of poetry that reached its culmination in twentieth-century criticism.
The essays gathered here are not comprehensive, but we think they are representative.
What they represent is not a developmental narrative, exactly, and they also do not consti-
tute an influence study. Rather, our anthology presents an intellectual history of a theory of
lyric reading that has circulated both within and beyond the classroom, wherever poetry
is being taught and read and discussed and debated today. Such an intellectual history
offers a timely critical perspective at a moment when all kinds of claims are being made
 8 for poetry as a way of redeeming a decadent culture, of restoring literariness to literary
studies, of making personal expression possible in public, of bestowing creative freedom
GENERAL on poet, critic, and reader alike. Those deep investments in what poetry can do for us
INTRooucTJON have a history as poetic practice but also as critical construction. The Lyric Theory Reader
encourages the next generation oflyric theory readers-students, teachers, scholars, critics,
poets-to reflect further on the paths by which we have reached the point of such idealiza-
tion of the potential function of poetry in our time. Histories of poetic practices often es-
tablish poetry as a stable term that then takes various forms or is used in a range of ways at
different places at different times. This volume instead surveys the idea of poetry as lyric
that emerged at a particular place and time (the twentieth century in Anglo-America); once
we see the outlines of that idea, that notion of poetry may not seem so stable or appropriate
for other places and other times, and from that insight other histories of reading-and
other ideas of poetry and its possibilities-may appear.

NOTES
1. There have of course been many attempts to 5· johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Noten und
define lyric in Anglo-American criticism over the Abhandlungen zu besserem Verstandnis des
past century. See suggested readings listed at the West-ostichen Diwans," in Goethes Werke,
end of section 1 on the general idea of lyric and at Hamburger Ausgabe (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981)
the end of section 2 on particular models of lyric. 2:187-89.
See also the different entries on "lyric" in The 6. G. W. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art,
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics by trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),
james William johnson (1st, 2nd, and 3rd eds., 2:971.
Princeton, N): Princeton University Press, 1965-93) 7- john Stuart Mill, Essays on Poetry, ed. F.
and by Virginia jackson (4th ed., 2012), and Parvin Sharpless (Columbia: University of South
differing perspectives in contributions to "The Carolina Press, 1976), 36. Mill's essays most often
New Lyric Studies" in PMLA 123:1 (Jan. 2008): quoted by critics ("What Is Poetry?" and "The Two
181-234- Kinds of Poetry") both date from 1833 and are
2. See Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, reprinted as "Thoughts on Poetry and Its
MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Varieties," revised in 1859.
3- See, for example, Craig Dworkin's introduc- 8. Robert Lowell, 1960 National Book Award
tion to the Anthology of Conceptual Writing on Acceptance Speech: www.nationalbook.org/
the UbuWeb: www.ubu.com/concept/. nbaacceptspeech_rlowell.html#.T61PnRw71Ew.
4· Mary Poovey, "The Model System of 9- Barbara Herrnstein Smith, On the Margins of
Contemporary Literary Criticism," Critical Inquiry Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language
27.3 (Spring 2001): 408-38. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 33-
PART ONE

How Does Lyric

Become a Genre?
SECTION 1

Genre Theory

How did the lyric become a genre? This may seem an odd question, especially to those
readers who think of the lyric as the most fundamental kind of poetry, or who think of
lyricism as poetry's essence. 1 Yet the idea that lyric poetry has always been a primary
form of literary-indeed, of human-expression is surprisingly modern. In the early
romantic period, literature began to be divided into three large categories, culminating
in Goethe's idea of the three "natural forms of poetry": lyric, epic, and drama. 2 Those
categories were then cast as ancient distinctions, but in fact (as Gerard Genette argues in
his essay included in this section), while epic and drama had various theories attached to
them before the seventeenth century, lyric was a third term added to literary description
by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary criticism. This is not to say that there
were no ancient or medieval or early modern or seventeenth- or eighteenth-century lyric
poems; rather, these poems were not understood as lyric in our current sense of the
term. Alistair Fowler puts the observation succinctly when he warns that lyric in literary
theory from Cicero through Dryden is "not to be confused with the modern term." 3 The
important distinction between the modern term and its antecedents is the way in which
lyric has been considered a genre, since in the eighteenth century the conception of
genre itself changed. As the essays in this section attest, the way we read the lyric (which
is to say the way we think about poetry) has everything to do with what we think literary
genres are or do.
In The Architext, Genette demonstrates that the relationship between theories of the
lyric and theories of genre is intimate in modernity. Observing the near ubiquitous invo-
cation of"the three major genres" (lyric, epic, and dramatic) in twentieth-century literary
criticism, Genette notices that this tripartite system is almost always attributed to the an-
cients, specifically to Plato and Aristotle. Yet in his reading of Plato and Aristotle, Genette
does not find any theory of these three major genres-in fact, he cannot find any mention
at all of"the lyric" as such. Where did the lyric come from, or how did "the retrospective
illusion" that the lyric has always been a major genre become so "deeply rooted in our
conscious, or unconscious, literary minds" that it could be referred to as self-evident by
twentieth-century critics as different from one another as Austin Warren, Northrop Frye,
and Mikhail Bakhtin? The search for an answer to this question leads Genette through an
 12 elaborate meditation on the history of genre theory. If for Plato "there is no poem except
a representative one" and Aristotle "also excludes non-imitative verse," then it begins to
SECTION 1 seem as if the shift from classical to modern poetics entailed a shift in the work that
GENRE THEORY genres were expected to do. While "lyric" was used as a name for various sorts of poetry
before the eighteenth century, toward the end of that century Genette finds that the lyric
began to be understood as a representative or imitative genre because literary thinkers
decided that "it imitates feelings" and thus could finally be "integrated into classical poet-
ics." In order to achieve this integration, the lyric poem had to be understood as a fiction,
as a representation of feeling rather than as feeling itself. Modern poetics required the
reconstruction of the lyric as something it had never been before: not a mode of enuncia-
tion but "a real genre" with its own thematic content, the expression of an essentially fic-
tive individual subject. In that reconstruction, the idea of the lyric, epic, and dramatic as
what Genette calls "archigenres" emerged: "Archi-, because each of them is supposed to
overarch and include, ranked by degree of importance, a certain number of empirical
genres that-whatever their amplitude, longevity, or potential for recurrence-are appar-
ently phenomena of culture and history." In order to make the three "archigenres" appar-
ently natural forms (in Goethe's phrase), or not simply effects of culture and history (as,
for example, ballads or epistles or elegies could be said to be), critics began to attribute the
romantic tripartite division to the ancients. As a structuralist, Genette is most interested
in what that attribution means for the large structures we have come to think of as liter-
ary genres. In the context of the Lyric Theory Reader, Genette's insight also means that a
shift in the conception of genre gave birth to the modern theory of the lyric.
In The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye, the Canadian literary critic who
proved highly influential for Anglo-American genre theory, dramatically demonstrated
and elaborated the modern theory of genre that Genette later identified as "a retrospec-
tive illusion." Invested in his own version of natural literary forms, Frye declared that in
the mid-twentieth century it was "time for criticism to leap to a new ground from which
it [could] discover what the organizing or containing forms of its conceptual framework
are." Like Genette, Frye's approach was essentially structuralist, but his structures were
large literary categories he called "archetypes" rather than "archigenres." Taking his cue
from Aristotle, Frye developed a systematic theory of literature that assumed and built
upon the tripartite division of major genres, but Frye elaborated the work of these genres
by suggesting that "the basis of generic distinctions in literature appears to be the radical
of presentation." What Frye means by "the radical of presentation" is the mode of perfor-
mance, "the distinctions of acted, spoken, and written word" or "the relationship between
a poet and his public." Frye essentially made genres back into modes of enunciation, a shift
from modern genre theory toward the classical sense of rhetorical performance. Frye is
thus able to think of the lyric as one of the "spoken genres" even when it is printed, since
its "radical of presentation" remains a particular kind of performance; the lyric is always,
according to Frye, "utterance that is overheard." This famous aphorism-taken out of the
context of J. S. Mill's "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties" (1833)-was abstracted by
Frye (and, as we shall see, by other literary critics of the 1950s) and transformed into a
model for reading the lyric, so often quoted that it has become a normative claim rather
than a theoretical proposition. The fiction of overhearing an utterance (whether spoken
or written) leads Frye to claim not just that the lyric is an imitation of feeling but that
"the lyric is an internal mimesis of sound and imagery," a representation he analyzes at
length in terms of melos and apsis, or "babble" and "doodle." Through the rhetorical
dynamics of sight and sound, Frye traces a history of variations on the dimensions of
lyric performance.
 Between Genette, who, late in the twentieth century, wondered when our modern 13
idea of the lyric began, and Frye, who had already embraced and extended that modern
idea in the middle of the twentieth century, Rene Wellek suggested in 1967 that literary SECTION 1
criticism recognize that "genres exist as institutions exist"-that is, that criticism might GENRE THEORY

want to accept genres as social fictions with particular uses and give up on writing
about the grand idea of the lyric. Through a reading of two contemporary German lit-
erary critics (Emil Staiger and Kate Hamburger), Wellek argues (in this sense agreeing
with Genette) that twentieth-century theories of lyric can be traced to German roman-
ticism and specifically to Schlegel and Hegel, who, with Goethe, outlined a dialectical
system of genre. In that system, the lyric was associated with erlebnis, or the lived expe-
rience of the subject-that is, with a nineteenth-century elevation of the eighteenth-century
notion that the lyric imitates feeling. Wellek's essay demonstrates how persistent that as-
sociation has been for modern criticism, but then it turns to point out how many different
literary works from different periods could be said to represent erlebnis: "If everything in
poetry is Erlebnis," then "the term loses its original relation to something given in life. It is
simply a term for the artist's activity. It is so broad as to be meaningless." According to this
modern definition, all poetry is lyric poetry. What is the alternative to the post-romantic
tradition of lyric theory founded on such a capacious idea of lyric experience? For
Wellek, "lyrical theory ... seems to have arrived at a complete impasse" by the time of
his writing; he thus concludes that we should "abandon attempts to define the general
nature of the lyric or the lyrical ... It seems much more profitable to turn to a study of
the variety of poetry and to the history and thus the description of genres which can be
grasped in their concrete conventions and traditions." In this way, Wellek moved in the
opposite direction to Frye; while Frye sought broad categories that could transcend
historical contingency, Wellek urged criticism to return to such contingencies. The
question left hanging at the end ofWellek's essay is what such a historical description of
the lyric would look like.
As the editor of New Literary History, Ralph Cohen had an interest in Wellek's ques-
tion, though while Wellek was one of the creators of the modern version of comparative
literature, Cohen's historical focus was very much on British literary history. Cohen's
1986 essay "History and Genre" agrees with Wellek by acknowledging that (as Fredric Jame-
son put it) genre criticism has been "thoroughly discredited by modern literary theory and
practice" but suggests that rather than abandoning genre (if that were possible), critics
might want to acknowledge "that genre concepts in theory and practice arise, change, and
decline for historical reasons." 4 As Cohen writes, "If Frye were a historical critic con-
cerned with actual texts, he would proceed to illustrate the kind of interrelations that
empirical critics develop, interrelations that show the choral chanting, riddling, and
other oral devices in works acted in front of a spectator. He would undertake to explain
how his genres interrelate historically with earlier genres as well as with each other. His
efforts, however, are directed at traditions and affinities rather than the actualities of
changing traditions and changing affinities." For Cohen, Frye typifies the problem with
modern genre theory, which depends on the abstract grouping of particular traits or (in
Jameson's variation) on an implied contract between the writer and the reader. But what
if critics were to give up such categories and instead were to trace the history of "generic
transformations as [when], for example, the 'ballad' and the 'lyric' are joined by Word-
sworth to form 'Lyrical Ballads.' Still another generic inquiry is to examine a single nar-
rative as it undergoes generic variations, becoming, in turn, a ballad, a prose fiction, a
tragedy, a memoir, as well as a member of other genres." The latter tack is the one Cohen
takes in his essay here through the variety of "genres" assumed by what was originally
 14 "The Excellent Ballad of George Barnwel" over the course of the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries. By the time that the Barnwel ballad was included in Percy's Reliques of
SECTION 1 Ancient English Poetry in 1765, we might call it a "lyric," but doing so would obscure all
GENRE THEORY of the other genres (from various kinds of ballads to prose narrative to tragedy to news or
memoir) it had been along the way. Cohen urges us to understand the ways in which
genres shift over time as one source for a possible "regeneration of genre theory." In that
theory, the historical process of generic transformation would take precedence over a
theory of any one genre, since the latter supposes that a genre remains stable while his-
tory changes. But what does Cohen's method ofliterary history mean for the theory of the
lyric? Could there be a history of the transformation of the lyric that could match Cohen's
account of the transformation of the ballad? What would we have to understand a lyric to
be in order to write such a history?
Jonathan Culler, one of the primary contemporary theorists of the lyric, has an an-
swer to this question. As a literary theorist committed to the comparative study of poet-
ics, Culler approaches the lyric as a "particularly interesting generic problem" that invites
us to articulate historical continuities as well as discontinuities. In response to Cohen,
Culler argues that "it would be wrong merely to accept as empirical fact every ascription
and description of genre"; instead, he emphasizes that literary critics should "reflect on
what makes something count as a genre" and pursue "a claim about fundamental struc-
tures that may be at work even when not manifest." Thus Culler counters Cohen's de-
scriptive approach in favor of a normative concept of lyric, one that seeks "an account of a
set of norms or structural possibilities" instead of particular uses and instances. For Culler,
it is not enough to study what critics and poets of a particular period thought about lyric;
we need to recognize the mutual implication of historical and theoretical conceptions of
generic categories within a longer "lyric tradition" that allows for continual transforma-
tion while assuming that there is a genre there to be transformed. While Culler accepts
both Genette's point that lyric was not made into one of three fundamental genres until
the romantic period and Wellek's critique of romantic theories of the lyric, he concludes
that focusing on particular historical verse genres (such as the ode or elegy as proposed by
Wellek or on the ballad as analyzed by Cohen) is "not a very promising strategy for nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century poetry, where many of the most interesting lyrics do not
seem to belong to those particular genres or subgenres." Of course much depends here on
Culler's assumption that the most interesting poems of the last two centuries are essentially
lyric. Here he takes up the "lyricization" argument proposed by Virginia Jackson, who traces
the historical process by which different poetic genres began to be collapsed into an abstract
idea of lyric in the course of the nineteenth century. Jackson argues that various historical
verse genres gradually became "lyric" as reading practices shifted over the nineteenth cen-
tury and were consolidated in the twentieth century. Whether or not such a process took
place is ofless interest to Culler than the fact that by the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, poets wrote and people read lyrics-and they knew how to do so because that is what
they had already been doing in one way or another for centuries before.
Thus the critical debate about the lyric as a genre comes down to a basic question:
how do we know a lyric when we see one? Whether the lyric as we know it was invented
in the eighteenth century or is as old as human expression, whether the lyric is "utterance
that is overheard" or is any representation of our essential, lived experience, whether the
lyric is historically contingent and ephemeral or is dependent on norms and structures
continuous across periods and cultures, you need to have some idea of what you think a
lyric poem is in order to know that you are reading (or hearing, or overhearing, or experi-
encing) one. In the final essay included in this section, Stanley Fish brings this fundamen-
tal premise of generic recognition into relief by performing a classroom experiment. In 15
his class on seventeenth-century religious poetry in 1971, Fish's students learned to recog-
nize a particular variety of lyric in seventeenth-century religious poetry. One day, the SECTION 1
students entered the classroom to discover a text written on the blackboard, a list of lin- GENRE THEORY

guistic textbooks left over from Fish's previous class. Fish asked the students to read the
list as if it were a seventeenth-century religious lyric. Fish's point in tricking his class was
not only to prove that his students were so well versed in the genre they had studied that
they could construct what in the specialized discourse ofliterary studies is called "a read-
ing"; the interest of this particular reading is that the students were capable of recogniz-
ing a poem that they had actually created themselves. That point leads Fish to conclude
that "acts of recognition, rather than being triggered by formal characteristics, are their
source. It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention
but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic quali-
ties." On this view, the debates over the status of the lyric as a genre-and over what a
literary genre is or does-might be reduced to kinds of attention to the problem.
All of the essays in this section agree that there is such a thing as the lyric, but none can
agree on the work that the lyric as a genre performs for its readers. What if Fish is right that
this set of disagreements has approached the question from the wrong direction? What if
we turn the question around to ask instead what kind of work readers perform in order to
make poems into lyrics? As Fish writes, "If the understandings of the people in question
are informed by the same notions of what counts as a fact, of what is central, peripheral,
and worthy of being noticed, in short, by the same interpretive principles-then agree-
ment between them will be assured, and its source will not be a text that enforces its own
perception but a way of perceiving that results in the emergence to those who share it (or
those whom it shares) of the same text." Of course, Fish's experiment was rigged to pro-
duce this conclusion as inevitable, and it was not designed as a theory of the lyric. We in-
clude Fish's essay at the conclusion of this section in order to frame the central issues in
contemporary lyric theory as questions about what a genre-or a text-is in the first place.
The Lyric Theory Reader presents the interpretive principles that have assured agreement in
classrooms over the last seventy-five years among readers who have produced the genre that
now counts as lyric poetry. As those ways of perceiving begin to change, not only our ways
of reading but our ways of recognizing a lyric when we see one will change as well.

NOTES
1. For recent examples of such arguments, see 4. For an extension of Cohen's contention
Blasing (2oo6), Brewster (2009), Stewart (2002 and that genre concepts-and particularly the
2011) and von Hallberg (2oo8). concept of the lyric-shift for historical
2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Noten und reasons, see Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of
Abhandlungen zu besserem Verstandnis des Romantic Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University
West-ostlichen Diwans," in Goethes Werke, Press, 1988). In his later work, Siskin has pursued
Hamburger Ausgabe (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981), Cohen's logic into the history of media shift and
2:187-89. On the three-genre system as critical the eighteenth-century invention of the system of
norm, see Rogers (1983) and Guillen (1971). genres.
3. See Fowler (1982), 220.

FURTHER READING

Bahti, Timothy. Ends of the Lyric: Direction and University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Consequence in Western Poetry. Baltimore: Press, 1994.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Lyric Poetry: The Pain and
Bee bee, Thomas. The Ideology of Genre: A Pleasure of Words. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Comparative Study of Generic Instability. University Press, 2006.
 16 Brewster, Scott. Lyric. New York: Routledge, 2009. jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious:
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY:
SECTION 1 Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, Cornell University Press, 1981.
1941. 3rd rev. ed., Berkeley: University of Jeffreys, Mark, ed. New Definitions of Lyric:
GENRE THEORY
California Press, 1973. Theory, Technology, and Culture. New York:
Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Garland, 1998.
Limits of Genre. Baltimore: johns Hopkins johnson, )ames William. "Lyric." In The New
University Press, 1979. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed.
Cavitch, Max. "Genre." In The Princeton A. Preminger, T. Brogan, and F. Warnke.
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., Princeton, Nj: Princeton University Press, 1993.
edited by R. Greene, S. Cushman, C. Cavanagh, Lewis, C. Day. The Lyric Impulse. London: Chatto
). Ramazani, and P. Rouzer. Princeton, Nj: and Windus, 1965.
Princeton University Press, 2012. Lindley, David. Lyric. New York: Methuen, 1985.
Culler, jonathan. "Genre: Lyric." In The Work Miller, Paul Allen. Lyric Texts and Lyric Conscious-
of Genre: Collected Essays from the English ness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to
Institute, edited by Robin Warhol. Cambridge, Augustan Rome. London: Routledge, 1994.
MA: English Institute in collaboration with the Olson, Elder. "The Lyric." PMMLA 1 (1969):
American Council of Learned Societies, 2011. 59-66.
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.90055-000I.001. Poovey, Mary. "The Model System of Contempo-
Dimock, W. C. and Robbins, Bruce, eds. "Remap- rary Literary Criticism." Critical Inquiry 27.3
ping Genre." Special issue of PMLA 122.5 (2007). (Spring 2001): 408-38.
Dubrow, Heather. Genre. London: Methuen, 1982. - - . Genres of the Credit Economy. Chicago:
Duff, David, ed. Modern Genre Theory. Essex: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Longman, 2000. Rhys, Ernest. Lyric Poetry. New York: E. P. Dutton,
Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduc- 1913.
tion to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Rogers, William Elford. The Three Genres and the
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Interpretation of Lyric. Princeton, N): Princeton
Guillen, Claudio. Literature as System: Essays University Press, 1983.
toward a Theory of Literary History. Princeton, Rosmarin, Adena. The Power of Genre. Minnea-
Nj: Princeton University Press, 1971. polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Hernadi, Paul. Beyond Genre: New Directions in Schelling, Felix E. The English Lyric. London:
Literary Classification. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Constable, 1913.
University Press, 1972. Tiffany, Daniel. Toy Medium: Materialism and
Hosek, Chaviva, and Patricia Parker, eds. Lyric Modern Lyric. Berkeley: University of California
Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Press, 2000.
Cornell University Press, 1985. Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse. Trans.
jackson, Virginia. Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge
Lyric Reading. Princeton, N): Princeton University Press, 1990.
University Press, 2005. Von Hallberg, Robert. Lyric Powers. Chicago:
- - . "Lyric." In The Princeton Encyclopedia of University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., ed. R. Greene, Wellek, Rene, and Austin Warren. Theory of
S. Cushman, C. Cavanagh, ). Ramazani, and Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942.
P. Rouzer. Princeton, N): Princeton University Waters, William. Poetry's Touch: On Lyric Address.
Press, 2012. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.
The Architext (1979; trans. 1992) 1.1
GERARD GENETTE Translated by Jane E. Lewin 1

1.

We are all familiar with that passage in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which
Stephen explains to his friend Lynch "his" theory of the three major aesthetic forms: "The
lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to him-
self; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to
himself and to others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents his image in im-
mediate relation to others." 2 This tripartition in itself is not especially original, as Joyce
was well aware, for in the first version of the episode he added ironically that Stephen was
expressing himself "with a naif air of discovering novelties," even though "his Esthetic
was in the main 'applied Aquinas.' "3
I don't know whether Saint Thomas ever proposed such a tripartition-or even
whether Joyce was really suggesting he did-but I have noted here and there that, for
some time, the tripartition has been readily attributed to Aristotle, even to Plato. In her
study of the history of the division into genres, Irene Behrens cited an example of the at-
tribution from the pen of Ernest Bovet ("Aristotle having distinguished among the lyric,
epic, and dramatic genres ...") and immediately refuted it, while asserting that it was
already very widespread. 4 But, as we will see, her clarification did not keep others from
repeating the offense-undoubtedly in part because the error (or, rather, the retrospective
illusion that is in question here) is deeply rooted in our conscious, or unconscious, liter-
ary minds. Besides, her clarification itself was not entirely untainted by the tradition she
was denouncing, for she wondered in all seriousness how it came about that the tradi-
tional tripartition did not appear in Aristotle, and she found one possible reason in the
fact that Greek lyricism was too closely associated with music to be included within poet-
ics. But tragedy was just as closely associated with music; and lyric is absent from Aristo-
tle's Poetics for a much more basic reason-a reason that needs only to be perceived for
the question itself to lose any kind of relevance.
But not, apparently, any raison d'etre; we do not easily forgo projecting onto the found-
ing text of classical poetics a fundamental tenet of"modern" poetics (which actually, as we
will often see, really means romantic poetics), and perhaps the theoretical consequences of
the projection are unfortunate. For by usurping that remote ancestry, the relatively recent
theory of the "three major genres" not only lays claim to ancientness, and thus to an ap-
pearance or presumption of being eternal and therefore self-evident; it also misappropri-
ates for the benefit of its three generic institutions a natural foundation that Aristotle, and
Plato before him, had established, perhaps more legitimately, for something very differ-
ent. This knot of confusions, quid pro quos, and unnoticed substitutions that has lain at
the heart of Western poetics for several centuries is what I want to try to untangle a bit.
But first, not for the pedantic pleasure of finding fault with some very bright minds but
to illustrate, by their examples, the pervasiveness of this lectio facilior, here are a few other,
more recent occurrences of it. In Austin Warren:
 18 Aristotle and Horace are our classical texts for genre theory. From them, we think of trag-
edy and epic as the characteristic (as well as the two major) kinds. But Aristotle at least is
SECTION 1 also aware of other and more fundamental distinctions-between drama, epic, and
GENRE THEORY lyric .... The three major kinds are already, by Plato and Aristotle, distinguished accord-
ing to "manner of imitation" (or "representation"): lyric poetry is the poet's own persona;
in epic poetry (or the novel) the poet partly speaks in his own person, as narrator, and
partly makes his characters speak in direct discourse (mixed narrative); in drama, the poet
disappears behind his cast of characters .... Aristotle's Poetics . .. roughly nominates epic,
drama, and lyric ("melic") poetry as the basic kinds of poetry.

Northrop Frye, more vague or more prudent: "We have the three generic terms drama,
epic, and lyric, derived from the Greeks." More circumspect still, or more evasive, Philippe
Lejeune assumes that the point of departure for the theory was "the threefold division by
the Ancients among the epical, the dramatic, and the lyrical." Not so, though, Robert Scho-
les, who specifies that Frye's system "begins with his acceptance of the basic Aristotelian
division into lyric, epic, and dramatic forms." And even less so Helene Cixous, who, com-
menting on Stephen's speech, pinpoints its source thus: "A classical tripartite division de-
rived from Aristotle's Poetics, 1447a, b, 1456-62a and b." As for Tzvetan Todorov, he has the
triad go back to Plato and to Diomedes' definitive systematization of Plato:

From Plato to Goethe and Jakobson to Emil Staiger, attempts have been made to divide
literature into three categories and to consider these as the fundamental or even the natu-
ral forms of literature .... Systematizing Plato in the fourth century, Diomedes defined
three basic genres: one including the works in which only the author speaks, another in-
cluding the works in which only the characters speak, and a third including the works in
which both author and characters speak.

In 1938 Mikhail Bakhtin, without formulating the attribution in question quite so precisely,
asserted that the theory of genres "has not, up to our own time, been able to add anything
substantial to what Aristotle had already done. His poetics remains the immutable foun-
dation of the theory of genres, although sometimes this foundation is so deeply buried that
we no longer discern it."5
Evidently Bakhtin is unaware of the massive silence the Poetics maintains on the subject
oflyric genres, and paradoxically his mistake demonstrates the very ignorance of the foun-
dation of the theory of genres that he thinks he is denouncing. For what is important, as we
will see, is the retrospective illusion by which modern (preromantic, romantic, and post ro-
mantic) literary theorists blindly project their own contributions onto Aristotle, or Plato,
and thus "bury" their own difference-their own modernity.
That attribution, so widespread today, is not entirely an invention of the twentieth
century. We find it as early as the eighteenth century, in a chapter that Abbe Batteux added
to his essay Les Beaux-Arts reduits aun meme principe (The Fine Arts Obeying One Law).
The title of this chapter is almost more than we could have hoped for: "Que cette doctrine
est conforme a celle d'Aristote" (That This Doctrine Is in Keeping with Aristotle's). 6 The
doctrine in question is Batteux's general theory on "the imitation of fair nature" as the sole
"law" of the fine arts, including poetry; but for the most part the chapter concentrates on
demonstrating that Aristotle divides the art of poetry into three genres or, as Batteux called
them, borrowing a term from Horace, three basic colors. "These three colors are those of the
dithyramb, or lyric poetry; the epic, or narrative poetry; and finally the drama, or tragedy
and comedy." The abbe himself quotes the passage in the Poetics on which he bases his
claim, and the quotation is worth repeating, in his own translation: "Les mots composes
de plusieurs mots conviennent plus specialement aux dithyrambes, les mots inusites aux 19
epopees, et les tropes aux drames" (The words made up of several words are more espe-
cially appropriate to dithyrambs, rare words to epics, and tropes to dramas). This comes 1.1
at the end of chapter 22, which focuses on questions of lexis or, as we would say, style. As GERARD GENETTE

one can see, at issue here is the appropriate linkage between genres and stylistic methods-
although Batteux stretches Aristotle's terms a bit in that direction by translating ta heroika
(heroic verses, that is, dactylic hexameter) as "epic" and ta iambeia (iambic verses, and
more particularly, no doubt, the trimeters of tragic or comic dialogue) as "drama."
Let us overlook this slight accentuation: here Aristotle indeed seems to apportion three
stylistic features among three genres or forms (dithyramb, epic, dramatic dialogue). What
we still need to evaluate is the equivalence Batteux establishes between dithyramb and
lyric poetry. Today the dithyramb is not a well-known form, for almost no examples of it
remain; but scholars generally describe it as a "choral song in honor of Dionysus" and thus
readily classify it among the "lyric forms." 7 They do not, however, go as far as Batteux, who
says that "nothing corresponds better to our lyric poetry," an assertion that gives short
shrift to, for example, the odes of Pindar or Sappho. But as it happens, Aristotle does not
mention the dithyramb anywhere else in the Poetics, except to refer to it as a forerunner
of tragedy. 8 In the Homeric Problems, he specifies that the form was originally narrative
and later became "mimetic"-that is, dramatic. 9 As for Plato, he mentions the dithyramb
as the consummate example of poetry that is ... purely narrative. 10
Nothing there, then, authorizes us to claim that in Aristotle (or Plato) the dithyramb
illustrates the lyric "genre"-quite the contrary. The passage Batteux cites is the only one
in all the Poetics he could have invoked to give Aristotle's sanction to the illustrious triad.
The distortion is flagrant, and the point at which it is applied is significant. To appreciate
the significance more fully, we must once again return to the source-that is, to the system
of genres that Plato conceived and Aristotle developed. I say "system of genres" as a provi-
sional concession to the vulgate, but we will soon see that the term is incorrect and that
something entirely different is involved.

2.
In the third book of the Republic, Plato justifies his well-known decision to expel poets from
the state with two sets of considerations. The first bears on the content (logos) of the poets'
works, which basically should be moralizing (though all too often it is not): the poet should
not represent shortcomings, especially in gods and heroes, and should certainly not pro-
mote shortcomings by representing virtue as miserable or vice as triumphant. The second
bears on the "form" (lexis), meaning the mode of representation _II Every poem is a narrative
(diegesis) of past, present, or future events; narrative in this broad sense can take three
forms: it can be purely narrative (haple diegesis), it can be mimetic (dia mimeseos-in other
words, as in the theater, by way of dialogue between characters), or it can be "mixed" (in other
words, in reality alternating-sometimes narrative and sometimes dialogue, as in Homer).
Here I will not go back over the details of Plato's demonstration 12 or his well-known devalu-
ing of the mimetic and mixed modes, which is one of his main grounds for indicting poets
(the other, of course, is the immorality of their subjects). I simply wish to point out the cor-
respondence between the three modes of lexis distinguished by Plato and what will later be
called the poetic "genres": the pure mimetic corresponds to tragedy and comedy, the mixed
to epic, and the pure narrative to-"especially" (malista pou)-dithyramb (the only illustra-
tion). The whole "system" comes down to that. Clearly, Plato here is considering only the
forms of poetry that is "narrative" in the broad sense-poetry that the subsequent tradition,
after Aristotle, will more readily call (inverting the terms) "mimetic" or representational:
 20 poetry that "reports" events, real or fictive. Plato deliberately, leaves out all nonrepresenta-
tional poetry-and thus, above all, what we call lyric poetry-and a fortiori all other forms
SECTION 1 of literature (including, of course, any possible "representation" in prose, like our novel or
GENRE THEORY modern theater). An exclusion not only in fact but indeed in principle, for again, the repre-
sentation of events is here the very definition of poetry: there is no poem except a represen-
tational one. Plato obviously was not unaware of lyric poetry, but he excludes it here with a
deliberately restrictive definition-a restriction perhaps ad hoc, since it facilitates the ban-
ning of poets (except lyric poets?), but a restriction that, via Aristotle, will become-and for
centuries will remain-the basic tenet of classical poetics.
Indeed, the first page of the Poetics clearly defines poetry as the art of imitation in verse
(more exactly, "by rhythm, language, or 'harmony'" [1447 a]), explicitly excluding imitation
in prose (the mimes ofSophron, the Socratic dialogues) and nonimitative verse-and making
no mention at all of nonimitative prose, such as oratory, on which the Rhetoric, for its part,
focuses. 13 To illustrate nonimitative verse Aristotle selects the work of Empedocles, and more
generally any "treatise on medicine or natural science ... brought out in verse" (1447 b)-in
other words, didactic poetry, which he rejects despite what he calls a widespread opinion
("the name of poet is by custom given to the author"). To Aristotle, as we know, "it would be
right to call ... [Empedocles] physicist rather than poet," even though Empedocles uses the
same meter as Homer. As for the poems that we would call lyric (for example, those ofSappho
or Pindar), neither here nor elsewhere in the Poetics does Aristotle mention them; they are
plainly outside his field, as they were outside Plato's. The subsequent subdivisions will thus be
brought to bear only within the strictly circumscribed area of representational poetry.
Their basis is an intersecting of categories that are directly connected to the very fact
of representation: the object imitated (the question what?) and the manner of imitation
(the question how?). The object imitated-here we have a new restriction-consists solely
of human actions, or more precisely of human beings in action, who can be represented
as superior to (beltionas), equal to (kat'hemas), or inferior to (kheironas) "us" (1448 a) 14 -
that is, no doubt, to ordinary people. The middle group will receive very little attention,
so the criterion of content (the object imitated) comes down to the contrast between supe-
rior and inferior heroes. As for the manner of imitation, it consists either of telling (the
Platonic haple diegesis) or of"present[ing] all [the] characters as living and moving before
us" (1448 a)-that is, setting them on stage moving about and speaking (the Platonic mime-
sis, or dramatic representation). Here again we see that an intermediate class-the Pla-
tonic mixed class-has disappeared, at least as a taxonomic principle. Apart from that
disappearance, what Aristotle calls "the manner ... of imitation" (1447 a) is exactly equiv-
alent to what Plato called lexis. This is not yet a system of genres; the most exact term for
designating this category is undoubtedly the term-used in the [Butcher] translation-
mode. Strictly speaking, we are dealing not with "form" in the traditional sense, as in the
contrast between verse and prose or between different types of verse, but with situations of
enunciating. To use Plato's terms, in the narrative mode the poet speaks in his own name,
whereas in the dramatic mode the characters themselves speak-or, more precisely, the
poet speaks disguised as so many characters.

[ ... ]

4·
For several centuries, the Platonic-Aristotelian restriction of poetics to the representative
will weigh heavily on the theory of genres and keep the theory's adherents in a state of mal-
aise or confusion} 5 The idea of lyric poetry is obviously not unknown to the Alexandrian
critics, but it is not made part of the paradigm alongside the ideas of epic and dramatic 21
poetry, and its definition is still purely technical (poems with lyre accompaniment) and
restrictive. Aristarchus, in the third to second century B.C., draws up a list of nine lyric 1.1
poets (including Alcaeus, Sappho, Anacreon, and Pindar), which will long remain ca- GERARD GENETTE

nonical and excludes, for example, the iambic and the elegiac distich. Horace, although
himself a lyricist and satirist, limits the Art of Poetry, in terms of genre, to praising Homer
and setting forth the rules of dramatic poetry. In the list of readings in Greek and Latin
that Quintilian recommends to the future orator, he mentions, besides history, philoso-
phy, and of course rhetoric, seven poetic genres: epic (which here comprises all kinds of
narrative, descriptive, or didactic poems, including those of Hesiod, Theocritus, and
Lucretius), tragedy, comedy, elegy (Callimachus, the Latin elegists), iambic (Archilochus,
Horace), satire ("tota nostra": Lucilius and Horace), and lyric poetry-this last illustrated
by, among others, Pindar, Alcaeus, and Horace. In other words, here the lyric is simply
one of several nonnarrative and nondramatic genres and comes down in fact to one form,
which is the ode.
But Quintilian's list is obviously not an art of poetry, since it includes works in prose.
The later attempts at systematization, at the end of antiquity and in the Middle Ages, make
great efforts to integrate lyric poetry into the systems of Plato or Aristotle without modify-
ing their categories. Thus Diomedes (late fourth century) rechristens the three Platonic
modes "genres" (genera) and, after a fashion, apportions among them the "species" (spe-
cies) that we would call genres: the genus imitativum (dramatic), in which only the charac-
ters speak, comprises the tragic, comic, and satiric species (the last-named is the satiric
drama of the early Greek tetralogies, not mentioned by Plato or Aristotle); the genus en-
narativum (narrative), in which only the poet speaks, comprises the properly narrative, the
sententious (gnomic?), and the didactic species; the genus commune (mixed), in which
poet and characters speak in turn, comprises the species that are heroic (the epic) and ...
lyric (Archilochus and Horace). Proclus (fifth century) omits the mixed category, as Aris-
totle did, and in the narrative genre he puts-alongside epic-iambic, elegy, and melos
(lyricism). John of Garland (thirteenth century) goes back to Diomedes' system.
The sixteenth-century authors of arts of poetry generally forgo constructing sys-
tems and are content instead simply to juxtapose species. Thus Peletier du Mans (1555):
epigram, sonnet, ode, epistle, elegy, satire, comedy, tragedy, "heroic work"; or Vauquelin
de La Fresnaye (1605): epic, elegy, sonnet, iambic, song, ode, comedy, tragedy, satire, idyll,
pastoral; or Sir Philip Sidney (An Apologie for Poetrie, about 1580): heroic, lyric, tragic,
comic, satiric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, etc. The main arts of poetry of the classical
tradition, from Vida to Rapin, are basically, as we know, commentaries on Aristotle, in
which the inexhaustible debate about the comparative merits of tragedy and epic goes
on and on, while the emergence in the sixteenth century of new genres (like the
heroical-romantic poem, the pastoral novel, the dramatic pastoral, or the tragicomedy,
each too easily reducible to the narrative or the dramatic mode) never really alters the
picture. In the classical vulgate, the de facto recognition of the various nonrepresenta-
tional forms is reconciled, after a fashion, with the maintenance of Aristotelian ortho-
doxy by means of a convenient distinction between "the major genres" and ... the
others-a distinction to which the arrangement of Boileau's Art poetique (1674) per-
fectly (albeit implicitly) attests: canto 3 deals with tragedy, epic, and comedy, while
canto 2, like its sixteenth-century predecessors, strings together idyll, elegy, ode, son-
net, epigram, rondeau, madrigal, ballad, satire, vaudeville, and song, without any com-
prehensive classification. 16 In the same year, Rap in speaks openly of the distinction and
pushes it further:
 22 Poetics as a whole can be divided into three different species of perfect Poem-Epic, Trag-
edy, and Comedy-and these three species can be reduced to only two, one of which con-
SECTION 1 sists of action and the other of narration. All the other species that Aristotle mentions [?]
GENRE THEORY can be reduced to those two: Comedy to dramatic Poetry, Satire to Comedy, Ode and
Eclogue to heroic Poetry. The Sonnet, the Madrigal, the Epigram, the Rondeau, and the
Ballad are but species of imperfect Poetry. 17

In short, the nonrepresentational genres may choose only between an annexation that en-
hances their value (satire annexed to comedy and thus to dramatic poetry, ode and eclogue
to epic) or a dismissal to outer darkness or, if one prefers, to the limbo of "imperfection."
There is undoubtedly no better comment on this segregative assessment than the dis-
couraged avowal Rene Bray makes when, having studied the classical theories of the "ma-
jor genres" and then tried to bring together some information on bucolic poetry, elegy, ode,
epigram, and satire, he abruptly breaks off: "But let us stop sifting through so barren a
doctrine. The theorists were too contemptuous of everything outside the major genres.
Tragedy and the heroic poem were all they paid attention to." 18
Beside-or rather, therefore, beneath-the major narrative and dramatic genres is a
cloud of small forms, whose inferiority or lack of poetic status is due somewhat to their
littleness (real in the case of their dimensions, alleged in the case of their subjects) and
much more to the centuries-old exclusion applied to everything that is not "an imitation
of men in action." Odes, elegies, sonnets, etc., "imitate" no action, because theoretically
all they do, like a speech or a prayer, is express their authors' ideas or feelings, real or ficti-
tious. Consequently, there are only two conceivable ways of promoting them to poetic
dignity. The first way is to uphold, while somewhat expanding, the classical dogma of
mimesis and strive to show that that type of statement is still, in its own fashion, an "imi-
tation." The second and more radical way is to break with the dogma and proclaim the
equal poetic dignity of a nonrepresentational utterance. Today those two movements
seem antithetical and logically incompatible. But in fact one will succeed the other and
link up with it almost unnoticeably, the former paving the way for the latter while cloak-
ing it, as reforms sometimes break the ground for revolutions.

5·
The idea of federating all the kinds of non mimetic poetry to establish them as a third party
under the common name oflyric poetry is not wholly unknown to the classical period: it is
merely marginal and, so to speak, heterodox. The first occurrence of it that Irene Behrens
noted is in the work of the Italian Minturno, for whom "poetry is divided into three parts,
one of which is called theatrical, the second lyrical, the third epical." Cervantes, in chapter
47 of Don Quixote, has his Canon speak of a fourfold division, with dramatic poetry split
into two parts: "The unrestricted range [of books of chivalry] enables the author to show his
powers, epic, lyric, tragic, or comic." Milton claims to find in Aristotle, Horace, "and the
Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others ... the laws ... of a true
epic ... , dramatic ... , [or] lyric" poem-the earliest example, to my knowledge, of our
improper attribution. Dryden distinguishes three "ways": dramatic, epic, lyric. Gravina
devotes one chapter of his Ragion poetica (1708) to epic and dramatic poetry and the next
chapter to lyric poetry. Houdar de Ia Motte, a "modern" in the context of the Quarrel of the
Ancients and Moderns, compares the three categories and describes himself as "at once an
epic, dramatic, and lyric poet." Finally, Baumgarten, in a 1735 text that outlines or prefigures
his Aesthetica, evokes "the lyrical, the epical, the dramatic and their generic subdivisions." 19
And my enumeration lays no claim to exhaustiveness.
 But none of those propositions is truly well grounded and well explained. The earliest 23
effort in that direction seems to have been made by the Spaniard Francisco Cascales, in his
Tab/as poeticas (1617) and Cartas philologicas (1634): lyric poetry, says Cascales apropos of 1.1
the sonnet, has for its "plot" not an action, as epic and dramatic poetry do, but a thought GERARD GENETTE

(concepto). This distortion of orthodoxy is significant: the term plot (jilbula) is Aristotelian,
and the term thought could correspond to the equally Aristotelian term dianoia. But the
idea that a thought can serve as the plot of anything whatsoever is totally alien to the spirit
of the Poetics, which explicitly defines plot (muthos) as "the arrangement of the incidents"
(1450 a) 20 and in which dianoia ("the faculty of saying what is possible and pertinent in
given circumstances," 1450 b) covers scarcely more than the characters' techniques of argu-
mentation; very logically, therefore, Aristotle dismisses the topic, referring to his study of it
in "the Rhetoric, to which inquiry the subject more strictly belongs" (1456 a). Even though
some critics, like Northrop Frye, 21 extend the definition to include the thought of the poet
himself, obviously all of that cannot constitute a plot in the Aristotelian sense. Cascales is
using a vocabulary that is still orthodox to cover an idea that is already as far from orthodox
as possible, namely, the idea that a poem, like a discourse or a letter, may have as its subject
a thought or feeling that it simply exposes or expresses. Utterly banal today, for centuries
this idea remained not unthought of, surely (no literary theorist could be unaware of the
immense corpus it covers), but almost systematically repressed because it could not be inte-
grated into the system of a poetics founded on the dogma of"imitation."
Batteux's effort-the last effort classical poetics makes to survive by opening itself up
to what it has never managed either to ignore or to acknowledge-therefore consists of at-
tempting the impossible: retaining imitation as the sole law of all poetry (as of all the arts)
but extending this law to lyric poetry itself. That is his aim in chapter 13, "Sur Ia poesie
lyrique." Batteux begins by admitting that, looked at superficially, lyric poetry "seems to
lend itself less than the other species to the general law that reduces everything to imita-
tion." Thus, it is said, the psalms of David, the odes of Pindar and Horace are only "fire,
emotion, intoxication, ... a song inspired by joy, admiration, thankfulness ... a cri de
coeur, an outburst in which nature does everything and art nothing." The poet, therefore,
is expressing his feelings and imitating nothing. "Which makes two things true: first, that
lyric poems are true poems; second, that these poems are not characterized by imitation."
But actually, answers Batteux, this pure expression, this true poetry without imitation, is
found only in the biblical hymns. God himself dictated them, and God "has no need to imi-
tate; he creates." Poets, on the contrary, who are only human beings,

have nowhere to turn but to their natural gift, an imagination excited by art, a feigned rap-
ture. That they may have really felt gladness is something to sing about, but for only one or
two couplets. If something more extensive is wanted, it is up to art to stitch to that first
cloth new feelings resembling the earlier ones. Let nature light the fire; art must at least
nourish and sustain it. So the example of the prophets, who sang without imitating, proves
nothing against poets as imitators.

At least in part, therefore, the feelings expressed by poets are feelings pretended through
art, and this part carries the whole, since it shows the possibility of expressing fictitious
feelings-which, moreover, drama and epic have done right from the start:

So long as the action [in epic or drama] moves forward, the poetry is epic or dramatic; when
the action stops and the poetry portrays nothing except the unique state of the soul, the
pure feeling it is experiencing, the poetry in itself is lyric; to be set to song, it need only be
given the appropriate form. The monologues of Polyeucte, Camille, and Chimene are lyric
 24 fragments; and in that case, why should feeling, which is susceptible of imitation in a drama,
not be susceptible of it in an ode? Why can passion be imitated on a stage but not in a song?
SECTION 1 So there is no exception. All poets have the same object, which is to imitate nature, and all
GENRE THEORY have to proceed in the same manner to imitate it.

Therefore lyric poetry, too, is imitation: it imitates feelings.

One could consider [it] a species apart, without violating the law that governs the other spe-
cies. But there is no need to separate them; lyric poetry enters naturally and even necessarily
into imitation, with but one difference to characterize and distinguish it: its particular
object. The main object of the other species of poetry is actions; lyric poetry focuses com-
pletely on feelings: they are its theme, its chief object.

So now lyric poetry is integrated into classical poetics. But, as readers may have ob-
served, that integration entailed two very noticeable distortions in opposite directions.
On the one hand, Batteux had to slip silently from a mere possibility of fictitious expres-
sion to an essential fictitiousness of the feelings expressed, had to reduce all lyric poetry
to the reassuring model of the tragic monologue, so that he could admit into the heart of
all lyric creation that screen of fiction without which the idea of imitation could not be
applied to lyric. On the other hand, he had to slip, as Cascales had already done, from the
orthodox term imitation of actions to a broader term: imitation, period. As Batteux him-
self says, "In epic and dramatic poetry, one imitates actions and customs; in the lyric, one
sings of imitated feelings or passions." 22 The asymmetry remains obvious, and with it the
surreptitious betrayal of Aristotle. Thus, a supplementary guarantee (or precaution) is
indeed necessary in this direction, and that is what lies behind Batteux's addition of the
chapter entitled "Que cette doctrine est conforme acelle d'Aristote."
The principle of the operation is simple and already familiar to us: it consists first of
deriving from a fairly marginal stylistic comment a tripartition of the poetic genres into
dithyramb, epic, and drama, which brings Aristotle to the Platonic point of departure; then
of interpreting dithyramb as an example of the lyric genre, which allows one to attribute to
the Poetics a triad that neither Plato nor Aristotle had ever considered. But we must imme-
diately add that this generic misappropriation has something to be said for it on the level
of mode: the initial definition of the pure narrative mode, we should remember, was that
the poet constitutes the only enunciating subject, monopolizing speech without ever
turning it over to any of his characters. In principle this is what happens in the lyric poem
also, except that in lyric, the speech in question is not inherently narrative. If we overlook
this proviso and go on to define the three Platonic modes purely in terms of enunciation,
we get the following tripartition:

enunciation enunciation
alternating
reserved for reserved for
enunciation
the poet the characters

Defined in this way, the first position can equally well be purely narrative or purely "expres-
sive" or can blend the two functions in any proportion at all. Since, as we noted earlier, no
purely narrative genre exists, the first position is just the right place for any kind of genre
devoted chiefly to expressing, sincerely or not, ideas or feelings: it is a negative catchall (for
everything that is neither narrative nor dramatic), 23 on which the name lyric will bestow
its hegemony and its prestige. Hence the expected chart:

lyrical epical dramatic

 One will rightly object to such an "accommodation" by pointing out that this modal 25
definition of lyric cannot be applied to the so-called lyric monologues in the theater, in the
style of Rodrigue's celebrated "stances,"24 to which Batteux attributes so much importance 1.1
for the reason we have seen and in which the enunciating subject is not the poet. But we must GERARD GENETTE

remember that this modal definition is not Batteux's doing, for he pays no attention to modes
(any more than his romantic successors do). That (trans)historic compromise, continuing to
slither along, so to speak, comes out into the open only in the twentieth century, when the
enunciating situation again gains prominence for the more general reasons we are all aware
of. In the interim, the ticklish matter of the "lyric monologue" receded into the background.
It remains intact, of course, and demonstrates, if nothing else, that modal and generic defini-
tions do not always coincide: modally, it is always Rodrigue who speaks, whether to sing of
his love or to provoke Don Gormas; generically, the provoking is "dramatic," whereas the
love song (with or without the formal markers of meter or strophe) is "lyric," and the distinc-
tion, once again, is (partly) thematic in nature: not every monologue is perceived as lyric
(Auguste's in the fifth act of Cinna is not, although it is no more integrated dramatically than
Rodrigue's, both of which indeed lead to a decision), and conversely, a dialogue on love ("O
miracle of love! I 0 crowning woe! ...")25 can easily be so perceived.

[ ... ]

9·
I have tried to show how and why theorists reached the point of devising, and then (as a
supplementary consideration) of attributing to Plato and Aristotle, a division of the "lit-
erary genres" that the whole "unconscious poetics" of both philosophers rejects. To get a
firmer grip on the historical reality, we should no doubt make clear that the attribution
passed through two periods and stemmed from two very distinct motives. At the end of
classicism, it stemmed from a still deepsea ted respect for orthodoxy and a need to treat it
with care. In the twentieth century, a better reason for the attribution is retrospective il-
lusion (the vulgate is so well established that imagining a time when it did not exist is very
difficult) and also (as is evident in Frye, for example) the legitimate renewal of interest in
a modal interpretation of the phenomena of genre-that is, an interpretation based on the
enunciating situation. Between the two periods, the romantics and postromantics were not
overly concerned about dragging Plato and Aristotle into all these matters. But the present
telescoping of these various positions-the fact, for example, that authority is claimed to
derive at one and the same time from Aristotle, Batteux, Schlegel (or, as we will see,
Goethe), Jakobson, Benveniste, and Anglo-American analytical philosophy-aggravates
the theoretical drawbacks of this erroneous attribution, or (to define the error itself in theo-
retical terms) this confusion between modes and genres.
In Plato, and again in Aristotle, as we have seen, the basic division had a clearly defined
status, for it bore explicitly on a text's mode of enunciation. To the extent that genres in
the proper sense of the term were taken into consideration (very little in Plato, more so in
Aristotle), they were allocated among modes inasmuch as they came under one enunciat-
ing stance or another: dithyramb under pure narration, epic under mixed narration, trag-
edy and comedy under dramatic imitation. But this inclusive relationship did not prevent
the generic and modal criteria from being absolutely dissimilar, as well as radically differ-
ent in status: each genre was defined essentially by a specification of content that was in
no way prescribed by the definition of its mode. The romantic and postromantic divi-
sion, in contrast, views the lyrical, the epical, and the dramatic no longer simply as
modes of enunciation but as real genres, whose definitions already inevitably include
 26 thematic elements, however vague. We see this in Hegel, among others: for him there ex-
ists an epic world defined by a specific type of social aggregate and human relationship; a
SECTION 1 lyric content ("the individual subject"); a dramatic milieu "made up of conflicts and colli-
GENRE THEORY sions." We also see it in Hugo, for whom real drama, for example, is inseparable from the
Christian message (separation of body and soul). We see it, as well, in Karl Vietor, for
whom the three major genres express three "basic attitudes": the lyrical expresses feeling;
the epical, knowledge; the dramatic, will and action. 26 Vietor thus resurrects the distribu-
tion Holderlin ventured at the end of the eighteenth century, but modifies it by transpos-
ing epic and dramatic.
The transition from one status to the other is clearly, if not intentionally, illustrated by a
well-known text of Goethe's, which we have mentioned in passing and must now consider
on its own account. 27 Here Goethe contrasts the ordinary "poetic species" (Dichtarten)-
particular genres, such as the novel, the ballad, or satire-with the "three genuine natu-
ral forms" (drei echte Naturformen) of poetry: the epic, defined as pure narration (klar er-
ziihlende); the lyric, as a burst of rapture (enthusiastisch aufgeregte); and the drama, as life-
like representation (personlich handelnde). 28 "These three poetic modes [Dichtweisen]," he
adds, "can function either jointly or separately." The contrast between Dichtarten and
Dichtweisen clearly encompasses the distinction between genres and modes, and it is re-
inforced by the purely modal definitions of epic and drama. The definition oflyric, how-
ever, is thematic, making the term Dichtweisen irrelevant and sending us to the vaguer
idea of Naturform, which covers all interpretations and is for that reason, no doubt, the
term commentators have most frequently used.
But the whole point is, precisely, to know whether the term natural forms can still be
legitimately applied to the triad lyrical/epical/dramatic once that triad has been redefined
in generic terms. The modes of enunciation can, in a pinch, be termed "natural forms," at
least in the sense in which we speak of "natural languages." Except when using language
for literary purposes, the language user is constantly required-even (or especially) if
unconsciously-to choose between forms of utterance such as discourse and story (in Ben-
veniste's sense), direct quotation and indirect style, etc. Therein lies the essential difference
of status between genres and modes: genres are properly literary categories, 29 whereas
modes are categories that belong to linguistics, or (more exactly) to what we now call prag-
matics. They are "natural forms," therefore, in this wholly relative sense and only to the
extent that language and its use appear as facts of nature vis-a-vis the conscious and de-
liberate elaboration of aesthetic forms. But the romantic triad and its subsequent deriva-
tives no longer occupy that terrain: lyrical, epical, and dramatic contrast with Dichtarten
no longer as modes of verbal enunciation that precede and are external to any literary
definition but, rather, as kinds of archigenres. Archi-, because each of them is supposed to
overarch and include, ranked by degree of importance, a certain number of empirical
genres that-whatever their amplitude, longevity, or potential for recurrence-are appar-
ently phenomena of culture and history; but still (or already) -genres, because (as we have
seen) their defining criteria always involve a thematic element that eludes purely formal
or linguistic description. This dual status is not peculiar to them, for a "genre" like the
novel or comedy may also be subdivided into more specific "species"-tale of chivalry,
picaresque novel, etc.; comedy of humours, farce, vaudeville, etc.-with no limit set a
priori to this series of inclusions. We all know, for example, that the species detective
novel may in turn be divided into several varieties (police procedural, thriller, "realistic"
detective story a Ia Simenon, etc.), that with a little ingenuity one can always multiply the
positions between the species and the individual, and that no one can set a limit on this
proliferation of species (the spy story would, I suppose, have been completely unforesee-
able to a literary theorist of the eighteenth century, and many species yet to come are still 27
unimaginable to us today). In short, any genre can always contain several genres, and in
that respect the archigenres of the romantic triad are distinguished by no natural privi- 1.1
lege. At most they can be described as the highest-the most capacious-positions of the GERARD GENETTE

classification then in use. But the example of Kate Hamburger shows us that a new reduc-
tion is not to be ruled out a priori (and it would not be unreasonable-quite the con-
trary-to envisage a fusion that would be the reverse of hers, a fusion between the lyrical
and the epical that would leave the dramatic as the only form with a rigorously "objec-
tive" enunciation). And the example ofW. V. Ruttkowski shows that one can always, and
just as reasonably, propose another ultimate position, in this case the didactic. 30 And so
on. In the classification of literary species as in the classification of genres, no position is
essentially more "natural'' or more "ideal''-unless we abandon the literary criteria them-
selves, as the ancients did implicitly with the modal position. There is no generic level
that can be decreed more "theoretical," or that can be attained by a more "deductive"
method, than the others: all species and all subgenres, genres, or supergenres are empirical
classes, established by observation of the historical facts or, if need be, by extrapolation
from those facts-that is, by a deductive activity superimposed on an initial activity that is
always inductive and analytical, as we have seen in the charts (whether explicit or implicit)
of Aristotle and Frye, where the existence of an empty compartment (comic narrative;
extroverted-intellectual) helps one discover a genre ("parody," "anatomy") otherwise
condemned to invisibility. The major ideal "types" that, since Goethe, have so often been
contrasted with the minor forms and intermediate genres 31 are simply more capacious, less
precisely defined classes; for that reason they are more likely to have a broader cultural
reach, but their principle is neither more ahistorical nor less. The "epic type" is neither
more ideal nor more natural than the genres of novel and epic that it supposedly
encompasses-unless we define it as the ensemble ofbasically narrative genres, which im-
mediately brings us back to the division by mode. For narrative, like dramatic dialogue, is
a basic stance of enunciation-which cannot be said of the epical or the dramatic or, of
course, the lyrical, in the romantic sense of these terms.

NOTES

1. [Translator's Note]: In English, the words epic, 3. Stephen Hero (New York: New Directions,
:Hie, and narrative function both as nouns and as 1944), 77-
adjectives; unless the context provides a decisive 4· Ernest Bovet, Lyrisme, epopee, drame: une loi
-adjectivity" cue, the reader processes each of those de/' evolution litteraire expliquee par/' evolution
words as a noun. In this book, however, it is generale (Paris: Colin,1911), 12; Irene Behrens, Die
6sential for the reader to recognize when the noun Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst, vornehm-
:s meant and when the adjective. (French makes the lich vom 16. bis 19. fahrhundert: Studien zur
distinction /'epopee!epique, le lyrique/ lyrique, le Geschichte der poetischen Gattungen, Beihefte zur
·.?cit I narratif.) Thus, whenever the adjectival form Zeitschrift fiir romanische Philologie, no. 92
:s meant but the context lacks a strong adjectivity (Halle: Niemeyer, 1940).
:ue (a cue that leads the reader to process the word 5. "Literary Genres," in Rene Wellek and Austin
:nstantaneously as an adjective), I have used epica/ Warren, Theory of Literature (New York:
:nstead of epic, lyrical instead of lyric, and have Harcourt, Brace, 1956), 217, 223; Northrop Frye,
;:-laced "[narratifl" immediately after narrative. [In Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; rpt. New
a few places the context makes it appropriate to York: Atheneum, 1967), 246; Philippe Lejeune, Le
::1odify this practice in one direction or another. Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 330;
For the English translation, the author modified the Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New
original French text in a handful of places.] Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 124; Helene
2. james joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cixous, The Exile of fames Joyce, trans. Sally A. j.
_\[an (1916; rpt. New York: Viking, 1966), 214. Purcell (New York: David Lewis, 1972), 625;
 28 Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Encyclope- in Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. Walter jackson
dic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, trans. Bate [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952]). All
SECTION 1 Catherine Porter (Baltimore: johns Hopkins references to the Poetics are given in the text.
University Press, 1979), 153; Mikhail Bakhtin, 14. The translation and therefore the interpreta-
GENRE THEORY
Esthetique et tht!orie du roman, trans. Daria tion of these terms obviously involve the entire
Olivier (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 445. All emphases interpretation of this aspect of the Poetics. Their
on attributions are mine. usual meaning is clearly moral, as is the context of
6. This chapter first appeared in the 1764 reprint their first appearance in this chapter: characters
of the essay (originally published in 1746) in the are distinguished by vice (kakia) and virtue (a rete).
first volume of Les Principes de littt!rature. At that The later classical tradition tends rather to
time it was only the end of a chapter, "La Poesie des interpret them in social terms, with tragedy (and
vers," that was added on. In the posthumous epic) portraying characters of high rank and
edition of 1824, this ending was made into a separate comedy characters of low rank; and it is certainly
chapter, with a title taken from the text of the true that the Aristotelian theory of the tragic hero,
material added in 1764. which we will come upon later, is not consistent
7· jacqueline de Rom illy, La Tragt!die grecque with a purely moral definition of the hero's
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1970), 12. excellence. "Superior"/" inferior" is a prudent
8. 1449 a. compromise, perhaps too prudent, but one
9· 19-918 b-919. hesitates to have Aristotle rank an Oedipus or a
10. Republic 394 c. "It seems that at the Medea with heroes who are "better" than the
beginning of the fifth century, the lyric song in average person. As for Hardy's [French] translation
honor of Dionysus may have dealt with sacred or (Paris: Les Belles Lettres), it gets enmeshed in
heroic subjects more or less associated with the incoherence from the start by trying both
god; thus, according to the fragments of Pindar renderings within fifteen lines of each other.
that have been preserved, the dithyramb appears to 15. For the most part, the historical information
have been a piece of heroic narration, sung by a that follows is taken from Edmond Faral, Les Arts
choir, without dialogue, and leading into an pot!tiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siecle: recherches et
invocation to Dionysus or sometimes even to other documents sur la technique littt!raire du moyen age
divinities. Plato must be alluding to this type of (Paris: Champion, 1924); Behrens, Lehre von der
composition rather than to the dithyramb of the Einteilung; Wellek and Warren, Theory ofLiterature;
fourth century, which was profoundly modified by M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp:
the mixing of musical modes and the introduction Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
oflyric solos" (Roselyne Dupont-Roc, "Mimesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953); Mario
et enonciation," in Ecriture et tht!orie pot!tiques: Fubini, "Genesi e storia dei generi litterari" (1951),
lectures d'Homere, Eschyle, Pia ton, Aristote [Paris: in Critica e poesia: saggi e discorsi di teoria
Presses de !'Ecole normale superieure, 1976], 8). Cf. letteraria (Bari: Laterza, 1966); Rene Wellek,
Arthur Wallace Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, "Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnis" (1967), in
Tragedy, and Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927). Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism
11. Of course the terms logos and texis do not a (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); Peter
priori have this antithetical value; out of context, Szondi, "La Theorie des genres poetiques chez F.
the most faithful translations would be "discourse" Schlegel" (1968), in Pot!sie et pot!tique de l'idt!alisme
and "diction." It is Plato himself who constructs allemand, trans. jean Bollack, Barbara Cassin,
the opposition (392 c) and glosses it as ha lekteon eta!. (Paris: Minuit, 1975); Wolfgang V. Rutt-
("the matter of speech") and h6s lekteon ("the kowski, Die literarischen Gattungen: Reflexionen
manner of speech"). Subsequently, as we know, tiber eine modifizierte Fundamentalpoetik (Bern:
rhetoric limits lexis to the meaning "style." Francke, 1968); Claudio Guillen, "Literature as
[Translator's note: Translations of Plato are from System" (1970), in Literature as System: Essays
the Loeb edition.] toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton:
12. I discuss them in Figures of Literary Princeton University Press, 1971).
Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: 16. We should remember that cantos 1 and 4 are
Columbia University Press, 1982), 128-33; and devoted to transgeneric considerations. And, in
Narrative Discourse, trans. jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: passing, that certain misunderstandings, not to
Cornell University Press, 1980), 162-70. say misinterpretations, of"classical doctrine" are
13. [Translator's note.] Throughout, translations due to an improper generalization of specific
of the Poetics are S. H. Butcher's (1895; rev. 1911; rpt. "precepts" that have become proverbs without
context and thus without relevance. For example, a variable number of strophes customarily of the 29
everyone knows that "un beau desordre est un effet same type."
de l 'art" (a fine disorder is an effect of art), but 25. Le Cid, in Pierre Corneille: The Cid, Cinna, 1.1
this is a five-foot alexandrine that people readily The Theatrical Illusion, trans. john Cairncross
GERARD GENETTE
complete with a "Souvent" (ofttimes) as apocry- (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 3.4.985-86.
phal as it is evasive. The real beginning of the line 26. "Die Geschichte literarischer Gattungen"
is "Chez elle" (with her). With whom? The answer (1931), in vol. 9 of Deutscher Vierteljahrsschrift fur
is in canto 2, lines 58-72. Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (rpt.
17. Rejlexions sur Ia poetique (Paris, 1674); part 2, in Geist und Form [Bern: Francke, 1952], 292-309);
chapter 1. French translation in Pot!tique 8, no. 32 (1977):
18. La Formation de Ia doctrine classique en 490-506. We have seen the same term (Grundhal-
France (1927; rpt. Paris: Nizet, 1966), 354· tung) in Kayser and the same concept in Bovet,
19. Minturno, De Poeta (Venice, 1559); his Arte who spoke of"basic ways of viewing life and the
poetica of 1563, in Italian, has the same division. universe.))
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. john 27. I am referring to two notes (Dichtarten and
Ormsby (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Naturformen der Dichtung) that were made part of
:-lorton Critical Editions, 1981), 375· john Milton, the 1819 Divan.
Of Education (1644), in Complete Poems and Major 28. The list of Dichtarten, deliberately put in
Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: [German] alphabetical order, is allegory, ballad,
Bobbs-Merrill Co., Odyssey Press, 1957), 637. john cantata, drama, elegy, epigram, epistle, epic,
Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), in narrative (Erziihlung) fable, heroic verse, idyll,
Selected Works of fohn Dryden, ed. William Frost didactic poem, ode, parody, novel, romance, satire.
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1953), 326. In Lichtenberger's bilingual edition of the Divan,
Houdar de !a Motte, Reflexions sur Ia critique, 2d which does not include the German text of the
ed. (Paris: Du Puis, 1716), 166. Baumgarten, notes, the translations (377-78) of klar erziihlende
Meditationes philosophicae de non nul/is ad poema and personlich handelnde ("qui raconte clairement"
pertinentibus (1735), section 106. [who recounts clearly] and "qui agit personnelle-
20. Cf. 1451 b: "The poet or 'maker' should be the ment" [who acts in person]) are more cautious or
maker of plots rather than of verses; since he is a evasive than my translations ("narration pure"
poet because he imitates, and what he imitates are [pure narration] and "representation vivante"
actions." [lifelike representation]). Nevertheless, it seems to
21. Anatomy, 52-53. me that two other statements in that note confirm
22. The chapter "Sur !a poesie lyrique," at the the modal interpretation. First, "In French tragedy,
end. Incidentally, the change from the concepto the exposition is epical, the middle part dramatic";
(thought) of Cascales to the sentiments (feelings) and then, with a strictly Aristotelian criterion,
of Batteux-skipping over the classical silence-is "The Homeric epic [Heldengedicht] is purely
a good measure of the distance between baroque epical: the rhapsodist is always in the foreground
intellectualism and preromantic sentimentalism. to recount the events; no one may utter a word
23. Mario Fubini, "Genesi e storia," quotes this unless the rhapsodist first gives him the floor."
revealing sentence from an Italian adaptation of In both cases "epical" clearly means narrative
Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres [narratifl
(1783; compendiate dal P. Soave, Parma, 1835, 211): 29. To be more precise, we should say "properly
"People commonly distinguish three genres of aesthetic," for, as we know, the fact of genre is
poetry: epic, dramatic, and lyric, with the latter common to all the arts. Here, therefore, "properly
including everything that does not belong to the literary" means proper to the aesthetic level of
first two." Unless I am mistaken, that reduction literature, the level literature shares with the other
does not appear in the work of Blair himself, who, arts, as opposed to the linguistic level, which
being closer to classical orthodoxy, distinguished literature shares with the other types of discourse.
poetry as dramatic, epic, lyric, pastoral, didactic, 30. Die literarischen Gattungen, chapter 6,
descriptive, and ... Hebraic. "Schlussforderungen: eine modifizierte
24. [Translator's note.] Corneille, Le Cid, 1.6. The Gattungspoetik."
Petit Robert dictionnaire de Ia langue franfaise 31. Type is sometimes one term of the opposition
defines stances as "the name given since the (Uimmert, Todorov in the Dictionary); other
sixteenth century to lyric poems of serious terminological couples that have been used are
inspiration (religious, moral, elegiac) composed in kind/genre (Wellek and Warren), mode/genre
 30 (Scholes), theoretical genre I historical genre may still have some meaning. One possibility is
(Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach that lyric poetry, epic poetry, and so on, are
SECTION 1 to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard [Ithaca: universal categories and thus belong to dis-
Cornell University Press, 1975]), basic atti- course. ... The other possibility is that such terms
GENRE THEORY
tude I genre (Vietor), basic genre or basic type I genre are used with regard to historical phenomena: thus
(Petersen), or even, with some slight differences, the epic is what Homer's Iliad embodies. In the
simple form I real form in Jolles. Todorov's current second case, we are indeed dealing with genres, but
position is closer to the one I am upholding here: these are not qualitatively different on the
discursive level from a genre like the sonnet (which
In the past, attempts have been made to
for its part is based on constraints: thematic,
distinguish "natural" forms of poetry (for example,
verbal, and so on). (''L'origine des genres" [1976], in
lyric, epic, or dramatic poetry) from its conven-
Les Genres du discours [Paris: Seuil, 1978], 50; tr.
tional forms (sonnets, ballads, odes), or even to
Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter [New
oppose [the "natural" and the conventional]. We
York: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 18.
need to try to see on what level such an assertion
Emphasis mine.)

1.2 Theory of Genres (1957)

NORTHROP FRYE

We complained in our introduction that the theory of genres was an undeveloped sub-
ject in criticism. We have the three generic terms drama, epic, and lyric, derived from
the Greeks, but we use the latter two chiefly as jargon or trade slang for long and short
(or shorter) poems respectively. The middle-sized poem does not even have a jargon
term to describe it, and any long poem gets to be called an epic, especially if it is divided
into a dozen or so parts, like Browning's Ring and the Book. This poem takes a dramatic
structure, a triangle of jealous husband, patient wife, and chivalrous lover involved in a
murder trial with courtroom and death-house scenes, and works it all out through the
soliloquies of the characters. It is an astounding tour de force, but we can fully appreciate
this only when we see it as a generic experiment in drama, a drama turned inside out, as
it were. Similarly, we call Shelley's Ode to the West Wind a lyric, perhaps because it is a
lyric; if we hesitate to call Epipsychidion a lyric, and have no idea what it is, we can al-
ways call it the product of an essentially lyrical genius. It is shorter than the Iliad, and
there's an end of it.
However, the origin of the words drama, epic, and lyric suggests that the central prin-
ciple of genre is simple enough. The basis of generic distinctions in literature appears to
be the radical of presentation. Words may be acted in front of a spectator; they may be
spoken in front of a listener; they may be sung or chanted; or they may be written for a
reader. Criticism, we note resignedly in passing, has no word for the individual member
of an author's audience, and the word "audience" itself does not really cover all genres, as
it is slightly illogical to describe the readers of a book as an audience. The basis of generic
criticism in any case is rhetorical, in the sense that the genre is determined by the condi-
tions established between the poet and his public.
 We have to speak of the radical of presentation if the distinctions of acted, spoken, 31
and written word are to mean anything in the age of the printing press. One may print a
lyric or read a novel aloud, but such incidental changes are not enough in themselves to 1.2
alter the genre. For all the loving care that is rightfully expended on the printed texts of NoRTHROP FRYE

Shakespeare's plays, they are still radically acting scripts, and belong to the genre of drama.
If a Romantic poet gives his poem a dramatic form, he may not expect or even want any
stage representation; he may think entirely in terms of print and readers; he may even
believe, like many Romantics, that the stage drama is an impure form because of the limi-
tations it puts on individual expression. Yet the poem is still being referred back to some
kind of theatre, however much of a castle in the air. A novel is written, but when Conrad
employs a narrator to help him tell his story, the genre of the written word is being as-
similated to that of the spoken one.
The question of how we are to classify such a novel is less important than the recogni-
tion of the fact that two different radicals of presentation exist in it. It might be thought
simpler, instead of using the term radical, to say that the generic distinctions are among the
ways in which literary works are ideally presented, whatever the actualities are. But Milton,
for example, seems to have no ideal of reciter and audience in mind for Paradise Lost; he
seems content to leave it, in practice, a poem to be read in a book. When he uses the conven-
tion of invocation, thus bringing the poem into the genre of the spoken word, the signifi-
cance of the convention is to indicate what tradition his work primarily belongs to and what
its closest affinities are with. The purpose of criticism by genres is not so much to classify as
to clarify such traditions and affinities, thereby bringing out a large number ofliterary rela-
tionships that would not be noticed as long as there were no context established for them.
The genre of the spoken word and the listener is very difficult to describe in English,
but part of it is what the Greeks meant by the phrase ta epe, poems intended to be recited,
not necessarily epics of the conventional jumbo size. Such "epic" material does not have
to be in metre, as the prose tale and the prose oration are important spoken forms. The
difference between metre and prose is evidently not in itself a generic difference, as the
example of drama shows, though it tends to become one. In this essay I use the word
-epos" to describe works in which the radical of presentation is oral address, keeping the
word epic for its customary use as the name of the form of the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and
Paradise Lost. Epos thus takes in all literature, in verse or prose, which makes some at-
tempt to preserve the convention of recitation and a listening audience.
The Greeks gave us the names of three of our four genres: they did not give us a word
:"or the genre that addresses a reader through a book, and naturally we have not invented
one of our own. The nearest to it is "history," but this word, in spite of Tom ]ones, has gone
outside literature, and the Latin "scripture" is too specialized in meaning. As I have to
have some word, I shall make an arbitrary choice of "fiction" to describe the genre of the
?rinted page. I know that I used this word in the first essay in a different context, but it
o;eems better to compromise with the present confused terminology than to increase the
difficulties of this book by introducing too many new terms. The analogy of the keyboard
:n music may illustrate the difference between fiction and other genres which for practi-
.:al purposes exist in books. A book, like a keyboard, is a mechanical device for bringing
an entire artistic structure under the interpretive control of a single person. But just as it
:s possible to distinguish genuine piano music from the piano score of an opera or sym-
?hony, so we may distinguish genuine "book literature" from books containing the re-
duced textual scores of recited or acted pieces.
The connection between a speaking poet and a listening audience, which may be actual
in Homer or Chaucer, soon becomes increasingly theoretical, and as it does so epos passes
 32 insensibly into fiction. One may even suggest, not quite seriously, that the legendary figure of
the blind bard, which is used so effectively by Milton, indicates that the drift toward an un-
SECTION 1 seen audience sets in very early. But whenever the same material does duty for both genres,
GENRE THEORY the distinction between the genres becomes immediately apparent. The chief distinction,
though not a simple one of length, is involved with the fact that epos is episodic and fiction
continuous. The novels of Dickens are, as books, fiction; as serial publications in a magazine
designed for family reading, they are still fundamentally fiction, though closer to epos. But
when Dickens began to give readings from his own works, the genre changed wholly to epos;
the emphasis was then thrown on immediacy of effect before a visible audience.
In drama, the hypothetical or internal characters of the story confront the audience
directly, hence the drama is marked by the concealment of the author from his audience.
In very spectacular drama, such as we get in many movies, the author is of relatively little
importance. Drama, like music, is an ensemble performance for an audience, and music
and drama are most likely to flourish in a society with a strong consciousness of itself as a
society, like Elizabethan England. When a society becomes individualized and competi-
tive, like Victorian England, music and drama suffer accordingly, and the written word
almost monopolizes literature. In epos, the author confronts his audience directly, and the
hypothetical characters of his story are concealed. The author is still theoretically there
when he is being represented by a rhapsode or minstrel, for the latter speaks as the poet,
not as a character in the poem. In written literature both the author and his characters
are concealed from the reader.
The fourth possible arrangement, the concealment of the poet's audience from the
poet, is presented in the lyric. There is, as usual, no word for the audience of the lyric:
what is wanted is something analogous to "chorus" which does not suggest simultaneous
presence or dramatic context. The lyric is, to go back to Mill's aphorism referred to at the
beginning of this book, preeminently the utterance that is overheard. The lyric poet nor-
mally pretends to be talking to himself or to someone else: a spirit of nature, a Muse (note
the distinction from epos, where the Muse speaks through the poet), a personal friend, a
lover, a god, a personified abstraction, or a natural object. The lyric is, as Stephen Dedalus
says in Joyce's Portrait, the poet presenting the image in relation to himself: it is to epos,
rhetorically, as prayer is to sermon. The radical of presentation in the lyric is the hypotheti-
cal form of what in religion is called the "!-Thou" relationship. The poet, so to speak, turns
his back on his listeners, though he may speak for them, and though they may repeat some
of his words after him.
Epos and fiction make up the central area of literature, and are flanked by the drama
on one side and by the lyric on the other. Drama has a peculiarly intimate connection with
ritual, and lyric with dream or vision, the individual communing with himself. We said at
the beginning of this book that there is no such thing as direct address in literature, but
direct address is natural communication, and literature may imitate it as it may imitate
anything else in nature. In epos, where the poet faces his audience, we have a mimesis of
direct address. Epos and fiction first take the form of scripture and myth, then of tradi-
tional tales, then of narrative and didactic poetry, including the epic proper, and of ora-
torical prose, then of novels and other written forms. As we progress historically through
the five modes, fiction increasingly overshadows epos, and as it does, the mimesis of direct
address changes to a mimesis of assertive writing. This in its turn, with the extremes of
documentary or didactic prose, becomes actual assertion, and so passes out of literature.
The lyric is an internal mimesis of sound and imagery, and stands opposite the external
mimesis, or outward representation of sound and imagery, which is drama. Both forms
avoid the mimesis of direct address. The characters in a play talk to each other, and are
theoretically talking to themselves in an aside or soliloquy. Even if they are conscious of an 33
audience, they are not speaking for the poet, except in special cases like the parabasis of Old
Comedy or the prologues and epilogues of the rococo theatre, where there is an actual ge- 1.2
neric change from drama to epos. In Bernard Shaw the comic parabasis is transferred from NoRTHROP FRYE

the middle of the play to a separate prose preface, which is a change from drama to fiction.
In epos some kind of comparatively regular metre tends to predominate: even oratori-
cal prose shows many metrical features, both in its syntax and in its punctuation. In fiction
prose tends to predominate, because only prose has the continuous rhythm appropriate for
the continuous form of the book. Drama has no controlling rhythm peculiar to itself, but
it is most closely related to epos in the earlier modes and to fiction in the later ones. In the
lyric a rhythm which is poetic but not necessarily metrical tends to predominate. We
proceed to examine each genre in turn with a view to discovering what its chief features
are. As in what immediately follows we are largely concerned with diction and linguistic
elements, we must limit our survey mainly to a specific language, which will be English:
this means that a good deal of what we say will be true only of English, but it is hoped that
the main principles can be adapted to other languages as well.

[ ... ]

The Rhythm of Association: Lyric

In the historical sequence of modes, each genre in turn seems to rise to some degree of
ascendancy. Myth and romance express themselves mainly in epos, and in the high mi-
metic the rise of a new national consciousness and an increase of secular rhetoric bring the
drama of the settled theatre into the foreground. The low mimetic brings fiction and an
increasing use of prose, the rhythm of which finally begins to influence verse. Word-
sworth's theory that apart from metre the lexis of poetry and of prose are identical is a
low mimetic manifesto. The lyric is the genre in which the poet, like the ironic writer,
turns his back on his audience. It is also the genre which most clearly shows the hypotheti-
cal core of literature, narrative and meaning in their literal aspects as word-order and
word-pattern. It looks as though the lyric genre has some peculiarly close connection with
the ironic mode and the literal level of meaning.
Let us take a line of poetry at random, say the beginning of Claudio's great speech in
.'vfeasure for Measure:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where:

We can hear of course the metrical rhythm, an iambic pentameter spoken as a four-stress
line. We can hear the semantic or prose rhythm, and we hear what we may call the rhythm
of decorum, the verbal representation of the horror of a man facing death. But we can also,
if we listen to the line very attentively, make out still another rhythm in it, an oracular,
meditative, irregular, unpredictable, and essentially discontinuous rhythm, emerging from
the coincidences of the sound-pattern:

Ay:
But to die ...
and go
we know
not where ...

Just as the semantic rhythm is the initiative of prose, and as the metrical rhythm is
the initiative of epos, so this oracular rhythm seems to be the predominating initiative of
 34 lyric. The initiative of prose normally has its center of gravity in the conscious mind: the
discursive writer writes deliberately, and the literary prose writer imitates a deliberative
SECTION 1 process. In verse epos the choice of a metre prescribes the form of rhetorical organization:
GENRE THEORY the poet develops an unconscious habitual skill in thinking in this metre, and is thereby
set free to do other things, such as tell stories, expound ideas, or make the various modi-
fications demanded by decorum. Neither of these by itself seems quite to get down to what
we think of as typically the poetic creation, which is an associative rhetorical process, most
of it below the threshold of consciousness, a chaos of paronomasia, sound-links, ambigu-
ous sense-links, and memory-links very like that of the dream. Out of this the distinctively
lyrical union of sound and sense emerges. Like the dream, verbal association is subject to
a censor, which (or whom) we may call the "plausibility-principle," the necessity of shap-
ing itself into a form acceptable to the poet's and his reader's waking consciousness, and
of adapting itself to the sign-meanings of assertive language well enough to be communi-
cable to that consciousness. But associative rhythm seems to retain a connection with
dream corresponding to the drama's connection with ritual. The associative rhythm, no
less than the others, can be found in all writing: Yeats's typographical rearrangement of
Pater which begins The Oxford Book of Modern Verse illustrates how it may be extracted
from prose.
The most natural unit of the lyric is the discontinuous unit of the stanza, and in ear-
lier periods most lyrics tended to be fairly regular strophic patterns, reflecting the ascen-
dancy of epos. Stanzaic epos, such as we find in medieval romance, is usually much closer
to the atmosphere of a dream world than linear epos. With the Romantic movement a
sense that the "true voice of feeling" was unpredictable and irregular in its rhythm began
to increase. Poe's Poetic Principle maintains that poetry is essentially oracular and discon-
tinuous, that the poetic is the lyrical, and that verse epos consists really oflyrical passages
stuck together with versified prose. This is a manifesto of the ironic age, as Wordsworth's
preface was a low mimetic one, and announces the arrival of a third period of technical
experiment in English literature, in which the object is to liberate the distinctive rhythm of
lyric. The aim of"free" verse is not simply revolt against metre and epos conventions, but
the articulation of an independent rhythm equally distinct from metre and from prose. If
we do not recognize this third rhythm, we shall have no answer for the naive objection that
when poetry loses regular metre it becomes prose.
The loosening of rhyme in Emily Dickinson and of stanzaic structure in Yeats are
intended, not to make the metrical pattern more irregular, but to make the lyric rhythm
more precise. Hopkins's term "sprung rhythm," too, has as close an affinity with lyric as
running rhythm has with epos. Pound's theories and techniques, from his early imagism
to the discontinuous pastiche of the Cantos (preceded by a half-century of French and En-
glish experiment in the "fragmentation" or lyricizing of epos), are lyric-centered theories
and techniques. The rhetorical analysis founded on ambiguity in new criticism is a lyric-
centered criticism which tends, often explicitly, to extract the lyrical rhythm from all the
genres. The most admired and advanced poets of the twentieth century are chiefly those
who have most fully mastered the elusive, meditative, resonant, centripetal word-magic
of the emancipated lyrical rhythm. In the course of this development the associative
rhythm has become more flexible, and has consequently moved from its Romantic basis
in style to a new kind of subjectivized decorum.
The traditional associations of lyric are chiefly with music. The Greeks spoke of lyrics
as ta mele, usually translated as "poems to be sung"; in the Renaissance, lyric was con-
stantly associated with the lyre and the lute, and Poe's essay just referred to lays an empha-
sis on the importance of music in poetry which makes up in strength what it lacks in preci-
sion. We should remember, however, that when a poem is "sung," at least in the modern 35
musical sense, its rhythmical organization has been taken over by music. The words of a
"singable" lyric are generally neutral and conventional words, and modern song has the 1.2
stress accent of music, with little if anything left of the pitch accent that marks the domina- NoRTHROP FRYE

tion of music by poetry. We should therefore get a clearer impression of the lyric if we
translated ta mele as "poems to be chanted," for chanting, or what Yeats called cantillation,
is an emphasis on words as words. Modern poets who, like Yeats, want their poems chanted
are often precisely those who are most suspicious of musical settings.
The history of music shows a recurrent tendency to develop elaborate contrapuntal
structures which, in vocal music, almost annihilate the words. There has also been a re-
current tendency to reform and simplify musical structures in order to give the words
more prominence. This has sometimes been the result of religious pressure, but literary
influences have been at work too. We may take the madrigal, perhaps, as representing
something close to a limit of the subservience of poetry to music. In the madrigal the po-
etic rhythm disappears as the words are tossed from voice to voice, and the imagery in the
words is expressed by the devices of what is usually called program music. We may find
long passages filled up with nonsense words, or the whole collection may bear the subtitle
"apt for voices or viols," indicating that the words can be dispensed with altogether. The
dislike of poets for this trituration of their words can be seen in the support they gave to
the seventeenth-century style of isolating the words on a single melodic line, the style which
made the opera possible. This certainly brings us closer to poetry, though music still pre-
dominates in the rhythm. But the closer the composer moves toward emphasizing the
verbal rhythm of the poem, the closer he comes to the chanting which is the real rhythmi-
cal basis of lyric. Henry Lawes made some experiments in this direction which won the
applause of Milton, and the admiration that so many symbolistes expressed for Wagner
was evidently based on the notion (if so erroneous a notion can be said to be a base) that
he was also trying to identify, or at least closely associate, the rhythm of music and the
rhythm of poetry.
But now that we have music on one boundary oflyric, and the purely verbal emphasis
of cantillation in the center, we can see that lyric has a relation to the pictorial on the other
side which is equally important. Something of this is present in the typographical appear-
ance of a lyric on a printed page, where it is, so to speak, overseen as well as overheard. The
arrangement of stanzas and indentations gives a visible pattern to a lyric which is quite
distinct from epos, where the lines have approximately the same length, as well as of
course from prose. In any case there are thousands oflyrics so intently focussed on visual
imagery that they are, as we may say, set to pictures. In the emblem an actual picture ap-
pears, and the poet-painter Blake, whose engraved lyrics are in the emblem tradition, has
a role in the lyric analogous to that of the poet-composers Campion and Dowland on the
musical side. The movement called imagism made a great deal of the pictorial element in
the lyric, and many imagistic poems could almost be described as a series of captions to
invisible pictures.
In such emblems as Herbert's The Altar and Easter Wings, where the pictorial shape of
the subject is suggested in the shape of the lines of the poem, we begin to approach the pic-
torial boundary of the lyric. The absorption of words by pictures, corresponding to the
madrigal's absorption of words by music, is picture-writing, of the kind most familiar to us
in comic strips, captioned cartoons, posters, and other emblematic forms. A further stage of
absorption is represented by Hogarth's Rake's Progress and similar narrative sequences of
pictures, in the scroll pictures of the Orient, or in the novels in woodcuts that occasionally
appear. Pictorial arrangements of the visible basis of literature, which is alphabetical
 36 writing, have had a more fitful and sporadic existence, ranging from capitals in illumi-
nated manuscripts to surrealist experiments in collage, and have not had much specifi-
SECTION 1 cally literary importance. They would have had more, of course, if our writing had re-
GENRE THEORY mained in the hieroglyphic stage, as in hieroglyphics writing and drawing are much the
same art. We have previously glanced at Pound's comparison of the imagistic lyric to the
Chinese ideogram.
We should expect that during the last century there would have been a good deal said
about the relation of poetry to music on the one hand, and to painting on the other. In fact
the attempts to bring words as near as possible to the more repetitive and emphatic
rhythm of music or the more concentrated stasis of painting make up the main body of
what is usually called experimental writing. It would make for clearer thinking if these
developments were regarded as lateral explorations of a single phase of rhetoric, not,
through a false analogy with science, as "new directions" portending a general advance of
literary technique on all fronts. The reverse movement of the same progressive fallacy
gives us the moral indignation that talks about "decadence." A question on which little has
yet been said is the extent to which poetry may, so to speak, disappear into painting or
music and come back with a different rhythm. This happened for example in the emer-
gence of the "prosa" out of the sequence in medieval music, and it happens in a different
way when a song becomes a kind of rhythmical reservoir for a number of different lyrics.
The two elements of subconscious association which form the basis for lyrical melos
and apsis respectively have never been given names. We may call them, if the terms are
thought dignified enough, babble and doodle. In babble, rhyme, assonance, alliteration,
and puns develop out of sound-associations. The thing that gives shape to the associating
is what we have been calling the rhythmical initiative, though in a free verse poem it
would be rather a sense of the oscillations of rhythm within an area which gradually be-
comes defined as the containing form. We can see from the revisions poets make that the
rhythm is usually prior, either in inspiration or in importance or both, to the selection of
words to fill it up. This phenomenon is not confined to poetry: in Beethoven's notebooks,
too, we often see how he knows that he wants a cadence at a certain bar before he has
worked out any melodic sequence to reach it. One can see a similar evolution in children,
who start with rhythmical babble and fill in the appropriate words as they go along. The
process is also reflected in nursery rhymes, college yells, work songs, and the like, where
rhythm is a physical pulsation close to the dance, and is often filled up with nonsense
words. An obvious priority of rhythm to sense is a regular feature of popular poetry, and
verse, like music, is called "light" whenever it has the rhythmical accentuation of a railway
coach with a flat wheel.
When babble cannot rise into consciousness, it remains on the level of uncontrolled
association. This latter is often a literary way of representing insanity, and Smart's Jubi-
late Agno, parts of which are usually considered mentally unbalanced, shows the creative
process in an interesting formative stage:

For the power of some animal is predominant in every language.

For the power and spirit of a CAT is in the Greek.
For the sound of a cat is in the most useful preposition x:cxr' c:v-xc:v ...
For the Mouse (Mus) prevails in the Latin.
For edi-mus, bibi-mus, vivi-mus-ore-mus ...
For two creatures the Bull & the Dog prevail in the English,
For all the words ending in ble are in the creature.
Invisi-ble, Incomprehensi-ble, ineffa-ble, A-ble ...
 For there are many words under Bull ... 37
For Brook is under Bull. God be gracious to Lord Bolingbroke.
1.2
It is possible that similar sputters and sparks of the fusing intellect take place in all poetic NORTHROP fRYE
thinking. The puns in this passage impress the reader as both outrageous and humorous,
which is consistent with Freud's view of wit as the escape of impulse from the control of
the censor. In creation the impulse is the creative energy itself, and the censor is what we
have called the plausibility-principle. Paronomasia is one of the essential elements of ver-
bal creation, but a pun introduced into a conversation turns its back on the sense of the
conversation and sets up a self-contained verbal sound-sense pattern in its place.
There is a perilous balance in paronomasia between verbal wit and hypnotic incanta-
tion. In Poe's line "the viol, the violet and the vine," we have a fusion of two opposed quali-
ties. Wit makes us laugh, and is addressed to the awakened intelligence; incantation by
itself is humorlessly impressive. Wit detaches the reader; the oracle absorbs him. In dream-
poems like Arthur Benson's The Phoenix, or in poems intended to represent dreaming or
drowsy states, like the medieval Pearl and ma_ny passages in Spenser and Tennyson, we
notice a similar insistence on hypnotically recurrent sound-patterns. If we were to laugh
at the wit in such a line as Poe's, we should break the spell of his poem, yet the line is
witty, just as Finnegans Wake is a very funny book, although it never leaves the oracular
solemnity of the dream world. In the latter, of course, the researches of Freud and Jung
into the mechanisms of both dream and wit have been extensively drawn upon. There
may well be buried in it some such word as "vinolent," intended to express everything in
Poe's line at once. In fiction the associative process ordinarily shows itself chiefly in the
names the author invents for his characters. Thus "Lilliputian" and "Ebenezer Scrooge"
are associative names for midgets and misers respectively, because one suggests "little" and
"puny" and the other "squeeze," "screw" and perhaps "geezer." Spenser says that a character
of his has been named Malfont:

Eyther forth' euill, which he did therein,

Or that he likened was to a welhed,

which implies that the second syllable of his name is to be derived both from fans and
fromfacere. We may call this kind of associative process poetic etymology, and we shall
say more about it later.
The characteristics of babble are again present in doggerel, which is also a creative
process left unfinished through lack of skill or patience, though the psychological condi-
tions are of the opposite kind from those of Jubilate Agno. Doggerel is not necessarily
stupid poetry; it is poetry that begins in the conscious mind and has never gone through
the associative process. It has a prose initiative, but tries to make itself associative by an
act of will, and it reveals the same difficulties that great poetry has overcome at a subcon-
scious level. We can see in doggerel how words are dragged in because they rhyme or scan,
how ideas are dragged in because they are suggested by a rhyme-word, and so on. De-
liberate doggerel, as we have it in Hudibras or German knittelvers, can be a source of bril-
liant rhetorical satire, and one which involves a kind of parody of poetic creation itself,
just as malapropism is a parody of poetic etymology. The difficulties in the way of giving
prose itself something of the associative concentration of poetry are enormous, and not
many prose writers, apart from Flaubert and Joyce, have consistently and resolutely faced
them.
The first rough sketches of verbal design ("doodle") in the creative process are hardly
separable from associative babble. Phrases are scribbled in notebooks to be used later; a
 38 first stanza may suddenly "come" and then other stanzas of the same shape have to be
designed to go with it, and all the ingenuity that Freud has traced in the dream has to be
SECTION 1 employed in putting words into patterns. The elaborateness of conventional forms-the
GENRE THEORY sonnet and its less versatile congeners the ballade, villanelle, sestina, and the like, to-
gether with all the other conventions that the individual lyric poet invents for himself-
indicates how far removed the lyrical initiative really is from whatever a cri de coeur is
supposed to be. Poe's essay on his own The Raven is a perfectly accurate account of what
he did in that poem, whether he did it on the conscious mental level that the essay sug-
gests or not, and this essay, like The Poetic Principle, anticipates the critical techniques
of a new mode.
We may note that although of course lyrics in all ages are addressed to the ear, the rise
of fiction and the printing press develops an increasing tendency to address the ear through
the eye. The visual patterns of E. E. Cummings are obvious examples, but do not by any
means stand alone. A poem of Marianne Moore's, Camellia Sabina, employs an eight-line
stanza in which the rhyming words are at the end of the first line, at the end of the eighth
line, and at the third syllable of the seventh line. I doubt if the most attentive listener
could pick this last rhyme up merely from hearing the poem read aloud: one sees it first
on the page, and then translates the visual structural pattern to the ear.
We are now in a position to find more acceptable words for babble and doodle, the
radicals oflyrical melos and apsis respectively. The radical of melos is charm: the hypnotic
incantation that, through its pulsing dance rhythm, appeals to involuntary physical re-
sponse, and is hence not far from the sense of magic, or physically compelling power. The
etymological descent of charm from carmen, song, may be noted. Actual charms have a
quality that is imitated in popular literature by work songs of various kinds, especially
lullabies, where the drowsy sleep-inducing repetition shows the underlying oracular or
dream pattern very clearly. Invective or flyting, the literary imitation of the spell-binding
curse, uses similar incantatory devices for opposite reasons, as in Dunbar's Flyting with
Kennedy:

Mauch mutton, byt buttoun, peilit gluttoun, air to Hilhous;

Rank beggar, ostir dregar, foule fleggar in the flet;
Chittirlilling, ruch rilling, like schilling in the milhous;
Baird rehator, theif of natour, fa is tratour, feyindis gett ...

From here the line of descent is easy to the melos of physical absorption in sound and
rhythm, the pounding movement and clashing noise which the heavy accentuation of
English makes possible. Lindsay's The Congo and Sweeney Agonistes are modern exam-
ples of a tendency to ragtime in English poetry that can be traced back through Poe's Bells
and Dryden's Alexander's Feast to Skelton and to Dunbar's Ane Ballat of our Lady. A more
refined aspect of melos is exhibited in lyrics which combine accentual repetition with
variations in speed. Thus Wyatt's sonnet:

I abide and abide and better abide,

And, after the olde proverbe, the happie daye:
And ever my ladye to me clothe saye,
"Let me alone and I will provyde."
I abide and abide and tarrye the tyde
And with abiding spede well ye maye:
Thus do I abide I wott allwaye,
Nother obtayning nor yet denied.
 Aye me! this long abidyng 39
Semithe to me as who sayethe
A prolonging of a dieng dethe, 1.2
Or a refusing of a desyred thing. NORTHROP FRYE

Moche ware it bettre for to be playne,

Then to saye abide and yet shall not obtayne.

This lovely sonnet is intensely musical in its conception: there is the repeated clang of
uabide" and the musical, though poetically very audacious, sequential repetition of the
first line in the fifth. Then as hope follows expectancy, doubt hope, and despair doubt, the
lively rhythm gradually slows down and collapses. On the other hand, Skelton, like Scar-
latti after him, gets fidgety in a slow rhythm and is more inclined to speed up. Here is an
accelerando in a rhyme royal stanza from The Garland of Laurell:

That long tyme blew a full tymorous blaste,

Like to the Boriall wyndes, whan they blowe,
That tow res and tounes and trees downe cast,
Drove clouds together like dryftes of snowe;
The dredful dinne drove all the route on a row;
Som trembled, som girned, som gasped, som gased,
As people half pevissh or men that were mased.

In the same poem there is a curious coincidental link with music: the verses to Margery
Wentworth, Margaret Hussey, and Gertrude Statham are miniature musical rondos of
:he abaca type.
We have several times noticed the close relation between the visual and the conceptual
jn poetry, and the radical of apsis in the lyric is riddle, which is characteristically a fusion of
sensation and reflection, the use of an object of sense experience to stimulate a mental ac-
tivity in connection with it. Riddle was originally the cognate object of read, and the rid-
dle seems intimately involved with the whole process of reducing language to visible form,
a process which runs through such by-forms of riddle as hieroglyphic and ideogram. The
actual riddle-poems of Old English include some of its finest lyrics, and belong to a cul-
ture in which such a phrase as "curiously inwrought" is a favorite aesthetic judgement.
rust as the charm is not far from a sense of magical compulsion, so the curiously wrought
object, whether sword-hilt or illuminated manuscript, is not far from a sense of enchant-
ment or magical imprisonment. Closely parallel to the riddle in Old English is the figure
of speech known as the kenning or oblique description which calls the body the bone-
house and the sea the whale-road.
1.3 Genre Theory, the Lyric,
and Erlebnis (r967)
RENE WELLEK

The theory of genres has not been at the center of literary study and reflection in this
century. Clearly this is due to the fact that in the practice of almost all writers of our time
genre distinctions matter little: boundaries are being constantly transgressed, genres
combined or fused, old genres discarded or transformed, new genres created, to such an
extent that the very concept has been called in doubt. Benedetto Croce, in his Estetica
(1902), launched an attack on the concept from which it has not recovered in spite of many
attempts to defend it or to restate it in different terms. In my and Austin Warren's Theory of
Literature (1949), in a chapter on "Literary Genres" written by Mr. Warren, some of these
attempts at renovation of the concept are surveyed and endorsed. Genre exists as an insti-
tution exists. "One can work through, express oneself through, existing institutions, cre-
ate new ones ... one can also join, but then reshape, institutions." Genres are aesthetic
(stylistic and thematic) conventions which have molded individual works of art impor-
tantly. Genres can be observed even in the apparently anarchic welter of twentieth-century
literary activity. Yet Mr. Warren was frankly dubious whether the division of poetry into
three basic kinds, the epic, the drama, and the lyric, can be upheld and whether these
three kinds can have "ultimate status." 1
Since our book was written (in 1944-46), Emil Staiger's Grundbegriffe der Poetik (1946)
and Kate Hamburger's Logik der Dichtung (1957) have presented theories which make im-
pressive efforts to arrive at basic distinctions of poetry with new arguments in different
philosophical contexts. Miss Hamburger appeals to phenomenology, Emil Staiger to Hei-
deggerian existentialism. Miss Hamburger defends a dichotomy, Staiger a threefold divi-
sion. In both theories the lyric or the lyrical presents the crux of the matter and thus will
be the focus of our discussion.
Miss Hamburger draws the main distinction between two kinds of poetry: fictional
or mimetic and lyrical or existential. Lyrical poetry is a "real utterance" (Wirklichkeitsau-
ssage) of the same status as a letter or a historical narrative, while epic and drama are "fic-
tion," the invention of actions and characters. The dividing criterion is the speaker: in the
lyric the poet himself speaks, in the epic and drama he makes others speak. The novel in
the first person (Ich-Roman) is resolutely grouped with lyrical poetry, as the author speaks
there himself. Miss Hamburger's observations on the novel and the narrator in a novel
have attracted much attention. Her thesis that the past tense in the novel loses its temporal
function and becomes a present tense is stated persuasively. She buttresses this view by the
observation that adverbs of time can be used in fictional contexts in disregard of the past
meaning of the verbs. Without denying her thesis that, in some narrative contexts, the past
verb loses its pastness, one may, however, object that combinations such as "he was coming
to her party to-night," which she quotes from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, 2 can only
occur in narrated monologue (Erlebte Rede) and do not set off all fiction. Still, her reflec- 41
tions on the narrator and the narrative function are ingenious and stimulating.
Miss Hamburger's other side of the bifurcation has, however, not aroused much discus- 1.3
sion. Her attempt to prove the lyric to be "real utterance," undistinguishable from a passage RENE WELLEK

in a letter if we dissolve a poem into prose, has gone unchallenged. In many variations she
asserts the thesis that a lyrical poem is a real utterance with its origin in an 'T' (Ich-Origo)
in which the object must be understood to be experienced (erlebt) by the speaker. She re-
jects the idea of a "fictive I," a "persona" or mask, propounded in our Theory of Literature
as "falser and more misleading than the older naive conception that a lyrical poem be-
trays much of the experience of the poet." 3 Still, she constantly appeals to a criterion of
"subjektive Erlebnisechtheit," even though she may not believe in a literal transcription of
actual events in the poet's life. But the criterion of "genuineness," "sincerity," "intensity,"
etc., is a psychological criterion which puts the onus on a completely unprovable and elu-
sive past experience of the poet. It is of course also not in any way peculiar to lyrical poetry.
Miss Hamburger, in her psychologism, even arrives at a formula which divorces the inner
act from the outward expression. A lyrical poem, she says, is a "secondary phenomenon"
since it is only "the expression, and proclamation of the will of the subject." She argues that
"the lyrical intensity of the lyrical I may be stronger than the expression, the form." Thus
any bad love poem by a schoolboy is "constituted by the lyrical 1." 4 She does not see that
the very same problem raised by the sincere rhyming schoolboy occurs also in fiction. We
can imagine a charming yarn-spinning "raconteur" inventing conversations and charac-
ters in a real life situation. The boundary between art and nonart, art and life, disappears
in Miss Hamburger's scheme, because she believes in the possibility of a purely phenome-
nological description of art apart from value judgment, from criticism.5 But it is a contra-
diction to speak of art as nonvalue or even disvalue. It is value-charged by definition.
Miss Hamburger not only considers "lived experience," intensity, Erlebnis the criterion
oflyrical poetry, she also endorses the view that a lyrical poem can have a function in real-
ity. She quotes a hysterical passage from a letter by Rahel Varnhagen commenting on a
charming gallant poem by Goethe, "Mit einem gemalten Band," addressed to Friederike
Brion: "Es musste sie vergiften. Dem hatte sie nicht glauben sollen? ... Und zum ersten
Male war Goethe feindlich fiir mich da." 6 Moreover, Miss Hamburger endorses Staiger's in
its sexual metaphor, embarrassing characterization of the contemporary "Mailied" ad-
dressed to the same woman. "Friederike ist zugegen. Goethe ist durchdrungen von ihr, wie
ihn seinerseits das Gefiihl begliickt, dass sie von ihm durchdrungen sei." 7 But soberly ex-
amined, all these high-flown phrases mean little more than that Goethe expressed his
feelings oflove and happiness successfully in fine poetry and that he addressed his poems,
as other poets before and after him, to real persons in a concrete situation, a fact which has
never been doubted. But the purpose, the aim of persuasion to love, can not constitute
value and will not set the poem off from any other utterance, a letter, a speech, a treatise,
even a fable or a fiction invented to serve a practical purpose. The poem remains the same
even if we should discover that the poet changed the addressee, as Ronsard and Lamartine
did with some of their love poems, or that we were mistaken in identifying the woman ad-
dressed as Minna Herzlieb or Marianne von Willemer.
But Miss Hamburger is too sophisticated and subtle not to notice the difficulties raised
with her insistence on "real utterance." She has to account for lyrical poetry, which is sim-
ply a descriptive statement about some natural object. She quotes some German verses
of this kind and then draws from Hermann Amman's Die menschliche Rede the view
that in such poetry we encounter sentences "which have no proper place in human
 42 intercourse"-e.g. "Der Bach rauscht, der Wind weht." She endorses Amman's view that
such a statement is "ein Stuck Leben ... es sind die Dinge selbst, die hier zu Worte kom-
SEcTJON 1 men," "the utterance about the things has no function in a reality nexus: they are seized,
GENRE THEORY animated and hence transformed." But why could a statement such as "der Bach rauscht"
not be made about a rushing brook outside a poetic context? How could one distinguish
such a pronouncement, which she calls "meaningless in isolation," or "aufeinander zuge-
ordnet," from any speech-situation comprehensible only in a context? The phrase about
"the things speaking for themselves," "the piece oflife," seem to me only farfetched meta-
phors for romantic animism. The conclusion that a lyrical poem is a "real utterance which
still has no function in a reality nexus" 8 is not only a flat contradiction to the discussion
about the Friederike poems but is simply an attempt to describe aesthetic distance, Schein,
illusion-what I would call fiction-in such a way that the thesis of "real utterance" and
"nonfiction" is preserved, at least verbally.
Usually, however, Miss Hamburger argues that we "must use external, even biographi-
cal investigations" for the explanation of a lyrical poem, considering this a "categorical
distinction" between the lyric and fiction. It is, however, hard to see why biographical evi-
dence is not as relevant to the study of Tolstoy, Dante, Proust, or Gide as to a lyrical poet
like Mallarme or Valery, or what can be the justification for her view-exactly inverting
the contrast between the "loose baggy monsters" of Tolstoy and the tight-closed realm of a
poem by Hopkins-in asserting that drama and novel are "closed structures" while "every
lyrical poem is an open structure." She argues that every lyrical poem eludes complete
explanation while even the most obscure surrealistic symbolic novel is explainable in prin-
ciple. All fiction, in her view, is through and through rational and hence know~ble: a lyri-
cal poem is open to the experience of the uttering "I," "toward the irrational life of the
poet." 9 She thinks it an argument for her view that biographical research has been most
intense on the lives of poets, as if Napoleon, Tolstoy, Voltaire, or Dr. johnson had not as
much or more attention than Holderlin or Keats. She admits that "how far the lyrical I is
the poet-I can never be settled and the poet himself would hardly be able to do so," 10 a con-
cession she should have extended to fictional characters such as Pierre Bezukhov or Kon-
stantin Levin, to give examples from an author particularly dear to Miss Hamburger.
One difficulty of her theory worries her: the use oflyrical poems in the novel. Are the
poems fiction, utterances of the characters, or are they "real utterances"? She draws a jus-
tifiable distinction between Goethe's use in Wilhelm Meister and that of Eichendorff in his
novels and stories. The Mignon and Harper songs are clearly more closely related to the
fictional speakers than those ofEichendorff's shadowy and often interchangeable charac-
ters. But the conclusion drawn by Miss Hamburger that Eichendorff's poems remain
"Wirklichkeitsaussage," while Goethe's are part of his fiction construes an untenable
contrast. 11 Goethe, after all, reprinted these poems among his collections oflyrical poetry,
and they have been read and sung by many who have never read Wilhelm Meister; and
Eichendorff's poems have also a characterizing function: the singing makes these men the
carefree, melancholy, nature-loving, wandering, musical fellows that they are. The distinc-
tion simply does not hold. It seems impossible to exclude from the lyric cycles such as Pe-
trarch's Canzoniere, Shakespeare's Sonnets, or Donne's Songs and Sonnets, which imply
some thread of a story or progression or vary their speakers, and to assign them to "fiction"
in Miss Hamburger's scheme.
This is the same difficulty raised by the "Rollenlyrik," which Miss Hamburger quite
wrongly dismisses as "eine an sich unbedeutende Erscheinung." 12 Half the world's lyrical
poetry could be described as such. It is ubiquitous in folk poetry: the oldest Romance lyr-
ics recently discovered, the eleventh-century Mozarabic poems, put into the mouths of
women, and certainly much of English poetry, often misnamed "dramatic monologue" or 43
even "poetry of experience" (Robert Langbaum), from Donne to Browning and Eliot
would have to be classed here. Its history is completely distorted when Miss Hamburger 1.3
explains the "Rollengedicht" as derived from the ancient picture inscription and consid- RENE WELLEK

ers it "as the germ for the formation of the ballad form." 13 Neither the popular women's
poem nor the medieval ballad has anything to do with the Alexandrian ekphrasis. Nor
can she convince by dismissing the ballad as "a museum piece," if we think, for instance,
of recent American and Russian examples. Finally she seems to admit some ambiguity
and complains "of a betrayal of the lyric" to fiction in the ballad, 14 a telltale phrase for her
annoyance with the breakdown of her scheme. In order to save it, she has recourse to an
obscure distinction between "fictiv" and "fingiert." Morike's poem "Fri.ih, wann die Hahne
krahn," put into the mouth of a girl, is "fingiert," while "N ur wer die Sehnsucht kennt," spo-
ken by Mignon, is apparently "fiktiv." Miss Hamburger knows that a man, Eduard Morike,
wrote the first poem and that Mignon, a fictional figure, sings the second poem in a novel,
but as texts the two poems do not differ in their status: they are both spoken by a "persona,"
a fictive speaker, a young girl. As a matter of fact, "Das verlassene Magdlein" occurs also
first in Morike's novel, Maler Nolten. Miss Hamburger can thus complain that the ballad
(and she includes the "Rollenlyrik" as a subdivision) is "ein struktureller Fremdling im
lyrischen Raum." 15
She has to treat the first person narrative as an analogous stranger in the epic-fictional
space. She still insists that the first person narrative is nonfiction, a form of real utterance,
though she admits that in an "Ich-Roman" the fixed teller who makes persons in the past
engage in dialogue comes very near the epic "I," the narrative function. 16 But she has again
recourse to her concept of "Fingiertsein," which she once admits would require further
analysis, 17 to account for the obvious fact that the ''I" of a first person narrative may be very
different from the poet's. She speaks of this difference as containing a "factor of uncer-
tainty," though there seems no doubt, for instance, in what specific way Felix Krull is not
Thomas Mann, or the judge in La Chute not Albert Camus. She parallels this uncertainty
with the uncertainty about the lyrical speaker, though the speaker in a lyric may be clearly
identified and distinguished from the poet (as in Browning's "Cavalier Tunes"), and though
a third-person narrative may raise the same doubts about the relationship of the teller to
the writer as a first-person story.
Miss Hamburger also does not properly face the question of the ease and frequency of
the switch from first person to third person and the other way round. Joyce, in some sec-
tions of Ulysses, shifts in almost every other sentence. Dostoevsky transcribed the origi-
nal first person confession of Raskolnikov into the third person, often changing only the
inflectional endings. Miss Hamburger herself refers to the two versions of Gottfried
Keller's Gruner Heinrich, the later with a part rewritten from the original third person
into the first. What would she say to a novel like Michel Butor's La Modification, written
throughout in the second person? What can she do with Caesar's Commentaries or The
Education of Henry Adams, both told by their authors in the third person? At one point
she seems to admit that the "form does not guarantee the reality content," but she insists
that a third-person narrative, however close to empirical reality, will always be fiction, while
a first-person narrative, however fantastically unreal, will still be nonfiction, Wirklichkeit-
saussage. "It is the form of the I utterance which preserves the character of a reality utter-
ance even for the most extreme unreality utterance." 18 One must quote such an awkward
sentence to see that Miss Hamburger throughout the book simply reiterates one undoubted
fact: many poems and novels use ''I" as the speaker, while other novels and some poems use
"he" and have characters speak for themselves. All the talk about the "logic of poetry," all
 44 the ingenuity spent in relating her obsen·ations to a theory of knowledge lead only to a
meager result: a grammar of poetry, the description of stylistic devices, a restatement of
SECTION 1 the ancient division of poetry by speaker.
GENRE THEORY Miss Hamburger herself appeals to historical precedence: she recognizes that she re-
vives Aristotle's concept of mimesis, which she oddly enough thinks was first "restored to
honor" by Erich Auerbach. As if the Neo-Thomists, the Marxists, and the Chicago Aris-
totelians had not honored it long before 1946! Actually, her division descends from Plato's
Republic 19 and was codified by the fourth-century grammarian Diomedes. Plato distin-
guishes three kinds of imitation: pure narrative, in which the poet speaks in his own
person; narrative by means of imitation, in which the poet speaks in the person of his
characters; and mixed narrative, in which he speaks now in his own person and now by
means of imitation. The epic would be the mixed kind; what we call lyric would appear
under first-person narrative. The theory has been restated many times since: in Germany,
for instance, in Johann Joachim Eschenburg's Entwurf einer Theorie und Litteratur der
schonen Wissenschaften (1783), where the lyric, ode, elegy, and even satire, allegory, and
epigram consistently appear under epic. Also, the well-known common scheme drawn up
by Goethe and Schiller, "Ober epische und dramatische Dichtung" (1797), distinguishes
the two kinds in terms of the speaker: "the rhapsode who as a higher being ought not to
appear in the poem, so that we may separate everything personal from his work, and may
believe that we are hearing only the voice of the Muses in general," while "the mime, the
actor, constitutes the opposite. He presents himself as a distinct individuality." 20 The lyric
is completely ignored, but Goethe's later scheme, "Die Naturformen der Dichtung"(1819),
finds a place for the lyric distinguished from the "clearly telling epic" and the "personally
acting drama" by being "enthusiastically excited." 21 Goethe, one sees, introduced the to-
tally different criterion of tone, excitement, enthusiasm, in order to accommodate the
third kind.
The division was restated most strikingly in Jean Paul's Vorschule der Asthetik (1804),
in a discussion of the lyric added in the second edition (1813). Jean Paul apologizes for
having ignored the lyric in the first edition and then restates Eschenburg's dichotomy:
one can look at the poet like philosophers arguing about God's relation to the world, as
either "extramundane" or "intramundane." But Jean Paul asks then:

could there be a more fluid division right in the middle of the poetic sea? For neither the
intrusion nor the concealment of the poet decides what form a poem may take ... How easy
it would be-if the trivialities of speaking and letting speak made the division-to fuse
forms with forms. The same dithyramb e.g. would become quickly epical if the poet were
to say or chant at the outset that he is going to chant about another poet; or it would
be quickly lyrical with a few words saying that he is to sing himself; or quickly dramatic if
he were to insert him, without himself saying a word, in a dramatic soliloquy. But mere
formalities, at least in poetry, are not forms. 22

Here, 144 years before Miss Hamburger's Logik der Dichtung, her theory is cogently
refuted.
Miss Hamburger arrives at a dichotomy splitting the realm of poetry: telling versus
saying, fiction versus real utterance, "he" versus "I". Many other genre theories arrive at a
triad, in defense of the three established kinds: lyric, epic, tragedy. Emil Staiger's Grundbe-
griffe der Poetik (1946) is the most influential attempt to reformulate the triad on new
grounds: to replace the kinds by categories which he calls "the lyrical," "the epical," "the
dramatic." Every piece of poetry is conceived as located somewhere between these three
extremes, since only very few works embody or fulfill the idea of the lyrical, the epical, or
:he dramatic. Staiger's examples, which he analyzes sensitively-Brentano for the lyrical, 45
:-Iomer for the epical, Kleist for the dramatic-are not meant to be normative. The three
:.ttitudes (not kinds) are coordinated mainly with the three dimensions of time: the past 1.3
-.dth the lyrical, the present with the epical, the future with the dramatic, and these time RENE WELLEK
iimensions are interpreted in terms of Heidegger's conception: the past implies recollec-
:ion ("Er-innerung," in Heidegger's punning term); the present "Vorstellung," presenta-
:ion; the future, "Spannung," tension. "Stimmung" for the lyrical, "Verfallen" for the epi-
~al, "Verstehen" for the dramatic mode is another series of coordinates drawn from
:-Ieidegger; it corresponds to the three ages of man: the lyrical to childhood, the epical to
-.-outh, the dramatic to maturity. The triad of man's faculties is introduced by calling the
:.-rica! "emotional" or "sinnlich," the epical "bildlich" or "anschauend," the dramatic "log-
~-=al" or "begriffiich," and the activities of "fiihlen, zeigen, beweisen" correspond closely.
?inally, we are told the three modes are correlated with the series: syllable, word, and sen-
:ence. Cassirer's theories provided the terminology here.
The crux of the scheme lies in the coordination of the "lyrical" with the "past," which
;eems to contradict all the usual analyses oflyrical presence or immediacy. But the Hei-
ieggerian use of"Erinnerung" allows the term to mean a lack of distance between subject
:.nd object: "Gegenwartiges, Vergangenes, ja sogar Zukiinftiges kann in lyrischer Dich-
::mg erinnert werden." 23 The time scheme is abolished for the lyrical mode, permitting
~estures toward the mystical and ineffable. We are told that "lyrisches Dichten ist jenes an
;ich unmogliche Sprechen der Seele." A contradiction between the lyrical and the nature
)f language is asserted. 24 Lyrical poetry somehow happens: "der lyrische Dichter leistet
:-:ichts," and even the relation of man and nature is reversed. I do not understand what is
:-:1eant by saying" die Natur erinnert den Dichter" 25 or what the meaning of the last sentence
:Jf the chapter could be: "Ein ungeheuerliches Dasein, das die Beseligungen der Gnade mit
::iner erschiitternden Hilflosigkeit in allem, was Verdienst ist, erkauft, das Gliick der Dber-
::instimmung mit einer im Alltag blutenden Wunde, fiir die auf Erden kein Heilkraut
)!i.iht." 26 One need not be a rationalist to doubt whether anybody could coincide with a
-.,'ound bleeding on a sober day. Quite seriously Staiger calls the lyrical "the liquid element,"
.:lr speaks of the soul as being "the fluidity [die Fliissigkeit] of a landscape in recollection,"
a.n attempt to use distinctions from Franz Baader's theosophic speculations to which
Staiger alludes with apparent approvalY
The trouble with the scheme is primarily its lack of relation to actual poetry. It could
)e arrived at without any literary evidence, as Staiger admits when he says that the "ideal
:neaning" of the lyrical can be experienced in front of a landscape, of the epical, in front of
a stream of refugees (an example suggested by Hermann und Dorothea), the dramatic from
a quarrel. 28 The terms which are, after all, derived from and devised for poetics become
names for human attitudes in an existential "anthropology." Nor can one imagine a poem
made out of syllables and not of words or sentences, as even Dada poetry uses words (and
of course syllables are often words, particularly in monosyllabic languages). The exam-
ples on which Staiger demonstrates his concept of the "lyrical" are all German romantic
-stimmungsgedichte," private moody musings for which even the admired "Dber allen
Gipfeln" is too rational, too pointed. "Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch" is not completely
lyrical in Staiger's sense. The poem, after all, was written with an eye to the point: it was
conceived because of that point. Staiger asserts "im Augenblick des Verstehens aber hort
das Iyrische Dasein auf." 29 In practice, we are sent off to the grossest irrationalism, to an
~inwardness" which cannot be expressed in words and hence cannot be art or poetry.
Staiger had disclaimed that his scheme has anything to do with valuation and he even
makes the admission which, one would think, questions the validity of the whole enterprise
 46 when he says that "in English or the Romance languages everything looks different."
"The Italian when he speaks of lirica thinks of Petrarch's 'Canzoniere.' For us Petrarch's
SEen oN 1 work is no prototype of the lyrical style."30 But these differences are dismissed as merely
GENRE THEORY "annoying" (iirgerlich), and in the postscript to the second edition (1952) the claim to
practical application to concrete literature is asserted much more clearly. Staiger recog-
nizes somewhat cautiously that his scheme has to do with traditional kinds, though he
should like to interpret them freely, with a "Spielraum" around them. He even allows the
possibility of a "Musterpoetik" of the ode, the elegy, the novel, and the comedy, though
he disclaims any intention of furnishing it. But he does make value judgments according
to his assumed genre scheme on Klopstock's Messias and on Keller's lyrical poetry. He
recognizes, however, that his "Fundamentalpoetik" is not an appropriate instrument to
grasp the type of poetry represented by Horace, in which the echo, the artistic game,
share in the nature and value of the verse. 31
Fortunately, Staiger's practice of interpretation always eludes his theory. The three
volumes on Goethe successfully combine narrative and interpretation as well as judg-
ment and use only occasionally the scheme of the Grundbegriffe. Staiger introduces the
more general concept of a "rhythm" of Goethe's life and work which he constantly tries to
characterize as the achievement of a moment, "Augenblick," a metaphor for harmony, "er-
fiillte Gegenwart," suggested by Faust and interpreted in Heideggerian terms. But
"rhythm" remains a hieroglyph, a gesture toward something felt, even though Staiger ap-
peals to Gustav Becking's completely fanciful idea of"Schlagfiguren." He wisely decided at
last that he will not demonstrate Goethe's "Schlagfigur" (he could not anyhow) and is
content to speak vaguely of the structure of his imagination or the rhythm of his life. 32
The peculiarity of Staiger's genre theory is the adaptation of the Heideggerian time
scheme, with the paradoxical result of assigning the lyric (or rather in Staiger "the lyrical")
to the past, the epic to the present, the drama to the future. In contrast to other theories,
Staiger's does not appeal to the speaker as a criterion. With his Heideggerian assump-
tions, the subjective-objective dichotomy is abolished: the lyrical poem is described in
terms of such a mystical fusion. 33 The account of Goethe's Strassburg lyrics, in the Goethe
book, plays another variation on the theme of the subject-object identity often phrased
pantheistically or sentimentally. Goethe's feeling that "his heart is the heart of creation
and the heart of creation his heart" is proclaimed the main accomplishment of the whole
German literary revival! 34
In the history of genre theories the triadic division is a leading theme. In a well docu-
mented thesis, Die Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst (1940), Miss Irene Behrens tried
to show that the triad is only the result of eighteenth-century theorizing. She considers
Charles Batteux's Les Beaux Arts reduits a un meme principe (1746) the crucial document
and traces its codification and general acceptance to the later German critics. Her own
book contains many examples of the triads used in earlier centuries often quite casually.
Many Italian examples could also be given from other sources. 35 Two of the greatest En-
glish poets, Milton and Dryden, use the distinction casually. Milton speaks of the "laws
of a true Epic poem, of a Dramatic and a Lyric," 36 and Dryden, in the Preface to the Essay
of Dramatic Poetry, speaks of "the English poets who have written either in this, the epic,
or the lyric way." 37 The lyric is here used not, as often in earlier times, as some minor
genre but as the alternative to epic and drama exhausting all possibilities. One can find
other examples: for instance, in Muratori, who includes even satire under lyric. 38
But the mere number three means little. All depends on the principle of division. The
rediscovery of dialectics with Kant and Fichte is obviously the crucial event. Genre theory
was resolutely connected with a theory of knowledge in Schiller's Ober naive and senti-
 :,·ntalische Dichtung (1795), which arrives at a scheme of the relationship between man 47
~::J nature which is at the same time a historical scheme and a genre theory. But Schiller
.::;..:arded the traditional kinds and devised, within "sentimental" poetry, a triad of genres: 1.3
,-.0::re, elegy, and idyll, which he himself emphasizes have nothing to do with the original RENE WELLEK

:-..:.:nes: they are determined by "Empfindungsweisen."39

The innovator was Friedrich Schlegel, whose originality and speculative boldness is
~-::.:oming more widely appreciated since the publication of his early notebooks and manu-
,_:::-ipts. In a note dated 1797 Schlegel makes the coordination with subjective-objective still
:::>·much within the scheme of the voice categories. "Lyrical [form] is merely subjective;
.:.:-amatic merely objective. As form the epic has apparently precedence. It is subjective-
-::-'ective." Two years later he changed the coordination: "epic is objective poetry; lyric,
, ..:j_iective; drama, objective-subjective." But he reverts again to the older coordination
:: 18oo: "the epic is subjective- objective, the drama objective, the lyric subjective." Later
:: ::>tes, "Zur Poesie und Literatur" (1808), reassert that "the epic is the root of the whole and
:::e exact middle between the wholly interior lyrical and the wholly external dramatic po-
:::-Y."40 But curiously enough, in Friedrich Schlegel's published writings such a genre the-
-:>- plays no role. In his histories of Greek literature a sequence, epic (Homer), lyric (Sap-
: ::o, etc.), drama (Aeschylus, etc.) is traced, and in the Preface to Ober das Studium der
0-:cchischen Poesie (1797) a historical typology is worked out in which "objective" is associ-
~:ed with Greek poetry, while modern poetry is "interesting" or "characteristic." Goethe is
~ Jnsidered the hope for a revival of objective poetry in the very same manner Schiller
~ Jnsidered Goethe the naive poet surviving in the modern sentimental age.41 In the sketch
::·the phases of Goethe's evolution in Gespriich uber die Poesie (18oo) Goethe's early man-
::er is considered mixed subjective-objective, while the second epoch is "objective to the
:-.:ghest degree." 42 "Objectivity" is here not a genre distinction, as Goethe wrote in all
~enres, but an attitude, implying aesthetic distance, detachment, classicism.
August Wilhelm Schlegel probably picked up the idea of relating the genres to the dia-
-~.:tics from his younger brother. In notes preserved for the continuation of the Berlin
_;:.:tures (1803), he remarks: "Episch, lyrisch, dramatisch als These, Antithese, Synthese.
::>as Epische das rein objektive im menschlichen Geiste. Das lyrische das rein subjektive.
::>as Drama die Durchdringung der beiden." 43 At about the same time Schelling, in his lec-
:·..:res on Philosophie der Kunst (1803), for which he had access to Schlegel's manuscript lee-
:-..:res, uses the dialectics again: the lyric is characterized by the predominance of the subject
:-r· the poet; it is the most individualized, particular genre. In the epic the poet rises to objec-
::\·ity, the drama represents the union of the lyric and the epic, of the subjective and objec-
::\·e, as in tragedy necessity is objective (i.e. in the order of the universe) and freedom sub-
ective (i.e. in the moral revolt of the hero). In comedy the relation is reversed. 44 Schelling, if
: understand him correctly, means that comic characters are somehow fixed and fated,
-.,·hi!e the world and its order is treated with freedom and irony. A puzzling question of the
iistory of genre theories is raised, however, by the circumstance that neither August Wil-
::dm Schlegel's nor Schelling's lectures were published in their time. 45 One would have to
examine the numerous German books on poetics during the first decades of the century to
:nake sure who formulated the dialectical scheme for the first time in print.
One new motif emerges: the coordination of the main kinds with the dimensions of
:ime. I find it in Wilhelm von Humboldt's Ober Goethes Hermann und Dorothea (1799),
Khich does not propound a triadic scheme but rather develops Schiller's theories. Hum-
boldt divides all poetry into "plastic" and "lyrical," and plastic poetry, in its turn, into epi-
.:al and dramatic. Humboldt then makes the suggestion that the simplest distinction be-
tween epic and tragedy is "indisputably" (unstreitig) that between past and present time. 46
 48 Here apparently a coordination between the genres and time is asserted for the first
time, but the specific coordination was and is far from "indisputable." Humboldt makes
SECTION 1 no effort to relate the future to a genre, and the lyric would, presumably, belong to the
GENRE THEORY present. In Schelling's Philosophie der Kunst the epic is referred to the past, the lyrical
poem to the present, but later Schelling speaks of the epic as indifferent to time, as "be-
yond time" or timeless. 47 The coordination with all three times is carried out expressly in
Jean Paul's Vorschule der Asthetik, in the second edition of 1813. The epic represents the
event which develops from the past, the drama the action which extends toward the fu-
ture, the lyric the emotion confined to the present. 48
All these motifs meet in Hegel's Vorlesungen iiber Asthetik, which were given in the
twenties but published in 1835. There the genres are worked into a dialectical scheme which
is also historical. The objective epic, the thesis, is contradicted by the subjective lyric and
synthesized by the drama. Hegel also speaks of the relation to time: "the lyrical effusion has
a much nearer relation to time than epical narration, which places real phenomena into the
past, and puts them or combines them next to each other in a more spatial unfolding, while
the lyric represents the momentary emergence of feelings and images in the temporal
succession of their genesis and formation and thus has to shape artistically the diverse
temporal motion itself." 49 The Hegelian scheme is developed and, in the theory of the
lyric, refined in Friedrich Theodor Vischer's Asthetik. The fifth volume on poetry (1857)
repeats the subjective-objective scheme and relates the genres to time: "the epic considers
the object from the point of view of the past, in lyrical poetry everything becomes present
in feeling, in drama the present tends toward the future as the action develops." In devel-
oping a theory of the lyric which distinguishes many subgenres, Vischer makes much of
the immediacy, the momentariness of the lyric in relation to time. He speaks of its char-
acter of "Punctualitat: sie ist ein punktuelles Ziinden der Welt im Subjecte." Though the
detailed discussion brings in much historical knowledge and thus modifies the initial
statements, Vischer radically limits the lyric to the overflow of feeling, even passive feel-
ing, suffering. "Erleben, erfahren, heisst durch Leiden gehn." 50
These theories had some echo also among English and American critics. They could
not leave the coordination between the genres and the tenses alone. In Eneas Sweetland
Dallas' Poetics (1852), for instance, the play is coordinated with the present, the tale with
the past, and the song, mysteriously, with the future. 51 John Erskine, in The Kinds of Poetry
(1920), finds the lyric expresses present time, the drama past, and the epic future. This odd
reversal is defended by interpreting tragedy in Ibsen's words as a judgment day on the
hero's past, while the epic predicts and projects the destiny of a nation or of the race. 52
One need not argue any specific influence to see how Staiger's and Miss Hamburger's
schemes grow out of a long tradition with roots in the great period of German aesthetic
speculation. Their theories of the lyric all have one common feature: the lyric is subjective;
it is the expression of feeling, of experience, Erlebnis. This in itself is not new at all. It is an
error to consider the idea of personal poetry, of poetry as autobiography, an innovation of
romanticism or more particularly of the German Sturm und Drang. No doubt, the reac-
tion against formal neoclassicism was then particularly vocal. It is easy to collect passages
from Burger, Stolberg, and others to prove that they thought of poetry as emotional over-
flow. It is sufficient to quote Franz in Gotz von Berlichingen (1771): "'So fiihl' ich denn in
dem Augenblick, was den Dichter macht, ein volles, ganz von Einer Empfindung volles
Herz!" 53 But such pronouncements could be paralleled all over Europe at that time. They
are common in the earlier English accounts of original poetry: in 1763 John Brown calls it
"a kind of rapturous exclamations, of joy, grief, triumph, or exultation."54 Robert Burns
speaks of his poetry as "the spontaneous language of my heart." 55 Much of this is simply
good classical doctrine. It can appeal to Horace: "Si vis me flere, dolendum est I Primum 49
ipsi tibi" (De art. poet., vv. 102 ff), which, in the context, applies to the actor but was con-
stantly quoted as a precept for all rhetoric. It is the demand for sincerity which has been 1.3
discussed throughout history, not only in the context of lyrical poetry. The troubadour RENE WELLEK

Bernart de Ventadour knows that "the song must come from the heart," 56 and Sir Philip
Sidney says: "Look into thy heart and write." 57 Much poetry even in older times was defi-
nitely and concretely autobiographical. It is hard to imagine that a poem like Sir Thomas
Wyatt's "They Flee from Me That Sometimes Did Me Seek" (before 1542) does not refer to
an intimate personal experience. Such a surmise cannot be refuted in spite of all argu-
ments about the conventionality of many devices, the universalizing of feelings in much
older poetry, and the general weight of traditional "topoi" and motifs. But what matters
in criticism is the claim that sincerity, emotion, Erlebnis is a guarantee of good art. As I
have said before, "the volumes of agonizingly felt love poetry by adolescents and the
dreary (however fervently felt) religious verse which fills libraries, are sufficient proof'
that it is not. 58 Yeats has said this memorably, referring to men in general:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. 59

But lived experience, intense, private experience, became precisely the central value
criterion in German lyrical (and not only lyrical) theories. Erlebnis became the term around
which they crystallize. It makes one reflect that the term cannot be readily matched in other
languages and that it is a neologism of the early nineteenth century. Hans Georg Gada mer,
in Wahrheit und Methode (1960), is, so far as I know, the only writer who has tried to trace
the history of the term. He has had information from the German Academy in Berlin which
supplied him with the earliest example from a casual letter of Hegel's in 1827 and with iso-
lated occurrences of the word in the thirties and forties, in Tieck, Alexis, and Gutzkow. 60
Yly own very limited research confirms these findings. The word does not occur in Herder
and Goethe, Novalis and Schleiermacher, who would seem to be the natural antecedents for
Dilthey. Gervinus, in his discussion of what today would be called "Erlebnislyrik," never
uses the term. 61 Nor do Jean Paul and Schopenhauer. The novelty of the word is indi-
cated also by the fact that Hegel makes Erlebnis feminine, saying: "Das ist meine ganze
Erlebnis," 62 the kind of vacillation which later afflicted another literary term in German:
Baroque. 63
Gadamer notes that Goethe comes near the term in his very late advice to young po-
ets: "Fragt euch nur bei jed em Gedicht, ob es ein Erlebtes enthalte, und ob dieses Erlebte
euch gefordert habe." 64 Thus it seems appropriate that Erlebnis occurs in one of Heinrich
Laube's Reisenovellen (2nd ed. 1847), where it is put in the mouth of Goethe discussing Die
Wahlverwandtschaften: "Das Benutzen des Erlebnisses ist mir alles gewesen; das Erfinden
aus der Luft war nie meine Sache." 65 Laube, however, has no independent source for this
pronouncement. He rephrases what Goethe had said to Eckermann about the novel: "Da-
rin ist kein Strich enthalten, der nicht erlebt, aber kein Strich wie er erlebt worden," 66 and
he might have remembered similar pronouncements and known even the advice to the
young poets.
Erlebnis occurs in early statements by Theodor Storm which bring the meaning nearer
to recent usage, though these passages could hardly have been noticed widely. In 1854, in a
review of one M. A. Niendorfs Lieder der Liebe, Storm asserts that "bei einem lyrischen
Gedicht muss nicht allein ... das Leben, nein da muss geradezu das Erlebnis das Funda-
ment desselben bilden"; and he complains in a review ofJulius von Rodenberg's Lieder: "Es
fehlt iiberall der Hintergrund des inneren Erlebnisses." In a later preface to his anthology
 so Deutsche Liebeslieder (1859) he criticizes J. G. Jacobi for not having written "aus dem
Drange ein inneres Erlebnis zu fixieren." 67 Hermann Lotze, in his Geschichte der Asthetik
SECTION 1 in Deutschland (1868), uses the term in the standard context: "so grossen Werth Gi:ithe und
GENRE THEORY Schiller darauf legen, dass das lyrische Gedicht einem innern Erlebnisse entspringe, die
blosse Darestellung der subjectiven Erschiitterung galt ihnen doch nicht fiir geniigend." 68
This passage is about contemporaneous with Dilthey's earliest specific uses. In his Leben
Schleiermachers (1870), on the very first page of the Introduction Erlebnis is used three times
most emphatically. Dilthey defines Schleiermacher's importance in the development of
European religiosity. "In ihm vollzog sich das grosse Erlebnis einer aus den Tiefen unseres
Verhaltnisses zum Universum entspringenden Religion," and on the same page he speaks of
"dieses Erlebnis seiner Jugend" and again of"dieses Erlebnis." But in the whole long book
we hear only once about his "religii:is-sittliche Erlebnisse." 69 Surprisingly, in the articles
which Dilthey wrote in the sixties and which he eventually used, in a revised and ex-
panded form, in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (1905), the word does not occur at all. It is
never used in the Novalis essay (1865) and not until the 1905 revision was it introduced
into the essays on Lessing (1867) and Hi:ilderlin (1867)? 0 Only in the article "Goethe und
die dichterische Phantasie" (1877) does the term become central to Dilthey's poetics.
There Erlebnis reveals a quality oflife: it may come from the world of ideas or may be sug-
gested by trivial circumstances, a chance meeting, the reading of a book, etc. One cannot
thus accuse Dilthey of simple "biograph ism," of a reduction of experience to private events
or feelings, but the concept, with him, remains psychological. It means an experience, of
whatever origin, intense enough to become the stimulus to creation. In one passage, how-
ever, the dualism oflife and poetry is denied. Dilthey speaks of a "Strukturzusammenhang
zwischen dem Erleben und dem Ausdruck des Erlebten; das Erlebte geht hier voll und ganz
in den Ausdruck ein." 71 An identification is made which seems the same as Croce's between
intuition and expression: an equation which was anticipated also by Dilthey's own revered
Schleiermacher. But in general, Erlebnis in Dilthey remained another term for intense per-
sonal experience, for involvement, or for what in different contexts has been called sin-
cerity, "engagement," and even "belief."72 Later in his life, in notes which Dilthey wrote for
a revision of his Poetik (1907-08), he recognized the failure of his psychologistic concep-
tion: he speaks of the detachment of the imaginative process from the personal and admits
that the "subject with which literary history and poetics have to deal primarily is totally
distinct from psychic events in the poet or his hearers." 73 But these notes were not pub-
lished then and the damage was done: Erlebnis became the shibboleth of German poetic
theory.
Most often it was used simply as a new term for the old biographical fallacy which found
here a less literal-minded formula for the study of the life, its incidents, the models in life,
the emotional states preceding a work of art, without having to commit the student to a
one-to-one relationship. In Gundolf's distinction between "Urerlebnis" and "Bildungser-
lebnis" (suggested first by Herman NohF4 in 1908) a terminology is established which allows
the grading of experiences according to their presumed immediacy, and in Ermatinger's Das
dichterische Kunstwerk (1921) Erlebnis becomes the overriding term, which is then subdi-
vided into "Gedankenerlebnis," "Stofferlebnis," and "Formerlebnis." Everything in poetry is
Erlebnis: with Ermatinger the term loses its original relation to something given in life. It is
simply a term for the artist's activity. It is so broad as to be meaningless?5
Certainly the relationship to the lyric or even to biography has been completely lost
sight of. Lyrical theory-at least with the terms which we have discussed, Erlebnis, sub-
jective, presence, Stimmung-seems to have arrived at a complete impasse. These terms
cannot take care of the enormous variety, in history and in the different literatures, of
lyrical forms and constantly lead into an insoluble psychological cul-de-sac: the supposed 51
intensity, inwardness, immediacy of an experience which can never be demonstrated as
certain and can never be shown to be relevant to the quality of art. Miss Hamburger, 1.3
Staiger, Ermatinger, Dilthey and their predecessors, in their different ways, lead all to this RENE WELLEK

central mystery, which remains a mystery to them and possibly to all of us.
The way out is obvious. One must abandon attempts to define the general nature of the
lyric or the lyrical. Nothing beyond generalities of the tritest kind can result from it. It
seems much more profitable to turn to a study of the variety of poetry and to the history
and thus the description of genres which can be grasped in their concrete conventions and
traditions. Several German books have shown the way, though some have suffered from
confusion with general "Geistesgeschichte." I think of Karl Vietor's Geschichte der deutschen
Ode (1923), Gunther Muller's Geschichte des deutschen Liedes (1925), Friedrich Beissner's
Geschichte der deutschen Elegie (1941), or of Kurt Schluter's Die englische Ode (1964) all of
which show an awareness of the paradoxical task: How can we arrive at a genre description
from history without knowing beforehand what the genre is like, and how can we know a
genre without its history, without a knowledge of its particular instances? 76 This is obvi-
ously a case of the logical circle which Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Leo Spitzer have
taught us not to consider "vicious." It can be solved in the concrete dialectics of past and
present, fact and idea, history and aesthetics. Psychological and existential categories such
as Erlebnis, subjectivity, and Stimmung accomplish nothing for poetics.

NOTES

1. New York, 1949, pp. 235, 238. fliissigere Abtheilung und Abscheidung mitten im
2. Die Logik der Dichtung (Stuttgart, 1957), pp. 9, poetischen Meere? Denn weder die Einmengung,
35· See also her defense: "Noch einmal: Vom noch die Versteckung des Dichters entscheidet
Erzahlen," Euphorion, 59 (1965), 46-71. zwischen zwei Formen des Gedichts ... Wie Ieicht
3. Logik, pp. 183 (referring to Theory of wiiren, falls nur die Kleinigkeiten des Sprechens
Literature, p. 15), 186 (for quotation). und des Sprechenlassens abtheilten, Formen in
4· Ibid., pp. 202 ff. Formen einzuschmelzen, und derselbe Dithyram-
5. Ibid., p. 5· bus wiirde, z. B. bald episch, wenn der Dichter
6. Ibid., p. 183. vorher sagle und siinge, er wolle einen fremden
7. Goethe, 1(3 vols. Ziirich, 1952), 56. singen, bald lyrisch durch die Worte, er wolle
8. Logik, pp. 176 ff., 180. seinen eignen singen, bald dramatisch, wenn er
9. Ibid., p. 187. ihn ohne ein Wort von sich in ein tragisches
10. Ibid., pp. 190, 186. Selbstgesprach einschiibe. Aber blosse Fiirmlich-
11. Ibid., pp. 204 ff. keiten sind-in der Poesie wenigstens-keine
12. Ibid., p. 220. Formen."
13. Ibid., p. 214. 23. Grundbegriffe (Ziirich, 1946), p. 67.
14. Ibid., p. 217. 24. Ibid., pp. 83, 82.
15. Ibid., p. 220. 25. Ibid., p. 67.
16. Ibid., p. 231. 26. Ibid., p. 88.
17. Ibid., p. 233. 27. Ibid., pp. 223, 227 ff, 231.
18. Ibid., p. 235: "Es ist die Form der Ichaussage, 28. Ibid., p. 9.
die auch der extremsten Unwirklichkeitsaussage 29. Ibid., p. 79·
noch den Charakter der Wirklichkeitsaussage 30. Ibid., pp. 246, 245.
bel asst." 31. Grundbegriffe (5th ed. Ziirich, 1961), pp. 248,
19. III 392 D-394 C. 246.
20. Cf. Goethe, Siimtliche Werke, ]ubiliiumsaus- 32. Goethe, 3 (3 vols. Ziirich, 1959), 474, 478 ff.
gabe, 36 (40 vols. Stuttgart, 1962-07), 149-52. 33. Grundbegriffe (1946), p. 64.
21. Ibid., 5, 223. 34. Goethe, 1, 59·
22. Siimtliche Werke, ed. E. Berend, I, 11 35. See, e.g., Antonio Possevino (1593), cited in
(Weimar, 1935), 254: "Gibt es dann aber eine Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism
 52 in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1961), p. 336, 6o. Tiibingen, 1960, pp. 56-6o.
or Gregorio Led (1667), cited in Ciro Trabalza, La 61. Geschichte der poetischen Nationalliteratur
SECTION 1 Critica letteraria (Milano, 1915), p. 239. der Deutschen, 4 (5 vols. Leipzig 1835-42; 2nd ed.
36. Treatise of Education (1644). 1843). 126, 130, 133. 504.
GENRE THEORY
37. Essay of Dramatic Poetry (1668), Preface to 62. Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. ). Hoffmeister 3,
the Reader. (3 vols. Hamburg, 1954), 179. To his wife from
38. Della Perfetta Poesia italiana, 3 (4 vols. Kassel, Aug. 19, 1827.
Modena, 1706), 3 ff. 63. johann Willibald Nagel and Jakob Zeidler, in
39. See note at beginning of section: "Idylle." Deutsch-osterreichische Literaturgeschichte (Wien,
40. Literary Notebooks 1797-1801, ed. H. Eichner 1899), use "die Barocke." "Der Barock" seems to
(Toronto, 1957), pp. 48, 175, 204, 238. have won out over "das Barock."
41. Kritische Schriften, ed. W. Rasch (Miinchen, 64. Werke, 38, 326. First published in 1833.
1956), pp. 105-12. 65. 2nd ed. Mannheim, 1847. p. 36.
42. Ibid., p. 334· 66. Gespriiche mit Goethe, ed. H. H. Houben
43· Die Kunstlehre, ed. E. Lohner (Stuttgart, (23rd ed. Leipzig, 1948), p. 315, Feb. J7, 1830. Cf.
1963). p. 306. pp. 498. 583.
44. Werke, ed. 0. Weiss, 3 (3 vols. Leipzig, 1907), 67. Werke, ed. F. Biihme, 8 (9 vols. Leipzig, 1936),
287, 296, 335, 341; cf. alsop. 19. 63. 69. 112.
45. Schlegel's lectures in 1884 by). Minor, 68. Miinchen, 1868, p. 643.
Schelling's in 1859 in Siimtliche Werke. 69. H. Mulert, ed. (wd ed. Berlin, 1922), p.
46. Werke, ed. A. Flitner and K. Giel, 2 (4 vols. XXIII; cf. p. 333.
Stuttgart, 1961), 272; corresponds to 2, 246, of the 70. Novalis, in Preussische /ahrbucher, 15 (1865),
Prussian Academy edition. 650-81. Lessing, ibid. 19 (1867), 117-61, 271-94.
47· Werke, 3. 291, 298. Hiilderlin, in Westermanns Monatshefte, 20 (1867),
48. Werke, 11, 254. 156-65.
49· Siimtliche Werke, ed. H. Glockner, 14 71. Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (9th ed.
(Stuttgart, 1928), 451. Leipzig 1924), p. 236.
so. Asthetik, 5 (5 vols. Stuttgart, 1857), 1260, 1331. 72. Cf. e.g., Hofmannsthal's use in "Der Dichter
51. London, 1852, pp. 81, 91, 105. und diese Zeit" (1906) in Gesamme/te Werke in
52. New York, 1920, p. 12. The essay was Einzelausgaben, ed. H. Steiner, Prosa II
originally published in 1912. (Frankfurt/M., 1951), pp. 294, 296.
53. Goethe, Werke, 10, 39; cf. p. 161. Cf., e.g. 73. Gesammelte Schriften, 7 (12 vols. Stuttgart,
Sturm und Drang. Kritische Schriften, ed. E. 1913-58), 85. Cf. my discussion in A History of
Lowenthal (Heidelberg, 1949), pp. 805-11, 798. Modern Criticism, 4 (4 vols. New Haven, 1965), 323.
54· Dissertation on the Rise, Union and Power, 74· Die Weltanschauungen der Malerei (Jena,
the Progressions, Separations and Corruptions of 1908).
Poetry and Music (London, 1763). 75. Cf. Charlotte Biihler, "Der Erlebnisbegriff
55. Scrapbook, No. 434. in der modernen Kunstwissenschaft," in Vom
56. Anthology of Provenfal Troubadours, ed. Geiste neuerer Literaturforschung, Festschrift fur
Hill-Bergin (New Haven 1941), No. 26. Oskar Walzel, ed. ). Wahle and V. Klemperer
57. A strophe/ and Stella (published 1591), the first (Wildpark-Potsdam, 1924), pp. 195-209, for more
sonnet. examples.
58. Theory of Literature (2nd ed. New York, 1956), 76. A good discussion in Karl Vietor's "Probleme
p. 56. der literarischen Gattungsgeschichte," in Deutsche
59. "The Second Coming." Yeats, The Variorum Vierteljahrschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und
Edition of the Poems, ed. P. Alit and R. K. Alspach Geistesgeschichte, 9 (1931) 425-47; reprinted in his
(New York, 1957), p. 402. Geist und Form (Bern, 1952), pp. 292-309.
History and Genre (1986) 1.4
RALPH COHEN

1.

:call this paper "History and Genre" though history is a genre and genre has a history. It
:s this interweaving between history and genre that I seek to describe. In The Political
~·nconscious Fredric Jameson wrote that genre criticism has been "thoroughly discred-
::ed by modern literary theory and practice." 1 There are at least three reasons for this.
?irst, the very notion that texts compose classes has been questioned. Secondly, the as-
'Umption that members of a genre share a common trait or traits has been questioned,
~nd thirdly, the function of a genre as an interpretative guide has been questioned.
But what is this genre that has been discredited? The term "genre" is relatively recent in
~ritical discourse. Previous to the nineteenth century the terms used for it were "kinds"
) f "species." Genre has its source in the Latin genus which refers in some cases to "kind"

)r "sort" or "class" or "species." But in others, "species" is considered a subclass of"genus."

:cs root terms are genre, gignere-to beget and (in the passive) to be born. In this latter
;cnse it refers both to a class and an individual. And it is, of course, derived from the same
~oot terms as gender. The connection of "genre" to "gender" suggests that an early use of
::-re term was based on division or classification. Two genders are necessary in order to
.:cfine one and sexual genders implied not merely classification but a hierarchy or domi-
:-rance of one gender over the other. Genres included, in the Attic age, poems written in a
.:istinctive meter like elegiac or satiric poetry. With regard to the number of genres, critics
::ave suggested that every work is its own genre, that there are two genres-literature and
::onliterature; that there are three genres-lyric, epic, and drama; that there are four
;enres-lyric, epic, drama, and prose fiction-and, finally, that genres are any group of
:exts selected by readers to establish continuities that distinguish this group from others.
_-\s one critic puts it, genre is "any group of works selected on the basis of some shared fea-
:ures."2 Genre has been defined in terms of meter, inner form, intrinsic form, radical of
::cresentation, single traits, family traits, institutions, conventions, contracts, and these
::ave been considered either as universals or as empirical historical groupings.
In recognition of this multiplicity of definitions, I wish to argue that genre concepts in
::-reory and practice arise, change, and decline for historical reasons. And since each genre
:s composed of texts that accrue, the grouping is a process, not a determinate category.
0enres are open categories. Each member alters the genre by adding, contradicting, or
~hanging constituents, especially those of members most closely related to it. The process
:>\-which genres are established always involves the human need for distinction and interre-
_ation. Since the purposes of critics who establish genres vary, it is self-evident that the same
:cxts can belong to different groupings or genres and serve different generic purposes.
Have all the theories of genre from Menander to Morson been discredited? Contem-
:>orary critics continue to invest in genre, and I shall urge that there are critical tasks that
~an best be undertaken by genre. But it is necessary to understand what aspects, what
~ssumptions of genre theory are being attacked. The first is that the classes or groupings
 54 that are called genres are no longer acceptable because we cannot be sure how to under-
stand the texts as a class.
SEen oN 1 Michel Foucault states the general objection that dividing genre into groups like litera-
GENRE THEORY ture or philosophy is not useful since users of such distinctions no longer agree on how to
take them. "We are not even sure of ourselves when we use these distinctions in our own
world of discourse, let alone when we are analysing groups of statements which, when first
formulated, were distributed, divided, and characterized in a quite different way." 3
Jacques Derrida argues, characteristically, for the need and futility of genre designa-
tion. He points out that any generic classification system is untenable because individual
texts although participating in it cannot belong to it. Individual texts resist classification
because they are interpretatively indeterminate. He asks: "Can one identify a work of art,
of whatever sort, but especially a work of discursive art, if it does not bear the mark of a
genre, if it does not signal or mention it or make it remarkable in any way?" 4
In putting the question in this manner Derrida wishes to confront all possible defini-
tions of genre. For example, "literature" can be considered a genre which includes novel,
elegy, tragedy, and so forth. It is a genre that includes other genres that define it; again, a
genre can intermix genres-as a novel can contain poems, proverbs, serinons, letters, and
so forth. The mark of belonging to a class need not be conscious (to author or reader)
though it obviously is conscious to the critic who notes it. Indeed, a work can refer to it-
self even in its title, as The History of Tom Jones a Foundling does, although subsequent
critics and readers distinguish "history" from "novel." Or a text can refer to itself as a travel
description when it is, like Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel
Gulliver, an imagined prose fiction. For Derrida, no generic trait completely or absolutely
confines a text to a genre or class because such belonging falsifies the constituents of a
text. He writes: "If ... such a [generic] trait is remarkable, that is, noticeable, in every
aesthetic, poetic, or literary corpus, then consider this paradox, consider the irony ...
this supplementary and distinctive trait, a mark of belonging or inclusion, does not
properly pertain to any genre or class. The re-mark of belonging does not belong. It be-
longs without belonging ..." (pp. 64-65).
Belonging without belonging. With it but not of it. Why should an author, reader, or
critic wish to classify a work or to identify it as belonging with other works of a similar kind?
What acts and assumptions are concealed in the infinitive to identify? After all, classifica-
tions are undertaken for specific purposes. Derrida assumes that such classes are determi-
nate and thus fix a text within them-even though a text may be "fixed" in several different
genres. But if one considers genres as processes, this criticism does not hold. Considerations
of purposes are historical; different authors, readers, critics have different reasons for identi-
fying texts as they do. The reasons for identifying texts differently do not interest Derrida;
the identifications themselves do. He wishes to demonstrate that generic traits cannot belong
to genres: "this supplementary and distinctive trait, a mark of belonging or inclusion, does
not properly pertain to any genre or class." And not because a text is "an abundant overflow-
ing or a free, anarchic, and unclassifiable productivity, but because of the trait of participa-
tion itself, because of the effect of the code and of the generic mark" (p. 65). No text which is
denominated "novel," for example, has traits that will identify all texts within the class.
Derrida both affirms and denies genre, and the basis for this inclusion and exclusion
is the manner in which the individual text participates in the class and denies the class.
Derrida does not pursue the historical inquiry of the types of "participation" involved in
specific works; he assumes that all such participations are to be distinguished from
"belonging." Indeed, for him, the individual text has so many contrary markings that
participations undo belonging.
 Derrida wishes to lead us away from the analysis of a class to an analysis of a text; tex- 55
_.:.: interpretation will then support the paradox of belonging and not belonging. How
~-=~suasive is his undoing of a class? He does not deny the necessity for grouping texts, for 1.4
.-.Jwing that a text participates in a group. But he points out that "at the very moment that RALPH CoHEN

_ ~enre or a literature is broached, at that very moment, degenerescence has begun, the
:::i begins" (p. 66). No sooner is a genre stipulated, than it proceeds to be ungenerated.
~..::it must be noted that this is a historical procedure-both the broaching of a genre and
·~::beginning of its end. For in order for the end to have a beginning we must be in time;
:::~poral history, however, insofar as it pertains to the process of undoing, is not what
~ ~~rida examines. By failing to do so, he takes a road that leads not to a history of generic
~ -rposes in a study of individual texts, but to a study of individual texts as distinct from
;o::1re. He creates a Herculean dilemma where none exists. Thus, to understand the aims
_::.:! purposes of genre, to understand beginnings and endings it is necessary to take the
-. .1d Derrida has not taken.

2.
=~ancis Cairns points out that genres are as old as organized societies and that early genres
· ::re classifications in terms of content. The functions of these were to aid the listener in
-::.1king logical connections and distinctions; generic distinctions aided him in following
. ~a! communications from the poet. Genre markers served to distinguish one type of com-
-::-.Jnication from another since such communications shared many secondary elements.
~ ~a! communication demanded primary markers. Members of the same oral genre shared
~:least one primary trait for purposes of recognition by hearers. 5 From these early begin-
~-~:-~gs of communication between poet and audience, we can note that genres possessed
, ~-=ial purposes in a community, and that genres arose to contrast, complement, define
:.:..:h other's aims.
When an oral society is replaced by a literate one, the reasons for generic classification
_:-;dergo change. The functions of markers or traits become the bases for value distinctions
:.; well as for artistic distinctions and interrelations. When Aristotle deals with tragedy, for
::..:ample, he lists plot as the primary marker within tragedy; he suggests the proper model
:·~r tragedy and he compares tragedy with epic in terms of generic value. He continues to
::ote the interrelation of genres by showing the similarities and differences in qualitative
::ements and quantitative parts of tragedy and epic. "Again, tragedy has everything that
~?iC has (it can even use its metre), and moreover has a considerable addition in the music
.:.:-~d the spectacle, which produce pleasure in a most vividly perceptible way.... So much
:·Jr tragedy and epic, their nature, the number and differences of their qualitative parts,
:ie reasons for success and failure in them, and criticisms of them and how to answer
. )) 6
::~em.

Even for Aristotle generic markers are not absolutes; they indicate stages through
·.,·hich a genre passes. Moreover, the traits that are shared do not necessarily share the
-arne function. Trait sharing may be, but need not be, the way to characterize a genre. A
~enre does not exist independently; it arises to compete or to contrast with other genres, to
~omplement, augment, interrelate with other genres. Genres do not exist by themselves;
:hey are named and placed within hierarchies or systems of genres, and each is defined by
~eference to the system and its members. A genre, therefore, is to be understood in rela-
:ion to other genres, so that its aims and purposes at a particular time are defined by its
:nterrelation with and differentiation from others. Thus critics can classify a Shakespear-
ean "tragedy" not merely as a tragedy, but as a poem, a performance, a narrative, and so
iorth, depending on the points a critic wishes to make. What is at stake is not some single
 56 trait that would place it in each of these classes, but the purpose for so classifying it
within a generic system. Only if one dehistoricizes genre does the notion of classification
SECTION 1 with one or more traits shared by each member become a problem; such a claim would
GENRE THEORY make it impossible for a class to undergo change since its traits would be essential rather
than existential.
Contemporary critics do not find classification to be the purpose of genres, nor do
they find that classifications serve evaluative purposes. When Northrop Frye sets up four
genres based on the radical of presentation, he returns to the view that genres are rhetori-
cal "in the sense that the genre is determined by the conditions established between the
poet and his public.'' 7
The trait called "radical of presentation" is the marker of a genre: "Words may be acted
in front of a spectator; they may be spoken in front of a listener; they may be sung or
chanted; or they may be written for a reader" (p. 247). It is apparent that, given this single
trait, Frye has to provide numerous qualifications and interrelations in the texts he con-
sults. If Frye were a historical critic concerned with actual texts, he would proceed to illus-
trate the kind of interrelations that empirical critics develop, interrelations that show the
choral chanting, riddling, and other oral devices in works acted in front of a spectator. He
would undertake to explain how his genres interrelate historically with earlier genres as
well as with each other. His efforts, however, are directed at traditions and affinities rather
than the actualities of changing traditions and changing affinities. He knows that genre is
determined by conditions that vary between poet and public, and that the terms "condi-
tions" and "public" are both problematic. Generic distinctions, he points out, "are among
the ways in which literary works are ideally presented, whatever the actualities are" (p. 247).
"Milton, for example, seems to have no ideal of reciter and audience in mind for Paradise
Lost; he seems content to leave it, in practice, a poem to be read in a book" (p. 247). "The
purpose of criticism by genres [writes Frye] is not so much to classify as to clarify ... tradi-
tions and affinities, thereby bringing out a large number ofliterary relationships that would
not be noticed as long as there were no context established for them" (pp. 247-48).
Frye's approach accepts the ideal of markers even though he has reservations about
their use in practice. But he desists, in the Anatomy, from attributing the weakness of
markers to different historical situations. The attempt to "recuperate" Frye's approach by
historicizing it was undertaken by Fredric Jameson. He set out to convert aspects of Frye's
approach to a Marxist theory of genres which coordinates "immanent formal analysis of
the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the
evolution of social life" (p. 105). Jameson sees genre as a literary institution, as a social
contract between a writer and a particular public "whose function is to specify the proper
use of a particular cultural artifact" (p. 106). Like Frye, he argues that genres exist in per-
formance situations, but he notes that genres do undergo changes: "as texts free them-
selves more and more from an immediate performance situation, it becomes ever more
difficult to enforce a given generic rule on their readers" (p. 106). The generic contract can
indeed be broken. "The generic contract and institution itself, ... along with so many
other institutions and traditional practices, falls casualty to the gradual penetration of a
market system and a money economy.... The older generic categories do not, for all that,
die out, but persist in the half-life of the subliterary genres of mass culture, transformed
into the drugstore and airport paperback lines of gothics, mysteries, romances, best-
sellers, and popular biographies, where they await the resurrection of their immemorial,
archetypal resonance at the hands of a Frye or a Bloch" (p. 107).
The contract theory of genre avoids the concept of specific markers; it rests on an
agreement between a writer and a particular public that specifies the proper use of a
cultural artifact. But is there only one public that specifies "proper" use? And how can 57
such a contract negotiate for the present, let alone for the future? Each new text that crit-
ics join to the genre results in interrelations with other genres. How does a contract come 1.4
to be established and how is it abrogated? How many contracts exist for the same text at RALPH CoHEN

any given time? Jameson claims that each genre is "immanently and intrinsically an ide-
ology in its own right," but insofar as a genre retains past elements in a text, and insofar
as different texts become members of a genre, how is this ideology determined?
Jameson's contract theory of genre presupposes a devolution of genres that follow the
economic pattern, "the gradual penetration of a market system and a money economy."
But the homology between genre and Marxist economic history disregards the contrasting
aims of contemporary readers, as witness the diverse views about genre. Moreover, the
reconceptualization of one genre often coincides with the initiation or restancing of
others because of the process of interrelation. Thus a genre like tragedy continues despite
the fact that it is reconceptualized by "domestic" tragedy; it is not abandoned despite seri-
ous changes in the economy. It seems a logical misstep to compare a kind of writing with
an economic system rather than with the writings about an economic system. When
such writings intersect with those of different genres they do not trivialize or dispose of
such genres; they establish combinations that can make their contributions subservient
rather than dominant in the genres that include them. As for genres possessing imma-
nent ideologies, it would appear that such an assumption disregards the differences
among the members of a genre. This is not to deny that texts-as generic members-can be
interpreted as possessing ideologies, but rather that these cannot be deduced from gener-
alizations about the genre.
For example, the characters, narrative, language-indeed all aesthetic strategies of Lord
Jim-form, for Jameson, one specific instance of the symbolic act of the end of capitalist
expansion. In the history of forms, Lord Jim "may be described as a structural breakdown
of the older realisms, from which emerges not modernism alone, but rather two literary
and cultural structures, dialectically interrelated and necessarily presupposing each
other for any adequate analysis: these now find themselves positioned in the distinct and
generally incompatible spaces of the institutions of high literature and what the Frank-
furt School conveniently termed the 'culture industry,' that is, the apparatuses for the pro-
duction of'popular' or mass culture" (p. 207). Jameson argues that Lord Jim represents in its
structure the breakdown of the novel as a genre in terms of what he calls "older realisms."
From this breakdown emerge two literary or cultural structures that are interrelated-
"necessarily presupposing each other for any adequate analysis" -institutions of high
literature and the apparatuses for the production of "popular" or mass culture. Since my
concern is with genre theory and how a member of the genre "novel"-Lord Jim, for
example-alters the genre while remaining a member of the class, the question arises,
How are we to understand the persistence of a classification without charting the pro-
cesses of classification change? It is, after all, through interrelation and competition with
other genres, alterations or omissions of generic traits, and so forth that a modernist text
begins to replace an "older realism."
My argument about text classes or genres can be summarized as follows: Classifications
are empirical, not logical. They are historical assumptions constructed by authors, audi-
ences, and critics in order to serve communicative and aesthetic purposes. Such group-
ings are always in terms of distinctions and interrelations, and they form a system or
community of genres. The purposes they serve are social and aesthetic. Groupings arise
at particular historical moments, and as they include more and more members, they are
subject to repeated redefinitions or abandonment.
 58 Genres are open systems; they are groupings of texts by critics to fulfill certain ends.
And each genre is related to and defined by others to which it is related. Such relations
SECTION 1 change based on internal contraction, expansion, interweaving. Members of a genre need
GENRE THEORY not have a single trait in common since to do so would presuppose that the trait has the
same function for each of the member texts. Rather the members of a generic classifica-
tion have multiple relational possibilities with each other, relationships that are discov-
ered only in the process of adding members to a class. Thus the claim that genre study
should be abandoned because members of a genre do not share a single trait or traits can
be seen not as undermining genre but as offering an argument for its study. Aimed as an
attack against an essentialist theory, this claim fails to address those theories that begin
by denying essential generic traits altogether.

3·
Finally there is the attack on genre as an interpretative guide. The attack rests on two
premises: that of genre and that of the text. With regard to genre, the argument is that a
class generalization cannot help to interpret a specific member of the class; with regard to
text, the argument is that a specific text is indeterminate; thus no determinate statements
are useful in its interpretation. Genre defenders have at least two important answers: genres
provide expectations for interpretations, and, a variant of this, genres provide conventions
for interpretation. Elizabeth Bruss, for example, writes: "The genre does not tell us the style
or construction of a text as much as how we should expect to 'take' that style or mode of
construction-what force it should have for us. And this force is derived from the kind of
action that text is taken to be."8 A knowledge of genre, says another critic, provides "invalu-
able clues about how to interpret" a poem, 9 and the strongest argument for generic expecta-
tions is made by Hans Robert Jauss. In his essay on theory of genres and medieval vernacu-
lar literature, he writes: "The new text evokes for the reader (listener) the horizon of
expectations and 'rules of the game' familiar to him from earlier texts, which as such can
then be varied, extended, corrected, but also transformed, crossed out, or simply repro-
duced. Variation, extension, and correction determine the latitude of a generic structure; a
break with the convention on the one hand and mere reproduction on the other determines
its boundaries." 10 Jauss offers as an explanation of genre the view that "the relationship be-
tween the individual text and the series of texts formative of a genre presents itself as a pro-
cess of the continual founding and altering of horizons" (p. 88). Jauss deals with the indi-
vidual text as well as with a group of texts; yet it is difficult to see how a single text can fuse
its horizons with a body of texts each of which has its own individual fusions.
The assumption of generic expectations makes or implies the claim that generaliza-
tions about a class can help interpret any particular instance of that class. What kind of
expectations does Oedipus Rex or Hamlet or the genre tragedy offer us in understanding
Death of a Salesman that we couldn't achieve without them? Such a conclusion does Jauss
an injustice since the aim of his genre theory is to trace the succession of responses to a
text and to explain its relation to society, author, and reader. He thus pursues history, in
Jameson's terms, as a history of forms and as a history to be compared with histories of
other genres and disciplines. Jauss seems minimally interested in how a text as a member
of a genre is constituted. But such a procedure is necessary for an interpretative theory.
Jauss realizes that readers extend beyond the original responders to a text, and it
is to the continuity or succession of responders that he turns in order to explain the
responses a text elicits. One might, therefore, point out that whereas Frye directs his
generic inquiry toward traditions and affinities that a writer has, Jauss directs his to
the historical responses of readers who are governed by "rules of the game." But both, it
;.!-lould be noticed, are concerned with the changing responses toward a text and with 59
:.:xtual affinities.
"Rules of the game" are but another name for "conventions," and some genre theorists 1.4
:.~gue for the interpretative importance of genre conventions. "Texts are ... classified ac- RALPH CoHEN

~ording to what I shall call their 'semiotic nature,' [writes Gary Morson] which is to say,
:~.: conventions acknowledged to be appropriate for interpreting them .... Readers can
:.:1d do disagree about conventions for interpreting a work; when they do, I shall say they
.::sagree about its genre. Strictly speaking, therefore, I shall not be stating that given
·.·;orks belong to certain genres. I shall, rather, describe the hermeneutic consequences en-
::.iled by classifying a work as one of a particular semiotic type." 11 This genre theory substi-
: ..:tes "reading conventions" for "genre," thus avoiding the problem of generic consistency or
~.:mstituents by placing them upon "conventions." The notion of convention as a basis
:·:.>r interpreting works within a class refers to "conventions acknowledged to be appropriate
:" ) f interpreting them." But conventions of interpretation are themselves writings (or

~cnre members) that control readings, and thus they are subject to the same kind of
~ianges that genres undergo. For example, conventions about treating a work as litera-
:..:re are not conventions applicable to one genre but to all genres included under the
~.:nre "literature." Moreover, the notion of"convention" is clearly not shared by informed
~=aders of the same time since interpretative disagreements do indeed arise. My point is
::ot that interpretative conventions do not exist, but that they exist within literary criti-
~:sm and literary theory and that the attempt to define such conventions merely leads-as
:::e examples of Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, and Jacques Derrida illustrate-to different
·. :.:ws of reading conventions. If reading conventions fall within the genres of criticism
:.:1d theory, are we not involved in a circular argument? Genres are identified by reading
~0nventions. But reading conventions are themselves parts of genres or genres. Thus
~=ading conventions are themselves involved in the problem of generic specification.
The difficulty with this semiotic approach to interpretation is that the critics assume
-:nterpretation" exists nongenerically. If they considered interpretation as text- and genre-
::--ound, as I have suggested, they would be dealing with the changes in and transformation
::·texts. They would thus be led to reconsider the function of textual constituents and to
:.:1alyze "conventions" in the same manner that they analyze other generic texts.
Consider Eric Havelock's discussion of the interpenetration of oral procedures in writ-
:::n tragedy. Discussing orality as a genre that includes many oral genres, he illustrates that
:. number of the practices characteristic of oral genres enter into Attic tragedy, and the
::xample he chooses for illustration is Oedipus Rex. "The Oedipus therefore is, under one
:.spect, a personally produced product embodying a degree of personal creativity. Never-
:!-leless its composition, like that of all Greek drama, involves a partnership between the
)ral and the written, the acoustic and the visual, a dichotomy which can also be rendered
~:1 terms of tradition versus design, generic versus specific, communal versus personal. It
.sa combination which lies at the heart of all high classic Greek 'literature' from Homer
:o Euripides." 12
The point to be made here is that an individual instance of a genre-Oedipus Rex-
~an reveal its individuality only by comparison with other tragedies within the genre and
·.,·ithin the oeuvre of Sophocles, but also by comparison with older oral genres. The con-
~cptual change brought about by literacy permits us to identify a historical process of
.:hange. This process includes the absorption of elements from nontragic forms to tragedy,
and, in particular, to Sophoclean tragedy. If, in other words, we wish to study literature as
an interrelated system of texts and society, generic distinctions offer us a procedure to
accomplish this.
 60 Havelock outlines the interpenetration of one type of orality in the plays of Sopho-
cles. I quote: "The riddling of the Oedipus, then, while giving to this particular play a
SECTION 1 peculiar degree of dramatic tension, can be seen as a revival of a traditional device, rune-
GENRE THEORY monic in character and having its roots in the habits of primary orality" (p. 190). Here a
constituent of oral performance enters into a later form, and in doing so we can come to
understand how a text is multitemporal. Oedipus Rex has sedimented in it elements from
older genres or elements from earlier examples of the same genre. In this respect generic
composition expresses diverse communal (or ideological) values.
Some defenders of genre theory find no inconsistency between the claim that texts are
indeterminate and their own assumption that a text can have diverse interpretations.
The expectations of readers change and the conventions of readings change and both
these hypotheses are advanced by genre critics. I have indicated that these hypotheses
can be made more adequate, but I do not find that they have been discredited. Critics who
assume that every text is self-contradictory still have to grant that types of contradiction
exist and that such types, including their own writings, presuppose generic groupings.
The view of genre that I have been advocating has considerable potential for interpreta-
tion and literary history, and I shall indicate some of this in my final section.

4·
It is unfortunate that one of the difficulties with genre is that we have the same term to
describe a genre like novel or a particular novel like Finnegans Wake. One designation for
a whole and for parts of the whole creates the impression of an organic linkage. But knowl-
edge of the relation between the genre "novel" and members such as Austen's Emma and
Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is useful for literary study only if we can explain how
they are continuous, how discontinuous. What inquiries can a genre study undertake to
explain changes in individual texts or genres and literary and historical reasons for them?
One is to examine the different genres an author undertakes; Joyce, for example, writes
short stories, poems, a play, novels, letters. What is involved in these generic variations?
Another is to relate generic changes to changes in the writing of history, granting that
there are special and general histories, Marxist and other approaches to history. Another
is to analyze the reasons for generic omissions or neglect of genres that can be but are not
written, as the neglect of the sonnet after Milton until the end of the eighteenth century.
Another is to analyze generic transformations as, for example, the "ballad" and the "lyric"
are joined by Wordsworth to form "Lyrical Ballads." Still another generic inquiry is to ex-
amine a single narrative as it undergoes generic variations, becoming, in turn, a ballad, a
prose fiction, a tragedy, a memoir, as well as a member of other genres. This is the inquiry I
shall offer in order to consider the potentialities of generic criticism. My assumption is
that an author in making a generic choice involves himself in an ideological choice, and
that the critic in reconsidering the generic choices he attributes to a text involves himself
in certain ideological, social, and literary commitments.
There is an early seventeenth-century ballad (ca. 1600-1624) called-in short-"The
Excellent Ballad of George Barnwel." Like most ballads, it was sung in the streets, and
the sheets on which it was printed-broadsides-usually wound up on the bottom of
baking dishes or in the fireplace. The ballad is a confession addressed to the youths of
London, and it serves as a moral warning at the same time that it notes the erotic plea-
sures of immorality. Its subject matter undergoes numerous generic transformations,
indicating the persistent audience appeal of sexual seduction, criminal licentiousness,
and parricide while paradoxically invoking the need for morality. The action of the
ballad is as follows:
 1. George Barnwe!, a youth apprenticed to a merchant, is accosted by a woman. 61
2. She is an experienced harlot and seduces him.
3. As a result of his infatuation and incapacity to resist sexual pleasures, she per- 1.4
suades him to embezzle his master's money. He does so and flees to her when his RALPH COHEN

exposure is imminent.
4· She instigates him to murder and rob his rich uncle, and he does so.
5. When the money is spent, she betrays him to the authorities.
6. He escapes and betrays her to the authorities in turn and she is hanged.
7. He flees to Poland and is hanged for an unrelated murder.

This ballad was republished several times during the seventeenth century and at
:he end of the century there appeared a prose fiction chapbook based on the poem and
:o which was appended a version of the ballad. The poetic song with its first person nar-
~ative was converted into a third person prose narrative. The prose version has a differ-
ent generic history from the ballad. It is modeled upon criminal biographies with quo-
:ations from Proverbs, a life history in outline, with episodes from fabliaux. Why should
a popular form be rewritten in another popular form? (1) The rewriting is addressed to
a more literate audience than the original since it goes into detail about the effects of
:he reading of classical romances. (2) It seeks to mitigate the criminality of Barnwel by
~aking him an innocent who can't distinguish between an angel and a whore. (3) It
~akes the narrative more erotic while becoming more didactically religious. (4) It is an
attack upon the dangers of reading pagan texts. The change of form nevertheless con-
:inues a narrative that is recognizably that of the original ballad. What we have, there-
:ore, is a generic change that expands upon the narrative of the ballad, but selects certain
ieatures-like the character of the harlot-to concentrate upon. There is an antifemi-
nism that surfaces in the prose version, and a structure that resembles other criminal
~iographies.
In 1731 the ballad was rewritten as a tragedy, called The London Merchant. Here we
have an elevation of a low genre into a high one: a tragedy about common people addressed
to common people, altering the genre of tragedy that characteristically was about kings and
aristocrats and dealt with affairs of state. The subject matter and characters altered the
constituents of the tragedy. In his introduction, the author, George Lillo, argued for the
need to extend the characters and subject matter of tragedy to include common people and
the events in which they were involved. What this implied was a conceptual change in
tragedy. The genre was now a model for what critics called "domestic" tragedy. The ques-
tion for the genre critic is why and how such a subgenre is initiated. The most obvious
explanation is ideological: the plot of a known popular form becomes the subject of a
traditionally elite one. The intermingling of the two suggests an elevation of the merchant's
role that is one of the tragedy's themes. It also indicates a reshifting of the hierarchy of ge-
neric kinds. It will not do to talk here about a reader's contract or reading conventions, since
key sections of the "contract" are abrogated and conventions disregarded. This classifica-
tion shift of ballad from subliterature to high literature involves generic procedures of
transformation and incorporation too complicated to discuss here. But I can point out
that the claim for the elevation of the ballad was made by Joseph Addison in a new genre,
the periodical essay, a "newspaper" genre; it justified, by analogy, the periodical essay itself
as a literary form. Moreover, ballad elevation was made analogous to the class elevation of
the merchant. Generic consciousness is not, in the early eighteenth century, separated
from social consciousness. It does not matter that critics parodied Addison's interest in
ballads; what does matter is that his argument for genre elevation offered a procedure for
 62 treating class elevation. In this respect, generic considerations do indeed suggest that
they can shape how critics look at social life rather than merely reflect it.
SECTION 1 Some of the problems that such a genre theory invites includes the interrelation of
GENRE THEORY forms; for example, in the ballad opera individual ballads become interrelated with music,
dialogue, spectacle, and comedy. Then again, there is the phenomenon in which a single
sonnet is joined to others to form a sequence. Or a single prose narrative or short story
joined to form a series of stories.
In Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which became the central
transmission agency by which the ballad genre entered English literature, there was pub-
lished a version of the Barnwel ballad. Percy rationalized ballads as literature by claiming
they were individual compositions; he consciously sought to identify them with a na-
tional tradition and he sought to illustrate them as "literature" by including in his collec-
tion a number of esteemed contemporary poems. But an important aspect of this effort at
gaining establishment acceptance of the popular genre was his editing of them. He im-
posed on Barnwel the standards of decorum and correctness practiced by established
eighteenth-century poets, standards that he found consistent with the needs of his audi-
ence. He deliberately revised the ballad of George Barnwel, therefore, to meet their as-
sumed social and literary criteria.
What conclusions can one draw about history and genre from this limited example?
Most obviously, genres have popular and polite functions and statuses. Generic trans-
formation can be a social act. Generic transformation reveals the social changes in au-
diences and the interpenetration of popular and polite literature. Within a common
audience different genres complement or contrast with one another. Some processes of
generic alteration-for example, of the single text leading to a collective text (sonnet to
sonnet sequence)-tend to repeat themselves regardless of cultural change. The success
of one genre-for example, The London Merchant-can lead to ideological changes in
an earlier genre-the ballad-now prepared for an audience familiar with the tragedy.
Generic differentiation serves different ends, but each new rewriting of the ballad in-
volves a selection from the original narrative. The ballad dealt with the mercenary, the
economic behavior of the prostitute, but the tragedy dealt with the noble behavior of
the merchant who had no role in the poem. The elements selected thus provide a clue
to the social and cultural implications of genre. The process of sedimentation involves,
in the different genres, elements from other genres that preceded them. Some of the
ballad repetitions interpenetrate the prose fiction, and others are explored in greater
detail. Since genres are understood in terms of their interrelation they can be seen as
renewing a distance which earlier genres sought to erase, to renew a justification for
separating once again popular and polite literature, once ballads are established as po-
lite literature. Narrative can function to establish an element of continuity among dif-
ferent genres and thus provide a guide for historical continuity while making possible
the recognition of historical changes in attitude-to merchant, merchant's apprentice,
and harlot.
In this paper I have sought to answer three types of discreditation of genre theory and
to offer an alternative theory. The claim that generic classes are indecipherable or indeter-
minate I have answered by showing how to decipher them and how a process theory can
explain their transformability. The claim that members of a genre share a common ele-
ment or elements in consequence of which genre is an essentialist study, I have answered
by showing the historical naivete of this argument and by illustrating that genre theory is
not dependent on such essentialist assumptions. The claim that genre cannot be a guide
to interpretation I have answered by showing how a process theory of genre explains the
~onstituents of texts that it seeks historically to explain. The whole direction of my paper 63
:nay thus be seen as a contribution to the regeneration of genre theory.
1.4
NOTES
RALPH COHEN
1. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious 6. Aristotle, Poetics 26 1462a-1462b.
::haca, 1981), p. 105; hereafter cited in text. 7- Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
2. John Reichert, "More than Kin and Less than (Princeton, 1957), p. 247; hereafter cited in text.
'::nd: The Limits of Genre Theory," in Theories of 8. Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts
_::crary Genre, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (University (Baltimore, 1976), p. 4-
:uk, Pa., 1978), p. 57- 9· Heather Dubrow, Genre (London, 1982), p. 135.
3- Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of 10. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetics of
·>:ow/edge, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York, Reception, tr. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis, 1982),
. 7-2), p. 22. p. 88.
4. Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre," Critical 11. Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre:

:.:uiry, 7, No.1 (Autumn 1980), 64; hereafter cited Dostoevsky's "Diary of a Writer" and the Traditions
~- :ext. This essay also appeared in Glyph 7 of Literary Utopia (Austin, 1981), pp. viii-ix.
::,itimore, 1980), 176-232. 12. Eric Havelock, "Oral Composition in the
;. Francis Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles," New Literary
- :.i Roman Poetry (Edinburgh, 1972), pp. 6-7, 34· History, 16, No.1 (Autumn 1984), 186.

Lyric, History, and Genre (2009) 1.5

~ O~ATHAN CULLER

::-.an article entitled "History and Genre," Cohen quotes Fredric Jameson's claim in The
_: .<itical Unconscious that genre criticism has been "thoroughly discredited by modern lit-
::-ary theory and practice," and he sets about efficiently and systematically to consider rea-
' )!lS for the disparagement of the idea of genre and to elucidate a conception of genre that

~.:.n be defended against common criticisms. 1 Though skepticism about the idea of genre
-. .:.s remained powerful in literary studies, I believe there are signs of a growing recogni-
:.)n of the importance of generic categories. In 2007, PMLA devoted a special issue to "Re-
:::apping Genre"; the subject of the September 2009 meeting of The English Institute was
-.:-nply "Genre"; and the so-called "new lyric studies" has sparked a lively debate about the
.:.:idity and bearing of the notion of the lyric as a genre. 2 It seems timely to take up the sort
. :·argument offered by Ralph Cohen's discussion of the category of genre, its relation to
:.:story and importance to literary studies.
Traditionaliy, theorists say there are two sorts of theories of genres, empirical and
:::coretical; the latter is based on some claim about elementary possibilities of thought,
-~?resentation, or discourse. Aristotle distinguishes literary types according to the possi-
~ .c modes and objects of representation. Northrop Frye bases genre categories on "radicals
:-.:>ot forms] of presentation": "words may be acted in front of a spectator, they may be
-:-oken in front of a listener, they may be sung or chanted, and they may be written for a
-:-ader"-fundamental possibilities, which for him yield drama, epic, lyric, and narrative
:=.~:ion. 3 Goethe spoke of the "drei echte Naturformen der Dichtung" (three pure natural
 64 forms of poetry): epic, dramatic, and lyric, which he distinguished from the variety of
Dichtarten, which one might translate as empirical genres: ballads, drama, epistles, fables,
SECTION 1 ode, novel, parody, romance, et cetera. 4 The alternative to theories of genres based on logi-
GENRE THEORY cal divisions of a sphere of possibilities would be such empirical genres, groupings that are
observed or practiced, based on principles other than theoretical. Empirical genres would
be lists of whatever genres people believe exist, some based on form, others on content-
classifications that do not seem very logical-like the categories we find in bookstores.
Now these do seem to be two different conceptions of genre, which we could call theo-
retical and historical, but I believe that in separating the two conceptions one obscures
fundamental aspects of genre and creates the sort of confusion that contributes to the
tendency to dismiss genres. On the one hand, theories of genre have indeed usually at-
tempted to find a logical basis for taxonomies but use these to situate historically-attested
genres. They do not derive categories that do not correspond to historically-attested
forms of literary practice. The attempt to posit genres based on fundamental features of
language or communication always draws on historically existing genres, as Gerard Gen-
ette argues in his fine little book about genre, Introduction al'Architexte, even if, as in the
case of the romantic division into subjective, objective, and mixed, theorists disagree
about whether it is epic that is objective and drama mixed, or vice versa. Insofar as genres
are literary categories, the projection of naturalness onto them is fallacious, Genette ar-
gues: "in the classification of genres no position is essentially more natural or more ideal
than any other." 5 They are all historical categories.
This is important because our historicist age has tended to be suspicious of generic cat-
egories that previous theorists have claimed to base on some fundamental aspect of lan-
guage, communication, or representation, as if these were eternal, atemporal categories,
which of course they are not. If, on the other hand, genres are seen as merely contin-
gent empirical groupings, categories that people have for various reasons found it convenient
to use in dealing with literature, then it is easy to dismiss them as mere conveniences of
classification-as in a bookstore or catalogue-with no critical purchase or function. But the
notion of genres as merely empirical categories is very dubious-classification schemes are
never without a theoretical or ideological basis of some sort, even the most heterogeneous,
which might be based on marketing schemes and ideas about distinct target audiences. And
a great many supposedly empirical generic categories do play a constitutive role in reading
and writing, whether independently, when writers compose a detective story or readers con-
sume a romance novel, or in combination, as when a writer deploys the conventions of one
genre while ostensibly working in another. If one avoids the temptation to separate generic
categories into the theoretical and the empirical but insists that genres are always historical
yet based on some sort of theoretical rationale, they are more defensible as critical categories,
essential to the understanding both of literature as a social institution and of the individual
works that take on meaning through their relations to generic categories.
Generic categories frame both reading and writing-writers write in relation to other
texts and textual traditions, both consciously and unconsciously, imitating, misreading,
and rejecting, and readers approach works differently according to how they conceive
them, even if those expectations are going to be disappointed. It was crucial to the effect
of the French nouveau roman, for example, that these texts were approached as novels,
with the framework of expectations governing plot, character, and meaning. The concept
of the novel in its capaciousness has proved a very fruitful one for thinking about litera-
ture, perhaps especially for productions that seem to lie on its margins.
In "History and Genre," Ralph Cohen critiques essentialist theories of genre, which
presume that genres are defined by necessary features that all examples of the genre
share, and describes genres as open systems, defined in relation to one another. He sum- 65
marizes his argument as follows:
1.5
Classifications are empirical, not logical. They are historical assumptions constructed by
jONATHAN CULLER
authors, audiences, and critics in order to serve communicative and aesthetic purposes.
Such groupings are always in terms of distinctions and interrelations, and they form a sys-
tem or community of genres. The purposes they serve are social and aesthetic. Groupings
arise at particular historical moments, and as they include more and more members, they
are subject to repeated redefinitions or abandonment. 6

And he concludes "History and Genre" with the splendid example of"The Excellent Bal-
lad of George Barnwel," which began as a broadside ballad in the early seventeenth cen-
tury, was transformed into a prose fiction chapbook in the late seventeenth century, then
in 1731 was rewritten as a tragedy, The London Merchant, and finally was incorporated as
a ballad in Bishop Percy's Reliques of English Poetry in 1765 but was revised in accordance
with the standards of decorum thought appropriate to a form newly promoted as literary.
These generic transformations involve the negotiation of social meanings, drawing upon
the social and cultural implications of genres, but also using popular material to enrich
and modify ~xisting genres, such as tragedy. The rewritings highlight different narrative
elements and play up or play down the possible moral of the story. Asking what one can
learn about history and genre from this briefly sketched example, Cohen concludes,
"Most obviously, genres have popular and polite functions and statuses. Generic trans-
formation can be a social act. Generic transformation reveals the social changes in audi-
ences and the interpenetration of popular and polite literature. Within a common audi-
ence different genres complement or contrast with one another," and in general what he
calls "a process theory of genre"-seeing genres as open-ended and in a constant process
of historical transformation-"explains the constituents of texts that it seeks historically
to explain" (216-17).
In explicitly treating genres as historical rather than logical, Cohen sometimes ap-
pears to assume that genres are whatever critics of a particular period say they are (genres
"are groupings of texts by critics to fulfill certain ends" [210]). But since, as he says in a
passage I quoted earlier, genre study analyzes our procedures for acquiring and accumulat-
ing knowledge, it would be wrong merely to accept as empirical fact every ascription and
description of genre. We need to evaluate such claims, and to do so, we need to reflect on
what makes something count as a genre, posing the question of the relation of the group-
ings posited by later critics, including ourselves, to those posited by critics of an earlier
era. And as soon as we take up this problem, genres are no longer merely empirical cate-
gories with no theoretical standing. Given the historicizing inclinations of criticism these
days, it is important to stress that conceptions of genres are not just accounts of what
people of a particular period thought; it is crucial to the notion of genre as model that
people might have been wrong about them, unaware of affinities or ignoring continuities
in favor of more striking novelties, or recognizing only an attenuated version of a larger
tradition. Genre study cannot be just a matter, for instance, of looking at what Renais-
sance critics say about genres and using only those categories for thinking about Renais-
sance literature, though of course one should try them out, while keeping in mind the
possibility that more capacious and historically informed categories may be essential to
grasping the full import and deepest resources of literary productions.
In my own work on the Western lyric tradition, for example, I find myself needing to
say that poets and critics have had erroneous conceptions of the lyric, which are under-
mined by the functioning of the poems themselves, when they are viewed in the context of
 66 a longer or broader lyric tradition. This desire to correct, which drives much academic
research on subjects like this, presumes that lyric is more than a construction of the
SECTION 1 moment, that the weight of tradition helps make there be something to be right or wrong
GENRE THEORY about, and in particular that a given historical construction of or notion of the lyric can
neglect or obscure crucial aspects of the nature and function even of the poems to which
the construction is supposed most directly to apply. The theory of a genre is an abstract
model, an account of a set of norms or structural possibilities that underlie and enable the
production and reception of literature: reading something as an epic or as a novel in-
volves sets of conventions and expectations even when the text is contesting or under-
mining them. A claim about a generic model is not an assertion about some property that
all works that might be attached to this genre possess. It is a claim about fundamental
structures that may be at work even when not manifest, a claim which directs attention to
certain aspects of a work, which mark a tradition and an evolution, that is to say, dimen-
sions of transformation. The test of generic categories is how far they help relate a work to
others and activate aspects of works that make them rich, dynamic, and revealing, though
it is crucial to stress that interpretation of individual works is not the goal of poetics,
which seeks to understand how systems ofliterary discourse work.
What about lyric, then, which constitutes a particularly interesting generic problem?
Aristotle has little to say about it. Lyric was an important literary mode of his day but,
perhaps because it is fundamentally nonmimetic, it is not taken up in the Poetics. Lyric
was finally made one of three fundamental genres during the romantic period, when a
more vigorous conception of the individual subject made it possible to conceive of lyric as
mimetic: mimetic of the experience of the subject. Distinguished by its mode of enuncia-
tion, where the poet speaks in propria persona, lyric becomes the subjective form, with
drama and epic as alternately the objective and the mixed, depending on the theorist.
Hegel gives the fullest expression to the romantic theory of the lyric, whose distinguishing
feature is the centrality of subjectivity coming to consciousness of itself through experi-
ence and reflection? The lyric poet absorbs into himself the external world and stamps it
with inner consciousness, and the unity of the poem is provided by this subjectivity.
This conception of the lyric no longer has great currency in the academic world. In a
notorious article, "Genre Theory, the Lyric and Erlebnis," Rene Wellek concludes that the
idea of lyric, at least in the conception inherited from the poetic theory of German roman-
ticism as an expression of intense subjective experience, does not work. "These terms can-
not take care of the enormous variety, in history and different literatures, of lyrical forms
and constantly lead into an insoluble psychological cui de sac: the supposed intensity,
inwardness and immediacy of an experience which can never be demonstrated as certain
and can never be shown to be relevant to the quality of art. ... The way out is obvious," he
continues; "One must abandon attempts to define the general nature of the lyric or the
lyrical. Nothing beyond generalities of the tritest kind can result from it." 8 Wellek pro-
poses that we focus instead on describing particular genres, such as the ode, elegy, and
song, their conventions and traditions-a not very promising strategy for nineteenth-
and twentieth -century poetry, certainly, where many of the most interesting lyrics do not
seem to belong to those particular genres or subgenres. It would be a major theoretical
and practical failure to ignore a vast group of poems, which in fact depend upon a con-
ceptual frame for their effect.
A more recent critique of"lyric" ends up with a surprisingly similar conclusion. What
some have called "the new lyric studies" is best observed in Virginia Jackson's book, Dick-
inson's Misery and in a set of short papers in PMLA of January 2008, of which the intro-
duction by Jackson and Rei Terada's contribution are the most significant. In Dickinson's
Misery, Jackson describes the process of lyricization or lyrical reading whereby the vari- 67
ous kinds of writing in which Emily Dickinson engaged were made by editors and critics
into lyric poems. She argues that it is criticism that has made Dickinson into a lyric poet, 1.5
according to a particular model of lyric, as expression of the attitudes of a lyric persona, JoNATHAN CULLER

whereas for her producing this verse was continuous with other mundane activities such
as writing letters to friends, working in the garden, et cetera. Extending M. H. Abrams'
argument in The Mirror and the Lamp concerning the lyric as poetic norm and Paul de
Man's conception of "lyrical reading," Jackson explores the process whereby the lyric
takes form during the nineteenth century "through the development of various reading
practices ... that eventually become the practice ofliterary criticism."9 In the process, as
"poetic subgenres collapsed into the expressive romantic lyric of the nineteenth century,
the various modes of poetic circulation-scrolls, manuscript books, song cycles, miscel-
lanies, broadsides, hornbooks, libretti, quartos, chapbooks, recitation manuals, annuals,
gift books, newspapers, anthologies-tended to disappear behind an idealized scene of
reading progressively identified with an idealized mode of expression." 10
Jackson argues for a critical history of this process oflyricization, a project I am happy
to endorse. Where we disagree is that she seems to want to dissolve the category oflyric in
order to return us to a variety of particular historical practices-though this is not entirely
clear. She does not tell us how she thinks we should treat Dickinson's verse if we do not
approach it as lyric; whereas I think that a critical history oflyricization should lead us to
a more capacious understanding of the lyric tradition that is not restricted either to the
idea of the decontextualized expression of subjectivity or what I take to be its successor,
the model of the dramatic monologue with a speakers whose situation, attitude, and goals
we should novelistically reconstruct. A process theory of genre, such as Ralph Cohen's,
enables us to study historically the transformations of a genre, as the system of literary
genres undergoes immense changes, while appreciating continuities.
I would add that the historical construction of lyric is carried out by poets as well as
critics, so we can study the struggle between William Wordsworth's move to constructing
lyrical ballads, attaching lyric to the modest anecdote rather than taking the ode as para-
digmatic for lyric, and John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley's exploitation of that latter
strain in new and powerful ways. Observing particular shifts in the lyric does not, though,
prevent one from maintaining a broad conception oflyric as genre and its historical tradi-
tion. Conceiving of a broad range of possibilities for lyric in many periods and languages
can help prevent a certain narrowing of the conception of lyric and a tendency, under-
standable given the realities ofliterary education today, to treat lyric on the model of nar-
rative, so that the dramatic monologue becomes the model of lyric. II A broadly historical
and, I would add, transnational conception oflyric enhances critical understanding.
But let me narrow my inquiry to exploration of some historical continuities and discon-
tinuities that make the concept of a lyric genre valuable. Northrop Frye, in arguing that the
basis of genre distinctions is what he calls the radical of presentation, identifies an underly-
ing structure oflyric:
The lyric poet normally pretends to be talking to himself or to someone else: a spirit of na-
ture, a muse, a personal friend, a lover, a god, a personified abstraction, or a natural object. ...
The radical of presentation in the lyric is the hypothetical form of what in religion is called
the "I-Thou" relationship. The poet, so to speak, turns his back on his listeners, though he
may speak for them and though they may repeat some of his words after hi mY

One way in which lyrics may hyperbolically mark this combination of indirection and ad-
dress is through the figure of apostrophe, a turning aside from supposedly real listeners to
 68 address to someone or something that is not an ordinary, empirical listener, such as a
nightingale, an urn, or one's own poem. I have been interested in the neglect of this rather
SECTION 1 striking figure by most accounts of lyric, even discussions of the ode, where it is of course
GENRE THEORY endemic, and have speculated that this absence of critical attention indicates that apostro-
phe represents what is most embarrassing in lyric: the pretension to vatic action that critics
prefer to evade, as they discuss instead, for instance, the theme of the power of poetic
imagination-a serious matter that ought not to be linked to an empty "o" of address:
"0 Wild West Wind ..."13
Apostrophe works to constitute a poetic speaker taking up an active relationship to a
world or element of the world constructed as addressee, an addressee which is often asked
to respond in some way, as if the burden of this apostrophic event were to make some-
thing happen, as in Shelley's address to the wild west wind,

Be thou spirit fierce, my spirit,

Be thou me, impetuous one ...
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy ... 14

The wind should respond, in the terms the verse suggests.

The fundamental characteristic of lyric, in this account, is not the description and
interpretation of a past event but the performance of an event in the lyric present, a time
of enunciation. What lyrics demand of the world is often something to be accomplished
by the performativity of lyric itself. With Charles Baudelaire's "So is sage, o rna douleur,"
douleur is to be assuaged by this familiar address, which constructs it as a child through
the familiar, chiding address, "sois sage!" Rainer Maria Rilke's lines from the ninth
Duino Elegy address the earth:

Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst, unsichtbar

in uns erstehn?-Ist es dein Traum nicht,
Einmal unsichtbar zu sein? 15
[Earth, isn't this what you want, to arise invisible within us? Is it not your dream to be,
one day, invisible?]

The claim is that the things of the world, addressed as subjects, would desire, like all sub-
jects, to transcend a purely material condition and become spirit. If earth can be ad-
dressed and have desires, it must want to be a spirit, to be invisible, and the speaker boldly
agrees to help:

Erde, unsichtbar!
Was, wenn Verwandlung nicht, ist dein drangender Auftrag?
Erde, du Iiebe, ich will.
[Earth, invisible!
What is your urgent command if not transformation.
Earth, you darling, I will.]

The speaker agrees to attempt this transformation willed by earth, which the poem hopes
to accomplish, constructing Earth as addressee.
In locating lyric value in a certain performativity, I have essentially treated it as an
active form of naming, which performatively seeks to create what it names, and may fail
or succeed in this extraordinarily arrogant ambition.
Apostrophe, which in this account can be identified with the ambitions oflyric, is not
just one trope among others but a troping on the circuit of communication or situation of
address, a turning aside from whatever is taken to be the real or normal addressee (in fo- 69
rensic oratory, the judge) to some other entity which is not an ordinary, present addressee.
Apostrophes foreground the act of address, lift it out of ordinary empirical contexts, and 1.5
thus at some level identify the poetic act as ritualistic, hortatory, a special sort of linguistic joNATHAN CuLLER

event.
So, William Blake's "The Sick Rose," addressing the rose, "0 rose, thou art sick," con-
stitutes it as addressee:

0 rose, thou art sick;

The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy. 16

This is a poem that has provoked a good deal of critical discussion, especially because other
texts of Blake's do not treat sexuality as a dark, destructive secret-except insofar as a per-
verted religious and social order constrains and represses it. Critics argue about this poem's
take on beauty and human sexuality: is this a poem of beauty destroyed by evil, or a critique
of the myth of female flight and male pursuit, or a representation of a puritanical, mis-
ogynistic male speaker who imputes sickness to any rose or woman whose bed is a site of
sexual pleasure? We seem to have a scenario in which a phallic force has invaded the
rose's bed. But Blake in one draft changed "his dark secret love" to "her dark secret love,"
making the invisible worm feminine, before changing it back again, suggesting that, for
him at least, this is not a straightforward male-female scenario, with the rose as the
woman and the worm as male sexuality. 17 Blake himself seems to have been convinced
that social and religious structures which keep fantasies from leading to action were a
source of illness: "He who desires and acts not breeds pestilence," he wrote. And there is
a highly relevant sequence in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: "She never told her love, I But
let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, I feed on her damask cheek" (and, of course dam-
ask is a rose). 18
But I am interested in the function of the address to the rose, which in this version of
lyric works to constitute it as a sentient creature, a potential listener, or rather, such address
presupposes an animate listener, as in Alphonse de Lamartine's apostrophic question,
"Objets inanimes, avez vous done une ame?" 19 [You inanimate objects, have you a soul?]
The difference between asking "Do inanimate objects have a soul" and asking them whether
they have a soul is that the latter presupposes the animicity by the act of addressing the
question to them and constitutes the first person speaker who is reciprocally implied by
the you as a visionary. The energy of poetic address creates a surprisingly strong sense of
prophetic revelation and marks this speech act as poetic discourse. If one has trouble
figuring out what the speaker is doing in saying "0 Rose, thou art sick," it is because this
statement does not correspond to any everyday speech act, and the simplest answer to
what the speaker is doing is something like "waxing poetical." Address to the rose, which
personifies it as sentient creature with a life of its own, creating anI-thou relation between
poetic subject and natural object, works to create the subject as bardic, visionary voice, and
can be inscribed in the tradition of poetry that seeks to make things happen by acts of nam-
ing. Paradoxically, the more such poetry addresses natural or inanimate objects, the more
 70 it proffers figures of voice, the more it reveals itself at another level as not spoken, but as
writing that through its personification engenders an image of voice, for the readers to
SECTION 1 whom it presents itself again and again. By addressing the flower or other nonempirical
GENRE THEORY listeners the poet works to constitute him- or herself as poet, in the tradition not just of
epic, with its address to the muse, but oflyric.
Whether we think of apostrophic poems as establishing an !-thou relation with the
universe, whose elements they constitute as addressees, or whether we see them as acts of
radical solipsism, constituting a world with projections of the self, the apostrophic act
works to constitute the poetic voice as vatic agent and thus to foreground the poetic act
itself. Paul de Man, in a notoriously difficult paper, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the
Lyric," analyzes Baudelaire's apostrophic poem "Obsession"-"Grands bois, vous
m'effrayez comme des cathedrales!"-as a translation of the celebrated "Correspondances"
into lyric intelligibility. De Man treats the lyric genre as a "defensive motion of the under-
standing," designed to make the world intelligible if oppressive (by contrast with what he
sees as the ultimate unintelligibility of the pre-text that "Obsession" transforms, "Corre-
spondances.")20 His analysis tempts readers to prefer the enumeration of the end of "Cor-
respondances" (which he calls a "stutter") to the lyrical operation set in motion by apos-
trophic address, but his implicit disparagement of the lyric only strengthens my inclination
to explore the generic tradition of the lyric and the relation of apostrophic address to it.
The notion of the lyric as a genre which undergoes historical transformations leads
one to consider the historicity of this lyrical function of address, as an aspect of that ge-
neric history. So we might compare Blake's address to the rose with Edmund Waller's
"Go, lovely Rose" of a century earlier. 21

Go, lovely rose!

Tell her that wastes her time and me
That now she knows
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that's young,

And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth

Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

Then die, that she

The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share,
That are so wondrous sweet and fair! 22

Addressing the rose and urging it to speak and then to die seems a different sort of ges-
ture here, for though it is certainly a distinctively poetic act it has a social dimension
missing in the Blake: the rose is lovely like the lady, asked to serve as a concrete instantia-
tion of the poetic act of comparison, but it is also the messenger, the go-between, a met- n
onymical extension of the speaker. By invoking the rose, this speaker does not so much
constitute himself as bardic voice as engage in social indirection. By apostrophizing the 1.5
rose rather than addressing the beloved directly, and telling the rose what to say to the be- JoNATHAN CuLLER

loved, the speaker makes the argument about virginity more gracious, less aggressive and
self-serving, than it would be if he directly told the imagined beloved, "suffer yourself to be
desired." This apostrophic poem does indeed involve a turning away from a possible em-
pirical listener, the lady, to another addressee, which is animated by this poetic address, but
the animation is not an intensification or an instantiation ofbardic power so much as gra-
cious and witty indirection, a social gesture. Though there is a certain poetic extravagance
in willing the rose to speak, giving it lines to utter, and directing it to die, the trope of apos-
trophe seems here to install us in a social situation rather than extract us from it, as so often
happens in the apostrophic lyrics of the romantic period.
Frye's model oflyric as address overheard (following John Stuart Mill's initial formu-
lation) makes apostrophic address one possibility, but it also allows for others, such as po-
ems explicitly addressed to no one or nothing, which are generally taken as meditative, as if
we were overhearing the poet speaking to himself or herself, and poems addressed to per-
sons, living or dead, real or imaginary, which modern criticism has tended to treat as min-
iature dramas that we overhear. One modern theoretical model takes literary works as fic-
tional imitations of real world speech acts-the novel as fictional history or fictional
biography, for example-and in this account, the lyric is a fictional representation of a
personal utterance. It is as if every poem began, "For example, I or someone might say
23
•••• " Confronted with a lyric, we interpret it by asking what is the situation of the speaker
(not to be identified with the poet) and attempt to work out what would lead someone to
speak thus and feel thus. I would argue that the dominant modern notion of the lyric-at
least in Anglo-American criticism, and especially in textbooks for the study of poetry-is
the dramatic monologue, in which we overhear a speaker responding to a situation.
Criticism of the modern lyric, or modern criticism of the lyric in general, has chal-
lenged the romantic conception oflyric as the direct or sincere expression of emotion, but in
so doing, it has allowed emphasis to fall on the importance of thinking of the speaker of
lyric as a persona created by the poet rather than as the poet him- or herself. If the speaker
is a persona, then interpretation of the poem is a characterization of the persona, as if he
or she were a character in a novel, and of the situation in which the event of speech occurs.
Though there is separation of the discourse of the lyric from the life of the poet as historical-
biographical figure, emphasis falls on the lyric as a representation of consciousness, and
ideally of a drama of consciousness. 24 Some of the reasons for the dominance of this
model are, very schematically, (r) the post-Enlightenment assumption of the priority of
experience over reflection,2 5 (2) the increasing priority in literary education of the model
of prose fiction, where narrators and point of view are central, (3) modernism's claim to
objectivity, and the consequent stress on the poem as artifact rather than statement by the
poet, and (4) the New Criticism's insistence that interpretation focus on the words on
the page rather than the intentions of the author, so that it became a point of doctrine that
the speaker of a lyric is to be treated as a persona, not the poet him- or herself. William
Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks write in their history of criticism, "Once we have dissoci-
ated the speaker of the lyric from the personality of the poet, even the tiniest lyric reveals
itself as drama." 26
There are numerous reasons to resist this normative model of lyric as dramatic mono-
logue: it pushes lyric in the direction of the novel by adopting a mimetic model and focus-
ing on the speaker as character, and it neglects all those elements of lyric-including
 72 rhyme, meter, refrain-not drawn from ordinary speech acts. But an alternative model
of lyric emerges from Greek and Roman literature, illustrating the importance of treating
SECTION 1 lyric as a continuing genre that undergoes historical transformations. In The Idea of the
GENRE THEORY Lyric, Ralph Johnson writes, "Lyric as inherited from the Greeks was sung to an audience,
so that there is a you as well as an I, 'a speaker, or a singer,' talking to, singing to, another
person or persons." 27 Modern conceptions of the lyric, he complains, have led us to imag-
ine that the lyric in general is to be understood as the solipsistic meditation of an indi-
vidual, expressing or working out personal feelings, if not the impersonal statement of
someone unable to communicate, whereas in the classical model, 'T' and "you," speaker
and listener, are, according to Johnson, directly related to one another in a community.
Now a lot could be said about the familiar move that opposes public to private, speech
to writing, integrated to alienated, but Johnson's argument at least alerts us to the potential
importance of address, though it does lead us to ask whether the forms of address in the
classical lyric do really indicate an integrated community. Though there are many second-
person pronouns in Greek and Latin lyrics, they very rarely designate a community the
poet could be said to address directly. Sappho's only complete poem is a complex invocation
of Aphrodite where the discourse addressed to Aphrodite quotes how the Goddess herself
on previous occasions invoked Sappho: "What is it now? Who, 0 Sappho is wronging
you?" 28 This configuration is very striking and unusual, giving concrete form to what for
later poets could only be wished for: that the figures invoked would actually respond. And
Sappho's most famous poem-"He seems to me equal to the Gods, that man who sits oppo-
site you and listens close to your sweet speaking...."-addresses the girl whose sweet speak-
ing and laughing "puts the heart in my chest on wings." "When I look at you, even a moment,
no speaking is left in me, no: my tongue breaks and thin fire races under the skin ...."29
Critics trying to imagine directness here have suggested that this might have been sung at
a wedding celebration, praising the bridegroom as a god while describing a powerful
erotic reaction to the bride, but this is certainly a stretch (and of course the poem is in-
complete). What we have is both extremely powerful and hard to imagine spoken directly
to the you as its audience. We find here a structure of triangulated address fundamental
to lyric.
If we look to Horace and Catullus for models of lyric, we find, first, that they do not
address the Roman people, the most obvious possible community. Of eighty-seven poems
in the first three books of Horace's Odes, only nine are addressed to no one and twenty-
three to nonhuman addressees (including gods and goddesses), but the address to human
you's, I argue, does not function in a radically different way from apostrophic address. The
pronouns do not designate the true audience for the poems. Even the poems addressed to
historical individuals seem designed to honor them (as a dedication would today) rather
than to tell them something they need to know, but the real test case is the corpus of poems
addressed to people regarded as fictional (many of them given Greek names). How do
these work? One of the most famous, the fifth ode of Book One, is addressed to Pyrrha.

Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa

perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
cui flavam religas comam,
simplex munditiis? heu, quotiens fidem
mutatosque deos flebit, et aspera
nigris aequora vent is
emirabitur insolens,
 qui nunc te fruitur credulus au rea; 73
qui semper vacuam, semper amabilem
sperat, nescius aurae 1.5
fallacis! miseri, quibus jONATHAN CULLER

intemptata nites! me tabula sacer

votiva paries indicat uvida.
suspendisse potenti ...
vestimenta maris deo.

What slim youngster soaked in perfumes

is hugging you now, Pyrrha, on a bed of roses
deep in your lovely cave? For whom
are you tying up your blonde hair?
You're so elegant and simple. Many's the time
he'll weep at your faithlessness and the changing gods,
and be amazed at seas
roughened by black winds,
but now in all innocence he enjoys your golden beauty
and imagines you always available, always loveable,
not knowing about treacherous breezes-
! pity poor devils who have no experience of you
and are dazzled by your radiance. As for me,
the tablet on the temple wall announces
that I have dedicated my dripping clothes
to the god who rules the sea. 30

Classicists, influenced by modern critical practice, have now begun to treat this poem as
a dramatic monologue. One writes that the speaker "is addressing Pyrrha and as we read we
gradually come to understand their story and their characters."31 To understand the poem,
then, would be to read it as the fictional representation of a real world speech act of address
and thus to try to reconstruct the situation of utterance, the relation of speaker and hearer
ro one another (with as much of their history as is relevant and inferable), and the aim or
?Urpose of the speaker's utterance. To read the poem in this way certainly gives readers
something to do, but it involves a great deal of speculation, and many simple questions
are hard to answer. Where does this speech act take place, for instance? And why would
the speaker say this to Pyrrha? Is the speaker supposed to have stumbled upon Pyrrha in
a cave, being amorously pressed by a gracile youth unknown to him? Presumably not-we
don't imagine he interrupts the love scene to put the question-but if we posit that he
encounters Pyrrha elsewhere, in the street, for instance, it is hard to imagine the motiva-
tion for the question, "What slim youngster is pressing you now?" Or if we take this as a
wittily hyperbolic version of "so who are you seeing these days?" then it is hard to imag-
ine the circumstances or rationale for the comments that follow, which would be better
addressed to a young man. This is especially true, given the order of the comments about
this young lover: one might imagine someone saying, "''m sure he is dazzled by your radi-
ance now, not realizing that the future will bring storms," but the converse-"Many's the
time that he will weep at your faithlessness .... though he is dazzled now"-seems much
more like musing about the vicissitudes oflove than an utterance to the woman on a spe-
cific occasion.
If we try to imagine lines five to thirteen addressed to Pyrrha, it makes the poem obscure
rather than clarifies it, whereas if we think of the poem as a disquisition on the vicissitudes
 74 of love directed at an imagined Pyrrha, apostrophized in the lyric present, the poem
makes much more sense. And the final lines come to emphasize the speaker's position as
SECTION 1 worldly wise, not jealous of the youth who may have supplanted him (as the one might
GENRE THEORY suppose he was if the poem were really spoken to Pyrrha). The speaker announces that he
is no longer engaged in such matters, which he can now view with wry amusement. Rather
than a dramatic monologue representing a real world speech act addressed to Pyrrha, we
have an addressee imagined for rhetorical purposes. Why not take the ode as an act of
poetic address: writing which imagines the addressee as it imagines the gracile youth, with
his present excitement and his future disappointments, and whose act of addressing, pre-
cisely because it does not seem focused on the referent of the pronoun, is more likely to
attain the reader?
We could say, in fact, that the key question is, whom is the poem seeking to persuade?
In ancient Greece, poetry was a form of epideictic discourse, a rhetorical transaction and
instrument of ethical paideia. The audience was expected to make observations (theoros),
about what is praiseworthy, worthy of belief. In Plato's Protagoras, where the protagonists
discuss the arguments of a poem by Simonides in order to reach conclusions about the
world, everyone takes it for granted that, as Protagoras says, the most important part of a
man's paideia is to be capable concerning verses-capable of judging which sayings of
poets are well-crafted and valuable and to give reasons when questioned. (Socrates argues,
against the received view, that people ought to discuss dialectic rather than poetry). 32
So, whom does this poem seek to persuade, and of what? Not Pyrrha-she is not ad-
dressed so as to be persuaded to act differently, for her behavior is compared to the natu-
ral changeableness of the sea. More plausibly, the gracile youth, or rather, since he is not
addressed at all, but pitied, as one of many "Miseri," perhaps all those "poor devils" who
don't anticipate the storms that will come. One could certainly argue that it is the audi-
ence of the poem that is to be persuaded to adopt the attitude that the speaking voice
projects of knowledgeable wariness, accepting what comes. Pyrrha is elegant and not to
be shunned; the youth should enjoy himself now, but not get too involved, for reversals
will occur, suffering will follow. There is a time for everything, says the wise man, retir-
ing from the amorous fray.
Now there are a few of Horace's odes that should be read as dramatic monologues
(such as Natis in usum, !.27)-where to make sense of the poem we really do have to imag-
ine a context of utterance and work out why in these circumstances someone would say
just these words. But they are rare, whereas this sort of structure-address to a you in a
situation better left indeterminate-is extremely common. The second person address
functions above all to place the act of lyric speech in the lyric present and to accentuate
the paradox of poetry, that evokes immediacy while adopting a temporality of deferral, as
it repeats itself for readers in a future not even imagined, and articulates an attitude
whose appropriateness future audiences of readers are to judge.
In a strange article entitled "The View from Halicarnassus," Jeffrey Walker argues
that Pindar's encomiastic verse provides the proper model for lyric-lyric is the original
form of epideictic rhetoric-and that because of a "brilliant mistake" by Aristotle, who
failed to honor the Greek notion of lyric, criticism has ever since possessed only a model
for minor poetry, what he calls the "apostrophic lyric," where lyric discourse is not public,
argumentative discourse, but private ejaculation. 33 It is ironic that Walker seeks to trivial-
ize the modern lyric by calling it "apostrophic," since until recently critics universally
treated apostrophe, when it occurs in modern lyrics, as a purely conventional element
inherited from the classical tradition. But Walker is right to emphasize that the classical
model helps us towards a more capacious and apposite notion of lyric. (Whether Pindar,
as opposed to, say, Horace, is really a good model for the lyric tradition is a different ques- 75
tion.) Only a broad concept of lyric, with its sweep across eras and languages, provides
the scope to activate possibilities occluded by narrower conceptions, such as that of the 1.5
ode or elegy, useful though they may be. joNATHAN CuLLER

In particular, the classical example reminds us that the model of the dramatic
:nonologue-a speaker-character whose situation and aims need to be reconstructed
novelistically-forecloses important traditional aspects and potentials oflyric-especially
:hose features, from rhythm and sound patterning to performative address, by which it
differentiates itself from narrative fiction and mimetic modes generally.
In an afterword to the PMLA issue on genre, Bruce Robbins compares notions of genre
:o the norms in the socioeconomic realm that allow, for instance, transnational compari-
;;on of living standards and argues that the case of genre in a nutshell is that of historical
-:omparison. 34 Genre, he maintains, is a crucial instrument combatting the professional
:nclination to focus on a literary period-which he calls "a sort of pseudo-anthropocentric
:-~orm that has been adopted for a long time out oflaziness. It is one level of magnification
.1mong others, no less valid than any other but also no less arbitrary." Genre, he insists,
offers us "versions of history that take us beyond the period-by-period agenda of our or-
Jinary studies." Foregrounding the generic cateogry oflyric, for instance, helps promote
:he possibility of comparisons with other traditions, and allows us, for example, to see
:hat it is perhaps only because the greatest systematic philosopher of the west, Aristotle,
··\TOte a treatise on mimetic literature and did not include lyric that lyric has not been
;;een as a foundational genre in Western culture until the romantic era, whereas it is in
.)ther cultures, whose literature did not originate in epic or tragedy. 35 "Why," Robbins
-:oncludes, "would criticism voluntarily deprive itself of this additional scale of transperi-
.)dic vision and the aggregations it brings into view?" 36 Whether or not notions of genre
are what make possible a literary history, as Ralph Cohen's work suggests, they certainly
.::an connect various narrower modes of reading and interpretation and enlarge our vi-
;.ion of historical discursive possibilities.
A. R. Ammons, in a posthumously published poem, "Aubade," evokes the "you" of po-
etic address and its history:

that "you" has

moved out of the woods and rocks and streams

and now is elusive, "nowhere to/be found or congratulated."37 When one writes "you," the
?oem suggests, "one lifts up one's voice to the/lineations of singing." The "you" of lyric
address "dwells in our heads now as a bit of/yearning, maybe vestigial." Perhaps there is
.:.!ways a you in the lyric, whether expressed or not, whatever its variations, as lyrics strive
:o be an event in the special temporality of the lyric present. Often that you is expressed-
:he you of the beloved, or the wind, a flower, a yearning. But the lyric "you" is also a bit of
:anguage, a trope, and Ammons concludes that this "nearly reachable presence" is also
-something/we can push aside as we get up to rustle up a/little breakfast." It is through
?reserving the notion of lyric as a genre, an open process of generic negotiation, that such
:,istorical variations in function and effect can be registered and analyzed.

NOTES

1. Ralph Cohen, "History and Genre," NLH 17, Studies" in PMLA 123, no. 1 (January 2008). The
::o. 2 (!986): 203. original manifesto for this movement is Virginia
2. "Remapping Genre," PMLA 122, no. 5 Jackson and Yopie Prins, "Lyrical Studies,"
October 2007). See the section "The New Lyric Victorian Literature and Culture (1999), 521-30.
 76 3. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 23. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, On the Margins
(Princeton, Nj: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), 247. of Discourse (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
SECTION 1 4. The Dichtarten are listed alphabetically: 1978), 142.
"Allegorie, Ballade, Can tate, Drama, Elegie, 24. See Culler, "Changes in the Study of the
GENRE THEORY
Epigramm, Epistel, Epopee, Erziihlung, Fabel, Lyric," and Herbert Tucker, "Dramatic Monologue
Hero ide, Idylle, Lehrgedicht, Ode, Parodie, and the Overhearing ofLyric," both in Lyric Poetry:
Roman, Romanze, Satyre." johann Wolfgang von Beyond the New Criticism, ed. C. Hosek and P.
Goethe, "No ten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985).
Verstiindnis des West-iistlichen Diwans," in 25. An influential book in the Anglo-American
Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe (Munich: tradition, Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of
C. H. Beck, 1981), 2:187-89. Experience (New York: Random House, 1957),
5· Gerard Genette, The Architext, An Introduc- argues that the desire to overcome subjectivity and
tion (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California achieve objectivity has determined poetic
Press, 1992), 65-6. developments since the end of the Enlightenment,
6. Cohen, "History and Genre," 210 (hereafter and that the central idea of the nineteenth century
cited in text). is the doctrine that the imaginative apprehension
7· G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford gained through immediate experience is primary
Univ. Press, 1975), 2:1113. and certain, whereas the analytical reflection that
8. Rene Wellek, "Genre Theory, the Lyric and follows upon it is secondary and problematical.
Erlebnis," Discriminations (New Haven, CT: Yale Thus the poem comes to be above all the
Univ. Press, 1970), 251-2. representation of the experience of consciousness
9. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp as it senses, investigates, recollects, and so on-
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), 84-8; Paul de not an idea distilled from past experience but the
Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the drama of consciousness as it engages some aspect
Lyric," The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: of the human condition, and it offers the reader an
Columbia Univ. Press, 1984); Virginia jackson, experience rather than a truth. Langbaum goes on
Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading to describe an important nineteenth century form,
(Princeton, Nj: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005), 7. the dramatic monologue, but does caution against
10. Virginia jackson and Yopie Prins, "Lyrical the inclination to treat as dramatic monologue
Studies," Victorian Literature and Culture (1999), every poem where there seems to be a speaker
521-30. other than the poet. For a shrewd discussion see
11. See jonathan Culler, "Why Lyric?" PMLA 123, Herbert Tucker, "Dramatic Monologue and the
no. 1 (January 2008). Overhearing of Lyric" in Lyric Poetry: Beyond the
12. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 250. New Criticism, ed. C. Hosek and P. Parker.
13. jonathan Culler, "Apostrophe," The Pursuit of 26. W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary
Signs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), 135-54. Criticism: A Short History (New York: 1957), 675.
14. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West 27. W. R. johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes
Wind," Poetical Works (Boston: Cambridge in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley and Los
Riverside Press, 1957), 377-9. Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1982), 3.
15. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies (Einse- 28. Sappho #I in Anne Carson, If Not Winter:
ideln, Switzerland: Daimon Verlag, 1992), 90. Fragments ofSappho (New York: Virago Press,
16. William Blake, Complete Works, ed. Geoffrey 2003), I.

Keynes (London: Clarendon Press, 1969), 213. 29. Sappho #31, If Not Winter, 63.
q. Blake, Complete Works, 175. 30. Horace, The Complete Odes and Epodes, trans.
18. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 2, David West (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 30.
scene 4. 31. David West, Horace Odes I, Carpe Diem
19. Alphonse de Lamartine, Oeuvres poetiques (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 40.
(Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 392. 32. See jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in
20. De Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 9,
the Lyric," 261. 149; (Plato's Protagoras, 339-47) Epideictic
21. See Paul Alpers, "Apostrophe and the rhetoric, which Walker argues derives from
Rhetoric of Renaissance Lyric," forthcoming. archaic lyric, includes panegyric, and unlike
22. Edmund Waller, "Go, Lovely Rose," Oxford pragmatic rhetoric, which is directed towards
Anthology of English Poetry (New York: Oxford decision, is directed to an audience that does not
Univ. Press, 1956), 322. make decisions, krites, but forms opinions in
response to the discourse, which thus "shapes and foundation genre for the poetics or literary 77
cultivates the basic codes of value and belief by assumptions of cultures throughout the world. Only
which a society or culture lives." This holds, he Western poetics differs. Even the major civilizations
1.5
argues, for the audience of Thucydides, Plato, and that have not shown a need to develop a systematic
jONATHAN CULLER
Sappho. And of course Horace aspires to revive the poetics (the Islamic, for instance) have demonstrably
Greek lyric tradition of Sappho and Alcaeus. based their ideas ofliterature on lyric assumptions."
33. Jeffrey Walker, "The View from Halicarnas- "Why Lyric?" in The Renewal of Song: Renovation in
sus: Aristotelianism and the Rhetoric of Epideictic Lyric Conception and Practice, ed. Earl Miner and
Song," in New Definitions of Lyric, ed. Mark Amiya Dev (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000). And he
Jeffreys (New York: Routledge, 1998), 19-21. adds, "The first thing to be said oflyric poetic
34. Bruce Robbins, "Afterword," PMLA 12, no. 5 systems is that they are not mimetic."
(October 2007): 1648. 36. Robbins, "Afterword," 1650.
35. Earl Miner, an eminent comparatist of Asian 37. A. R. Ammons, Bosh and Flapdoodle (New
literatures as well as English, observes: "Lyric is the York: Norton, 2005), 22-4.

How to Recognize a Poem When 1.6

You See One (1980)
STANLEY FISH

Last time I sketched out an argument by which meanings are the property neither of fixed
and stable texts nor of free and independent readers but of interpretive communities that
are responsible both for the shape of a reader's activities and for the texts those activities
produce. In this lecture I propose to extend that argument so as to account not only for
the meanings a poem might be said to have but for the fact of its being recognized as a
poem in the first place. And once again I would like to begin with an anecdote.
In the summer of 1971 I was teaching two courses under the joint auspices of the Lin-
guistic Institute of America and the English Department of the State University of New
York at Buffalo. I taught these courses in the morning and in the same room. At 9:30 I
would meet a group of students who were interested in the relationship between linguistics
and literary criticism. Our nominal subject was stylistics but our concerns were finally
theoretical and extended to the presuppositions and assumptions which underlie both
linguistic and literary practice. At n:oo these students were replaced by another group
whose concerns were exclusively literary and were in fact confined to English religious
poetry of the seventeenth century. These students had been learning how to identify
Christian symbols and how to recognize typological patterns and how to move from the
observation of these symbols and patterns to the specification of a poetic intention that
was usually didactic or homiletic. On the day I am thinking about, the only connection
between the two classes was an assignment given to the first which was still on the black-
board at the beginning of the second. It read:
 78 Jacobs- Rosenbaum
Levin
SECTION 1 Thorne
GENRE THEORY Hayes
Ohman(?)

I am sure that many of you will already have recognized the names on this list, but for
the sake of the record, allow me to identify them. Roderick Jacobs and Peter Rosenbaum are
two linguists who have coauthored a number of textbooks and coedited a number of an-
thologies. Samuel Levin is a linguist who was one of the first to apply the operations of
transformational grammar to literary texts. J.P. Thorne is a linguist at Edinburgh who,
like Levin, was attempting to extend the rules of transformational grammar to the notori-
ous irregularities of poetic language. Curtis Hayes is a linguist who was then using trans-
formational grammar in order to establish an objective basis for his intuitive impression
that the language of Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire is more complex than the
language of Hemingway's novels. And Richard Ohmann is the literary critic who, more
than any other, was responsible for introducing the vocabulary of transformational gram-
mar to the literary community. Ohmann's name was spelled as you see it here because I
could not remember whether it contained one or two n's. In other words, the question
mark in parenthesis signified nothing more than a faulty memory and a desire on my part
to appear scrupulous. The fact that the names appeared in a list that was arranged verti-
cally, and that Levin, Thorne, and Hayes formed a column that was more or less centered
in relation to the paired names ofJacobs and Rosenbaum, was similarly accidental and was
evidence only of a certain compulsiveness if, indeed, it was evidence of anything at all.
In the time between the two classes I made only one change. I drew a frame around the
assignment and wrote on the top of that frame "p. 43." When the members of the second
class filed in I told them that what they saw on the blackboard was a religious poem of the
kind they had been studying and I asked them to interpret it. Immediately they began to
perform in a manner that, for reasons which will become clear, was more or less predict-
able. The first student to speak pointed out that the poem was probably a hieroglyph, al-
though he was not sure whether it was in the shape of a cross or an altar. This question
was set aside as the other students, following his lead, began to concentrate on individual
words, interrupting each other with suggestions that came so quickly that they seemed
spontaneous. The first line of the poem (the very order of events assumed the already
constituted status of the object) received the most attention: Jacobs was explicated as a
reference to Jacob's ladder, traditionally allegorized as a figure for the Christian ascent to
heaven. In this poem, however, or so my students told me, the means of ascent is not a
ladder but a tree, a rose tree or rosenbaum. This was seen to be an obvious reference to the
Virgin Mary who was often characterized as a rose without thorns, itself an emblem of
the immaculate conception. At this point the poem appeared to the students to be operat-
ing in the familiar manner of an iconographic riddle. It at once posed the question, "How
is it that a man can climb to heaven by means of a rose tree?" and directed the reader to
the inevitable answer: by the fruit of that tree, the fruit of Mary's womb, Jesus. Once this
interpretation was established it received support from, and conferred significance on,
the word "thorne," which could only be an allusion to the crown of thorns, a symbol of
the trial suffered by Jesus and of the price he paid to save us all. It was only a short step
(really no step at all) from this insight to the recognition of Levin as a double reference,
first to the tribe of Levi, of whose priestly function Christ was the fulfillment, and second
to the unleavened bread carried by the children of Israel on their exodus from Egypt, the
place of sin, and in response to the call of Moses, perhaps the most familiar of the old
:estament types of Christ. The final word of the poem was given at least three comple- 79
:nentary readings: it could be "omen," especially since so much of the poem is concerned
·,,·ith foreshadowing and prophecy; it could be Oh Man, since it is man's story as it inter- 1.6
>ects with the divine plan that is the poem's subject; and it could, of course, be simply STANLEY FISH

-amen," the proper conclusion to a poem celebrating the love and mercy shown by a God
·.,·ho gave his only begotten son so that we may live.
In addition to specifying significances for the words of the poem and relating those
>ignificances to one another, the students began to discern larger structural patterns. It
·,,·as noted that of the six names in the poem three-Jacobs, Rosenbaum, and Levin-are
:-Iebrew, two-Thorne and Hayes-are Christian, and one-Ohman-is ambiguous, the
J.mbiguity being marked in the poem itself (as the phrase goes) by the question mark in
?arenthesis. This division was seen as a reflection of the basic distinction between the old
Jispensation and the new, the law of sin and the law oflove. That distinction, however, is
':Jlurred and finally dissolved by the typological perspective which invests the old testa-
:nent events and heroes with new testament meanings. The structure of the poem, my
students concluded, is therefore a double one, establishing and undermining its basic
?attern (Hebrew vs. Christian) at the same time. In this context there is finally no pres-
sure to resolve the ambiguity of Ohman since the two possible readings-the name is
:-Iebrew, the name is Christian-are both authorized by the reconciling presence in the
?Oem of Jesus Christ. Finally, I must report that one student took to counting letters and
:ound, to no one's surprise, that the most prominent letters in the poem were S, 0, N.
Some of you will have noticed that I have not yet said anything about Hayes. This is
":>ecause of all the words in the poem it proved the most recalcitrant to interpretation, a fact
:-tot without consequence, but one which I will set aside for the moment since I am less in-
:erested in the details of the exercise than in the ability of my students to perform it. What
:s the source of that ability? How is it that they were able to do what they did? What is it
:hat they did? These questions are important because they bear directly on a question
often asked in literary theory, What are the distinguishing features of literary language?
Or, to put the matter more colloquially, How do you recognize a poem when you see one?
The commonsense answer, to which many literary critics and linguists are committed, is
that the act of recognition is triggered by the observable presence of distinguishing fea-
tures. That is, you know a poem when you see one because its language displays the char-
acteristics that you know to be proper to poems. This, however, is a model that quite obvi-
ously does not fit the present example. My students did not proceed from the noting of
distinguishing features to the recognition that they were confronted by a poem; rather, it
was the act of recognition that came first-they knew in advance that they were dealing
with a poem and the distinguishing features then followed.
In other words, acts of recognition, rather than being triggered by formal characteris-
tics, are their source. It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of
attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic
qualities. As soon as my students were aware that it was poetry they were seeing, they began
to look with poetry-seeing eyes, that is, with eyes that saw everything in relation to the
properties they knew poems to possess. They knew, for example (because they were told
by their teachers), that poems are (or are supposed to be) more densely and intricately or-
ganized than ordinary communications; and that knowledge translated itself into a
willingness-one might even say a determination-to see connections between one word
and another and between every word and the poem's central insight. Moreover, the as-
sumption that there is a central insight is itself poetry-specific, and presided over its own
realization. Having assumed that the collection of words before them was unified by an
informing purpose (because unifying purposes are what poems have), my students
 80 proceeded to find one and to formulate it. It was in the light of that purpose (now as-
sumed) that significances for the individual words began to suggest themselves, signifi-
SECTION 1 cances which then flesh out the assumption that had generated them in the first place.
GENRE THEORY Thus the meanings of the words and the interpretation in which those words were seen to
be embedded emerged together, as a consequence of the operations my students began to
perform once they were told that this was a poem.
It was almost as if they were following a recipe-if it's a poem do this, if it's a poem, see
it that way-and indeed definitions of poetry are recipes, for by directing readers as to
what to look for in a poem, they instruct them in ways of looking that will produce what
they expect to see. If your definition of poetry tells you that the language of poetry is com-
plex, you will scrutinize the language of something identified as a poem in such a way as to
bring out the complexity you know to be "there." You will, for example, be on the look-out
for latent ambiguities: you will attend to the presence of alliterative and consonantal pat-
terns (there will always be some), and you will try to make something of them (you will
always succeed); you will search for meanings that subvert, or exist in a tension with the
meanings that first present themselves; and if these operations fail to produce the antici-
pated complexity, you will even propose a significance for the words that are not there,
because, as everyone knows, everything about a poem, including its omissions, is signifi-
cant. Nor, as you do these things, will you have any sense of performing in a willful man-
ner, for you will only be doing what you learned to do in the course of becoming a skilled
reader of poetry. Skilled reading is usually thought to be a matter of discerning what is
there, but if the example of my students can be generalized, it is a matter of knowing how
to produce what can thereafter be said to be there. Interpretation is not the art of constru-
ing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them.
To many, this will be a distressing conclusion, and there are a number of arguments that
could be mounted in order to forestall it. One might point out that the circumstances of my
students' performance were special. After all, they had been concerned exclusively with re-
ligious poetry for some weeks, and therefore would be uniquely vulnerable to the deception
I had practiced on them and uniquely equipped to impose religious themes and patterns on
words innocent of either. I must report, however, that I have duplicated this experiment
any number of times at nine or ten universities in three countries, and the results were
always the same, even when the participants know from the beginning that what they are
looking at was originally an assignment. Of course this very fact could itself be turned
into an objection: doesn't the reproducibility of the exercise prove that there is something
about these words that leads everyone to perform in the same way? Isn't it just a happy
accident that names like Thorne and Jacobs have counterparts or near counterparts in
biblical names and symbols? And wouldn't my students have been unable to do what they
did if the assignment I gave to the first class had been made up of different names? The
answer to all of these questions is no. Given a firm belief that they were confronted by a
religious poem, my students would have been able to turn any list of names into the kind
of poem we have before us now, because they would have read the names within the as-
sumption that they were informed with Christian significances. (This is nothing more
than a literary analogue to Augustine's rule of faith.) You can test this assertion by replac-
ing Jacobs-Rosenbaum, Levin, Thorne, Hayes, and Ohman with names drawn from the
faculty of Kenyon College-Temple, Jordan, Seymour, Daniels, Star, Church. I will not
exhaust my time or your patience by performing a full-dress analysis, which would in-
volve, of course, the relation between those who saw the River Jordan and those who saw
more by seeing the Star of Bethlehem, thus fulfilling the prophecy by which the temple of
Jerusalem was replaced by the inner temple or church built up in the heart of every Chris-
tian. Suffice it to say that it could easily be done (you can take the poem home and do it 81
yourself) and that the shape of its doing would be constrained not by the names but by
the interpretive assumptions that gave them a significance even before they were seen. 1.6
This would be true even if there were no names on the list, if the paper or blackboard STANLEY FISH

were blank; the blankness would present no problem to the interpreter, who would im-
mediately see in it the void out of which God created the earth, or the abyss into which
unregenerate sinners fall, or, in the best of all possible poems, both.
Even so, one might reply, all you've done is demonstrate how an interpretation, if it is
prosecuted with sufficient vigor, can impose itself on material which has its own proper
shape. Basically, at the ground level, in the first place, when all is said and done, "Jacobs-
Rosenbaum Levin Thorne Hayes Ohman(?)" is an assignment; it is only a trick that allows
you to transform it into a poem, and when the effects of the trick have worn off, it will re-
turn to its natural form and be seen as an assignment once again. This is a powerful argu-
ment because it seems at once to give interpretation its due (as an act of the will) and to
maintain the independence of that on which interpretation works. It allows us, in short, to
preserve our commonsense intuition that interpretation must be interpretation of some-
thing. Unfortunately, the argument will not hold because the assignment we all see is no less
the product of interpretation than the poem into which it was turned. That is, it requires
just as much work, and work of the same kind, to see this as an assignment as it does to see
it as a poem. If this seems counterintuitive, it is only because the work required to see it as
an assignment is work we have already done, in the course of acquiring the huge amount of
background knowledge that enables you and me to function in the academic world. In order
to know what an assignment is, that is, in order to know what to do with something identi-
fied as an assignment, you must first know what a class is (know that it isn't an economic
grouping) and know that classes meet at specified times for so many weeks, and that one's
performance in a class is largely a matter of performing between classes.
Think for a moment of how you would explain this last to someone who did not already
know it. "Well," you might say, "a class is a group situation in which a number of people are
instructed by an informed person in a particular subject." (Of course the notion of"subject"
will itself require explication.) "An assignment is something you do when you're not in class."
"Oh, I see," your interlocutor might respond, "an assignment is something you do to take
your mind off what you've been doing in class." "No, an assignment is a part of a class." "But
how can that be if you only do it when the class is not meeting?" Now it would be possible,
finally, to answer that question, but only by enlarging the horizons of your explanation to
include the very concept of a university, what it is one might be doing there, why one might
be doing it instead of doing a thousand other things, and so on. For most of us these matters
do not require explanation, and indeed, it is hard for us to imagine someone for whom they
do; but that is because our tacit knowledge of what it means to move around in academic life
was acquired so gradually and so long ago that it doesn't seem like knowledge at all (and
therefore something someone else might not know) but a part of the world. You might think
that when you're on campus (a phrase that itself requires volumes) that you are simply walk-
ing around on the two legs God gave you; but your walking is informed by an internalized
awareness of institutional goals and practices, of norms of behavior, of lists of do's and
don't's, of invisible lines and the dangers of crossing them; and, as a result, you see every-
thing as already organized in relation to those same goals and practices. It would never oc-
cur to you, for example, to wonder if the people pouring out of that building are fleeing
from a fire; you know that they are exiting from a class (what could be more obvious?) and
you know that because your perception of their action occurs within a knowledge of what
people in a university could possibly be doing and the reasons they could have for doing it
 82 (going to the next class, going back to the dorm, meeting someone in the student union). It
is within that same knowledge that an assignment becomes intelligible so that it appears to
SECTION 1 you immediately as an obligation, as a set of directions, as something with parts, some of
GENRE THEORY which may be more significant than others. That is, it is a proper question to ask of an as-
signment whether some of its parts might be omitted or slighted, whereas readers of poetry
know that no part of a poem can be slighted (the rule is "everything counts") and they do
not rest until every part has been given a significance.
In a way this amounts to no more than saying what everyone already knows: poems
and assignments are different, but my point is that the differences are a result of the dif-
ferent interpretive operations we perform and not of something inherent in one or the
other. An assignment no more compels its own recognition than does a poem; rather, as
in the case of a poem, the shape of an assignment emerges when someone looks at some-
thing identified as one with assignment-seeing eyes, that is, with eyes which are capable
of seeing the words as already embedded within the institutional structure that makes it
possible for assignments to have a sense. The ability to see, and therefore to make, an as-
signment is no less a learned ability than the ability to see, and therefore to make, a poem.
Both are constructed artifacts, the products and not the producers of interpretation, and
while the differences between them are real, they are interpretive and do not have their
source in some bedrock level of objectivity.
Of course one might want to argue that there is a bedrock level at which these names
constitute neither an assignment or a poem but are merely a list. But that argument too
fails because a list is no more a natural object-one that wears its meaning on its face and
can be recognized by anyone-than an assignment or a poem. In order to see a list, one
must already be equipped with the concepts of seriality, hierarchy, subordination, and so
on, and while these are by no mean esoteric concepts and seem available to almost every-
one, they are nonetheless learned, and if there were someone who had not learned them,
he or she would not be able to see a list. The next recourse is to descend still lower (in the
direction of atoms) and to claim objectivity for letters, paper, graphite, black marks on
white spaces, and so on; but these entities too have palpability and shape only because of
the assumption of some or other system of intelligibility, and they are therefore just as
available to a deconstructive dissolution as are poems, assignments, and lists.
The conclusion, therefore, is that all objects are made and not found, and that they
are made by the interpretive strategies we set in motion. This does not, however, commit
me to subjectivity because the means by which they are made are social and conventional.
That is, the "you" who does the interpretative work that puts poems and assignments and
lists into the world is a communal you and not an isolated individual. No one of us wakes up
in the morning and (in French fashion) reinvents poetry or thinks up a new educational
system or decides to reject seriality in favor of some other, wholly original, form of orga-
nization. We do not do these things because we could not do them, because the mental
operations we can perform are limited by the institutions in which we are already embed-
ded. These institutions precede us, and it is only by inhabiting them, or being inhabited
by them, that we have access to the public and conventional senses they make. Thus while
it is true to say that we create poetry (and assignments and lists), we create it through in-
terpretive strategies that are finally not our own but have their source in a publicly avail-
able system of intelligibility. Insofar as the system (in this case a literary system) con-
strains us, it also fashions us, furnishing us with categories of understanding, with which
we in turn fashion the entities to which we can then point. In short, to the list of made or
constructed objects we must add ourselves, for we no less than the poems and assign-
ments we see are the products of social and cultural patterns of thought.
 To put the matter in this way is to see that the opposition between objectivity and 83
subjectivity is a false one because neither exists in the pure form that would give the op-
position its point. This is precisely illustrated by my anecdote in which we do not have 1.6
free-standing readers in a relationship of perceptual adequacy or inadequacy to an equally STANLEY FJsH

free-standing text. Rather, we have readers whose consciousnesses are constituted by a set
of conventional notions which when put into operation constitute in turn a conventional,
and conventionally seen, object. My students could do what they did, and do it in unison,
because as members of a literary community they knew what a poem was (their knowl-
edge was public), and that knowledge led them to look in such a way as to populate the
landscape with what they knew to be poems.
Of course poems are not the only objects that are constituted in unison by shared ways
of seeing. Every object or event that becomes available within an institutional setting can be
so characterized. I am thinking, for example, of something that happened in my classroom
_iust the other day. While I was in the course of vigorously making a point, one of my stu-
dents, William Newlin by name, was just as vigorously waving his hand. When I asked the
other members of the class what it was that Mr. Newlin was doing, they all answered that
he was seeking permission to speak. I then asked them how they knew that. The immedi-
ate reply was that it was obvious; what else could he be thought to be doing? The meaning
of his gesture, in other words, was right there on its surface, available for reading by any-
one who had the eyes to see. That meaning, however, would not have been available to
someone without any knowledge of what was involved in being a student. Such a person
might have thought that Mr. Newlin was pointing to the fluorescent lights hanging from the
ceiling, or calling our attention to some object that was about to fall ("the sky is falling,"
~the sky is falling"). And if the someone in question were a child of elementary or middle-
school age, Mr. Newlin might well have been seen as seeking permission not to speak but to
go to the bathroom, an interpretation or reading that would never occur to a student at Johns
Hopkins or any other institution of"higher learning" (and how would we explain to the un-
initiated the meaning of that phrase).
The point is the one I have made so many times before: it is neither the case that the
significance of Mr. Newlin's gesture is imprinted on its surface where it need only be read
off, or that the construction put on the gesture by everyone in the room was individual and
idiosyncratic. Rather, the source of our interpretive unanimity was a structure of interests
and understood goals, a structure whose categories so filled our individual consciousnesses
that they were rendered as one, immediately investing phenomena with the significance
they must have, given the already-in-place assumptions about what someone could pos-
sibly be intending (by word or gesture) in a classroom. By seeing Mr. Newlin's raised
hand with a single shaping eye, we were demonstrating what Harvey Sacks has character-
ized as "the fine power of a culture. It does not, so to speak, merely fill brains in roughly
the same way, it fills them so that they are alike in fine detail." 1 The occasion of Sacks's
observation was the ability of his hearers to understand a sequence of two sentences-
"The baby cried. The mommy picked it up."-exactly as he did (assuming, for example
that "the 'mommy' who picks up the 'baby' is the mommy of that baby"), despite the fact
that alternative ways of understanding were demonstrably possible. That is, the mommy
of the second sentence could well have been the mommy of some other baby, and it need
not even have been a baby that this "floating" mommy was picking up. One is tempted to
say that in the absence of a specific context we are authorized to take the words literally,
which is what Sacks's hearers do; but as Sacks observes, it is within the assumption of a
context-one so deeply assumed that we are unaware of it-that the words acquire what
seems to be their literal meaning. There is nothing in the words that tells Sacks and his
 84 hearers how to relate the mommy and the baby of this story, just as there is nothing in the
form of Mr. Newlin's gesture that tells his fellow students how to determine its significance.
SEcnoN 1 In both cases the determination (of relation and significance) is the work of categories of
GENRE THEORY organization-the family, being a student-that are from the very first giving shape and
value to what is heard and seen.
Indeed, these categories are the very shape of seeing itself, in that we are not to imagine
a perceptual ground more basic than the one they afford. That is, we are not to imagine a
moment when my students "simply see" a physical configuration of atoms and then assign
that configuration a significance, according to the situation they happen to be in. To be in
the situation (this or any other) is to "see" with the eyes of its interests, its goals, its under-
stood practices, values, and norms, and so to be conferring significance by seeing, not after
it. The categories of my students' vision are the categories by which they understand them-
selves to be functioning as students (what Sacks might term "doing studenting"), and ob-
jects will appear to them in forms related to that way of functioning rather than in some
objective or preinterpretive form. (This is true even when an object is seen as not related,
since nonrelation is not a pure but a differential category-the specification of something
by enumerating what it is not; in short, nonrelation is merely one form of relation, and its
perception is always situation-specific.)
Of course, if someone who was not functioning as a student was to walk into my class-
room, he might very well see Mr. Newlin's raised hand (and "raised hand" is already an
interpretation-laden description) in some other way, as evidence of a disease, as the salute of
a political follower, as a muscle-improving exercise, as an attempt to kill flies; but he would
always see it in some way, and never as purely physical data waiting for his interpretation.
And, moreover, the way of seeing, whatever it was, would never be individual or idiosyn-
cratic, since its source would always be the institutional structure of which the "see-er"
was an extending agent. This is what Sacks means when he says that a culture fills brains
"so that they are alike in fine detail"; it fills them so that no one's interpretive acts are ex-
clusively his own but fall to him by virtue of his position in some socially organized envi-
ronment and are therefore always shared and public. It follows, then, that the fear of so-
lipsism, of the imposition by the unconstrained self of its own prejudices, is unfounded
because the self does not exist apart from the communal or conventional categories of
thought that enable its operations (of thinking, seeing, reading). Once one realizes that
the conceptions that fill consciousness, including any conception of its own status, are
culturally derived, the very notion of an unconstrained self, of a consciousness wholly
and dangerously free, becomes incomprehensible.
But without the notion of the unconstrained self, the arguments of Hirsch, Abrams, and
the other proponents of objective interpretation are deprived of their urgency. They are
afraid that in the absence of the controls afforded by a normative system of meanings, the self
will simply substitute its own meanings for the meanings (usually identified with the inten-
tions of the author) that texts bring with them, the meanings that texts "have"; however, if
the self is conceived of not as an independent entity but as a social construct whose opera-
tions are delimited by the systems of intelligibility that inform it, then the meanings it
confers on texts are not its own but have their source in the interpretive community (or
communities) of which it is a function. Moreover, these meanings will be neither subjective
nor objective, at least in the terms assumed by those who argue within the traditional frame-
work: they will not be objective because they will always have been the product of a point of
view rather than having been simply "read off''; and they will not be subjective because that
point of view will always be social or institutional. Or by the same reasoning one could say
that they are both subjective and objective: they are subjective because they inhere in a par-
ticular point of view and are therefore not universal; and they are objective because the point 85
of view that delivers them is public and conventional rather than individual or unique.
To put the matter in either way is to see how unhelpful the terms "subjective" and "ob- 1.6
_iective" finally are. Rather than facilitating inquiry, they close it down, by deciding in ad- STANLEY FisH

vance what shape inquiry can possibly take. Specifically, they assume, without being aware
that it is an assumption and therefore open to challenge, the very distinction I have been
putting into question, the distinction between interpreters and the objects they interpret.
That distinction in turn assumes that interpreters and their objects are two different kinds
of acontextual entities, and within these twin assumptions the issue can only be one of
control: will texts be allowed to constrain their own interpretation or will irresponsible
interpreters be allowed to obscure and overwhelm texts. In the spectacle that ensues, the
spectacle of Anglo-American critical controversy, texts and selves fight it out in the per-
sons of their respective champions, Abrams, Hirsch, Reichert, Graff on the one hand, Hol-
land, Bleich, Slatoff, and (in some characterizations of him) Barthes on the other. But if
selves are constituted by the ways of thinking and seeing that inhere in social organizations,
and if these constituted selves in turn constitute texts according to these same ways, then
there can be no adversary relationship between text and self because they are the necessar-
ily related products of the same cognitive possibilities. A text cannot be overwhelmed by an
irresponsible reader and one need not worry about protecting the purity of a text from a
reader's idiosyncrasies. It is only the distinction between subject and object that gives rise
to these urgencies, and once the distinction is blurred they simply fall away. One can re-
spond with a cheerful yes to the question "Do readers make meanings?" and commit one-
self to very little because it would be equally true to say that meanings, in the form of cultur-
ally derived interpretive categories, make readers.
Indeed, many things look rather different once the subject-object dichotomy is elimi-
nated as the assumed framework within which critical discussion occurs. Problems disap-
pear, not because they have been solved but because they are shown never to have been
problems in the first place. Abrams, for example, wonders how, in the absence of a norma-
tive system of stable meanings, two people could ever agree on the interpretation of a work
or even of a sentence; but the difficulty is only a difficulty if the two (or more) people are
thought of as isolated individuals whose agreement must be compelled by something ex-
ternal to them. (There is something of the police state in Abrams's vision, complete with
posted rules and boundaries, watchdogs to enforce them, procedures for identifying their
\·iolators as criminals.) But if the understandings of the people in question are informed by
the same notions of what counts as a fact, of what is central, peripheral, and worthy of be-
ing noticed-in short, by the same interpretive principles-then agreement between them
will be assured, and its source will not be a text that enforces its own perception but a way
of perceiving that results in the emergence to those who share it (or those whom it shares)
of the same text. That text might be a poem, as it was in the case of those who first "saw"
~Jacobs-Rosenbaum Levin Hayes Thorne Ohman(?)," or a hand, as it is every day in a
thousand classrooms; but whatever it is, the shape and meaning it appears immediately to
have will be the "ongoing accomplishment" 2 of those who agree to produce it.

NOTES

1. "On the Analysability of Stories by Children," and maintain the features of everyday life. See,
:n Ethnomethodology, ed. Roy Turner (Baltimore: for example, Don H. Zimmerman, "Fact as a
?enguin, 1974), p. 218. Practical Accomplishment," in Ethnomethodology,
2. A phrase used by the ethnomethodologists to pp. 128-143·
~haracterize the interpretive activities that create
SECTION 2

Models of Lyric

Focusing on "models oflyric" borrowed from earlier centuries, the essays collected in this
section offer exemplary rather than generic approaches; that is to say, they generalize from
particular historical examples of poets or poems in order to make broad claims about lyric
as it may be found (or found missing) in other literary periods. For some critics, an earlier
model may serve as prototype for a transhistorical idea of lyric, or as an imagined origin
for a continually self-transforming lyric tradition; for other critics, an earlier model may
serve as a contrast case to demonstrate historical differences and discontinuities in ideas
about lyric. But on both ends of this critical spectrum, lyric is already assumed to be a ge-
neric category that exists across history. Thus, while the previous section of The Lyric The-
ory Reader showed the consolidation of lyric as a genre through twentieth-century genre
theory, this section demonstrates how that idea has been projected back into literary his-
tory. The essays are arranged chronologically according to the models to which they refer
(drawn from classical, medieval, and early modern periods, and extending to the late nine-
teenth century). Such a chronological arrangement is itself reminiscent of early-twentieth-
century studies on the history oflyric, such as Lyric Poetry by Ernest Rhys and The English
Lyric by Felix Schelling, both published in 1913 as surveys of Western poetics that chronicled
the evolution or devolution oflyric from one literary period to the next. However, our pur-
pose in juxtaposing different historical models of lyric (just a few among many possible
examples) is not to suggest that this story really is the history oflyric but rather to empha-
size the continual reinvention of that history by Anglo-American critics for the purposes
of modern lyric reading.
We include W. R. Johnson as one example of a critic who (in a longer tradition of liter-
ary criticism) looks back to classical antiquity to discover the origins oflyric. In The Idea
of Lyric, Johnson announces that the theoretical project of his book is to advance an idea of
"this genre as immutable and universal" (2), and he refers to classical poets like Sappho
and Catullus to define the "typical lyric form" in terms of direct address: "The most usual
mode in Greek lyric (probably) and in Latin lyric (certainly) was to address the poem (in
Greek, the song) to another person or to other persons" (4). By contrast, the modern lyric
(according to Johnson, in a reformulation of Mill) is characterized by the conversion of
direct to indirect address, leading to the loss of"the lyric You" and the dissolution of"the
lyric I." Johnson is in this sense working in a long tradition of literary criticism that seeks 87
to describe the modern lyric 'T' by way of ancient Greek poetry. In that tradition of trac-
ing the modern lyric back to its classical origin, Sappho in particular becomes the site of SecTION 2
lyric invention and lyric possibility. As Yopie Prins has argued in Victorian Sappho, this MoDELS oF LYRIC

idealization of Sappho has a long and varied history, culminating in nineteenth-century

personifications of the poetess as an exemplary lyric figure precisely because her song is
always already lost. But for Johnson, the late Victorian context for the reception of the
Sapphic fragments has become a background assumption: Sappho and classical lyric sim-
ply do represent the source for the poetry we recognize in modernity as lyric.
Yet the disappearance (or death) of classical lyric is also the beginning of its afterlife in
theory, as Johnson goes on to argue in "On the Absence of Ancient Lyric Theory." He dis-
covers the critical invention of modern lyric in ancient literary criticism, exemplified by
Hellenistic scholar-librarians who "lived in a world of books rather than performed poems,
in a world where music, had for the most part, separated from poetry and where the occa-
sions for and the function of the old lyric poetry had either disappeared or had been al-
tered beyond recognition." In Johnson's account, Aristophanes of Byzantium (who ar-
ranged the poems of Pindar into seventeen books) was a pivotal figure for generating an
.-\lexandrian theory of lyric genre that was further elaborated by Horace, the Latin poet
and critic "who was to serve as the essential link in the chain of Western lyrical tradition."
.-\ccording to Johnson, "largely because of the work and genius of Horace, it is this rhetori-
.:al theory oflyric poetry that dominates European poetry from the late Middle Ages until
\·ery recent times." Into this longer history Johnson projects another essential feature of
lyric that can only become explicit (and fully explicated) in modern lyric theory, as he
writes: "One thing about the nature of poetry that moderns have steadily recognized and
that ancients could not recognize is the significance, the importance, of the inner stories
that personal lyric imitates." Assuming the continuity of a longer Western tradition, John-
son's approach to lyric theory is both retrospective (looking back on classical lyric) and
prospective (looking ahead to modern lyric); indeed, it is only in the presence of this mod-
ern idea that we discover what was always implicit or "absent" in ancient lyric theory.
Moving from classical to medieval models oflyric, we excerpt an article by Seth Lerer,
who explores the transition from Old to Middle English poetry, before and after the Nor-
man conquest of England. He revisits a commonplace of twentieth-century criticism,
where "to speak of the origins of Middle English lyric is to speak about the idea of the
lyric voice itself and, furthermore, about the birth of subjectivity in the vernacular." But
Lerer argues that this birth also marks the afterlife of Old English idioms and genres, as
he goes on to trace the historical process by which older genres like the poem on the grave
are embedded (or entombed) in later Middle English lyrics. He exhumes an elegiac strain
in these poems (in a more detailed analysis, not included in the excerpt below) and also in
a reading of "The Owl and the Nightingale," as an early Middle English poem in which
~we may discern not just the outpouring of a lyric voice but an assessment of the idea of
!vricality itself." While emphasizing that "the lyric, as we have been taught to think of it, is
foreign to pre-conquest England," Lerer also assumes a normative lyric reading in order to
analyze how "the Nightingale, traditionally a figure for the secular, the lyrical, the felt, the
emotive, makes a case not just for a particular approach to life or love but for a lyric subjec-
tivity." In his reading, "The Owl and the Nightingale" exemplifies the emergence of "the
idea of the lyric voice and of the literary as a function of the speaking subject," albeit in
~a placement of the speaking self at moments of decline, nostalgia, or internal exile."
From a moment in which the lyric seemed not to exist, Lerer thus moves to the moment
at which he claims what we now think of as the modern lyric subject began to emerge.
 88 Yet such moments of modern lyric emergence tend to repeat themselves. Identifying
the 1590s as another critical turning point in the history of English poetry, Heather Du-
SecTJON 2 brow's essay surveys the proliferation of"many types oflyric" in order to ask, "Why did the
MooeLs OF LYRIC Renaissance lyric develop when and how?" Dubrow argues that definitions and descrip-
tions of the lyric should be historically specific because "the variety lyric manifests even
within a single historical period, such as the early modern one, offers further caveats about
generalizations." Despite the difficulty of extrapolating a general idea of lyric from early
modern miscellanies and hierarchies of genre, (Dubrow notes that "the lyric does not win
the lottery" in that revolving wheel of fortune), she does connect the characterization of
the poet "with his well-tuned lyre and well-accorded voice" (in Sidney's 1595 "Defence of
Poetrie") to the emergence of a lyric mode that can be found in a variety of poetic genres.
According to Dubrow, "genre provides the best perspective on the sixteenth-century lyric,"
glimpsed in various generic classifications including epithalamium, complaint, elegy,
hymn, love song, sonnet, and pastoral, the last of these being "a strikingly reflexive genre"
that may be understood as "metalyric" insofar as it demonstrates how "the workings of
poetry itself are at the core of the lyric mode." Hovering between genre and mode, Dubrow's
definition understands later ideas about lyric as already embedded in Renaissance lyric, yet
she does note that "One can also assert with confidence that Renaissance lyrics variously
qualify and challenge definitions that emphasize an isolated speaker overheard rather
than participate in social interactions." For Dubrow, early modern lyric made the mod-
ern lyric possible, but remains distinguished by its temporalizing adjective-it was not
yet everything we now take a lyric to be.
By contrast, Helen Vendler insists that "lyric, though it may refer to the social, remains
the genre that directs its mimesis toward the performance of the mind in solitary speech,"
whether that mimesis is in the modern or in the early modern period. For Vendler, the
lyric always was what it now is. She begins her commentary on Shakespeare's sonnets with
a general introduction that explains and defends her approach to lyric reading as a radi-
cally privatized, internalized, and transhistorical activity. Going beyond Mill's formula-
tion, Vendler argues that "the act of the lyric is to offer its reader a script to say," not as if
the poem were "overheard" or as if the poet were "speaking to himself," but as an "utter-
ance for us to utter as ours." What is understood to be "as if" by Mill is literalized and
dramatized by Vendler in her reading of Shakespeare's sonnets, which she declares "new
in Western lyric" and indeed the very model of lyric because the sonnets demonstrate
most perfectly how "the lyric gives us the mind alone with itself." As a supplement to
critical and scholarly editions of Shakespeare, the pedagogical purpose ofVendler's book
is to teach the reader to inhabit the structure of the sonnet stanza (often figured as a
room) as a space for private reading, where "lyric can present no 'other' as alive and lis-
tening or responding in the same room as the solitary speaker." Writing in the tradition
of Anglo-American New Criticism, and especially of her teacher Reuben Brower (further
discussed in section 3 of The Lyric Theory Reader), Vendler explicates the formal struc-
tures and patterns of Shakespeare's sonnets in order to demonstrate "the strategies that
create a credible speaker with a complex and imaginative mind (a mind which we take on
as our own when stepping into the voice)." On the one hand, Vendler attributes the inven-
tion of the speaker to the poet, as she proclaims, "Shakespeare's speaker, alone with his
thoughts, is the greatest achievement, imaginatively speaking, of the sequence." On the
other hand, the speaker is a critical invention that is predicated on-and according to
Vendler, predicted by-a voice that is found in Shakespeare's sonnets as the fulfillment of
modern assumptions about reading lyric as a genre. Following this logic oflyric reading,
the "mind which we take on as our own" is indeed our own. Thus it may come as no sur-
prise that the original publication ofVendler's book on Shakespeare included a recording 89
of the sonnets recited by Vendler herself, whose greatest achievement, imaginatively speak-
ing, is to produce a reading of the sequence that imagines the convergence of speaker, SEcTION 2

reader, and author in her own voice. Vendler's radically performative approach to the his- MooELs oF LYRIC
tory oflyric reading makes the lyric always a creature of the present tense, a living vehicle
of readerly expectation and experience.
As an influential literary critic in the study of Romanticism in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, M. H. Abrams turned to a later moment in literary history to discover the origins of an
expressive model of lyric. In "The Lyric as Poetic Norm," Abrams describes how "the lyric
form ... connected by critics to the state of mind of the author" increasingly became a "po-
etic norm" in the course of the eighteenth century, leading toward its apotheosis in high
Romanticism. In part, this literary historical narrative draws on the work of Norman Ma-
clean, who traced shifting theories of the lyric in the eighteenth century by demonstrating
how the greater ode (associated with the Longinian sublime and English imitations of the
Pindaric Ode) gave way to the increased versification and diversification of the lesser ode
'included among "minor" poetic genres like the sonnet, song, epitaph, elegy, and so on). For
.\Iaclean and Abrams alike, a more abstract idea of lyric as poetic norm thus emerged
through a graduallyricization of the ode. Abrams further builds on this idea by looking for
its origins not only in biblical and classical prototypes for eighteenth-century ideas about
lyric, but in the translations and imitations of Sanskrit and Persian poems published by Sir
William Jones in 1772. According to Abrams, "Jones employs the lyric not only as the origi-
nal poetic form, but as the prototype for poetry as a whole, and thereby expands what had
occasionally been proposed as the differentia of one poetic species into the defining attri-
bute of the genus." Through the example of Jones, the late-eighteenth-century Orientialist
who proclaimed the primitive origins of lyric as expression of the passions, Abrams makes
a powerful claim for a reorientation oflyric reading in nineteenth-century England, leading
to "its climax in the theory ofJohn Mill." But what Abrams attributes to Jones-namely, the
expansion of one poetic species into the defining attribute of the genre-may in fact be de-
finitive for twentieth-century lyric theory, in its progressive expansion of all poetry into an
abstract idea of lyric. In the process of historicizing the emergence of the lyric as poetic
norm, Abrams assumes the existence of that norm then as well as now.
The modern critical investment in the lyric as poetic norm is evident as well in an-
other essay by Abrams, "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric," not re-
printed here but worth mentioning because of its influence on twentieth-century ideas
about Romantic poetry. Abrams identifies a certain kind of descriptive-meditative Ro-
mantic poem that presents "a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually a lo-
.:alized, outdoor setting, whom we overhear as he carries on, in a fluent vernacular which
rises easily to a more formal speech, a sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with
the outer scene but more frequently with a silent human auditor, present or absent" (76-77).
Emerging from various descriptive poetic genres in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, this Romantic genre is (according to Abrams) "of great interest because it was the
earliest Romantic formal invention, and at once demonstrated the stability of organization
and the capacity to engender successors which define a distinct lyric species. New lyric
forms are not as plentiful as blackberries, and when one turns up, it is worth critical atten-
tion" (79). Here again, a "distinct lyric species" has been expanded into a defining attribute
of the genus. What Abrams calls the "greater Romantic Lyric" is not just another lyric
form but the very form oflyric that twentieth-century readers have retrospectively identi-
fied with Romanticism, as a critical turning point from "the greater ode" celebrated by
neoclassical criticism to the expressive lyric celebrated by modern criticism.
 90 The greater Romantic lyric canonized by Abrams looks somewhat differPnt, however,
from the perspective of the Victorian dramatic monologue, as Herbert Tucker argues in
SECTION 2 "Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric." In a canny rereading of Mill, Tucker
MooELs oF LYRIC suggests that Mill's lyricism was "overheard" in the sense of being "heard too much" and
"overdone" by poets like Browning and Tennyson, whose invention of the dramatic mono-
logue played out "a reductio ad absurdum of the very lyric premises staked out in Mill's
essays." The dramatic monologue is a hybrid genre constituted by "narrative" and "lyrical"
elements, according to Tucker, and best understood as a further elaboration of the greater
Romantic lyric that "may help us save it from assimilation to orthodox lyricism by remind-
ing us that the genre Abrams called 'greater' was not more-lyrical-than-lyric but rather
more-than-lyrical." Demonstrating in delicate detail how to read between the lines of po-
ems like "My Last Duchess" and "Fra Lippo Lippi," Tucker argues that the orthodoxies of
modern lyric reading (the critical fiction of a speaker, the assumption of a voice, the inter-
subjective confirmation of a self) were both anticipated and disrupted by the dramatic
monologue. It is an ironic twist that the dramatic monologue, seemingly resistant to lyric,
became the abstract paradigm for reading lyric in the twentieth century. Or perhaps not
ironic but overdetermined, since Tucker's argument depends on the opposition between
dramatic monologue and an undifferentiated lyric terrain: "Lyric, in dramatic monologue,
is what you cannot have and what you cannot forget." This binary is part of a revisionist
history of poetry astutely described by Tucker himself as "a lyrically normed historiogra-
phy," when nostalgia for lyric among fin-de-siecle purists produced a "generic back-
formation ... from the dramatic monologue and related nineteenth-century forms": the
purification oflyric from a hybrid to a singular form.
Of course this nostalgia for lyric at the end of the nineteenth century is, from the his-
torical and theoretical perspective of The Lyric Theory Reader, also the invention oflyric.
Like the other critics presented in this section, Tucker projects a modern problem back
into an earlier moment in literary history. Where to locate the origin oflyric is a recurring
question, the answer to which keeps shifting according to the scholarly preference and
historical expertise of each critic. Does lyric originate in antiquity or in modernity, in
primitive or advanced cultures, as a function of classical or medieval or early modern or
neoclassical or romantic or Victorian or modernist aesthetics? It is possible to find many
historical models for lyric reading, each time with different historical implications for the
study oflyric; at the same time, it remains impossible to claim a definitive history oflyric,
precisely because its origins keep changing.

FURTHER READING

Abrams, M. H. "Structure and Style in the Greater Cohen,). M. The Baroque Lyric. London:
Romantic Lyric," in The Correspondent Breeze: Hutchinson, 1963.
Essays in British Romanticism. New York: W. W. Dronke, Peter. The Medieval Lyric. London:
Norton, 1984. Hutchinson, 1968. 3rd ed., London: Boydell and
Albright, Daniel. Lyricality in English Literature. Brewer, 1996.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. Dubrow, Heather. The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric
Biester, James. Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Poetry and Early Modern England. Baltimore,
Renaissance English Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
University Press, 1997. Duff, David. Romanticism and the Uses of Genre.
Brower, Reuben, ed. Forms of Lyric: Selected Papers Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
from the English Institute. New York: Columbia Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The
University Press, 1970. Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets.
Clausen, Christopher. The Place of Poetry: Two Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Centuries of an Art in Crisis. Lexington: Fry, Paul H. The Poet's Calling in the English Ode.
University Press of Kentucky, 1981. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980.
Greene, Roland. Post-Petrarchism: Origins Modern, edited by R. S. Crane, 408-60. Chicago: 91
and Innovations of the Western Lyric Se- University of Chicago Press, 1955.
quence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. Princeton, N):
SECTION 2
Press, 1991. Princeton University Press, 1999.
MODELS OF LYRIC
Greene, Thomas M. The Light in Troy: Imitation Rader, Ralph. "The Dramatic Monologue and
and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Related Lyric Forms." Critical Inquiry 3 (1976):
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982. 131-51.
Hardy, Barbara. The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Rawlinson, Matthew. "Lyric." In A Companion to
Feeling in Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana Victorian Poetry, edited by R. Cronin, A.
University Press, 1977. Chapman, H. A. Harrison, 59-79. Malden, MA:
:-!arman, William, ed. Classic Writings on Blackwell, 2002.
Poetry. New York: Columbia University Scodel, Joshua. "Lyric Forms." In The Cambridge
Press, 2003. Companion to English Literature I650-I740,
:-luot, Sylvia. From Song to Book: The Poetics of edited by Steven N. Zwicker, 148-52. Cambridge:
Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Cambridge University Press, 1998.
.Varrative Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Siskin, Clifford. The Historicity of Romantic
Press, 1987. Discourse. London: Oxford University Press,
:.angbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Experience: The 1988.
Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Thain, Marion, ed. The Lyric Poem: Formation of a
Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986. forthcoming.
:.evinson, Marjorie. Keats's Life of Allegory: The Vendler, Helen. Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy
Origins of a Style. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. in Herbert, Whitman and Ashbery. Princeton,
- - . The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
of a Form. Chapel Hill: University of North --.The Odes of fohn Keats. Cambridge, MA:
Carolina Press, 1986. Harvard University Press, 1985.
:.0wrie, Michele. Horace's Narrative Odes. Oxford: Walker, Jeffrey. Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity.
Clarendon Press, 1997. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
:.~aclean, Norman. "From Action to Image: Welsh, Andrew. Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry
Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth and Modern Poetics. Princeton, N): Princeton
Century." In Critics and Criticism: Ancient and University Press, 1972.

On the Absence of Ancient 2.1

Lyric Theory (1982)
\\·. R. JoHNSON

Cicero said that even if his lifetime were to be doubled he would still not have time to waste
on reading the lyric poets ....
Seneca, Epistles 49·5

~~ough exacerbated by the new vogue for Alexandrian frivolity that contributed its share
the irritations of his declining years, Cicero's judgment is not unrepresentative of the re-
: ::>

~::'iYed, established position toward lyric in the ancient world after the decline of the Greek
 92 city-state. Some of this hostile indifference to lyric we may ascribe to the misease with emo-
tion that is common to schoolmasters, politicians, and military men in any age, to their
SECTION 2 vague anxiety that the young, and even the middle-aged and the elderly, may somewhere be
Moons oF LYRIC ignoring their duties or even be having fun. But more crucial to this contempt for lyric po-
etry is the fact that the kind oflyrical poetry we have just examined was not composed and
performed with any real vigor or success after the collapse of the civilization of classical
Greece. Even the surviving memorials to that poetry, having been increasingly replaced by
epic, drama, oratory, and popular philosophy in the schools, 1 became the private preserve of
literary scholars and of connoisseurs of poetry; and because of their difficulties and what
seemed their obscurities, the old lyrics were misunderstood, ignored, and finally all but
abandoned by the common reader, who is, after all, the final arbiter of what literature lives
and does not live. Hymns and victory songs, of course, continued to be esteemed for their
legends of law and order and for their unequivocal moral utterance and were therefore
sharply distinguished from the immoral, amoral poems that Cicero had consciously in
mind when he dismissed lyric poetry from the attention of serious grownups. But even this
moral, acceptable variety of lyric suffered a general neglect, for the moral functions it per-
formed had been taken over by epic and by tragedy, high comedy, history, and oratory. As
we shall see in the next chapter, the living lyric of this period did not deeply engage the seri-
ous attention of most ancient readers/ and even the frequent and amazing tours de force of
Horace could not quite invest lyric poetry at Rome with anything like the dignity and the
popularity it had enjoyed in Greece for well over two centuries.
If we take into consideration these attitudes to lyric poetry and keep in mind that by
the time attempts to theorize about the nature oflyric began its composition and perfor-
mance had all but ceased, we shall not be surprised when we discover how relatively un-
impressive ancient theories of this most protean and complex literary genre seem to have
been. 3 The ancients' efforts to grapple with the ideas of epic, tragedy, history, and oratory
were as persistent as they were, in various ways at various times, successful; but lyric was
curiously unsuited to the major categories of ancient literary theory. Ancient classical
Greek lyric was, as we have seen, essentially concerned with worlds that were at once in-
ner and shared, with the ceremonies and the habits of feeling of small, closed communi-
ties; it was musical and performed; and it transcended the morality of classical humanism
as it transcended reason, logic, and rhetoric. The theorists of lyric lived in worlds where
the social patterns that shaped and sustained Greek lyric were dying or dead, where the
convictions about human nature and human destiny were radically different from the con-
victions that had informed Greek lyric and the communities that it had educated, solaced.
and entertained. In ancient lyric theory, the dominant critical categories center on ideas o:'
imitating the visible, outer world; on a rhetoric devoted to analyzing the structure and the
effects of the spoken, as against the sung, word; on the strict moral functions of poetn
(literature as the handmaiden, not the mother, of philosophy and politics); and on the
autonomy both of artistic creation and of the enjoyment of art-at Alexandria and later a:
Rome the concept of art for art's sake naturally flourished in cosmopolitan societie•
which were too large and too complex to allow much scope for the older lyric poetry anc
its profound, eccentric commitment to communitas.4
I am not, of course, suggesting that ancient critics oflyric did not know far more fact•
about ancient lyric than its modern students, but it is clear that they interpreted the ok
lyrics and the idea oflyric according to their own critical categories and their own patterr:-
of aesthetic enjoyment and that in so doing they tended to misinterpret the function an.:
the nature of a kind of poetry that was essentially alien to their interests, their expectc.-
tions, and their experience. This is, of course, a perennial, inescapable, necessary prot--
!em in literary criticism, but if we consider that ancient literary critics were less prone to 93
err in theorizing about other major literary genres than they were when handling lyric, we
may perhaps gain a better sense both of the peculiarities of Greek lyric poetry and the 2.1
difficulties of lyric theory in general. w. R. joHNSON
There is one kind of poetry and fable which entirely consists of imitation: this is tragedy
and comedy, and there's another kind consisting of the poet's own report-you find this
particularly in dithyrambs; while the mixture of the two exists in epic and in many other
places .... (Republic 3.394B-C)

What shall we do then? Shall we admit all these patterns into the city, or one or the other
unmixed, or the mixed one? If my vote is to prevail, the imitator of the good, unmixed.
(Republic 3.397D)

In the passage quoted here from his attack on mimesis in general and the epic and
tragedy in particular, Plato seems to be stating his approval of lyric poetry, but we quickly
see that the only kind of lyric poetry he deigns to sanction is the most ancient, the most
conservative, and the least lyrical form of lyric poetry: the other, later and richer, forms are
utterly ignored as if they did not exist; and indeed in Plato's city of the soul they do not
and must not. For Plato, as for Aristotle, the object of poetic mimesis is the human being
and his behavior, 5 and if there must be mimesis in the city of the soul, it can only be an
imitation of"the brave, the self-controlled, the righteous, the free" (3.395C) that promotes
the growth toward goodness that is the goal of Platonic man. Pure imitation (tragedy and
comedy, where the poet disappears into his creatures and thus apes them freely and irre-
sponsibly) and mixed imitation (epic, where the poet mingles direct narrative with pure
imitation) are inevitably drawn to imitate men and even gods in their passions, their weak-
ness, and their degradation; and the result of such imitation-consider Emma Bovary leaf-
ing ruthlessly through her penny dreadful-is spiritual ruin, in which the illusory fruit of
such imitation becomes the evil reality. The seductive power of such artifice first instills a
desire for the illusions it imitates, then convinces that the intense, disgraceful illusions
and passions are the only realities, that they alone are proper models for our lives. Only
the poet who does not need to hide behind his personae because he has nothing to hide,
who can tell his story straight because his story is straight 6 (haple diegesis-"pure, direct,
simple narration") may be permitted to remain within the walls of the soul's city because
only he is a good man imitating (or rather, pointing to) the good.
In his usual manner, Plato has taken a fundamental concept of Greek civilization-
here, the concept of mimesis, the belief that reality can be understood by being re-created
and reordered through metaphors, through imagination, by being sculpted, drawn,
danced-and radically redefined it. For Plato the object of poetic mimesis is no longer
humans and their behavior. And the agent of poetic mimesis is no longer any poet, what-
ever the mode of his narration, whatever his persona as a storyteller; it is always and only
the good man telling his story about goodness candidly, without artifice:

So when you find admirers of Homer saying that he educated Greece and that for human
management and education one ought to take him up and learn his lesson and direct one's
whole life on his principles, you must be kind and polite to them-they are as good as they
are able to be-and concede that Homer is foremost and the most poetical of the tragic
poets; but you must be clear in your mind that the only poetry admissible in our city is
hymns to the gods and encomia to good men. If you accept the "sweetened Muse" in lyric
or epic, pleasure and pain will be enthroned in your city instead of law and the principle
which the community accepts in any given situation. (Republic 10.6o7A)
 94 In this closing attack on "bad" mimesis and irresponsible, destructive poetry, the kinds
of lyric poetry that Plato had carefully ignored in his earlier argument are banished from
SECTION 2 the city along with epic (tragedy and comedy have long since been bundled off); it is Pin-
Moons oF LYRIC dar 7 and his holy predecessors who remain to' foster the imitation that instills righ-
teousness and prepares the soul for the journey into goodness and the really real.
This is not the place to argue the wisdom or folly of Plato's moral and ontological aes-
thetics. For our present purposes, it is enough to point out that in the course of his argu-
ment Plato succeeds in establishing the classic triad of genres (lyric, epic, and drama) that
continues, even today, to exert a strong influence on generic theory and that he distin-
guishes among these genres by examining them in terms of their characteristic agents of
mimesis. If he ignores Sappho, Anacreon, and Simon ides in this discussion, it is perhaps
because narrative lyric provides him with the clearest foil to the drama and the epic that he
is anxious to reject; but it is also possible that neither he nor his audience would think of
the various kinds of personal lyric as vehicles of stories. In any case, it is certain that what-
ever it was that Plato may have thought Sappho and Anacreon to be imitating, both the
objects and the agents of this imitation could do the city of the soul no possible good and
could do it endless harm. Such dismissal of this considerable portion of lyric poetry does
not advance investigation of the idea of lyric very far, but in raising these issues about the
nature oflyric in order to conduct his ethical debate, Plato nevertheless fastened on prob-
lems that are central to any discussion of lyric genre: the primacy of the object and the
agent of mimesis, of story and of lyric voice, in discussions of lyric as a genre.
This Platonic formulation of generic distinctions in poetry is recalled and, of course,
reformulated by Aristotle at the opening of his Poetics:

Epic and tragic poetry, comedy and dithyrambic, and most music for the flute or lyre are
all, generally considered, varieties of mimesis, differing from each other in three respects,
the media, the objects, and the mode of mimesis. (1447a)

In addition to agent (mode) of mimesis, Aristotle also posits medium of mimesis (rhythm,
harmony, verse) and object of mimesis (people performing actions: people as they are in
life, or better or worse than they are in life) as elements to be considered when we are at-
tempting to distinguish among genres, but he gives agent or mode of mimesis pride of
place in his listing of generic differentiae, and much of what he goes on to say about
Homer and tragedy turns on this final element:

There is still a third difference, the mode in which one presents each of these objects. For
one can represent the same objects in the same media

r. sometimes in narration and sometimes becoming someone else, as Homer does, or

2. speaking in one's own person without change, or
3. with all the people engaged in the mimesis actually doing things. (1448a)

At first glance, it might appear that Aristotle has done nothing more than rephrase
Plato's description of the agents of mimesis and their particular genres (mixed agency,
epic; pure narrative, lyric; pure imitation, drama), but Aristotle, for all his passion for both
Homer and tragedy, at first seems to play no favorites with one of the three possible agents
of mimesis: all are equally necessary, all are equally valid-in theory. In practice, Aristot-
le's bias in favor of drama requires that he prefer the mode of pure imitation of drama (not
incorrectly, Aristotle recognizes Homer as a forerunner of dramatic sensibility and tech-
nique, and it is the dramatic Homer that he reveres). In drama the biologist discovers a
concentration of plot and action, a unity, a tidiness, and an immanent intelligibility that
neither pure nor mixed narrative can achieve. After his balanced and objective analysis 95
and description of possible narrative agents, he tacitly opts for the supremacy of the narra-
tive mode that Plato had specifically condemned, the pure imitation of drama, partly be- 2.1
cause it was natural to him (and perhaps fun for him) to disagree with Plato and partly W. R.joHNSON

because the controlled dynamism and the concrete lucidity of drama were as welcome to
him as narrative sweep (when untempered by Homeric drama) was alien to him.
But why is lyric not even in the running here? 8 It is possible, of course, that in lost
portions of the Poetics Aristotle did examine lyric in some detail and gave to it the appre-
ciation that he lavishes on tragedy and grudgingly allows to epic. But when the superior-
ity of tragedy over epic has been so elaborately and so cunningly demonstrated (1461a-
1462b), it is unlikely that lyric could have garnered anything but the crumbs of his praise.
Although it is idle to speculate about the reasons for Aristotle's prejudices here, it may yet
be worthwhile to indulge in such speculation because what I take to be the possible preju-
dices of Aristotle against lyric suggest the real prejudices of later ancient literary critics
who were inevitably influenced in some degree by his formulations and who also show
only the faintest interest in the theory of lyric. What follows then, is sheer fiction, but I
hope it may be useful fiction. First, as against Plato, Aristotle believes that mimesis is a
way oflearning about truth (1448b) and that poetry is a form of knowledge (1451b); there-
fore, though Aristotle is wholly lacking in Plato's rage for perfection and is everywhere
charitable to natural aberrations from the ideal in space and time, he has his own hierar-
chies of moral grandeur, and it is not likely that Sappho, let alone Anacreon, would stand
any chance against Homer or Sophocles in Aristotle's ordering of degrees of poetic truth.
In his own way, Aristotle is as much a proponent of moral aesthetics as Plato, which is not
strange because all ancient literary critics were, and wisely so, essentially moral in their
aesthetic orientations.
Second, just as Aristotle may have found Sappho's "He is a god in my eyes" either frivo-
lous or immoral or purely artistic (and therefore relatively deficient in valid general
truth), so he may very well have failed to see that Sappho is in fact engaged in telling a
story (in a lyric manner) whose plot and action (muthos-praxis-"story-action") are, in
their own way, for all their brevity, as valid, as significant, as true as the story of Achilles
and Hector and the story of Oedipus. In other words, judged by the categories of Aristo-
tle's criticism, the object of Sappho's mimesis may seem, in comparison with Homer and
Sophocles, so fragile as to appear almost insignificant. (It may also seem lacking in ampli-
tude [1450b-1451b]: after Callimachus' defense of brevity, it will not be until the romantics
in general and Edgar Allan Poe in particular that champions of the short personal lyric
will dare, without qualification, to assert its superiority over epic and drama and "short"
will become not only beautiful but also the only beautiful.)
One thing about the nature of poetry that moderns have steadily recognized and that
ancients could not recognize is the significance, the importance, of the inner stories that
personal lyric imitates. Aristotle, perhaps, did not see that Sappho also is imitating a hu-
man action, or he thought that the action she imitated (whether her own or that of an imag-
ined person-"When I state myself," said Dickinson, "as the Representative of the Verse-it
does not mean-me-but a supposed person") 9 was too insignificant, too "merely per-
sonal," to be the vehicle of the anagnorisis ("recognition") and the peripeteia ("sudden
change in fortune") that make manifest hoia an genoito ("what may be")-such things as
may possibly occur any place, any time. But "He is a god in my eyes," fragile and ephem-
eral as the action it imitates might seem, catches and holds the light of things as they are,
everywhere, always, as surely as does the Iliad or the Antigone. It differs from an epic or a
tragedy in its dimensions and range; but it needs offer no apologies for its intensity or its
 96 profundity or its own moral grandeur. Aristotle's passion for order led him, it seems, to
prefer the concentration of drama to the (to him) uncontrolled sprawl of epic; but, so far
SecnoN 2 as one can judge, his earnestness precluded his appreciating both the earnestness and the
MooELs oF LYRIC concentration of personal lyric. It would not be until the romantics taught us that any
inner story, precisely imitated (imagined), can reveal general truth that the real serious-
ness of lyric could be seen and understood. These hindrances to lyrical theory-
exaggerated and misdirected emphasis on the morality of art and inability to grasp and
appreciate the kinds of stories, that is, emotional actions, that lyric has to tell-exert their
force throughout antiquity. They are both serious hindrances, but the more serious is the
ancients' inability to make proper use of their favorite and precise aesthetic concept, mi-
mesis, in their efforts to investigate the genre of lyric.
After Aristotle, the Alexandrian critics worked hard and well to define the forms and
subgenres of lyric poetry, and this effort implies a theory of lyric that has not, unfortu-
nately, come down to us. The beginnings of serious literary scholarship in Athens of the
late fourth century B.C. might easily have been aborted or have dwindled into fruitless
word games had the structure and dynamics of Alexander's empire not caused its diffu-
sion throughout the new Greek world of the third century B.C. But it was at Alexandria,
with the founding of the museum and its library, that the study of literature in the West
came to its first flowering, for in gathering literary texts and scholars to edit and order
them, the Ptolemies both assured the survival of the literature of classical Greece and
promoted an atmosphere in which the work of sorting out and interpreting that literature
could be vigorously and profitably pursued. To suppose, as it has sometimes been, that
this endless chore of collecting manuscripts, sorting them, correcting them, cataloguing
them, and arranging them was somehow dull and simple-minded is to fail in perform-
ing the act of historical imagination. Imagine all of English literature from Chaucer to
Tennyson, long circulated in manuscripts indifferent and bad, suddenly dumped helter-
skelter in your lap. The task that confronted the Alexandrian scholar-librarians was hercu-
lean, and they performed it for the benefit of all posterity magnificently, their imagination
and ingenuity as ruthlessly tested as their erudition and industry.
None of the sorting and editing can have been easy, but lyric presented special prob-
lems. In its linguistic variety, its antiquity, its metrical difficulties, and its bewildering
profusion of similar, sometimes nearly identical subgenres, lyric poetry required all the
talent and all the tools of scholarship and criticism that the museum had been able to as-
semble. The immediate practical result of the long and arduous labor of editing Greek
lyric of the archaic and classical ages was the survival of this poetry (much of it down
through the life of Byzantium) in accurate and readable editions, but what matters here is
that in performing this labor, the scholar-critics of Alexandria were forced to shape theo-
retical categories that remain invaluable to the study and enjoyment of lyric poetry. With
Aristophanes of Byzantium we encounter the first serious and successful theorist of lyric
genre in Western literature, for it is he, who, confronted with the jungle of the Pindaric
corpus, invented the strategem of sorting them, not only on the basis of their musical
modes or metrical schemes but also on the basis of their themes and concerns. 10
Aristophanes arranged the Pindaric corpus into seventeen books: hymns and paeans
in one book each; dithyrambs, processionals, maiden songs, and poems for dancing in
two books each (with perhaps an added book for purely secular maiden songs); four books
of victory songs; and a book each of encomia and threnoi. 11 It is not a question here of Aris-
tophanes's having invented these terms and the categories they denote since at least some
of them go all the way hack to Homer and most likely precede him. 12 What Aristophanes
did, what he had to do in order to make adequate use of these old, vague categories, was
to study their formal properties, the meters, the topoi and rhetorical stratagems, the for- 97
mulae and themes that were characteristic of them; on the basis of this study he was pre-
pared to formulate descriptive definitions of the categories that were superior both 2.1
in precision and in flexibility to the traditional, uncertain definitions that he had inher- W. R. joHNSON

ited; and on the basis of his improved definitions he was able to assign the jumble of po-
ems he had confronted to their proper categories.
Beyond his immediate purpose-the ordering of chaotic bodies of poetry, the mak-
ing of intelligible, enjoyable collections-the method he devised and refined had and
continues to have major importance for the theory and practice of the lyric genre. The
idea behind Aristophanes's method (this is a modern inference for which we have no
hard evidence) is the idea of decorum, and the method itself is the analysis of particular
instances of decorum. The kinds of questions he seems to have asked himself, both in
devising and refining the method itself and in applying it to the actual sorting of poems
into their proper categories, would seem to have been something like this. What are the
essential elements in a paean? What is the natural (or conventional) order of these ele-
ments? What metrical or rhetorical patterns tend to appear in the paean? What instru-
ments accompanied it and what were the conditions of its performance? What elements
can possibly be omitted from a paean without its ceasing to be a paean, and what elements
cannot under any circumstances be neglected or altered? How does a paean differ from a
dithyramb or a hymn?
The concept of decorum, its uses and its limitations, is so familiar as to seem to us per-
haps obvious, if not simple-minded. But to ignore the realities of decorum in the study of
literature is usually to invite confusion and error. In concentrating on the contents of
iyric poems and the surfaces of their content, in systematically collecting and synthesiz-
:ng his observations on the conventional and formal appearance of lyric poems, Aristo-
?hanes made it possible for later critics and common readers to see the substance of the
?Oems through their surfaces ("It is only shallow people," remarked Wilde, "who do not
'udge by appearances"). Once it became habitual for critics and readers to look for and
~ecognize the conventional features in a poem that would tell them what kind of poem it
·.,·as (and the looking for and the recognizing quickly become almost automatic and
:argely unconscious), it became easier to understand and to enjoy the special artistry and
:he special sensibility-the originality-of its poet. What are the usual, what are the suit-
.J.ble, things to say in a love poem? What sort of person is the proper person to say these
:hings? Once a spectrum of conventions has been established and the reader's expecta-
::ons have been properly defined, it is then possible to notice how a particular poet dis-
:Jrts conventions even as he makes use of them, defeats expectations even as he satisfies
:hem. Guided by an understanding of decorum (what is proper for a given kind of poem),
·.,·e can respond accurately to wide varieties of feeling, to a given poet's new, unfamiliar
.:.ttitudes toward his material-life, his chosen form, the conventions that obtain in that
:·Jrm. We can, in other words, hear precisely the distinctive voice of a particular poet be-
~ause we hear it against, magnified by, the standard patterns that he uses and transforms.
3ut until that standard pattern is isolated and defined, the artifice and the integrity of the
?Oet's voice in a given poem will not be available to the reader.
It goes without saying that Sappho's audience did not consciously consider what spe-
~:es of poem they were listening to when they watched and heard her perform it-because
:iey did not need to. When conventions are living, when both poets and their listeners
~espond to poetic conventions they have grown up with as naturally as they breathe air or
.:rink water, there is of course no need for critics to distinguish among kinds of poems
.:.nd to list the characteristic formal elements of different species oflyric.U In general, it is
 98 only when artistic conventions are dead or dying or when they have been so transformed
as to be unrecognizable that critics want or are required to attempt to recover them, to
SECTION 2 distinguish them, stabilize them, arrange them. There was, for example, very little effort to
Moons oF LYRIC describe and codify the formal conventions of modernist poetry until it began to be
vaguely sensed that the great modernist poets had all disappeared and that the music of
their epigones sounded not quite right; while the great modernists were writing, though
there was plenty of propaganda, controversy, and explications, there was not and could not
be much in the way of formal analysis. The living contemporaries of the great modernists
did not need to be instructed in conventions that they lived in and shared with their
poets-they needed only to read the poetry, experience and enjoy it. We who live when
modernism is exhausted can only experience and enjoy its poetry by trying to understand
it, and to do this, we need all the help we can get from critics who can recover and describe
its formal conventions, its special hybrid genres, and the sensibilities that created them.
Aristophanes of Byzantium and the readers he helped lived in a world of books rather
than of performed poems, in a world where music had become, for the most part, sepa-
rated from poetry and where the occasions for and the function of the old lyric poetry
had either disappeared or had been altered beyond recognition. Thus, as the circum-
stances in which old lyric poetry was experienced changed, as its conventions became
unintelligible or blurred through the passage of time and the hybridization of genres and
subgenres, the services of Aristophanes and his successors became indispensable to an-
cient readers, who, without these scholar-critics, would have had neither adequate texts
nor notions of literary convention and generic forms that were and are necessary for en-
joyable reading of these poems. But it was not merely readers of the postclassical age who
were indebted to the Alexandrian critics. All lyric poets in the classical tradition of Eu-
rope, whether they are directly or indirectly in that tradition, whether they are con-
sciously or unconsciously influenced by it, depend on Aristophanes and his school for
their understanding of the possibilities of lyric poetry, of its various kinds, and of the
various voices and combinations of voices that are suitable to its various kinds. It goes
without saying that good lyricists could grasp the generic forms and the voices they need
by direct imitation of their predecessors, by the intuitions proper to their talents, without
the help of critics. But the fact is that they seldom do this, that they "find their own
voices," their particular attitudes toward their materials and their artistry within the
tradition of lyrical categories that critics (many of whom are poets) redefine after each of
the poetry's major renewaJs.I 4 What Aristophanes found and sanctioned-it was not ex-
actly what he intended to find and the way I define his discovery is not the way he would
have defined it-was the range of voices, styles, and attitudes that are appropriate to the
varieties of lyric poetry; and he found this spectrum of lyric voices by studying the out-
ward forms of classical lyric poems.
It was the poet-critic who was to serve as the essential link in the chain of Western lyri-
cal tradition who saw and acknowledged the prime importance of this Alexandrian theory
of lyric genre. In discussing the importance of metrical decorum and metrical tradition,
Horace turns from epic, elegiacs, and iambics to lyric poetry and remarks:

To praise the gods and the children of gods,

to honor the triumphant boxer,
to tell of young lovers and their sufferings,
to commend the solace of wine-
these offices the Muse conferred upon the lyre.
If! am unable or unwilling
 to preserve the distinctive patterns, 99
the special shades of the several genres,
why should I expect to be hailed as poet? (Art of Poetry, lines 83-88) 2.1
w. R. jOHNSON
Though "the distinctive patterns" and "special shades" 15 refer to epic and the other genres
mentioned before lyric, it is possible that Horace discusses lyric last not only because it has
become his own special preserve and the source of his greatest pride but also because the
"shifts and shades" of lyric poetry needed far more care in their analysis than the other,
larger and simpler genres. 16 In its metrical variety, in its subtle differences in content, func-
tion and form, and, above all, in its varieties and combinations of voices, the practice as well
as the theory oflyric poetry had benefited and would continue to benefit from Aristophanes's
analysis oflyric content, from his emphasis on the crucial importance oflyric categories.
The successors of Aristophanes continued to be engaged in refining the lyrical cate-
gories that he established, but so far as we can tell from the meagre and often obscure
information that has survived, their interest in these categories and their manner of deal-
ing with them gradually shifted direction and focus. If the resume of Proclus's work on
lyric by the Byzantine Photius can be trusted, 17 it would seem that some time soon after
the beginning of the Christian era, lyrical theory has completely abandoned (or taken as
resolved) the question of the essential nature oflyric, has come to treat the musical nature
of ancient Greek lyric as something approaching antiquarian curiosity, and has begun to
busy itself primarily with rhetorical analysis of lyric and with definition of the purely
secular, purely literary varieties of poetry that had replaced ancient lyric in Hellenistic lit-
erature. Given the overwhelming importance of rhetoric in education (throughout this
period and until the end of antiquity), combined with the failure of music in poetry, this
change-one is tempted to say, this trivialization-of emphasis is natural enough, indeed,
is all but inevitable, but it betokens not only the death of ancient lyric but also, incredibly,
a lack of any awareness that lyric had died. As we shall see in the next chapter, the lyric
spirit had, of course, survived, had emigrated into and hidden itself in other kinds of po-
etry, but Greek lyric, this musical, ontological, social, performed poetry, had vanished as
a living art.
Proclus, apparently, divided lyric poetry into four major categories: (1) lyrics addressed
to the gods, (2) lyrics addressed to men, (3) lyrics addressed to both gods and men (a con-
fusing, uncertain category), and (4) verse for occasions (prospiptousai peristaseis). Pro-
clus himself protested that this final category should not properly be classed with the
others, which are traditional. 18 That he finally and grudgingly does admit this category is
an index to its extreme popularity in late Hellenistic times, and to the fact that this oc-
casional verse had almost completely replaced the older lyric forms. 19 Religious poetry
continued to be written (and the old religious poetry continued to be performed) for cults
and festivals; and royal personages and wealthy men continued to commission celebra-
tions of themselves, but the remnants of this poetry show why it perished rapidly. Love
songs, dirges, victory celebrations, semiphilosophical drinking songs, marriage songs, the
poems that comprise Proclus's second category, tend to find themselves transformed into
elegiac epigram. Since there was in fact little real, or at least little good, lyric poetry during
the centuries in which Proclus's sources were theorizing, it is no wonder that the lyric cat-
egories were expanded (padded out) to include prosaic doodling in metrical disguise that
concerns itself with impressions of travelers, advice to friends in epistolary form, sugges-
tions about farming, musings on Life, and reflections on destiny-Polonius poetasting.
But why did Polonius take to writing verse? How did he learn to do it? And why did he
think anyone would be interested if he attempted to subject his earnest ponderings to the
 100 discipline of verse?-because he had been to school and there learned to read poetry rhe-
torically, as had the readers he wrote for. Reading poetry for its rhetoric and for its moral
SECTION 2 platitudes was, of course, no worse than reading it for its ironies and ambiguities or for its
Moons oF LYRIC criticism of life or for any other modern reductive function of poetry we might recall
here-indeed, to read poetry for its rhetoric is hardly the worst way to read poetry. Nor
was much harm done by the little rhetoricians who grew up to be soldiers, businessmen,
teachers, and government officials and who scribbled verselets in their spare time on sub-
jects dear to their hearts-money, connections, prospects, status. The harm was-well, but
there was no harm. These poets and their readers were apparently content with this versi-
fying, and the lyric spirit, while waiting its reincarnations into Horace, into Latin and
Greek Christian hymns, and into the songs of Provence and Sicily, masqueraded as epic, as
epigram, as pastoral. It is a world of rhetoricians, professional and amateur, active and pas-
sive, that unites to produce the categories of Proclus, in which occasional verse, prosaic
thoughts woven into mechanical verse and mechanical rhetoric, hobnobs with Pindaric
epinicia ("victory songs") and Sapphic erotica ("love songs"). A strange poetic world-
emptied of the lyric spirit, filled with busy poets with their dull, correct rhythms, their
rhetorical commonplaces and their commonplace notions-a million miles from the pas-
sions and paradoxes of great lyric poetry; yet if it is boring, it is civilized, and if it is safe.
complacent, tidy, it is not wholly unattractive. There are worse poetic worlds than this.
Nor, moreover, were its virtues merely negative or neutral. Schoolmasters and the
students who were obsessed with rhetoric and occasional verse perfected the discipline of
poetic rhetoric that in the hands of Horace, Joachim du Bellay, and Ben Jonson would
kindle into incomparable glories. Francis Cairns has reminded us, indeed has retaught
us, that each of the varieties oflyric (he calls them genres)

can be thought of as having a set of primary or logically necessary elements which in com-
bination distinguish that genre from every other genre. For example, the primary ele-
ments of the propemtikon are in these terms someone departing, another person bidding
him farewell, and a relationship of affection between the two, plus an appropriate set-
ting.... As well as containing the primary elements of its genre every generic example
contains some secondary elements (topoi). These topoi are the smallest divisions of
the material of any genre useful for analytical purposes. Their usefulness lies in the fact
that they are the commonplaces which recur in different forms in different examples of the
same genre. They help, in combination with the primary elements, to identify a generic
example. But the primary elements are the only final arbiters of generic identity since any
particular individual topos (secondary element) can be found in several different genres. 20

The poet who inherited and submitted himself to the strict yet flexible system of these
primary and secondary elements was possessed of an enormous poetic freedom, the free-
dom to use and to alter the system that he preserved. Poetic rhetoric, at least by the begin-
ning of the Christian era, was the common, living poetic language just as oratorical rheto-
ric was the common language of history and moral philosophy as well as of the forurr:
and the courtroom.
In a very real sense, it was his reader's mastery of poetic rhetoric that assured the poe:
his complete poetic freedom. And if the modern reader shudders as he glances througl:
Cairns's invaluable discussion of this poetic rhetoric, if he pities the ancients whc
troubled themselves with the endless, ugly jargon that denotes varieties of lyric poem;
and who learned by heart the lists of decorous cliches (topoi) that structured these lyrk
poems-tant pis pour lui ("that is his problem")-and the problem of the contemporan·
poets he reads. The lyrical theorists oflater and late antiquity completed the work begur:
by Aristophanes of Byzantium by systematically subdividing the varieties of lyric, by 101
rigorously defining the elements oflyrical poetry, and by collecting, distinguishing, sort-
ing out the commonplaces and the combinations of commonplaces that are typical of 2.1
particular kinds of lyric poems. 21 Much of the poetry that grew out of and depended on w. R. joHNSON
this theory of lyrical poetry was evidently (and, naturally) not very good, but largely be-
cause of the work and genius of Horace, it is this rhetorical theory of lyric poetry that
dominates European poetry from the late Middle Ages until very recent times, and it is
this rhetorical tradition that is largely responsible for Petrarch's, Herbert's, Goethe's, and
Valery's having been able to do with lyric poetry what they could do with it. In this sense,
the patient labors of Aristophanes and his followers were and remain crucial to lyric and
the idea oflyric.
Not the least surprising thing about lyric theory in antiquity is that one of the greatest
lyricists, himself a literary theorist of the first rank, did not bother to theorize formally
about the idea of lyric. Horace's theory of lyric is implicit, of course, in his lyric composi-
tion, that careful, systematic re-creation of as much of ancient Greek lyric as a Roman
poet, writing in Latin in the second half of the first century B.C., could succeed in re-
creating. Still, it is puzzling that this poet who had given so much of his time and talent to
reviving the dead genre, transplanting it into a culture and language that were alien to it,
should refrain from a precise and extended statement of his theory of lyric. Perhaps he
eschewed such a statement because he found, at last, that it was unnecessary-his poems,
in which the old Greek voices spoke again, in another language, in the modern world,
needed neither explanation nor defense. Perhaps that is what he thought, but he did de-
fend them, rankled apparently by their tepid reception outside the charmed circle of the
best people, the happy few who recognized his lyric genius and his lyric achievement.
Epistles 1.19 is a ferocious answer to the stupid critics and semiliterate readers who had no
notion of Greek lyric and could therefore have no notion of how hard his task had been or
how brilliantly, how completely, he had performed it: "I have set my footprints in open
country I where none before me dared venture" (lines 21-22). That is a favorite topos
among both Greek and Roman Alexandrians, but the next statement, which introduces
his claim to have imported Archilochus and Alcaeus into Roman literature undamaged
and (perhaps) improved, has none of the ironic modesty, almost the coyness, of similar
claims elsewhere (see particularly Odes 2.20 and 3.30): "He who trusts himself will rule
the swarm" (lines 22-23). The poet who has confidence in his own powers, the poet with
guts, is the "king" bee who dominates the hive. He had dared much and won everything.
If he seems merely an imitator (lines 26-31), he must seem so only to the uneducated who
misunderstand tradition and do not see that Sappho and Alcaeus had imitated Archilo-
chus even as Horace has imitated all three. But especially Alcaeus:

His verse forms, attempted by none before,

I, the Latin lyricist, have given the world.
It pleases me to be read by the eyes,
to be held in the hands,
of the happy few. (lines 33-34)

Latin us fidicen, "the Latin lyricist"! It is more than a boast, more than a challenge: it is a full-
voiced, ruthless statement of fact, a fact that the ingratus lector (the "thankless reader," the
Philistines, the stupid public) cannot begin to grasp. It is the eyes of the happy few (in-
genuis oculis) that will read his poems, and it is their hands that will hold the book.
Yet if the ignorant herd cannot appreciate the blessed miracle of a Horace in their
midst, an emperor can:
 102 The poet is usually a lazy, a terrible soldier.
Yet if you'll admit
SECTION 2 that greatness can he served by what is humble-
MODELS OF LYRIC he has his uses to the City. (Epistles 2.1.124-25)

The ironic humility returns as he addresses Augustus in one of his greatest, perhaps one
of his last, poems. The Latin lyricist serves his community even if it cannot appreciate
who he is and what he is doing for it:

The poet shapes the child's stammering mouth,

diverts his ear from vulgar speech,
then forms his heart with cordial lessons,
redeeming it from harshness, from envy and rage.
He sings of good deeds and he furnishes
those flowering years with famous models,
he comforts the poor and the sick.
Where could the unmarried girl or the pure young man
discover a teacher of their prayers,
had the muse not sent them a sacred poet?
Their chorus begs his assistance,
then, feeling the divine presence,
persuading with the prayer he taught,
it asks for rain from heaven,
it wards off plague and banishes war,
it wins peace for the city and rich harvest.
The heavenly gods and the gods below
yield to its incantation. (Epistles 2.1.126-38)

Musa dedit fidibus ("the Muse gave to the lyre") (AP 83) recalls vatem ni Musa dedisset
("had the muse not sent"). Though Horace seems to slight lyric poetry in his theoretical
criticism, here, in his most subtle and most powerful defense of poetry, he places lyric even
above epic and tragedy. A poet of many voices, Horace deliberately avoids mention of his
favorite voices (Archilochus, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Simonides) in this passage in order to
elevate lyric poetry by focusing on its most exalted figure-the vatic Pindar. The satirist,
the epicurean dialectical poet, and the dandified hedonist are temporarily and ironically
sequestered because this is no moment for the paradoxes, the ironies, and the eccentric
orbits that this configuration of voices recalls. What is needed here is the shaman, the
figure of Pindar, "to purify the language of the tribe," to preside over the city's paideia
("education"), to define and to instill sophrosyne ("prudence"), to recall the grand origins
of courage and morality, to evoke eternity (praesentia numina), and to win divine bless-
ings for the community. The image of the chorus recalls Horace's own Carmen Saeculare,
and this image is, in the modern Rome of Horace and Augustus, as anachronistic as that
poem and its performance had been. Yet it is the image that Horace wants and needs here,
for since the question he is asking in this poem is, "What are the uses of poetry?" and
since the answer he gives Augustus is, "Not primarily, not really, to immortalize emper-
ors," he does well to exclude from his definition oflyric all varieties oflyric except the one
that manifests clearly the most ancient and most vital lyrical form and function. By this
strategem he answers Augustus with a fair amount of tact, and he also reminds the vulgar
throng of their ignorance of the essence of lyric poetry, a long vanished, long dead art that
he had succeeded in resuscitating almost single-handedly. Himself an ironic Pindarist, a
 102 The poet is usually a lazy, a terrible soldier.
Yet if you'll admit
SECTION 2 that greatness can he served by what is humble-
MODELS OF LYRIC he has his uses to the City. (Epistles 2.1.124-25)

The ironic humility returns as he addresses Augustus in one of his greatest, perhaps one
of his last, poems. The Latin lyricist serves his community even if it cannot appreciate
who he is and what he is doing for it:

The poet shapes the child's stammering mouth,

diverts his ear from vulgar speech,
then forms his heart with cordial lessons,
redeeming it from harshness, from envy and rage.
He sings of good deeds and he furnishes
those flowering years with famous models,
he comforts the poor and the sick.
Where could the unmarried girl or the pure young man
discover a teacher of their prayers,
had the muse not sent them a sacred poet?
Their chorus begs his assistance,
then, feeling the divine presence,
persuading with the prayer he taught,
it asks for rain from heaven,
it wards off plague and banishes war,
it wins peace for the city and rich harvest.
The heavenly gods and the gods below
yield to its incantation. (Epistles 2.1.126-38)

Musa dedit fidibus ("the Muse gave to the lyre") (AP 83) recalls vatem ni Musa dedisset
("had the muse not sent"). Though Horace seems to slight lyric poetry in his theoretical
criticism, here, in his most subtle and most powerful defense of poetry, he places lyric even
above epic and tragedy. A poet of many voices, Horace deliberately avoids mention of his
favorite voices (Archilochus, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Simonides) in this passage in order to
elevate lyric poetry by focusing on its most exalted figure-the vatic Pindar. The satirist,
the epicurean dialectical poet, and the dandified hedonist are temporarily and ironically
sequestered because this is no moment for the paradoxes, the ironies, and the eccentric
orbits that this configuration of voices recalls. What is needed here is the shaman, the
figure of Pindar, "to purify the language of the tribe," to preside over the city's paideia
("education"), to define and to instill sophrosyne ("prudence"), to recall the grand origins
of courage and morality, to evoke eternity (praesentia numina), and to win divine bless-
ings for the community. The image of the chorus recalls Horace's own Carmen Saeculare,
and this image is, in the modern Rome of Horace and Augustus, as anachronistic as that
poem and its performance had been. Yet it is the image that Horace wants and needs here,
for since the question he is asking in this poem is, "What are the uses of poetry?" and
since the answer he gives Augustus is, "Not primarily, not really, to immortalize emper-
ors," he does well to exclude from his definition oflyric all varieties oflyric except the one
that manifests clearly the most ancient and most vital lyrical form and function. By this
strategem he answers Augustus with a fair amount of tact, and he also reminds the vulgar
throng of their ignorance of the essence of lyric poetry, a long vanished, long dead art that
he had succeeded in resuscitating almost single-handedly. Himself an ironic Pindarist, a
spoiled shaman-turned-epicurean humanist, he ironically and sincerely recalls, defines 103
eloquently and for good in the classical tradition, the religious origin, the religious func-
tion, and the religious power of lyric poetry. Having put away his feathers and his drum, 2.1
having relapsed once more into Simonidean humanism and modern times, he had still W. R. joHNSoN

the taste and the judgment to praise his betters-the forgotten authentic vates ("seer")
with whom the evocation of eternal moments had begun. This is not perhaps a theory of
lyric, but it is good to find Horace in his humility reminding a world that had lost all
memory of great lyric what the idea of great lyric must be.

NOTES

r. For a reasoned statement of the attitudes behind Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
this sad mistake, see Quintillian, Institutes 1.8.6. University Press, 1972), p. 6.
2. See C. 0. Brink, Horace on Poetry (Cam- 11. See Plato, The Laws 700a-b. For useful
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 1:182. descriptions of the species of Greek lyric, see
3· See joel E. Springarn, The History of Literary Herbert W. Smyth, Greek Melic Poets (Lon-
Criticism in the Renaissance (New York: Columbia don: Macmillan, 1900), pp. xxiii-cxxxiv;
University Press, 1924), pp. 27-99. Calame, "Reflexions sur les genres," pp.
4. Brink, Horace on Poetry, 1:169-70. 116-120; Steinmetz, "Gattungen und Epochen,"
5. See Hans Farber, Die Lyrik in der Kunsttheorie pp. 458ff.
der Antike (Munich: Neue Filser, 1936), pp. 3ff. The 12. See Cairns, Generic Composition, p. 14. For
translations of Plato are by M. E. Hubbard, those of the possible influence of Calli mach us, see Pfeiffer,
:\ristotle by D. A. Russell, in Ancient Literary History of Classical Scholarship, p. 130. See alsoP.
Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations, M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford
ed. D. A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom University Press, 1972), 1:459-63.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). 13. See Cairns, Generic Composition, pp. 71-72,
6. Farber, Die Lyrik, pp. 23-4. 75·
7. See Paul Vicaire, Platon, Critique Litteraire 14. See Stanley Edgar Hyman, Poetry and
(Paris: Klincksieck, 1960), p. 146; see also Plato, Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1961), passim.
The Laws 799b. 15. See C. 0. Brink, Horace on Poetry (Ars
8. What Aristotle does, in fact, is to reduce the Poetica) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
means of literary mimesis to narrative (mixed and 1971), 2: 172-73.
unmixed being fused) and dramatic. See Farber, 16. See Cairns, Generic Composition, p. 138.
Die Lyrik, pp. 4ff.; and P. Steinmetz, "Gattungen 17. Calame, "Reflexions sur les genres," pp.
und Epochen der griechischen Literatur in der 114-5, shows clearly why we should not; see also
Siehl Quintilians," Hermes 92 (1964): 461. For his Douglas E. Gerber, "Studies in Greek Lyric
apparent neglect oflyric, see Gerald Else, Aristotle's Poetry," Classical World 70 (October 1976): 69.
Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard If, as seems likely, this Proclus is the neoplatonist
University Press, 1957), pp. 567-68; Luigi E. Rossi, (fifth century A.D.), we are here assuming, and it
"I generi letterari e le !oro leggi scritte e non scritte is a large assumption, that Prod us recapitulates
nelle letterature classiche," Institute of Classical the entire late tradition from Didymus to his own
Studies, University of London Bulletin 18 (1971): 78. time. See Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship,
For the difficulties with the triad of modes, see pp. 182-84, 277; and Rossi, "I generi litterari,"
Claudio Guillen, Literature as System (Princeton: pp. 74-75·
Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 383-405. 18. See Albert Severyns, Recherches sur Ia
9. Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters, ed. Thomas Chrestomatie de Proclus, Bibliotheque de Ia Faculte
H. johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University de Philosophie et Lettres de l'Universite de Liege
Press, 1971), letter 268, p. 176. For lyric mimesis of 79 (1938): 33-40, 115. See also Farber, Die Lyrik,
an action, see Charles Batteux, Principes de Ia pp. 31ff.; and Pfeiffer, History of Classical
litterature (Paris: Nyons, 1775; reprt., Geneva: Scholarship, p. 184.
Slatkin Reprints, 1967), 1:316-28. For an elegant 19. Much of Statius's Silvae and some of Martial
criticism of antimimetic theories, see Gerald Graff, may be thought to represent this category
Literature Against Itself(Chicago: University of adequately.
Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 179-205. 20. See Cairns, Generic Composition, p. 6.
10. See Francis Cairns, Generic Composition in 21. Ibid., pp. 10, 75.
2.2 The Genre of the Grave and
the Origins of the Middle
English Lyric (1997)
SETH LERER

Written along the top margin of a late-twelfth-century theological manuscript, penciled

as continuous prose in a hand now only barely legible, is the following brief text. Linea ted
by modern editors, the uneven marginalia in the manuscript become a supple stanza of
personal poetry.

ic an witles fuJi wis

of worldles blisse nab be ic nout
for a lafdi pet is pris
of aile pet in bure goo
sepen furst pe heo was his
iloken in caste! wal of stan
nes ic hoi ne blipe iwis
ne priuiinde mon
!if p mon non bildes me
abiden 7 blipe for to bee
ned efter mi deao me longgep
I mai siggen wei by me
herde pet wo hongep

[I am completely without sense,

of the world's bliss have I nothing,
on account of a lady who is valued
above all others who walk in the bower.
Since first she was his,
locked up inside a castle wall of stone,
I have been neither whole nor happy,
nor a thriving man.
There is not a man alive who does not advise me
to wait and be happy,
but it is my death that I long for;
I can say truthfully that on me,
woes hang terribly. ]I

Since its publication by Carleton Brown over sixty years ago, this poem has been under-
stood to represent the "earliest example of the secular lyric" in Middle English (xii). With
its arresting first-person declaratives, its masterful command of a complex rhyme scheme,
and its seemingly effortless blend of personal desire and literary convention, the poem 105
speaks directly to our modern critical appreciations of the medieval lyric. Brown himself
queried its marginal status, wondering if it recorded the "actual human experience" of its 2.2
author (xii), and his original impressions have informed all subsequent readings of the SETH LERER

text. It remains, as far as anyone can tell, the earliest piece of Middle English lyric poetry
and thus appears to anticipate the individual voiced feelings of the famous Harley Lyrics
and the verities of such familiar anthology pieces as "Foweles in the frith." There is, as
Peter Dronke puts it in a highly influential formulation, a shared "underlying innocence"
to these early poems, a compression of events into "concreteness and dramatic power"
that defines our "first encounter" with the Middle English lyric (Medieval Lyric, 145).
But what precisely does it mean to speak of first encounters with the Middle English lyric
or to locate its beginnings in such verses? On the one hand, it implies formal and linguistic
standards. The emergence of Middle English has long been traced to the mix of imported
::-Jorman vocabulary and domestic grammatical change that characterizes the immense di-
versity of vernacular writing from the late eleventh to the early thirteenth centuries. 2 Quan-
titative meter and patterns of rhyme (as opposed to Old English prosody, based on a four-
stress line and alliteration) take over as the organizing principles of verse making, and
the genres of this poetry are often understood to follow Continental, rather than Insular,
models. 3 Thus Middle English poetry is found to consist of"lyrics," "romances," and "fa-
bles," rather than of the epics, elegies, and gnomic sayings of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. It
offers pastourelles and ballades, treatments of the themes of carpe diem, contemptus mundi,
and memento mori.~
On the other hand, to speak of the origins of Middle English lyric is to speak about the
idea of the lyric voice itself and, furthermore, about the birth of subjectivity in the vernacu-
lar.5 Few modern readers would find in the corpus of Old English the expected personal
identity we seek in lyric poetry. 6 The very names that modern scholars have bequeathed to
Anglo-Saxon shorter verse-the riddle, the gnome, the elegy-place these texts outside
the expectations of truly lyric utterance. 7 First-person texts in Old English are rarely con-
sidered as anything but examples of a speaking object or narrativized versions of Chris-
tian doctrine. Even such seemingly felt utterances as De or and Widsith are largely under-
stood to stand along the axes of Germanic lament or Indo-European blame-and-praise
verse: depersonalized forms that seek not the recovery of individuated voices but the veri-
ties of social statement and the ventriloquizings of the bardic. 8 In short, the lyric, as we
have been taught to think of it, is foreign to pre-Conquest England, an invention of the
continental European consciousness and an importation from the Latin schools or Ro-
mance courts (Woolf, 1-2; Pearsall, 126-7).
Although they have long dominated criticism of the early English lyric, such approaches
to post-Conquest literary history are themselves curiously ahistoricist. Modern readings of
the poems, in fact, have often valorized their anonymity, their lack of context, their free-
standing status and survival. The lack of identifiable authors or audiences-celebrated in
the title of one critical anthology, Poems without Names-made them the delight of both
New Critical formalists and patristic exegetes, the former commending their structure,
imagery, and drama, the latter detailing their doctrinal message or biblical idiom. 9 The
survival of many early Middle English texts in flyleaves, marginalia, or disjecta membra
does not deprive them of a recoverable context. Rather, it provokes a reassessment of the
historical conditions in which they were written down and read. It makes them products of
reception and transmission: documents in the history of reading in the English past.
This essay seeks to understand such documents in the changing linguistic, aesthetic,
and political conditions of post-Conquest England, in particular in the sustained interest
 106 in an Old English literary culture that established small but highly active communities of
scholarly antiquarianism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Early Middle English
SECTION 2 verse, I argue, shares not the "underlying innocence" of the first forays into a form but the
Moons oF LYRIC complex and multilayered ambiguities of a literary tradition. Its "concreteness and dra-
matic power" issue from the matrix of Old English elegy, religious polemic, and vernacu-
lar chronicle. Such verse gives voice not just to a loving, longing self but to a community
beset by the loss of language, landscape, and national institutions.
Much has been made, of late, of the emergent "nationhood" of English literary culture:
its self-consciousness of vernacular expression, its explicit topicality, its political agendas,
its satiric mien, its penchant for precise topographical description. 10 Thorlac Turville-Petre,
reappraising the national identity articulated in the early Middle English period, suggests
that "concepts of nationhood become dominant when the nation is perceived to be under
threat from outside attack or influence, for it is national identity that distinguishes the En-
glish from the feared French or the despised Scots." Writing in English is "a statement about
belonging," a claim for cultural uniqueness in an age when French rulers had measured out
the land, built strange fortifications, and replaced familiar leaders of the Church and local
communities with foreigners (England the Nation, 4, n). "Anglia exterorum facta est habita-
tio et alienigenarum dominatio" [England has become the dwelling place of foreigners and
the property of strangers], wrote William of Malmesbury in the early 1120s. His sentiments
were echoed in 1237 by Matthew of Paris: "Vae Angliae, quae quondam princeps provin-
ciarum ... nunc facta est sub tributo, conculcaverunt earn ignobiles, et facta est in praedam
degeneribus" [Alas, England, once first among regions ... now she is placed under tribute,
low-born men have trodden her down, and she has been plundered by degenerates]Y
The literary culture of the century bracketed by these remarks has come under renewed
scrutiny. Recent accounts of Insular romance, of the epic antiquarianism of La:samon's Brut,
and of the theories of history behind the burst oflocal and official annalistic writing have all,
to varying degrees, attended to the blend of poetics and politics in post-Conquest writingP
My goal is to bring critical discussion of Middle English lyrics into the ambit defined by this
cultural historiography,13 as well as to call attention to a set of tropes and idioms controlling
the making and reception oflate Old and early Middle English writing. Central to both pur-
poses is a preoccupation with architectural form and topographical manipulation, a re-
sponse to the new Norman projects of castle building, cathedral reorganization, and forest
management but also to the older Anglo-Saxon philosophical concerns with the transitori-
ness of human works and with death and burial. My title therefore evokes an important
genre of Old English verse, the poem on the grave, to find in early Middle English a poetics
of the entombed body and an inhumed past. By focusing on architectural control, the lyric
seeks analogies between the artifacts of engineering and the structures of society. By draw-
ing on naturalistic description, it illustrates the dislocated English voice, lost in a landscape
changed by castle, church, and royal forest. I survey a poetry of enclosed spaces: not the pri-
vacy of the domestic but the confines of the coffin. In the longer poems and the manuscript
assemblies of the age-most notably the witty bird debate known as The Owl and the Night-
ingale and the mid-thirteenth-century anthologies in which it survives-we may discern not
just the outpourings of a lyric voice but an assessment of the idea oflyricality itself. There is,
even in this most celebratory of early Middle English poems, a pervasive elegiac cast, and
when we see the text anew in its manuscript contexts, we witness how compilations shape a
sense of English literary history in the post-Conquest age. What Turville-Petre dubs "En-
gland the nation" lies, I propose, in the act not only of making new vernacular expressions
but of reading older English texts, maintaining older English ecclesiastical foundations, and
keeping local memories and human bodies secure in the face of alien encroachment.
[ ... ] 107

These bits and pieces of post-Conquest verse have long been seen as sharing in a teleology 2.2
of literary history, a trajectory from early-thirteenth-century folk song to the powerful SETH LERER

sophistications of the early-fourteenth-century Harley Lyrics. Yet, according to standard

literary histories, there is little in these early verses to prepare us for the poignancy of Har-
ley. Pearsall sees in them "no evidence of a tradition of courtly love lyrics"; but for the
Harley collection, our understanding of the early Middle English secular lyric would be
confined to "cryptic love songs, a fly-leaf fragment of a popular dance-song with refrain ...
[and] some casually preserved jottings of strange poignant individuality" (101). Similarly,
Thomas C. Moser Jr. finds in "Foweles in the frith" and its kin "a tiny, enigmatic fragment
of an intellectual world that we can only see in scattered parts and whose parts are held
together by a wild sort of meditational-exegetical glue" (334).
I wish to redirect our notions of this literature from scholarly laments and dismissals
of scattered fossils to a new, historically minded understanding of the fragments as frag-
ments. Post-Conquest writing is a collocation of images commensurate with the broken
quality of an Anglo-Saxon afterlife. Like the stones piled up by Wulfstan's flock, the remi-
niscences of an Alfredian education, and the grave sites and cells of distant saints, these
stanzas of early Middle English lyric are the pieces of a world, the objects oflinguistic and
literary study by the Worcester antiquarians. They are verse examples of a vernacular
culture shoring itself up against the claims of other languages and other readers. They are
the English versions of what Maria Rosa Menocal calls "shards oflove," expressions of the
alienation that provokes the lyric statement and, in historical terms, locates the speaking
subject in a landscape of displacement:
The medieval-and thus what we call the modern and the postmodern-lyric is invented
in bitter exile. And not just the normal and conventional and essentially metaphoric exile
that is, perhaps, the condition of all poetry and its reading. No, here the poet must finally
face the harsh winter night when he knows, in that full solitude, that he will never again
see the lovely terra-cotta rooftops of Florence, that he will never be buried in the barren
but olive-fragrant soil outside Granada. In that cold and darkness, the solitary voice asks
what he will do about it. Among the thousands of answers that have come with the morn-
ing, one singular and unexpected one, the love lyric, has been a powerful and charming
defense, a form of resistance commonly taken for retreat. (91-2)

For early Middle English lyricists, the sense of exile is not conditioned by physical removal
to a place of punishment or pathos. Rather, it remains the product of a country stripped of
its familiarities, an exile now internal and the product of a language and a landscape taken
over. To live as English speakers in a newly French land, to pile up stones against the
monumental ism of the Conquest, is to live in the regia dissimilitudinis at the heart of all
exilics. The very images of Menocal's review vibrate with the reflections of the Middle
English lyric: the harsh winter night, the architecture of desire, cold and darkness. Early
~liddle English lyric, I have argued, is a form of resistance, a defense of the vernacular
against the impositions of the foreign. "When is a song of love ... about a city and not a
woman?" Menocal asks (92). The longings of the lyric she finds in medieval and modern
:raditions are themselves longings not just for persons but for places, and in her account
:he city and the woman become interchangeable counters in the poetry ofloss. So, too, in
.:arly Middle English verse, it is the place that is estranged. The "lafdi pet is pris" of "Ic
an witles," locked in the Norman "caste! wal of stan," is England itself. The association
:s not as fanciful as it might seem, when we reread the poem against the full text of
 108 Matthew of Paris's lament: "Alas, England, once first among regions, mistress of peoples
[domina gentium], mirror of the Church and a pattern of religion: now she is placed under
SecTION 2 tribute, low-born men have trodden her down, and she has been plundered by degener-
Moons oF LYRIC ates." To recall Matthew's words now is to see their gender made explicit, to see the histo-
rian transformed into a lyricist. Such sentiments are those of the speaker of "Foweles in
the frith," whose madness comes as a consequence of seeing the familiar seasons change
in a demesne now scripted by the Domesday Book. So, too, for the others. "Ej! ej! what pis
nicht is long." "Dureleas is pret hus and dearc hit is wioinnen."

If the first century and a half after the Conquest saw the emergence of "shards of love" in
scribal ephemera, the following century witnessed attempts to bring together the exam-
ples of Middle English lyric into compilations of pedagogical or thematic value. A manu-
script such as Trinity College Cambridge MS 323-with its interlarding of the English,
French, and Latin-illustrates the range of languages and literary forms that occupied
monastic readers, as does British Library MS Harley 2253, the famous compilation con-
taining the Harley Lyrics, the early-fourteenth-century collection of secular English
verse, Latin religious prose, and Anglo-Norman fabliaux and saints' lives. Perhaps no-
where is such multilingualism so palpable as in the macaronic lyric from that manu-
script, "Dum ludis floribus," in which Latin and French lines alternate until the final
stanza proceeds, in all three languages, from schoolroom notes through Parisian wan-
derings to English love and loss:
Scripsi hec carmina in tabulis;
mon ostel est en mi Ia vile de Paris;
may y sugge namore, so wel me is;
3efhi de3e for loue of hire, duel hit ys.
[I have written this song on tablets (of wax);
my dwelling is in the middle of the city of Paris;
may I say no more, to keep me happy;
if! die for love of her, it would be a grievous thing.]l 4

Such poetry bears witness not just to the multilingualism of contemporary culture but to
the growing sense, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, of retrospection
and review. Scribal assembly oflyrics often older than their compilation preserves a tradi-
tion and anthologizes the exemplars of vernacular expression.
Such acts of preservation are politically thematized in two related manuscripts from
the mid- to late thirteenth century. British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.ix and Jesus
College Oxford MS 29 are best known for The Owl and the Nightingale, but they also con-
tain religious verse, secular lyric, and metrical history. 15 The Caligula manuscript begins
with a copy of La3amon's Brut, while Jesus preserves a text of the versified Proverbs of
Alfred. They share copies of The Latemest Day, Domesday, and Deaths Wither-Clench, all
securely in the late Old English tradition of elegiac mournfulness, while offering texts in
Anglo-Norman French. They have long been studied for their similarities of content and
order as well as for their representativeness in the history of Insular paleography. 16 In
tandem, they constitute an anthology of English literary history: Latin altercatio and
French fable, proverbs attributed to Alfred and the poems of the grave, fit together here
and also in the omnivorous purview of The Owl and the Nightingale's avian disputants.
The manuscripts mime something of the world distilled, half a century later, into the
macaronic Harley stanza quoted above: its inhabitants pass from the text to the home,
from Paris to England, from scholarship to longing and loss.
 While displaying the capacity of English verse to mime the patterns of the Latin school 109
or the matter of Marie de France, The Owl and the Nightingale is also about the idea oflyri-
cality and thus the relations between vernacular language and the speaking voice. The 2.2
Nightingale, traditionally a figure for the secular, the lyrical, the felt, and the emotive, SETH LERER

makes a case not just for a particular approach to life or love but for a lyric subjectivity. Hers
is the world oflove song and desire, of seasonal change and emotional response. 17 She is the
"bryd one brere," whose announcements mark not only the occasions of desire but the mo-
ments of desiring individuals, in a voice from which another, human, lyric 'T' may speak.
At stake in the Nightingale's arguments, and at the heart of her rebuttal to the Owl's
claims that her songs lead women into adultery (1045-66), are the nature of individual will
and, consequently, the relations between authorial utterance and reader response. The
~ightingale claims that she does not "teache wifbreke spuse" (1334) but sings of an idealized
love that can exist in marriage. She is not responsible for women of "nesche mode" (1349)
who misunderstand her:
!>at heo, for sume sottes lore
l>e 3eorne bit & sikep sore,
Misrempe & misdo summe stunde,
Schal ich paruore beon ibunde?
3ifwimmen luuiep unrede,
Hwi witistu me hore misdede? (1351-6)

[That these women, on account of some foolish learning,

Eagerly pray and sigh sorrowfully,
Go astray and sometimes act wrongly,
Should I therefore be held responsible?
If women live ill-advisedly,
Why do you blame me for their misdeeds?]

Such women may well turn the song amiss (1364):

Alswa hit is bi mine songe:
l>ah he beo god, me hine mai misfonge
An drahe hine to sothede
And to opre uuele dede. (1373-6)

[Likewise, the same is true about my song:

If it is good, one may misapply it
And drag oneself down into folly
And to other evil actions.]

Here, as elsewhere, The Owl and the Nightingale remains a poem about understand-
ing and intention. Its central claim, voiced throughout myriad disputations on secular
and religious issues, is that language often does go amiss: the gap between intention and
expression is a feature of linguistic competence, and the speaker need not be blamed for
what the listener hears. The linguistic epistemology of the poem recalls many disputes on
language and understanding that pre-occupied English and French intellectuals in the
late twelfth century. The poem's notion of intention, for example, resonates strongly with
Abelard's conception of intentio and responsibility in his Ethics and De dialectica. Its pre-
occupations with perception and impression similarly recall John of Salisbury's academic
skepticism in the Metalogicon and, in turn, his understanding of the ambience of debate as
the realm of the verisimilar, rather than of the absolutely true (Murphy, "Rhetoric and
 110 Dialectic"; Reed, 255-60). The Owl and the Nightingale marries these philosophical con-
cerns with an interest in the idea of the lyric voice and of the literary as a function of the
SECTION 2 speaking subject and its understandings. The poem is, at this level, an essay in the arts of
Moons oF LYRIC subjectivity: a playful exercise in how words go well or awry, a meditation on the power of
the lyric to convey and sway emotion.
Like the poem's philosophy, its appearance is Continental. In both manuscripts it is
written out in linea ted couplets. Unlike the Brut, which, in spite of its scribes' pointing of
its half lines, remains written out as continuous prose, The Owl and the Nightingale is
visually indistinguishable from verse in Latin or the Romance vernaculars. Both of its
manuscripts offer short lines in double columns, and both punctuate line endings. In the
Jesus manuscript the poem comes with a Latin title (Incipit altercacio inter filomenam et
bubonem), and each line's initial letter is set off from the others. In Caligula the text is
written in a "professional" gothic hand, more usual for works of the learned Latin tradi-
tion, such as the Historia scholastica in British Museum MS Royal 3 D.vi (c. 1283-1300).
In these texts The Owl and the Nightingale looks for all the world like a European rather
than an English poem, and it may have been as striking to a reader of the mid-thirteenth
century as to one of the late twentieth (Ker, xvi).
Indeed, perhaps the poem is not a translation, in the narrow sense, but a formally and
generically Continental work. Throughout the texts I have surveyed it has been apparent
that the Englishness of English verse is less a function of vocabulary, theme, or genre than
a product of the scribes. Regardless of its metrical form or subject matter-be it the hero-
ics of the Brut; the lyric voicings of "Ic afl witles"; the homiletics of The Soul's Address,
The Grave, or the First Worcester Fragment; or the encomiums of Durham or the Rime of
King William-all verse of this period is inscribed as continuous prose. The visual ap-
pearance of The Owl and the Nightingale thus announces a vernacularity more Continen-
tal than Insular, a metier more in tune with Latin schooling and the Ile de France than
with the antiquarianism of Worcester Cathedral.
Yet it remains an English poem. The Proverbs of Alfred takes precedence over material
drawn from the fables of Marie de France. The English Nicholas of Guildford (whoever
he may be) is the final judge of the birds' argument, in spite of earlier appeals to canon law
and the pope of Rome. 18 For all its scribal trappings of European literacy, the altercatio
transpires in a landscape unique to the British Isles.

Ich was in one sum ere dale;

In one supe di3ele hale
Iherde ich holde grete tale
An Hule and one Ni3tingale. (1-4)

[I was in a summer valley;

In a secret, hidden nook,
I heard a great debate held
Between an Owl and a Nightingale.]

Though arranged in precise octosyllabics and perfect rhymes, the words descend directly
from Old English. And if the locus amoenus seems universally familiar from a range of lit-
erary disputations, the bird's setting should remind the reader that it is still England: "I:>e
Ni3tingale bigon pe spece!In one hurne of one breche" [The Nightingale began the plea/In
a corner of a fallow field] (13-4)! 9 Such fields, broken up for cultivation, were the product of
the domestication of the forest that began under William the Conqueror and continued
through the thirteenth century. New clearings took on new names-Gilibertesbreche,
Parkeresbreche, Brechehurne-and with them came new castles. As the Nightingale puts it, 111
in an early disclaimer to the Owl's accusations of her weakness, "I habbe on brede & eck on
lengpe I Castel god on mine rise" [I have in the length and breadth of my bough I A castle, 2.2
good in every respect] (174-5). Alive to a political landscape manipulated by castellation, she SETH LERER

equates her own strength with that of the Conqueror, of whom it is said, in the Peterborough
Chronicle's memorable phrase, that "castelas ... he let wyrcean." Closer to the date of the
poem's composition, the Nightingale's references would recall, too, the massive castle
building-and castle besieging-that marked the anarchy under King Stephen.

Mid lutle strengpe pur3 ginne

Castel & bur3 me mai iwinne;
Mid liste me mai walles felle
And worpe ofhorsse kni3tes snelle. (765-8)

[With only a little strength, but through ingenuity,

One may conquer castle and town;
One may bring down walls with deceit
And throw bold knights off their horses.]

The lesson of the Nightingale is also that of King Stephen. Both the Peterborough Chron-
icle and the Latin Gesta Stephani tell stories of castle building and besieging. In the
Chronicle the king's enemies "fylden pe land ful of castles" after having deprived the
people of it (Clark, 55). In the Gesta Stephen himself works through guile and stealth, as
well as brute force, to retake the castles of the towns held by his rebels. 2°Castle building,
the nexus of political control and dynastic establishment under Stephen, continued as the
mode of rule until the reign of Henry II (the late "king Henri" of one of the Nightingale's
stories [1091], whose death in n89 has been taken as the terminus post quem for the poem's
composition). 21 It was for the twelfth century what it had been for the age of the Con-
queror: "one of the consequences of the suspension of the juridical protection of property
rights," in other words, the way kings made themselves kings (Coulson, 68).
Yet the castle falls before the Nightingale's "ginne." This Middle English word, to-
gether with its semantic pair liste, translates the Old French engin, the ingenuity and guile
of romance that topple castle, burg, and wall. 22 Not only a claim for philomenal strength
against bubonic pressure but a large set of linguistic and historical references is advanced
in these lines. In an English landscape full of both newer castles and older burgs, what is
left in the aftermath of conquest and anarchy is not so much brute strength as it is craft and
skill. Subtly the nature of the poem's landscape shifts, locating the Nightingale's sense of
bodily strength in terms of built, controlled, or crafted things-or their destruction.
From this poem, as from the short lyrics that are its literary contemporaries, emerges
the speaking voice, set or en housed within a landscape. The opening words of this unmis-
takably urbane Middle English poem take us back to the rough couplets of the Rime of
King William and the little stanzas of the early lyrics, and for all its delicacy of diction and
easy wit, The Owl and the Nightingale offers tensions as deep as those of the other poems
written in the first centuries of Norman rule. For the first readers of the Caligula manu-
script, such tensions would have been felt immediately, as the text segues without break
or explicit into the lyric known as Death 's Wither-Clench. 23 Coming after the battle of the
birds, it presents a somber commentary on their vigor and wit. "J:>at plait was sif 7 stare 7
strong," the narrator told us (5), but Death's Wither-Clench reminds us, "Nis non so
stronge ne sterche ne kenelpat mai ago deapes wither clench" [There is no one so strong
or stark or keen I who may withstand death's wither clench] (n-2).
 112 As the coda to a debate poem full of misdoings and misunderstandings (where misded,
misdon, and other mis- words appear over twenty times), 24 Death's Wither-Clench invites
SECTION 2 the reader to recall the teachings of Solomon, in order that "penne ne schal pu never mis
MooELS oF LYRIC do" [then you shall never do wrong] (22). What the poem calls "salemones rede" [Solo-
mon's counsel] (21) now replaces as present, unambiguous advice the deferred judgment of
the absent Nicholas of Guildford, to whom the Owl and the Nightingale will fly. "Ah wa
schal unker speche rede, I An telle touore unker deme?" [Who shall advise us in our
speech,/ And render therefore our judgment?] (1782-3), asks the Nightingale-and the
scribe of the Caligula manuscript offers, in effect, an answer. Death's Wither-Clench is a
poem about deme, about judgment and decision. Indeed, after a poem in which one bird
has accused the other of subsisting on a diet of"attercroppe & fule ugli3e/ & wormes" [spi-
ders and foul flies/ And worms] (601-2), Death's Wither-Clench reiterates the inescapable
fact that in the end, all of us "wormes fode ... shald beo" [shall be food for worms] (34).
To read The Owl and the Nightingale in its historical, political, codicological, and lit-
erary contexts is to move past appreciations of its innovation or its ease to see the dark-
ness of its past and present. Through its vocabulary and its manuscript environment, it
locates itself in the late Old English traditions of a subjective geography: a placement of
the speaking self at moments of decline, nostalgia, or internal exile. The voices that
emerge from castles and from graves remind the reader of conquest's "wither-clench" and
of the afterlife of Old English idioms and genres in later lyrics. If the Nightingale seeks to
upset the world of power through her verbal "liste" and "ginne," then so, perhaps, do the
first Middle English lyricists as their tiny verses find their places in landscapes of desire
and release the "lafdi pet is pris," the domina gentium, from a "caste! wal of stan."

NOTES

1. The text appears in British Library MS Royal Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 57-118.
8.D.xiii, fol. 25r. It was first edited by Carleton Specialized studies of the metrical shifts at work
Brown, English Lyrics of the Thirteenth Century in the period include N. F. Blake, "Rhythmical
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), xii. The manuscript was Alliteration," Modern Philology 67 (1969): 118-24; S.
reexamined and reedited by Theo Stemmler, who K Brehe, "Reassembling The First Worcester
also reproduced a photograph of the manuscript Fragment," Speculum 65 (1990): 521-36; and Daniel
folio ("Textologische Probleme mittelenglischen Donoghue, "La3amon's Ambivalence," Speculum
Dichtungen," Mannheimer Berichte a us Forschung 65 (1990): 537-63. For discussions of generic
und Lehre 8 [1974]: 245-8). Peter Dronke reviewed affiliations along the lines of Romance verse forms
Stemmler's edition and offered new readings and see Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in
emendations of his own, together with a modern the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 1-15.
translation (The Medieval Lyric, 2d ed. [London: 4· Woolf, 67-85; Raymond Oliver, Poems without
Hutchinson, 1978], 144, 280). My edition is based Names: The English Lyric, 1200-1500 (Berkeley:
(with slight modifications) on that ofDronke. The University of California Press, 1970), 74-85.
translation is mine (as are all further unattributed 5. Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of
translations). the European Love Lyric, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Oxford:
2. ). A. W. Bennett, G. V. Smithers, and Norman Oxford University Press, 1968); Dronke, Poetic
Davis, eds., Early Middle English Verse and Prose, Individuality in the Middle Ages (Oxford:
2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), xxi-lxi; ). A. Clarendon, 1970); Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric
Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, A Book of (Princeton, N.j.: Princeton University Press, 1972);
Middle English, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), Lois Bragg, The Lyric Speakers of Old English
3-65; for technical details see Fernand Mosse, A Poetry (Cranbury, N.).: Associated University
Handbook of Middle English, trans. )ames A. Presses, 1991); Maria Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love:
Walker (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham, N.C.:
Press, 1952), 1-130. Duke University Press, 1994).
3. Burrow and Turville- Peyre, 57-62; Derek 6. Though Bragg clearly does (she defines Old
Pearsall, Old and Middle English Poetry (London: English poetry not on formal or metrical grounds
but on the basis of a "taxonomy of Old English 13. Some gestures have been made in this 113
lyric speakers" [39]). direction by Pearsall, 85-118; and Turville-Petre,
7. For attempts to frame shorter Old English England the Nation, 181-221. 2.2
verse generically see Martin Green, ed., The Old 14. Harley Lyrics, no. 19, II. 17-20, in Brook, 55·
SETH LERER
English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and For trilingual literary culture in England and its
Research (London: Associated University Presses, impact on the making of lyric anthologies see
1983); and Anne L. Klinck, The Old English Elegies Turville-Petre, England the Nation, 181-221.
(Montreal: MeGill-Queen's University Press, 1992). 15. Eric Gerald Stanley, ed., The Owl and the
8. See Kemp Malone, ed., Widsith (Copenhagen: Nightingale, 2d ed. (Manchester: Manchester
Rosenkilde and Bagge, 1962); and joseph Harris, University Press, 1972). All quotations and
"Deor and Its Refrain: Preliminaries to an references to the poem are from this edition. The
Interpretation," Traditio 43 (1987): 23-53. studies most relevant to my discussion are Kathryn
9. See G. L. Brook, ed., The Harley Lyrics D. Hume, "The Owl and the Nightingale" and Its
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956); Critics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977);
Oliver (n. 4 above), whose critical inheritance ). ). Murphy, "Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Owl
actually lies in the judgmental formalism ofYvor and the Nightingale," in Medieval Eloquence, ed.
Winters; and Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. ). ). Murphy (Berkeley: University of California
Hoffman, eds., Middle English Lyrics, Norton Press, 1978), 198-230; and Thomas L. Reed )r.,
Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1974), an Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of
anthology with a distinctively Robertson ian Irresolution (Columbia: University of Missouri
exegetical bias (for a review of competing opinions Press, 1990), 219-60. Some of the interpretations I
along New Critical/ exegetical lines see 309-50). advance here are developed from my dissertation,
For the ideological and institutional tensions "Classical Skepticism and English Poetry in the
between New Criticism and exegesis in American Twelfth Century" (University of Chicago, 1981).
medieval studies generally see Lee Patterson, 16. SeeN. R. Ker, "The Owl and the Nightingale":
Negotiating the Past: The Historical Study of Facsimile of the jesus and Cotton Manuscripts,
Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Early English Text Society, 251 (London: Oxford
Wisconsin Press, 1987), 3-39. University Press, 1963).
10. See, e.g., Richard Helgerson, Forms of J7. See Thomas A. Shippey, "Listening to the
Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England Nightingale," Comparative Literature 22 (1970):
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); 46-60.
Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: 18. For the poem's appeal to these sources, and
The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian the likely fictionality of Nicholas of Guildford, see
Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Stanley's introduction to his edition (19-35).
Press, 1994); and Thorlac Turville-Petre, England 19. See Stanley's note to I. 14 (105) and his
the Nation: Language, Literature, and National glossary entry for the word. See, too, MED, s.v.
Identity, 1290-1340 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). "breche," sense 6, for the information concerning
Behind them all, to varying degrees, stands the place-names quoted below.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: 20. K. R. Potter, ed. and trans., Gesta Stephani
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of National- (London: Thomas Nelson, 1955), 45-7.
ism, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 21. Stanley convincingly dates the poem
11. William Stubbs, ed., Willelmi Malmesbirien- between Henry II's death and Henry III's
sis Monachi De Gestis Regum Anglorum, 2 vols. ascension in 1216 (19).
(London: Rolls Series, 1887-89), 1:278; Henry 22. See Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in
Richards Luard, ed., Matthaei Parisiensis: Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven, Conn.:
Chronica Majora, 7 vols. (London: Rolls Series, Yale University Press, 1977), 108-n; and Geraldine
1872-87), 3:390. Quoted and translated in Barnes, "Cunning and Ingenuity in the Middle
Turville- Petre, England the Nation, 41, 22. English Floris and Blaunchefleur," Medium/JEvum
12. Susan Crane, Insular Romance (Berkeley: 53 (1984): 10-25.
University of California Press, 1986); Donoghue (n. 23- Death's Wither-Clench is titled and edited by
3 above); M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Brown (15-8). The poem survives in two different
Record, England, 1066-1307 (Cambridge, Mass.: versions in four manuscripts: Maidstone Museum
Harvard University Press, 1979); james Campbell, MS A.13; British Museum MS Laud Miscell.471;
"Some Twelfth-Century Views of the Anglo-Saxon and the two manuscripts of The Owl and the
Past," Peritia 3 (1984): 131-50. Nightingale (seeKer, x-xi). The quotation of the
 114 poem in several later compilations, prose works, 246r), from which I quote, was printed by Richard
and personal anthologies testifies to its wide Morris, An Old English Miscellany, Early English
popularity (Brown, 170-1). Brown printed the texts Text Society, o.s., 49 (London: Trench, 1872), 156-9.
from Maidstone and Laud. The Caligula text ( fol. 24. See Stanley's glossary (188-9).

2.3 Lyric Forms (2ooo)

HEATHER DUBROW

Definitions and Distinctions

Students with a keen sense of curiosity-or possibly merely a keen sense of mischief-
could fruitfully exercise either predilection by asking their teachers for a brief definition
of lyric. The complexities of responding to that demand, like the problems a similar
query about tragedy would generate, demonstrate the complexities of the literary types in
question. But despite the difficulty of defining lyric, exploring the forms it took during
the English Renaissance can illuminate this mode as a whole, some of its most challeng-
ing and exciting texts, and the workings of the early modern era.
Aristotle posits an apparently clear-cut division of all literature into lyric, epic, and
drama, basing the distinctions on the mode of presentation: lyric is sung, epic recited,
and drama staged. This division remains influential, lying behind the work of Northrop
Frye and many other modern theorists. Yet certain successors to Aristotle devise more
elaborate subdivisions of poetry, adducing criteria that narrow the concept of lyric and
lead to withholding that label from some forms of poetry. Thus, for example, in Book I,
Chapter II of his Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham distinguishes heroic,
lyric, elegaic, and epigrammatic verse and nods toward the presence of other types as
well; this list shows the influence of classical writers like Horace.
When they attempt to define and describe lyric, twentieth-century critics replicate the
problems earlier writers confronted. Some try to categorize it through formal qualities;
lyrics are generally considered to be short, though of course that criterion is frustratingly
relative and imprecise. Some argue that stanzaic form is typical oflyric though not neces-
sarily present in all poems deserving that title. Other definitions emphasize the connec-
tion between lyric and song, variously citing direct allusions to songs, such as Carmina (a
title of Horace's poems), the presence of such characteristics as the refrain, and references
to musicality like Keats' famous address to a nightingale.
Another approach is defining lyric in terms of its relationship to time. The claim that
it rejects or ignores temporality, though common, is less persuasive than more subtle at-
tempts to anatomize the complex and varied ways the lyric engages with time. Thus, for
example, Sharon Cameron's trenchant study Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre
suggests that the mode in question fears time, associating it with death, and works out
ways of redefining that potential antagonist. But how does this imputed fear relate to the
indubitable presence of history in many lyrics?
Yet another avenue toward a definition is characterizing the lyric speaker. Some argue
that this form allows the poet to express his real feelings, but recently most critics have in-
stead asserted that this, like virtually all types of writing, is mediated in so many ways that 115
the concept of actual emotions risks naivete. It is common to claim that the lyric speaker is
isolated; yet, as we will see, early modern pastorals, like many other lyrics of the period, not 2.3
only celebrate community as a value but also are typically situated in a community of shep- HEATHER DuBRow

herds. One group of critics maintains that lyric speakers express universal feelings and
represent all of us rather than individualized, historically situated people; another group,
however, retorts that such speakers are often, or even necessarily, historicized.
Certain commentators in turn focus on the relationship between the speaker and his
audience, with John Stuart Mill delivering the highly influential observation that the
lyric speaker is overheard. Similarly, in opposition to the suggestion that lyric is funda-
mentally a social mode, Helen Vendler defends the isolation and universality of its speaker.
The reader is present, she insists, as a kind of mirror: "a lyric is a role offered to a reader;
the reader is to be the voice speaking the poem." 1
Northrop Frye offers another seminal approach when he discusses lyric in terms of
what he playfully terms "babble" and "doodle." Associated with sound or melos, the for-
mer, he suggests, signals its connections with the charm and is manifest in rhythm, allit-
eration, and puns. "Doodle," in contrast, is the realm of verbal pattern or apsis, and Frye
connects it to another blood relative of lyric, the riddle. 2
Influenced by the importation of influential Continental theorists such as Derrida,
Foucault, and Lac an and by the emphasis on the instability of language that characterizes
and arguably defines poststructuralism, in the final three decades of the twentieth cen-
tury critics have challenged many preconceptions lying behind earlier descriptions of the
lyric. 3 One of the most common moves of poststructuralist criticism, the dismissal of
older conceptions of the autonomous individual as tainted products of humanist ideol-
ogy, is manifest in focusing on the rhetoric and performativity oflyric in lieu of the expe-
rience of the speaker or author.
Feminism has also informed reconsiderations of the mode in question, with critics
Yariously endorsing and questioning the frequently cited gendering of the lyric as female
and of narrative as male. In addition, love lyrics pivot on gender more immediately in the
relationship between speaker and object, the first generally male and the second female.
Hence many critics have read the lyric as both source and symptom of its culture's sup-
pression of women, pointing to the ways its addresses to the woman may silence her and
its descriptions dismember and disempower her; in particular, the blazon, a part-by-part
celebration of the female body based on the French blason, is seen as an assertion of con-
trol under the guise of praise. And the concern for the historical and political that char-
acterizes many critical movements at the end of the twentieth century has variously pro-
duced both distaste for the lyric's imputed tendency to suppress historical imperatives
and issues rather than merely ignoring them, and demonstrations of its putative partici-
pation in historical discourses despite assumptions to the contrary.
Finally, however, the controversies surrounding these and other attempts to define lyric
mandate distinctions based on both historical periods and genres. David Lindley, the author
of an excellent short overview entitled Lyric, brackets his attempts at definition by insisting
on historical specificity.4 As he and others have pointed out, many discussions of the mode
are shaped-and misshaped-by their positing the Romantic lyric as the normative model.
How and why, then, do sixteenth-century poets approach that protean form, the lyric?

Principal Poets and Styles of the Sixteenth Century

Even a brief and preliminary chronological survey of major developments and authors
of the period provides some answers to that question-but in so doing generates yet
 116 more questions. Though born in the fifteenth century, John Skelton composed most of his
important poetry in the sixteenth. His output is varied, encompassing spiritual meditations
SECTION 2 on death and salvation, a portrait of an alehouse, and a dream vision; one of his best-known
MooELs oF LYRIC poems is Philip Sparrow, a thought-provoking example of lyric lament. Equally thought-
provoking is Skelton's approach to metrics; his short lines, so idiosyncratic that they are
aptly termed "Skeltonics," may well be based on church music, especially plainsong. 5
Sir Thomas Wyatt, who lived between 1503 and 1542, is not only one of the earliest
poets of the period but also one of the most intriguing. His canon includes several forms
that were to be popular throughout the period, such as satires and metrical translations
of the Psalms; his love poetry is especially impressive for its often colloquial diction and
its intensity. Adapting sonnets by his Italian predecessor Francis Petrarch, he variously
fashions poems that are virtually translations and others that reformat Petrarch's lines in
a darker, more bitter font. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who was born fourteen years
after Wyatt, also contributed to the development of the sonnet, working out the rhyme
scheme discussed below that came to be called "Shakespearean." In contrast to the ir-
regular metrics and tangled emotions of Wyatt's sonnets, those of Surrey are typically
limpid and graceful.
George Gascoigne, indubitably among the most significant writers in the early years
of Elizabeth's reign though he is often neglected, includes among his varied canon, A
Hundred Sundry Flowers (1573) and The Posies (1575). These volumes contain skillfully
crafted love poetry, some of which is reminiscent of Wyatt's bitterness and wryness, as
well as instances of such forms as the epitaph and satire. Among his most moving lyrics is
"Lullaby of a Lover," which plays the soothing reassurances associated with the lullaby
against its own caustic reflections on aging and desire. Gascoigne's contemporaries in
this period experimented with a number of forms that were to become very popular later
in the century; George Turberville, for example, translates the pastorals of the Italian
monk Battista Spagnoli, often known as Mantuan. These decades also saw the publica-
tion of several collections oflyrics, notably the popular book known as Tottel's Miscellany
(1557); this volume includes love poetry, pastoral, and satire and represents a wide range of
authors, including Wyatt and Surrey.
Edmund Spenser's collection of pastorals entitled The Shepheardes Calender (1579), a
text to which I will return in more detail, is often seen as inaugurating the extraordinarily
rich production of poetry that characterizes the final decades of the sixteenth century.
Certainly it manifests many characteristics that were to recur in its author's later poetry,
such as his self-conscious and complex relationship to his literary predecessors, his en-
gagement with the controversies surrounding English Protestantism, and his delight in
stylistic experimentation, which in this instance is especially manifest in his range of verse
forms and his use of archaic language. In his sonnet collection Amoretti (1595), Spenser la-
ments the tension between working on The Faerie Queene (1590; 1596) and pursuing other
types of writing; but he continued to produce lyric poetry throughout his career.
Often described as a seventeenth-century poet in order to substantiate a clear-cut
break between the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, John Donne in fact probably wrote
many of his love lyrics and elegies during the 1590s. The rapid variations in tone and style
from poem to poem, as well as within a single text, render his work as difficult to encapsu-
late as it is intriguing to read. The approaches commonly associated with him-the ar-
gumentative stance, the conversational voice, the witty playfulness, the intellectual
knottiness-are famously present in such poems as "The Canonization" and "The Ec-
stasy," among many others. Such lyrics thus exemplify certain characteristics generally
associated with metaphysical poetry: its philosophical speculations, its interest in abstract
ratiocinations, and its so-called metaphysical conceits, startling images that typically link 117
apparent opposites, such as sexuality and spirituality. Yet Donne's secular verse encom-
passes many other registers as well, including the lyric simplicity of songs like "Sweetest 2.3
love, I do not go," a poem we would not be surprised to find in any Elizabethan miscellany. HEATHER DuBROw

As such texts as "The Bait" and "The Funeral" demonstrate, Donne's canon also swerves
from bitterly misogynistic poems, notably some graphically bawdy elegies, to ones that
celebrate the beloved (or, as some readers claim, in appearing to do so primarily celebrate
the speaker's power over her). (Some critics attempt to negotiate the infinite variety of
Donne's lyrics by positing a chronological movement from the conventional language and
eroticism of Petrarchism, a movement discussed in more detail below, to the refined spiri-
tuality ofNeo-Platonism; but in fact these and other strains coexist in his work.)
The 1590s was a decade of not only extraordinary richness but also extraordinary va-
riety in English poetry; remembering that John Donne may well have written many of his
acerbic love poems during the period and that it also saw the development of formal verse
satire provides a salutary qualification to generalizations about the lush, graceful verse
conventionally associated with these ten years. Love poetry of many types flourished dur-
ing the decade, drawing particularly on the erotic lyrics of Ovid and the sonnets of Pe-
trarch. In particular, the sonnet tradition enjoyed a great vogue in the 1590s, inspired by
the posthumous publication in 1591 of Sir Philip Sidney's collection Astrophil and Stella,
which is discussed in more detail in the section on the sonnet below. Contributions to
this genre during the 1590s range in tone and subject matter from the predictable but
gracefully melodic verse in Samuel Daniel's Delia (1592) to the iconoclasm of Barnabe
Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593), which ends in a startling fantasy of a rape.
In addition to love poetry, the 1590s saw the appearance of many other types of lyric.
Witness, for example, the career of Michael Drayton, who during that decade alone pub-
lished scriptural paraphrases, sonnets, pastorals, historical complaints, and historical
epistles based on Ovid's Heroides. Indeed, some of the most intriguing lyric poems in the
English language-variously intriguing in the ways they challenge their readers intellec-
tually, impress them aesthetically, and woo them ideologically-date from the 1590s.

Literary and Cultural Conditions

Why, then, did the Renaissance lyric develop when and how it did? Literary, social, and
cultural conditions in the early modern period inform it, and are in turn informed by it.
To begin with, during that era the mode in question enjoyed, or more accurately endured,
a lower status than certain other types of writing. Not only the problems of defining lyric
but the imbricated challenges of evaluating and justifying it emerge with particular force
in Sidney's Defence of Poetrie (1595), a treatise manifesting the defensiveness about the
mode that recurs throughout the Tudor period. Sidney offers an impassioned justification
of lyric: "who with his tuned lyre and well-accorded voice, giveth praise, the reward of
virtue, to virtuous acts; who gives moral precepts, and natural problems; who sometimes
raiseth up his voice to the height of the heavens, in singing the lauds of the immortal
God." 6 Thus Sidney elevates and justifies the lyric by encompassing didactic poetry, the
poetry of praise, and religious verse within the category in question. The text nervously
proceeds, however, to answer the charge that lyric poetry includes amoral love poetry by
suggesting such texts are an abuse of the potentials of the genre.
Other literary theories in the early modern period further complicated evaluations of
lyric. A medieval formulation that remains popular during the Renaissance, the concept
of the Vergilian wheel, states that Vergil moves chronologically from pastoral to georgic
(literature about agricultural practice) to epic. This model encouraged later poets to define
 118 their careers in similar terms, thus spurring the writing of pastoral; yet the widely cited if
historically inaccurate trajectory of the Vergilian wheel clearly privileges narrative forms
SecTION 2 over lyric. We encounter the same preference for narrativity when Aristotle posits a hier-
Moons oF LYRIC archy of genres with tragedy at the pinnacle, a judgment adopted by many other writers
as well; some Renaissance rhetoricians, including Sidney himself, offer an alternative
ranking that privileges epic, reflecting the nationalistic aspirations of their era. But which-
ever of those systems one adopts, lyric does not win the lottery.
As I have already suggested, gender and gendering offer additional explanations for
its dubious status. Love has been the subject oflyric poetry in many different eras, and in
the early modern period in particular the connection between the two was intensified by
the vogue the sonnet enjoyed in England in the 1590s, as well as by the popularity oflove
songs throughout the era. But the credo that love, including the activity of writing about
it, is effeminate and effeminizing recurs throughout early modern texts. Or, to put it an-
other way, one might say that in Renaissance aesthetics lyric adopts a female subject posi-
tion to the male one of epic-not only inferior but also in some way threatening, much as
female characters in both classical and Renaissance epics threaten the city that must be
built, the nation that must be founded.
Yet sixteenth-century culture also offered many justifications for composing lyrics,
even ones about love. Nationalism encouraged demonstrations that English poetry could
rival the achievements of classical and Continental writers, including those of sonneteers.
Attending to the commonplace that the Bible is a compendium of all genres, Renaissance
lyricists could claim as their predecessor no less a figure than David, considered the author
of the Psalms. Similarly, pastoral writers could dignify their work by adducing the revered
Vergil as a forebear, as Spenser insistently does in his Shepheardes Calender (1579).
Prosodic developments and disagreements also shaped the aesthetics of the early
modern lyric. Essentially English poets inherited two principal possibilities, accentual-
syllabic and quantitative verse. The first, the main form of English poetry, grounds its
metrical schemes both in where stresses fall and in the number of syllables. In contrast to
these patterns, quantitative verse, practiced by Greek and Latin writers, ignores stress,
relying instead on the length or quantity of its syllables. It is common-and broadly
speaking accurate-to map the history of prosody in the sixteenth century as a move-
ment from rough and unsuccessful experiments with iambic pentameter, the form of
accentual-syllabic verse based on a pattern of five units that are typically iambic, to its
triumphant execution in the mellifluous poetry of the 1590s. But this schema, while pro-
viding a sound overview, resembles the parallel assumption that the English sonnet was
gradually moving from less successful rhyme schemes toward its natural form, the so-
called Shakespearean sonnet; both trajectories have tempted critics to express a xenopho-
bic nationalism, and both encompass as well the threat of underestimating the achieve-
ments of material that does not fit the pattern. Writers who do not achieve smooth iambic
pentameter might be marching to, or rather composing for, a different drummer. Witness
the debates about the decasyllabic (ten-syllable) lines of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Some read
them as instances of crude early sorties into iambic pentameter; alternatively, critics have
proposed a whole series of different systems that Wyatt might be successfully shaping,
such as the skillful combination of the versification ofLydgate and Italianate hendecasyl-
labic (eleven-syllable) patterns that George T. Wright identifies as the drummer in Wyatt's
hauntingly irregular lines?
A more extreme alternative to iambic pentameter was the possibility of importing a
system of quantitative verse into English. Impelled by their respect for Latin and Greek
verse, a number of poets in the period debated and experimented with this option.
Edmund Spenser and an academic with whom he was friendly, Gabriel Harvey, ex- 119
changed a series of letters, published in 1580, about quantitative verse. Sir Philip Sidney,
who delighted in experimenting with verse forms as well as with meter, also wrote some 2.3
quantitative lyrics. HEATHER DUBROW

Debates about alternative metrical systems are closely related to controversies about
whether rhyme is an appropriate ornament or a lamentable barbarism, since here too one
central issue is whether English verse could and should imitate its classical predecessors.
Despite his own success with rhyme, Thomas Campion, associating it with a lamentable
neglect of classical principles of meter, mocks it in his Observations in the Art of English
Poesie (1602): "the facilitie and popularitie of Rime creates as many Poets, as a hot som-
mer flies"; 8 yet other sixteenth-century poets, notably Samuel Daniel, as vigorously de-
fend rhyme.
Whatever their position on such debates, in practice sixteenth-century poets enthusi-
astically experimented with a range of stanzaic patterns. Courtly forms popular in the
fifteenth century such as the rondeau, a French stanza in which the opening words recur,
survive and flourish in the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt in particular-yet another warning
of the dangers of stressing the modernity of the period at the expense of acknowledging
its continuing affiliations with the past. Later in the century, poets, reveling in virtuoso
performance, adopted a number of other difficult forms. For example, both Sidney and
Spenser composed sestinas, a devilishly complex system of six six-line stanzas plus envoi
that they inherited from Italian writers. The technical triumphs achieved in such chal-
lenging stanzaic patterns in turn pose challenges for us as critics: how can we most inci-
sively reconcile-or perhaps most illuminatingly juxtapose-contemporary interpreta-
tions of the early modern writer as passive vehicle for cultural anxieties with the recognition
that such poets were also agents effecting pyrotechnics of prosody?
The early modern lyric was, of course, shaped not only by rhythm in the literal sense
but also by the rhythms of court life. Although the profound impact of the literary move-
ment New Historicism and its English cousin cultural materialism have intensified criti-
cal interest in that environment, it was investigated from different perspectives by earlier
students of the lyric. In particular, in Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court, a study
published in 1961, John Stevens relates Renaissance poetry to conditions at the Tudor
court, emphasizing in particular practices of setting poems to music and of passing lyrics
among a circle of friends in what he terms "the game of love." Such connections between
the Renaissance lyric and courtly music clarify debates about the workings of lyric in
general, reminding us that in some important instances it is indeed linked with song-
and, more significantly, linked as well with performance and courtly ritual, thus further
calling into question generalizations about lyric as a spontaneous overflow of emotion.
The connections between lyric and song manifest the fascination with music that
characterizes the English Renaissance, like its Continental counterparts. Philosophical
treatises deploy music as a symbol for cosmic orders; the Renaissance schoolmaster Rich-
ard Mulcaster movingly advocates teaching it; poetic texts frequently fashion musical im-
agery. But this sibling art affected early modern poetry more immediately and directly as
well. Songbooks were published throughout the sixteenth century, though they became
especially popular and prevalent around the turn of the century. Songs ranged in form
from the simple monophonic type called an "air," a form to which Thomas Campion and
John Dowland contributed significantly, to the elaborately polyphonic madrigal, a form
with Continental antecedents that was developed in England by William Byrd.
Musical settings survive for some well-known Renaissance lyrics, including the songs
that were frequently incorporated into plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. A
 120 manuscript heading reminds us that no fewer than six of Donne's love poems were set to
airs. Other poems allude to musical performance, as Wyatt famously does in "Blame not
SECTION 2 my lute" and "My lute, awake." Indeed, among the significant authors of Renaissance lyr-
Moons oF LYRIC ics should be listed the composer Campion.
The second question Stevens had raised, the use of the lyric within social interac-
tions, has been pursued from different perspectives by critics at the end of the twentieth
century. Exemplifying the New Historicist privileging of politics in its many senses over
the private spheres, Arthur F. Marotti's article "'Love is not love': Elizabethan Sonnet
Sequences and the Social Order" (ELH, 49 [1982]: 396-428) impelled a revisionary redefi-
nition of the functions of lyric. Sonnets that appear to be about love, Marotti argues,
should really be read as statements about the author's struggle for patronage, a link en-
couraged by that supreme patroness Elizabeth's predilection for presenting herself as the
mistress of sonnets. Marotti's assertion that struggles for place in the patronage system
inform the more overt struggles for the affections of a disdainful mistress is persuasive.
Yet, like many revisionist readings, this essay overstates its case: the insistence that poems
that appear to be about love instead encode their primary concern with patronage is far
less convincing than the alternative formulation that love lyrics, while centrally and often
primarily concerned with romantic relationships, play love against courtly politics in
ways that comment on both arenas.
Marotti and others have recently repositioned the Renaissance lyric in a different type
of social context. Impelled by the materialist concern for the conditions of production,
many critics have been tracing the consequences of the form in which Renaissance lyrics
appeared. In particular, extensive and often exciting scholarship has illuminated the con-
sequences of the movement from a manuscript to a print culture, with critics positing a
radical change in conceptions of authorship. 9 As these studies indicate, numerous early
modern lyrics were in fact circulated in manuscript, often in collections that included a
range of poets and did not identify the authors; others appeared within popular collec-
tions such as Totte/'s Miscellany; and yet others were published in single-author books,
the format enjoyed by the posthumous volume of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella. All these
patterns were complicated by the appearance oflyrics in commonplace books, collections
compiled by an individual that might, for example, juxtapose poetry and recipes or scur-
rilous verse with more elevated poetry. Manuscript culture, according to the critics study-
ing it, virtually erases the autonomy of the individual writer: a given poem might be sig-
nificantly changed a number of times in transmission, and texts are seen as amorphous
and permeable in ways that minimize the poet's identification with or control over his
work. Print culture, in contrast, both impels and is impelled by a greater emphasis on the
individual author, a perspective that such analyses see as tellingly parallel to the develop-
ment of bourgeois conceptions of subjectivity.
Such arguments carry with them many intriguing implications about not only au-
thorship but also content and style. For example, it is likely that the juxtaposition of dis-
parate texts within a given manuscript both encouraged and was encouraged by the lyr-
ic's tendency to explore meaning relationally. That is, lyrics often comment explicitly or
implicitly on alternative generic possibilities, which come to represent different perspec-
tives and ideologies; for example, as Rosalie L. Colie demonstrates, the sonnet is on one
level the opposite of epigram and on the other a host that welcomes epigrammatic cou-
plets.10 Moreover, the juxtapositions of texts in the practices of manuscript culture argu-
ably encouraged as well an equally revealing phenomenon in the print culture of the pe-
riod, the habit of publishing related but significantly different texts together in ways that
invite comparison and contrast. Thus Spenser's Amoretti appears with his "Epithalamion" 121
and some short lyrics in the form known as anacreontic.
Yet, despite these and many other important implications of the research that com- 2.3
pares manuscript and print cultures, arguments about it need to be nuanced more than is HEATHER DuBRow

sometimes the case. We have to recognize the coexistence of several models of authorship
throughout the period, including very early versions of characteristics attributed to print
culture. For example, the elaborate revisions visible on Wyatt's manuscripts suggest a
pride in and concern for details of the text not usually associated with manuscript culture
even though his poems were circulated in that form and, indeed, the kinds of laborious
revision involved in crafting forms like the sonnet also suggest a model of authorship
sometimes associated largely or even exclusively with a later period.

Lyric Genres
The significance of literary form in the period-a significance as paradoxical as it was
profound-helps to explain why genre provides the best perspective on the sixteenth-
century lyric. In England as on the Continent, generic classifications were at once studied
sedulously and violated repeatedly. Forms not sanctioned by Aristotle, such as the ro-
mance, and so-called mixed genres or genera mista such as tragicomedy were variously
condemned and pursued. Not coincidentally, in this combination of firmly established
divisions and frequent violations of them the genre systems of the early modern period
resemble its systems of social class and gender.
A wide range of literary types flourished during the sixteenth century. Given its inti-
mate relationship to the sonnet, the epigram should also be read in relation to lyric. The
epithalamium or wedding poem tradition, very popular in the seventeenth century, pro-
duced only a few sixteenth-century examples; but this select company includes Spenser's
Epithalamion (1595) and his cognate poem the Prothalamion (1596), the latter celebrating
nuptials of sisters rather than a marriage. The complaint, a type of poem whose speaker
delivers a lament, often though not invariably about love, also proved popular in the pe-
riod, encompassing such texts as Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond (1592). In 1591 Spenser
published a group of poems, including "Prosopopoia," "Muiopotmos," and "Visions of
the Worlds Vanitie" under the title Complaints; they demonstrate the variety in the genre,
with the first a fable; the second a description, sometimes read allegorically, of a butter-
t1y's capture; and the third visionary sonnets influenced by Du Bellay and Petrarch.
The elegy is another sixteenth-century form with complex valences. In classical litera-
ture, the term refers to a particular meter, the alternation of hexameter and pentameter
lines. In sixteenth-century England, however, the label "elegy" was used loosely for a range
of literary types, generally lyric-in particular, funeral poetry and solemn meditations on
many different subjects, including love. Hence instances range from Spenser's funeral la-
ment Daphnaida (1591) to a series of Ovidian poems by Donne. The popularity of the elegy
in the early modern period and the recurrent, in fact obsessive, references to loss in many
other genres signal the intimate relationship between lyric and loss. Although this relation-
ship occurs in many periods, it is particularly marked in the English Renaissance because
both the sonnet and pastoral are genres of loss. The versions of repetition-the recurrence
of a refrain, a word, an action-that are so characteristic oflyric may be a way of negotiating
loss and recovery: subsequent versions of the repeated element remind us of the absence of
the original one and yet offer the hope of recovery via substitution.
Although the category of religious poetry is too loose clearly to constitute a genre, it
represents another important type of sixteenth-century poetry. It is no accident that the
 122 sixteenth-centun· flowering of the English lyric coincided with the development of Prot-
~' :c.:-:c >1:. for the Reformation's emphasis on interior states and meditation is clearly very
So::-:: .. :;. ~::-.~c.:c.: to inic poetry; tellingly, medieval religious poems often celebrate Mary or
V::::o....s ::= -·• c c::-.~:st rather than scrutinize the soul of the speaker. Protestantism also, of course, in-
:'ormed religious poetry more directly. Thus it generated an outpouring of hymns, the
genre to which that deeply Protestant poet Sidney repeatedly alludes in his Defence of
Poetrie; their influence is manifest, when, for example, Donne deploys the term in three
of his divine poems, "A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors Last Going into Germany,"
"Hymne to God my God, in my Sicknesse," and "A Hymne to God the Father." This is not
to deny, however, that the period also encompasses significant religious lyrics by Catho-
lics, notably Robert Southwell.
Like the hymn, the sonnet form attracted many poets writing about religion and spiri-
tuality. Some critics have even suggested that a rejection of secular for spiritual love is
central to the sonnet, although it is in fact present more intermittently and ambivalently.
In any event it is clear that the struggles between the Augustinian concepts of caritas and
cupiditas, which may roughly be rendered as the attraction of the soul toward God and its
pull toward the corporeal, were sometimes enacted in the implicit or explicit juxtaposition
of religious and spiritual poems; thus Barnabe Barnes published Parthenophil and Parthe-
nophe, a highly eroticized collection of sonnets, in 1593, and two years later brought out
what was virtually a palinode, A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets. Another type of
religious poetry, metrical translations of the Psalms, was so common in the period that
composing such texts has been described as a virtual initiation rite for fledgling poets.
Sidney's sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, participated in that vogue, while another
woman writer, Anne Lok, wrote a collection of sonnets based on the fifty-first Psalm.
As such instances demonstrate, while women such as Louise Labe composed sonnets
and other types of verse on the Continent, the principal mode of writing for sixteenth-
century Englishwomen was religious verse, whether they translated it or, as in the case of
Lok, composed it themselves. The argument that this was a less threatening arena for
women's voices is persuasive; Lok not only writes spiritual poetry but also quite literally
locates her voice within patriarchal strictures by appending her poetry to her translation
of Calvin. But equally persuasive is the assertion that such poems demonstrate at least
some measure of resistance to and even subversion of patriarchy; female poets were turn-
ing to a form whose value was unassailable and in so doing arguably implying as well that
a higher audience would attend to their words even if their contemporaries did not.

The Sonnet
Love poetry was of course composed in a range of forms, including that broad category
generally called "song." Even-or especially-collections of poems termed "sonnet se-
quences" frequently encompass a number of other stanzaic forms; Astrophil and Stella, for
example, incorporates eleven songs. But arguably the sonnet and pastoral were the two
most popular and characteristic lyric forms of the period. Hence exploring these two genres
in greater depth than others can help us to address many questions about the workings of
lyric in the sixteenth century.
One of the few instances in which a genre is defined in terms of a verse form, the son-
net can most safely be categorized as a fourteen-line poem that often, although not in-
variably, follows one of a handful of specified rhyme schemes and often, although not in-
variably, concerns love. One mark of the variety and experimentation that characterized
the lyric during the early modern period, however, is the instability of even that loose a
definition. In 1582, Thomas Watson published Hecatompathia, a collection of eighteen-
line sonnets, and throughout the period other writers occasionally deviated from the 123
fourteen-line pattern; moreover, the term "sonnet" was sometimes used loosely for love
poetry, so that Donne's lyrics were termed Songs and Sonnets even though few of them 2.3
have anything like the length or rhyme scheme usually associated with the term. HEATHER DuaRow

But normative models were also available and frequently imitated. Thus the so-called
Petrarchan sonnet may rhyme abba abba cde edc; the first eight lines, the octet or octave,
are fixed in their rhyme scheme, while the final three, the sestet, can assume a range of
other shapes, such as cdecde or cdcdee. The sonnet labeled Shakespearean consists of
three four-line units known as quatrains and a couplet, so it assumes the form: abab cdcd
efef gg. All these versions of the sonnet play subdivisions against each other, the octet
versus the sestet in the Petrarchan form and the quatrains versus the couplet in its En-
glish cousins; in addition, patterns of rhyme and meaning create further subdivisions, so
that English sonnets, like their Italian predecessors, often include a significant break after
line eight as well as the secondary shifts between quatrains. In the English sonnet these
relationships among prosodic and semantic units tend to be varied and unstable. For ex-
ample, while the Shakespearean sonnet often effects closure on a reassuring note of epi-
grammatic finality, couplets may undercut what has come before, or they may undercut
the apparent neatness of their own unit, as when Shakespeare's Sonnet 35, a poem en-
gaged throughout with the loss of comfortingly predictable patterns, begins its final
statement in the twelfth, not thirteenth, line. Thus the form itself may enact an imperiled
and often unsuccessful attempt at resolution.
Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, which signals both the speaker's connection with and
distance from the author by naming him "Astrophil" or "star-lover," demonstrates the
dramatic immediacy and psychological complexity the form could achieve. The sequence
also demonstrates its author's delight in experimenting with verse form, rhyme, and rhe-
torical devices such as complex patterns of repetition. These poems, whose author attained
a virtually mythic status after his early death, enjoyed an extraordinary popularity, as did
many of Sidney's other writings. Spenser's Amoretti (1595) is sometimes contrasted with
Sidney's collection as more melodious and descriptive in its style and less troubled in its
responses to love and desire, though Spenser does in fact include some extraordinarily bit-
ter invective as well as soaring praise of his lady. Similarly, it is customary to contrast the
graceful lyricism of Samuel Daniel's Delia with the Sidneyan drama of Michael Drayton's
sonnets, but such generalizations also need qualifications. Many of the poems in the first
edition of Drayton's Ideas Mirrour (1594) are indistinguishable from Daniel's work; some
of the putative distinctions in question gradually emerged as Drayton saw the volume
through eleven editions, including three significant revisions in the seventeenth century,
but the collection remained varied in tone and style. Other poets of the period produced
not only some impressive sonnet sequences but also enough indifferent or truly dreadful
ones to inspire Sir John Davies' witty parodies entitled "gullinge sonnets" (appearing only
in a manuscript miscellany, not in printed form, during the early modern period and
speculatively dated 1594). Although many of the other poems in the tradition were indeed
as humdrum as Davies' mockery suggests, some distinguished themselves in significant
ways. Richard Barnfield, for example, writes homoerotic sonnets. The sonnet became less
popular around the turn of the century, though the first English sonnet sequence by a
woman, Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, appeared in 1621.
English sonnets have multiple and intertwined roots, including the poetry of the
troubadours, the idealized visionary love poems in Dante's Vita nuova, and Neo-Platonic
philosophy. The Italian poet Petrarch 's collection, variously known by the revealing titles
Rime sparse ("scattered rhymes") and Canzoniere ("songs"), is, however, the principal
 124 source of the English sonnet tradition. Although the Rime sparse encompasses a range of
verse forms and subjects, most of its poems are sonnets concerning the speaker's rela-
SecTION 2 tionship to Laura, a woman who may or may not have been fictive. These lyrics model
MooELs oF LYRIC several characteristics that English sonneteers were to imitate: a typically unhappy rela-
tionship with a woman who is often idealized but sometimes demonized (feminism has
trenchantly glossed the reactive dynamic that structures that paradox), a preoccupation
with representation itself, a struggle between a commitment to secular love and an at-
tempt to disavow it, whether in the name of its spiritual counterpart or simply common
sense and self-protection. Petrarch contributed as well a number of formal characteris-
tics that recur in English sonnets. From him English poets borrowed the signature trope
of the genre, the oxymoron, which combines opposites, generally in the form of an
adjective-noun phrase such as "icy fire" or "sweet warrior." They adapted as well images
for love that appeared in Petrarch and his predecessors, such as references to a hunt or a
careening ship. Their interaction with the author of the Rime sparse was, however, medi-
ated not only by his own commentators (his immense popularity generated ten major
commentaries, so that his poems often appeared with elaborate and lengthy glosses) but
also by the later Italian and French poets who themselves imitated him and thus implic-
itly commented on him. Four poems Daniel published in Delia derive from Du Bellay,
for example, and Lodge bases several of his poems on sonnets by Ronsard, sometimes
virtually plagiarizing them.
Indeed, nationalism, so central to the English early modern period in England in other
ways, shapes its sonneteering as well, with an impulse to appropriate, nationalize, and sur-
pass Continental models among its principal motivations. But, as I have already suggested,
this is only one of several explanations for the extraordinary popularity of sonneteering.
The sonnet attracted poets and readers in part because it enacted many of the central
struggles of the age, often distancing them through transposition: its swings between
power and powerlessness, for example, staged contemporary concerns about the uncer-
tainties of social status. 11 Above all, though, Petrarchism served variously to intensify and
resolve early modern negotiations about gender. As many critics have demonstrated, the
genre provides reassuring scenarios for controlling the threats associated with the female
body and female subjectivity; for example, the blazon, that part-by-part description of the
female body, can provide an instance of divide and conquer. And yet such generaliza-
tions, though widely accepted, risk over-simplification: despite the conventional wisdom
about the silencing of women in early modern culture, Petrarchan mistresses not only
speak but are praised for their voices, and in fact the sequences most often manifest not
the power of the male speaker but an unresolved struggle between power and powerless-
ness. Indeed, the Petrarchan sonnet models gender relations elsewhere in the culture
above all in its complexities, contradictions, and ambivalences.

Pastoral
Pastoral was also especially popular in and characteristic of early modern English litera-
ture. But whereas the sonnet enjoyed a relatively brief but extraordinarily intense vogue
during the sixteenth century, pastoral poetry was written virtually throughout the pe-
riod, being variously deployed for love poetry, funeral elegies, meditations on religious
and ethical problems, and satire, especially of the church; Spenser's Shepheardes Calender
includes all of these approaches to the mode. Important and highly influential precedents
to the English tradition include the Eclogues of Vergil (which attracted interest in part
because the fourth poem was interpreted as prophesying the birth of Christ) and the
lyrics of the Greek poets Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus. English poets were also familiar
 ·. :th their Continental predecessors in the genre; for example, Mantuan provided a sig- 125
~-:ficant precedent for using pastoral to discuss religion.
Probably the most famous pastoral of the period is Spenser's Shepheardes Calender; his 2.3
~::oice of this form for his virtual poetic debut (he had previously published some transla- HEATHER DuBRow

::ons) reflects both the continuing power of the model of the Vergilian wheel and the sig-
:::ficance of this genre for his culture. Twelve eclogues comprise this collection, each ac-
~;:Jmpanied by a woodcut, a motto, and elaborate notes by one "E.K.," who may or may not
~c Spenser himself. Among the many pastorals included in Sidney's prose romance, the
.~.rcadia (1590), is "Ye goteherd gods"; the poet here skillfully deploys the repeated rhymes
::-the sestina to stage the obsessiveness of mourning. Another influential and revealing
. .:rsion of the genre is Christopher Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd to his Love," a poem
·:hose speaker attempts to seduce a lady by promising her the delights of the countryside;
:iis lyric inspired a number of retorts in its own day, notably Sir Walter Ralegh's "Nymph's
~cply to the Shepherd" and Donne's "Bait." In our own century Marlowe's text was turned
-~to a cabaret song in Ian McKellan's cinematic version of Richard III, thus figuring the
2cstruction and deformation of the values the poem ostensibly celebrates.
Once one moves beyond the obvious generalization that pastoral concerns the coun-
:~yside, engaging with the values it represents and playing them against those of court or
~ity, it becomes more complicated to define and describe the form. Certain convention-
~lized situations and formats do recur in the pastorals of many periods: shepherds often
?articipate in singing contests, and they lament the sorrows of love. Often, too, pastorals
2cscribe invasions into the pastoral world, though this characteristic of the genre has
::ot received the attention it deserves; whether effected by the intruders on whose threat-
::ned arrival Vergil tellingly opens his collection or by death, such intrusions mime and
~omment on the presence of other genres within pastoral, such as references to epic and
>atiric rebukes. Dialogues are common within pastoral, as is the Chinese-box effect of a
:·rame story within which other stories are told. And pastoral, a strikingly reflexive
;cnre, characteristically incorporates commentaries on its own practices, such as the act
Jf writing poetry. Indeed, it is not only metapastoral but also metalyric in that the ques-
:ions it raises about temporality, loss, and the workings of poetry itself are at the core of
:he lyric mode.
But what values and ideologies characterize pastoral? Some assert that it focuses on
:he relationship between man and nature, while others instead draw attention to its eroti-
~ism. Some claim pastoral is simple and idyllic, while others stress the complexities and
Jmbivalences exemplified by the statement attributed to death in pastoral, Et in Arcadia
.·go ("I am even in Arcadia"). Some associate it with detachment, while others trace the
-.,·ays pastoral allegorizes political, social, and religious controversies, as Spenser famously
Joes in his Shepheardes Calender. In a major study of the genre, What Is Pastoral?, Paul
_-\lpers negotiates a number of these debates, incisively arguing, for example, that pastoral
:ypically neither denies nor drowns in the threats it engages but rather suspends them.
_-\nd pastoral is, he suggests, often concerned primarily with the interactions in human
communities. 12
To understand the workings of pastoral in the early modern period, one needs to look
more closely at additional characteristics and predilections as well. Its emphasis on the
contrast between the here of the country and the there of city or court is the spatial ana-
logue to its recurrent temporal preoccupation with then and now; the former is generally
represented as the idyllic time before the pastoral world is threatened, whether by the new
inhabitants who displace the shepherds in Vergil's first eclogue, by love, or by that figure
who is both enemy and sibling of love in pastoral, death. This contrast between then and
 126 now is sometimes figured in the combination of narrative and lyric elements in pastoral.
Pastoral is also typically concerned with the unstable relationship between loss and re-
SECTION 2 covery. Thus, for example, in a sense the pastoral landscape is a second Eden, and yet it
Moons oF LYRIC too is under threat (a pattern that recurs in dramatic pastorals such as Shakespeare's As
You Like It as well as their lyric counterparts); and when a shepherd sings a song associ-
ated with another shepherd, he both recuperates that lyric and signals the absence of its
original author. Pastoral, the genre that on some level represents a lost home, is also deeply
concerned with threats to an abode; witness Vergil's telling decision to open his eclogues
on a story of a shepherd being dispossessed.
Although these characteristics recur throughout the history of pastoral, they would
have been especially appealing in the early modern period. Its interest in time and change
attracted an era that was fascinated with history and historicity. Its emphasis on both the
loss and restoration of home interested a culture that mythologized itself as a second Troy-
and that feared that that Troy, like the first one, was subject to invasions, notably from the
Catholic powers in Europe. Seamus Heaney, whose own poems are so often written within,
about, and in defiance of history, observes, "A poem floats adjacent to, parallel to, the his-
torical moment." 13 Even when pastoral does not comment directly on history and politics,
it may trope them, floating adjacent to and thus variously refracting, redefining, and
reinterpreting them.
But pastoral is often more directly connected with its culture as well, and this too helps
to explain its appeal. Two of the most significant rhetorical treatises of the sixteenth cen-
tury emphasize its congeniality to allegorical treatments of political and social issues.
Although pastoral was seen as a low form during the Renaissance, involving both lan-
guage and speakers less elevated than their counterparts in, say, epic, Sidney stresses that
it could perform an important social function. "Is the poor pipe disdained, which some-
time out of Meliboeus' mouth can show the misery of people under hard lords or raven-
ing soldiers? ... sometimes, under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep, can include the
whole considerations of wrongdoing and patience" (Defence of Poetrie, p. n6). Sidney
does precisely what he describes in his romance, the Arcadia. And in Book 1, Chapter 18
of his Arte of English Poesie, Puttenham asserts that the impetus behind pastoral was not
in fact the exploration oflove "but under the veil of homely persons, and in rude speeches
to insinuate and glance at greater matters." 14 Exploring and expanding the commentaries
by Sidney and Puttenham, recent studies have trenchantly traced how pastoral glances at
"greater matters" of English Renaisssance politics and culture. Thus Annabel Patterson
traces references to patronage, while Louis Montrose demonstrates the ways this genre
explores, often in safely allegorical form, questions about power, status, and patronage} 5

Conclusion
But much as Shakespeare's sonnets end on ostensible summaries that often instead chal-
lenge what has come before, so a survey of the genres of lyric poetry should terminate on
an acknowledgment of the instability of that category. Some genres regularly encompass
both lyric and narrative modes: witness the range of poems in Spenser's Complaints. The
so-called lyric epithalamium dovetails both modes, insistently temporal in its chronicle
of the events of the wedding day and lyric in its meditations on them. Similarly, the
nymphs' song in Spenser's "Prothalamion" signals a change of mode through a change of
speakers. But one of the best examples of the interplay between lyric and narrative is the
sonnet tradition. Individual sonnets often tell stories; witness the whole host of mytho-
logical tales so popular in the genre, such as the seventeenth poem in Sidney's Astrophil
and Stella. The tension between the attempt to find a plot in a collection of sonnets pub-
lished by a given poet and the insistence that the poems in question reject narrativity is 127
manifest in the terms used for such collections: "sonnet sequence" versus "sonnet cycle."
The soundest approach to these debates moderates (in both senses of that verb) the ex- 2.3
treme arguments on both sides: we need to recognize that the balance between lyric and HEATHER DuBRow

narrative elements differs significantly from one group of sonnets to the next, but often a
single author's collection of sonnets will juxtapose poems that are discrete meditations
and might as plausibly be arranged in a different order with groups of sonnets that appear
to tell a story. In any event, however one resolves the disagreements about the presence of
narrative plots, in the sonnet as in many other genres the interaction among lyric, narra-
tive, and dramatic elements stages the tensions among differing visions of problems rang-
ing from temporality to gender.
We are now in a position briefly to return to my initial questions about the problems
of defining lyric and relating it to sixteenth-century culture. Not only should definitions
and descriptions be historically specific; the variety lyric manifests even within a single
historical period, such as the early modern one, offers further caveats about generalizations.
One can, however, say that in the Renaissance the connection between lyric and song is
central. One can also assert with confidence that Renaissance lyrics variously qualify and
challenge definitions that emphasize an isolated speaker overheard rather than participate
in social interactions. To be sure, some poems, notably in the sonnet tradition, are indeed
internalized meditations, and often their so-called plots are far more amorphous than
critics more accustomed to reading narrative and drama like to acknowledge. But many
other Renaissance lyrics evoke a social situation, whether it be that of the shepherd com-
municating with other shepherds or of the elegiac poet addressing the dead person or
other mourners. And even the poems that involve internalized reflection often presume
as well an audience who is not simply overhearing private thoughts but rather being indi-
rectly addressed. The lament in a sonnet, for example, may present itself as a private out-
pouring of sorrow but also function as implicit pressure on the lady and an implicit com-
plaint about her behavior to a male audience. Thus, though this predilection has not
received the attention it deserves, Renaissance lyrics frequently address not just a single
audience but rather multiple and different audiences. 16 In an age fascinated by rhetoric,
:he lyric poet is typically a consummate rhetorician, adorned with the literary skills and
shadowed with the ethical dangers of that role.
The presence of multiple audiences aptly figures the ways contemporary critics can
:nost fruitfully read the sixteenth-century lyric. We need to eschew generalizations that
:1eglect its own multiplicity, and we need to approach it from many critical perspectives,
2.lert to both technical virtuosity and ideological imperatives and thus to the complex
:nterplay between formal potentialities and cultural history.

NOTES

1. Helen Vendler, "Tin tern Abbey: Two Assaults," Hosek and Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
~- Wordsworth in Context, ed. Pauline Fletcher and Press, 1985).
-: 'ln Murphy (Lewisburg and London: Bucknell 4· David Lindley, Lyric (London: Methuen, 1985),
-_-:-:iversity Press and Associated University pp. 22-24-
=~esses, 1991), p. 184. 5- For this explanation of Skelton's prosody, see
2. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Arthur F. Kinney, john Skelton; Priest as Poet:
;=:;;ays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Seasons of Discovery (Chapel Hill: University of
.;s~l. pp. 275-80. North Carolina Press, 1987), esp. pp. 46-51.
3- For a useful overview of these changes, see 6. The reference is to Sidney, An Apologie for
=::aviva Hosek and Patricia Parker, "Introduc- Poetrie, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Nelson,
in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed.
:_:.rl," 1965). p. 118.
 128 7· George T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art community in a number of places, but see esp.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. pp. 81-82.
SECTION 2 27-37· 13. Heaney, The Government of the Tongue:
8. The citation is to Campion, Observations in Selected Prose 1978-1987 (New York: Farrar, Straus
MODELS OF lYRIC
the Art of English Poesie (London, 1602), p. 4· and Giroux, 1989), p. 121.
9. See esp. Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 14. I cite Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie,
and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: ed. Baxter Hathaway (Kent, OH: Kent State
Cornell University Press, 1995); Wendy Wall, The University Press, 1970), p. 53·
Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in 15. See two essays by Montrose: "'Eliza, Queene
the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell of shepheardes,' and the Pastoral of Power," English
University Press, 1993). Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 153-82; "Of
10. Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), Elizabethan Pastoral Form," English Literary
ch. 2. History 50 (1983): 415-59; Patterson, Pastoral and
11. For a more detailed discussion of this and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Berkeley: University of
cognate explanations for its popularity, see my California Press, 1987).
study Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its 16. Multiple audiences are also common in love
Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University poetry in particular, a point Christopher Martin
Press, 1995). demonstrates, though from perspectives different
12. On suspension see Paul Alpers, What from mine, in Policy in Love: Lyric and Public in
Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Ovid, Petrarch and Shakespeare (Pittsburgh, PA:
Press, 1996), pp. 68-69, 173; he discusses Duquesne University Press, 1994).

2.4 Introduction to The Art of

Shakespeare)s Sonnets (1997)
HELEN VENDLER

There are indeed a sort of underlying auxiliars to the difficulty of work, call'd Commenta-
tors and Critics, who wou'd frighten many people by their number and bulk, and perplex
our progress under pretense of fortifying their author.
Alexander Pope to Joseph Addison, 1714

In fact, every poem has the right to ask for a new poetics. This is created only once to ex-
press the contents, also given only once, of a poem.
Anna Swir, quoted by Czeslaw Milosz in his introduction to
Talking to My Body, by Anna Swir

Writing on the Sonnets

Before I begin to describe my own intentions in commenting on Shakespeare's Sonnets, I
must say a few prefatory words. I intend this work for those who already know the Son-
nets, or who have beside them the sort of lexical annotation found in the current editions
(for example, those of Booth, Kerrigan, or Evans). A brief account of the reception history 129
of the Sonnets can be found in these editions, as well as a more comprehensive bibliogra-
phy than I can offer here. The older reception history in Hyder Rollins' Variorum Sonnets 2.4
is still the most complete-and the most sobering to anyone hazarding a new addition to HELEN VENDLER

that history. Perhaps total immersion in the Sonnets-that is to say, in Shakespeare's

mind-is a mildly deranging experience to anyone, and I cannot hope, I suppose, to es-
cape the obsessive features characterizing Shakespearean sonnet criticism.
How are the Sonnets being written about nowadays? And why should I add another
book to those already available? I want to do so because I admire the Sonnets, and wish to
defend the high value I put on them, since they are being written about these days with
considerable jaundice. 1 The spheres from which most of the current criticisms are gener-
ated are social and psychological ones. Contemporary emphasis on the participation of
literature in a social matrix balks at acknowledging how lyric, though it may refer to the
social, remains the genre that directs its mimesis toward the performance of the mind in
solitary speech. Because lyric is intended to be voiceable by anyone reading it, in its nor-
mative form it deliberately strips away most social specification (age, regional location,
sex, class, even race). A social reading is better directed at a novel or a play: the abstrac-
tion desired by the writer of, and the willing reader of, normative lyric frustrates the
mind that wants social fictions or biographical revelations.
Even the best sociopsychological critic to write on the Sonnets, Eve Sedgwick, says
"Shakespeare's Sonnets seem to offer a single, discursive, deeply felt narrative of the dan-
gers and vicissitudes of one male homosocial adventure" [49]; "It is here that one most
wishes the Sonnets were a novel, that readers have most treated it as a novel, and that we
are, instead, going to bring the Sonnets' preoccupation to bear on real novels" [46] (italics
mine). The persistent wish to turn the sequence into a novel (or a drama) speaks to the
interests of the sociopsychological critic, whose aim is less to inquire into the successful
carrying-out of a literary project than to investigate the representation of gender rela-
tions. It is perhaps a tribute to Shakespeare's "reality-effect" that "one most wishes the
Sonnets were a novel," but it does no good to act as if these lyrics were either a novel or a
documentary of a lived life.
Other critics (Barrell, Marotti, Kernan) have brought the Sonnets into the realm of
the social by drawing analogies between the language of the poetry and the language of
solicitations addressed to patrons and requesting patronage. This is a reasonable se-
mantic (if not poetic) investigation, and reminds us that lyric language in any given
epoch draws on all available sociolects of that epoch. The Sonnets, however (as Kernan
makes clear), go far outside the originating discourse: no patron was ever addressed
qua patron in language like that of sonnet 20 (A woman's face with Nature's own
hand painted). Aesthetically speaking, it is what a lyric does with its borrowed social
languages-i.e., how it casts them into new permutational and combinatorial forms-
that is important. Shakespeare is unusually rich in his borrowings of diction and for-
mulas from patronage, from religion, from law, from courtship, from diplomacy, from
astronomy, and so on; hut he tends to be a blasphemer in all of these realms. He was a
master subverter of the languages he borrowed, and the point of literary interest is not
the fact of his borrowings but how he turned them inside out. (See, in the commentary,
sonnets 20, 33, 105, 135, or 144.) 2 One of Shakespeare's most frequent means of subver-
sion is the total redefinition, within a single sonnet, of a word initially borrowed from a
defined social realm (such as state in sonnet 33); there is no social discourse which he
does not interrogate and ironize.
 130 The sonnets have also been investigated by psychoanalytically minded critics, of
whom the most formidable was the late Joel Fineman. Fineman, fundamentally disap-
SecTION 2 pointed by the Young Man sonnets, much preferred the Dark Lady sequence, where "dif-
MooeLs oF LYRIC ference" (read: the Lacanian Symbolic) replaces "sameness" (read: the Lacanian Imagi-
nary).3 Anyone who prizes drama above other genres delights in conflict, the structural
principle of drama; and for Shakespeareans the Dark Lady sequence is, give or take a few
details, a proto-sketch for a drama rather like Othello, with its jealousy, its sexuality, its
ambiguous "darkness," its betrayals, and so on. It is much harder to imagine the Young
Man sequence as a play. Yet, if one judges not by the criteria proper to drama but by those
appropriate to lyric-"How well does the structure of this poem mimic the structure of
thinking?" and "How well does the linguistic play of the poem embody that structural
mimesis?"-Shakespeare's first subsequence is at least as good as (and in my view better
than) the second. A psychological view of the Sonnets (whether psychoanalytically ori-
ented or not) stresses motivation, will, and other characterological features, and above all
needs a story on which to hang motivation. The "story" of the Sonnets continues to fasci-
nate readers, but lyric is both more and less than story. And, in any case, the story of the
Sonnets will always exhibit those "gaps" and that "indeterminacy" intrinsic to the sonnet
sequence as a genre [Kuin, 251] 4. A coherent psychological account of the Sonnets is what
the Sonnets exist to frustrate. They do not fully reward psychological criticism (or gender
criticism, motivated by many of the same characterological aims) any more than they do
political criticism. Too much of their activity escapes the large sieves of both psychology
and politics, disciplines not much concerned to examine the basic means of lyric: sub-
genre, structure, syntax, and linguistic play.
The true "actors" in lyric are words, not "dramatic persons"; and the drama of any lyric
is constituted by the successive entrances of new sets of words, or new stylistic arrange-
ments (grammatic, syntactical, phonetic) which are visibly in conflict with previous ar-
rangements used with reference to the "same" situation. (See, for example, my comments
on sonnet 73 or sonnet n6.) Thus, the introduction of a new linguistic strategy is, in a
sonnet, as interruptive and interesting as the entrance of a new character in a play. And
any internal change in topic (from autumn to twilight to glowing fire in sonnet 73, for
instance) or any change in syntactic structure (say, from parallel placement of items to
chiastic placement) are among the strategies which-because they mimic changes of
mind-constitute vivid drama within the lyric genre. Read in the light of these lyric cri-
teria, the first subsequence is fully as dramatic (in the form proper to lyric) as the second.
The art of seeing drama in linguistic action proper (action that may be as simple as the
grammatical change in a given passage from nouns to verbals and back again-see son-
net 129) is an art that has lapsed, even in interpreters whose criteria appear to be literary
rather than political or psychological. 5
What, then, am I attempting in the Commentary below? Chiefly, a supplement to the
accounts of the Sonnets in current editions (Ingram and Redpath, Booth,6 Kerrigan, Evans)
and in the books of the last thirty years (notably those by Leishman, Melchiori, Trousdale,
Booth, Dubrow, Fineman, Vickers, de Grazia, Roche, Pequigney, Sedgwick, Weiser, and
Martin). These editorial and critical accounts do not, to my mind, pay enough attention to
the sonnets as poems-that is, as a writer's projects invented to amuse and challenge his
own capacity for inventing artworks. Formal mimeses of the mind and heart in action are
of course representative of human reality, but it is not enough to show that the moves of
their language "chart ... the ways we may be affected, morally and emotionally, by our
own rhetoric" [Dubrow, 213].7 A poem must be beautiful, too, exhibiting the double beauty
that Stevens called "the poetry of the idea" and "the poetry of the words." That is, the
theme must be freshly imagined, the genre must be renewed, and the words must surprise 131
and satisfy from the point of view of proportion, musicality, and lexical vivacity.
2.4
[ ... ] HELEN VENDLER

Evidence and Import

This Commentary consists primarily of what might be called "evidential" criticism: that
is, I wanted to write down remarks for which I attempt to supply instant and sufficient
linguistic evidence. This, like all Platonic aims, must be imperfectly achieved, but I've
tried to remember it at every point. There must of course be conjecture and speculation
in divining the poetic laws which are being obeyed by a particular series of words, but I
have given the reasons for my conjectures in as plain a way as I could find. One can write
convincing evidential criticism only on fairly short texts (in longer texts, the permuta-
tions become too numerous). The Sonnets are ideal for such a purpose; and they deserve
detailed and particular commentary because they comprise a virtual anthology of lyric
possibility-in the poet's choice of subgenres, in arrangements of words, in tone, in dra-
matic modeling of the inner life, in speech-acts. In every case, I wanted to delineate what-
ever the given sonnet offered that seemed aesthetically most provocative: if there is an
interesting change of address, it will be remarked, while a predictable change of address
may not be commented on at all. The presence of unexpected (or inexplicable) words will
be dwelt on; other words may go unnoticed. I have tried to point out problems that I have
not been able to solve to my own satisfaction.
I come to Shakespeare's Sonnets as a critic oflyric poetry, interested in how successful
poems are put together, ideationally, structurally, and linguistically; or, to put it another
way, what ideational and structural and linguistic acts by a poet result in a successful
poem. The brilliant beginnings in this direction by William Empson (on individual
words and images), Winifred Nowottny (on formal arrangement), Stephen Booth (on
overlapping structures), and Brian Vickers and Heather Dubrow (on rhetorical figura-
tion) suggest that such efforts are particularly rewarding. Inevitably, rather few sonnets
have been examined in detail, since critics tend to dwell on the most famous ten or fifteen
out of the total 154; in fact, the Sonnets represent the largest tract of unexamined Shake-
spearean lines left open to scrutiny. As A. Nejgebauer remarked in his recapitulation (in
the 1962 Shakespeare Survey) of work on the Sonnets: "Criticism of the sonnets will not
stand comparison with that of the plays .... It has largely been amateurish and mis-
placed .... As regards the use oflanguage, stanzaic structure, metre, tropes, and imagery,
these demand the full filth and husbandry of criticism" [18]. Nejgebauer's complaint
could not be made with quite the same vehemence today, largely because of Stephen
Booth's massive intervention with his Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets (1969) and his pro-
vocative edition of the Sonnets (1977). Yet Booth's critical stance-that the critic, helpless
before the plurisignification of language and overlapping of multiple structures visible in
a Shakespearean sonnet, must be satisfied with irresolution with respect to its fundamen-
tal gestalt-seems to me too ready a surrender to hermeneutic suspicion.
On the other hand, the wish of interpreters of poems to arrive at something they call
"meaning" seems to me misguided. However important "meaning" may be to a theologi-
cal hermeneutic practice eager to convey accurately the Word of God, it cannot have that
importance in lyric. Lyric poetry, especially highly conventionalized lyric of the sort
represented by the Sonnets, has almost no significant freight of "meaning" at all, in our
ordinary sense of the word. "I have insomnia because I am far away from you" is the gist
of one sonnet; "Even though Nature wishes to prolong your life, Time will eventually
 132 demand that she render you to death" is the "meaning" of another. These are not taxing or
original ideas, any more than other lyric "meanings" ("My love is like a rose," "London in
SEcTION 2 the quiet of dawn is as beautiful as any rural scene," etc.). Very few lyrics offer the sort of
Moons oF LYRic philosophical depth that stimulates meaning-seekers in long, complex, and self-contradicting
texts like Shakespeare's plays or Dostoevsky's novels. In an effort to make lyrics more
meaning-full, even linguistically minded critics try to load every rift with ore, inventing
and multiplying ambiguities, plural meanings, and puns as if in a desperate attempt to add
adult interest to what they would otherwise regard as banal sentiment. This is Booth's path,
and it is also that ofJoseph Pequigney, who would read the words of the Sonnets as an elabo-
rate code referring to homosexual activity. Somehow, Shakespeare's words and images
(most of the latter, taken singly, fully conventional) do not seem interesting enough as
"meaning" to scholarly critics; and so an argument for additional "ambiguous" import is
presented, if only to prop up Shakespeare's reputation. The poet Frank O'Hara had a better
sense for the essential semantic emptiness of love lyrics when he represented them (in his
poem "Blocks") as "saying" "I need you, you need me, yum yum." The appeal of lyric lies
elsewhere than in its paraphrasable statement. Where, then, does the charm oflyric lie? The
answers given in this Commentary are as various as the sonnets examined, since Shake-
speare almost never repeats a strategy. However, they can be summed up in the phrase "the
arrangement of statement." Form is content-as-arranged; content is form-as-deployed.

[ ... ]

The Art of the Sonnets, and the Speaker They Create

With respect to the Sonnets-a text now almost four hundred years old-what can a com-
mentary offer that is new? It can, I think, approach the sonnets, as I have chosen to do,
from the vantage point of the poet who wrote them, asking the questions that a poet
would ask about any poem. What was the aesthetic challenge for Shakespeare in writing
these poems, of confining himself (with a few exceptions) to a single architectural form?
(I set aside, as not of essential importance, the money or privileges he may have earned
from his writing.) A writer of Shakespeare's seriousness writes from internal necessity-to
do the best he can under his commission (if he was commissioned) and to perfect his art.
What is the inner agenda of the Sonnets? What are their compositional motivations? What
does a writer gain from working, over and over, in one subgenre? My brief answer is that
Shakespeare learned to find strategies to enact feeling in form, feelings in forms, multiply-
ing both to a superlative degree through 154 poems. No poet has ever found more linguistic
forms by which to replicate human responses than Shakespeare in the Sonnets.
Shakespeare comes late in the sonnet tradition, and he is challenged by that very fact
to a display of virtuosity, since he is competing against great predecessors. His thematic
originality in his dramatis personae makes the sequence new in Western lyric. Though
the sharing of the speaker by the young man and the lady, and the sharing of the young
man by the lady and the rival poet, could in other hands become the material of farce, the
"plot" is treated by Shakespeare elegiacally, sardonically, ironically, and tragically, mak-
ing the Sonnets a repository of relationships and moods wholly without peer in the sonnet
tradition. However, thematic originality alone never yet made a memorable artwork. Nor
did psychological depth-though that is at least a prerequisite for lyric profundity.
No sufficient description exists in the critical literature of how Shakespeare makes his
speaker "real." (The speaker is the only "person" interiorized in the Sonnets, though there
are other dramatis personae.) The act of the lyric is to offer its reader a script to say. The
words of a poem are not "overheard" (as in the formulations ofJ. S. Mill and T. S. Eliot);
this would make the reader an eavesdropping voyeur of the writer's sensations. Nor is the 133
poet "speaking to himself" without reference to a reader (if so, there would he no need to
write the poem down, and all communicative action would be absent). While the social 2.4
genres "build in" the reader either as listener (to a narrator of a novel) or as audience (to a HELEN VENDLER

play), the private literary genres-such as the Psalms, or prayers printed in prayer books,
or secular lyrics-are scripted for repeated personal recitation. One is to utter them as
one's own words, not as the words of another. Shakespeare's sonnets, with their un-
equaled idiomatic language-contours (written, after all, by a master in dramatic speech
who shaped that speech into what C. S. Lewis called their lyric cantabile), are preemi-
nently utterances for us to utter as ours. It is indispensable, then, if we are to be made to
want to enter the lyric script, that the voice offered for our use be "believable" to us, re-
sembling a "real voice" coming from a "real mind" like our own.
It is hard to achieve such "realness." Many lyrics are content with a very generalized and
transient voice, one of no determinate length of life or depth of memory. In a drama, the
passage of time and the interlocking of the web of events in which a character participates
allow for a gradual deepening of the constructed personality of even minor characters. But
Shakespeare must render his sonnet-speaker convincing in a mere fourteen lines. He is
helped, to this end, by the fact that a "thick description" of his speaker accretes as these-
quence progresses; but since few readers read the sequence straight through, the demand
ior evident "realness" in each poem, even were it to stand alone in an anthology, remains.
The Sonnets cannot be "dramatic" in the ordinary sense because in them, as in every lyric
of a normative sort, there is only one authorized voice. True drama requires at least two
voices (so that even Beckett's monologues often include an offstage voice, or a tape of a
voice, to fulfill this requirement). Some feminist critics, mistaking lyric for a social genre,
have taken offense that the women who figure as dramatis personae within sonnet se-
quences are "silenced," meaning that they are not allowed to expostulate or reply. In that
(mistaken) sense one would have to see all addressees in lyric as "silenced" (God by
George Herbert, Robert Browning by E. B. Browning) since no addressee, in normative
lyric, is given a counter and equal voice responding to that of the speaker.8 Since the per-
son uttering a lyric is always represented as alone with his thoughts, his imagined ad-
dressee can by definition never be present. The lyric (in contrast to the dramatic mono-
logue, where there is always a listener present in the room), gives us the mind alone with
itself. Lyric can present no "other" as alive and listening or responding in the same room
as the solitary speaker. (One of Herbert's witty genre-inventions, depending on this very
genre-constraint, was to assert that since God is everywhere, God could be present in the
room even in the speaker's "solitariness" and could thus offer a reply, as God the Father
does in "The Collar" and as Jesus does in "Dialogue.")
Shakespeare's speaker, alone with his thoughts, is the greatest achievement, imagina-
tively speaking, of the sequence. He is given" depth" of character in each individual sonnet
by several compositional strategies on Shakespeare's part. These will be more fully de-
scribed and demonstrated in the individual commentaries below, but in brief they are:
1. Temporal. The establishment of several retreating "panels" of time, representing
episodes or epochs in the speaker's past, gives him a continuous, nontransient existence
and a continuity of memory. (See, for example, sonnet 30, When to the sessions of sweet
silent thought.)
2. Emotional. The reflection, within the same poem, of sharply conflicting moods
with respect to the same topic (see, e.g., sonnet 148, 0 me! what eyes hath love put in my
head). This can be abetted by contradictory or at least nonhomogeneous discourses ren-
dering a topic complicated (see, e.g., sonnet 125, Wer't aught to me I bore the canopy). The
 134 volatility of moods in the speaker (symbolized by the famous lark at break of day arising
of sonnet 29) suggests a flexibility-even an instability-of response verbally "guarantee-
SECTION 2 ing" the presence of passion.
Moons oF LYRIC 3. Semantic. The speaker's mind has a great number of compartments of discourse
(theological, legal, alchemical, medicinal, political, aesthetic, etc.). These compartments
are semipervious to each other, and the osmosis between them is directed by an invisible
discourse-master, who stands for the intellectual imagination.
4· Conceptual. The speaker resorts to many incompatible models of existence (de-
scribed in detail in the commentary) even within the same poem; for example, sonnet 6o
first describes life as a homogeneous steady-state succession of identical waves/minutes (a
stoic model); then as a sharply delineated rise-and-eclipse of a sun (a tragic model); and
next as a series of incessant violent extinctions (a brutal model). These models, unrecon-
ciled, convey a disturbing cognitive dissonance, one which is, in a philosophical sense,
intolerable. The alert and observant mind that constructs these models asserts the "truth"
of each for a particular occasion or aspect of life, but finds no "supramodel" under which
they can be intelligibly grouped, and by which they can be intelligibly contained. In this
way, the mind of the speaker is represented as one in the grip of philosophical conflict.
5. Philosophical. The speaker is a rebel against received ideas. He is well aware of the
received topoi of his culture, but he subjects them to interrogation, as he counters neo-
Platonic courtly love with Pauline marital love (n6), or the Christian Trinity with the Pla-
tonic Triad (105), or analogizes sacred hermeneutics to literary tradition (106). No topics
are more sharply scrutinized than those we now subsume under the phrase "gender rela-
tions": the speaker interrogates androgyny of appearance by evoking a comic myth of
Nature's own dissatisfaction with her creation (2o); he criticizes hyperbolic praise of fe-
male beauty in 130; he condones adultery throughout the "will" sonnets and elsewhere
(and sees adultery as less criminal than adulterated discourse, e.g., in 152). This is not
even to mention the interrogations of "love" and "lust" in n6 and 129 (sonnets of which
the moral substance has not been properly understood because they have not been de-
scribed in formal terms). No received idea of sexuality goes uninvestigated; and the thor-
oughly unconventional sexual attachments represented in both parts of the sequence
stand as profound (if sometimes unwilling) critiques of the ideals of heterosexual desire,
chastity, continence, marital fidelity, and respect for the character of one's sexual partner.
What "ought to be" in the way of gender relations (by Christian and civic standards) is
represented as an ideal in the "marriage sonnets" with which the sequence opens, but
never takes on existential or "realist" lived validation. Shakespeare's awareness of norms
is as complete as his depiction, in his speaker, of experiential violation of those norms.
6. Perceptual. The speaker is also given depth by the things he notices, from damask
roses to the odor of marjoram to a canopy of state. Though the sonnets are always openly
drifting toward emblematic or allegorical language, they are plucked back (except in ex-
treme cases like 66) into the perceptual, as their symbolic rose is distilled into "real"
perfume (54) or as an emblematic April is burned by hot June (104). The speaker stands
poised between a medieval emblematic tendency and a more modern empirical posture;
within his moral and philosophical systems, he savors the tang of the "sensual feast."
7. Dramatic. The speaker indirectly quotes his antagonist. Though no one but the speaker
"speaks" in a lyric, Shakespeare exploits the usefulness of having the speaker, in private,
quote in indirect discourse something one or the other of the drama tis personae previously
said. Many of the sonnets (e.g., 76 and n6) have been misunderstood because they have been
thought to be free-standing statements on the speaker's part rather than replies to the an-
tagonist's implicitly quoted words. Again, I support this statement below in detail; but one
can see what a difference it makes to interpretation whether in sonnet 76 the poet-speaker 135
means to criticize his own verse-"Why is my verse so barren of new pride?''-or whether he
is repeating, by quoting, an anterior criticism by the young man: "Why [you ask] is my verse 2.4
so [in your words] 'barren of new pride'?" In the (often bitter) give-and-take of prior- HELEN VENDLER

criticism-answered-by-the-speaker (in such rebuttal-sonnets as 105, 117, 151, and the previ-
ously mentioned 76 and 116), we come closest, in the sonnets, to Shakespeare the dramatist.
More could be said of the strategies that create a credible speaker with a complex and
imaginative mind (a mind which we take on as our own when stepping into the voice); but
I want to pass on to the greatest strength of the sonnets as "contraptions," their multiple
armatures. Booth sees these "overlapping structures" as a principle of irresoluble indeter-
minacy; I, by contrast, see them as mutually reinforcing, and therefore as principles of
authorial instruction.

Organizing Structures
When lyric poems are boring, it is frequently because they possess only one organizing
structure, which reveals itself unchanged each time the poem is read. If the poet has de-
cided to employ a single structure (in, say, a small two-part song such as "When daisies
pied and violets blue"), then the poem needs some other principle of interest to sustain
rereading (in that song, a copious set of aspects-vegetative, human, and avian-of the
spring). Shakespeare abounds in such discourse-variety, and that in part sustains reread-
ings of the sonnets; but I have found that rereading is even better sustained by his won-
derful fertility in structural complexity. The Shakespearean sonnet form, though not in-
\·ented by Shakespeare, is manipulated by him in ways unknown to his predecessors.
Because it has four parts-three isomorphic ones (the quatrains) and one anomalous one
(the couplet), it is far more flexible than the two-part Italian sonnet. The four units of the
Shakespearean sonnet can be set in any number of logical relations to one another:

successive and equal;

hierarchical;
contrastive;
analogous;
logically contradictory;
successively "louder" or "softer."

This list is merely suggestive, and by no means exhaustive. The four "pieces" of any given
sonnet may also be distinguished from one another by changes of agency ("' do this; you
do that"), of rhetorical address ("0 Muse"; "0 beloved"), of grammatical form (a set of
nouns in one quatrain, a set of adjectives in another), or of discursive texture (as the de-
scriptive changes to the philosophical), or of speech act (as denunciation changes to exhor-
tation). Each of these has its own poetic import and effect. The four "pieces" of the sonnet
may be distinguished, again, by different phonemic clusters or metrical effects. Booth
rightly remarks on the presence of such patternings, but he refuses to establish hierarchy
among them, or to subordinate minor ones to major ones, as I think one can often do.
I take it that a Shakespearean sonnet is fundamentally structured by an evolving inner
emotional dynamic, as the fictive speaker is shown to "see more," "change his mind," "pass
from description to analysis," "move from negative refutation to positive refutation," and
so on. There can be a surprisingly large number of such "moves" in any one sonnet. The
impression of an evolving dynamic within the speaker's mind and heart is of course cre-
ated by a large "law of form" obeyed by the words in each sonnet. Other observable struc-
tural patterns play a subordinate role to this largest one. In its Shakespearean incarnation,
 136 the sonnet is a system in motion, never immobile for long, and with several subsystems
going their way within the whole.
SEcTioN 2 The chief defect in critical readings of the Sonnets has been the critics' propensity to
MoDELs oF LYRIC take the first line of a sonnet as a "topic sentence" which the rest of the poem merely il-
lustrates and reiterates (a model visible in Berowne's sonnet quoted above). Only in the
plays does Shakespeare write nondramatic sonnets in this expository mode. In his lyrics,
he sees structure itself as motion, as a composer of music would imagine it. Once the dy-
namic curve of a given sonnet is perceived, the lesser structuring principles "fall into place"
beneath it. See, e.g., my commentary on 129 for a textbook example of a trajectory of
changing feelings in the speaker about a single topic (lust); it is the patterns and under-
patterns of the sonnet that enable us to see the way those feelings change. If the feeling
were unchanging, the patterns would also remain invariable. The crucial rule of thumb
in understanding any lyric is that every significant change of linguistic pattern represents
a motivated change in feeling in the speaker. Or, to put it differently, if we sense a change
of feeling in the speaker, we must look to see whether, and how, it is stylistically "guaran-
teed." Unless it is deflected by some new intensity, the poem continues by inertia in its
original groove.
I deliberately do not dwell in this Commentary on Shakespeare's imagery as such, since
it is a topic on which good criticism has long existed. Although large allegorical images
(beauty's rose) are relatively stable in the Sonnets, imagery is meaningful only in context; it
cannot be assigned secure symbolic import except with respect to the poem in which it oc-
curs. The point, e.g., of the fire in sonnet 73 (That time of year) is that it is a stratified im-
age: the glowing of the fire lies upon the ashes of youth. The previous images in the sonnet
have been linear ones (time of year and twilight) referring to an extension in time (a year,
a day), rather than superposition in space. By itself, the image "fire" does not call up the
notion of stratification, nor does it in the other sonnets in which it appears; but in this
poem, because of the poet's desire for variance from a previously established linear struc-
ture, the fire is called upon to play this spatial role, by which youth appears as exhausted
subpositioned ashes rather than as an idyllic era (the sweet birds; sunset) lost at an earlier
point in a timeline. Previous thematic commentators have often missed such contextual
determination of imagistic meaning.
In trying to see the chief aesthetic "game" being played in each sonnet, I depart from
the isolated registering of figures-a paradox here, an antimetabole there-to which the
practice of word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase commentary inevitably leads. I wish to
point out instead the larger imaginative or structural patterns in which such rhetorical
figures take on functional (by contrast to purely decorative) significance. I do not intend,
by this procedure, to minimize the sonnets' ornamental "excess" (so reprehensible to Pound);
no art is more pointedly ornamental (see Puttenham) than the Renaissance lyric. Yet
Shakespeare is happiest when an ornamental flourish can be seen to have a necessary
poetic function. His changes in discursive texture, and his frequent consciousness of ety-
mological roots as he plays on Anglo-Saxon and Latin versions of the "same" meaning
("with my extern the outward honoring"), all become more striking when incorporated
into a general and dynamic theory of the poem. (Rather than invoke the terms of Renais-
sance rhetoric, which do not convey much to the modern reader, I use ordinary language
to describe Shakespeare's rhetorical figuration.)
To give an illustration; I myself find no real functional significance in Shakespeare's
alliteration when the speaker says that in the swart complexioned night, I When sparkling
stars twire not, thou [the young man] gildst the even. Such phonetic effects seem to have a
purely decorative intent. But an alliterative "meaning-string"-such as sonnet 25'sjavour,
fortune, triumph,favourites,fair,frown, painful,famoused,fight (an emendation),foiled, 137
and forgot-encapsulates the argument of the poem in little, and helps to create and sus-
tain that argument as it unfolds. Grammar and syntax, too, can be functionally signifi- 2.4
cant to argument; see, for instance, the way in which 66 uses phrases of agency, or the way HELEN VENDLER

in which 129 uses its many verbals. In his edition of the Sonnets, Booth leaves it up to the
reader to construct the poem; I have hoped to help the reader actively to that construction
by laying out evidence that no interpretation can afford to ignore. Any number of inter-
pretations, guided by any number of interests, can be built on the same foundation of evi-
dence; but an interpretation ignoring that evidence can never be a defensible one.
I believe that anyone seriously contemplating the interior structures and interrela-
tions of these sonnets is bound to conclude that many were composed in the order in
which they are arranged. However, given the poems' variation in aesthetic success, it
seems probable that some sonnets-perhaps written in youth (as Andrew Gurr suggested
of the tetrameter sonnet 145, with its pun on "Hathaway") or composed before the occur-
rence of the triangular plot-were inserted ad libitum for publication. (I am inclined to
believe Katherine Duncan-Jones's argument that the Sonnets may have been an autho-
rized printing.) The more trifling sonnets-those that place ornament above imaginative
gesture, or fancifulness above depth (such as 4, 6, 7, 9, 145, 153, and 154)-do seem to be less
experienced trial-pieces. The greater sonnets achieve an effortless combination of imagina-
tive reach with high technical invention (18, 73, 124, 138), or a quintessence of grace (104, 106,
132), or a power of dramatic condensation (121, 147) that we have come to call "Shakespear-
ean," even if, as Kent Hieatt (1991) has persuasively shown, they were composed in groups
over time.
The speaker of Shakespeare's sonnets scorns the consolations of Christianity-an af-
terlife in heaven for himself, a Christian resurrection of his body after death-as fully as
he refuses (except in a few sonnets) the learned adornment of classical references-a sta-
ple of the continental sonnet. The sonnets stand as the record of a mind working out posi-
tions without the help of any pantheon or any systematic doctrine. Shakespeare's speaker
often considers, in rapid succession, any number of intellectual or ideological positions,
but he does not move among them at random. To the contrary: in the first quatrain of any
given sonnet he has a wide epistemological field in which to play, but in the second qua-
train he generally queries or contradicts or subverts his first position (together with its
discourse-field). By the third quatrain, he must (usually) advance to his subtlest or most
comprehensive or most truthful position (Q 3 therefore taking on, in the Shakespearean
sonnet, the role of the sestet in the Petrarchan sonnet). And the couplet-placed not as
resolution (which is the function of Q 3) but as coda-can then stand in any number of
relations (summarizing, ironic, expansive) to the preceding argument. The gradually
straitened possibilities as the speaker advances in his considerations give the Shakespear-
ean sonnet a funnel-shape, narrowing in Q3 to a vortex of condensed perceptual and in-
tellectual force, and either constricting or expanding that vortex via the couplet.

The Couplet
The Shakespearean couplet has often been a stumbling block to readers. Rosalie Colie's
helpful distinction (in Shakespeare's Living Art) between the mel (honey) of love-poetry
and the sal (salt) of epigram-a genre conventionally used for satiric purposes-represents
a real insight into the mind of Shakespeare's speaker: the speaker is a person who wishes
to analyze and summarize his experience as well as to describe and enact it. The distance
from one's own experience necessitated by an analytic stance is symbolized most fully by
the couplet, whereas the empathetic perception necessary to display one's state of mind is
 138 symbolized by the quatrains. In speaking about the relation of quatrain to couplet, one
must distinguish the fictive speaker (even when he represents himself as a poet) from
SECTION 2 Shakespeare the author. The fictive speaker gradually becomes, over the course of the
MoDELs oF LYRic poem, more analytic about his situation (and therefore more distanced from his first self-
pathos) until he finally reaches the couplet, in which he often expresses a self-ironizing
turn:

For thee watch I, whilst thou dust wake elsewhere,

From me far off, with others all too near. (sonnet 61)

This we can genuinely call intrapsychic irony in the fictive speaker. But the author, who is
arranging the whole poem, has from the moment of conception a relation of irony to his
fictive persona. The persona lives in the "real time" of the poem, in which he feels, thinks,
and changes his mind; the author has planned the whole evolution of the poem before
writing the first line, and "knows" conceptually the gyrations which he plans to represent
taking place over time in his fictive speaker. There is thus a perpetual ironizing of the
living temporality of the speaker by the coordinating spatial overview of the author. Al-
though the speaker seems "spontaneous" in his utterance, the cunning arrangements of
the utterance belong primarily to Shakespeare (even if dramatically ascribed to the
speaker). It is at the moment of the couplet that the view of the speaker and the view of the
author come nearest to convergence.

NOTES
1. The most recent book considering them in and he would just as soon stick to the homey blur
some detail-Christopher Martin's Policy in Love: of abstracted tradition" [148]. "On sonnets 124 ("'f
Lyric and Public in Ovid, Petrarch and Shakespeare my dear love were but the child of state") and 125
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1994)- ("Were't aught to me I bore the canopy"): "Posing
may serve to prove my assertion. Here are some as sonnets about discovery and liberation, these
quotations. On the initial seventeen sonnets: poems are overtaken by a spirit of persecution and
"[The poet's] rigid alignment with a legitimizing resentment. ... He resorts to a fantasy isolation ...
community exhausts the technical resources of his He lapses, moreover, by the final couplet's arch
discourse as it exposes the emotional sterility of renunciation ["Hence, thou suborned informer! A
the conventions in which he invests" [134-135]. true soul! When most impeached stands least in
"While the procreation subsequence's tight focus thy control"], from anxious vigilance to paranoia"
insures coherence, it simultaneously threatens a [175].
monotony that has also taken its toll on the 2. Because of Shakespeare's subversion of any

poetry's modern audience. Even Wordsworth ... discourse he adapts, it seems to me inadequate to
was put off by a general 'sameness,' a feature most suggest, as john Barrell does, that sonnet 29
damagingly concentrated in this introductory ("When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes")
series" [145]. "Lars Engle is right to suggest that the "may be actively concealing ... a meaning that
initial quatrain: runs like this: 'when I'm pushed for money, with
all the degradation that poverty involves, I
[From fairest creatures we desire increase,
sometimes remember you, and you're always good
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
for a couple of quid'" [30]. Barrell prefers to
But as the riper should by time decease
conceive of Shakespeare as attempting the
His tender heir might bear his memory ... ]
language of transcendent love, hut unable to
'might be the voice-over of a Sierra Club film in achieve it, "because the historical moment he seeks
which California condors soar over their eggless to transcend is represented by a discourse [of
nest'" [148]. "The poet betrays himself [in the early patronage] whose nature and function is to
sonnets] as one uneager to focus on human beings contaminate the very language by which that
in any precise manner, much less upon the assertion of transcendence must try to find
potentially messy emotions which join them to one expression. For me, the pathos of the poem-! can
another.... Questions of detail make him nervous, repeat here my earlier point-is that the narrator
can find no words to assert the transcendent power metaphor.... The result is a poem which, for all its 139
of true love, which cannot be interpreted as charm [unspecified by Kerrigan] (and integrity),
making a request for a couple of quid" [42]. lacks the compelling excitement of a metaphoric 2.4
A poet is not quite so helpless before his sonnet such as 60, 'Like as the waves make toward
HELEN VENDLER
discourses as Barrell believes. In the first place, the the pebbled shore.' In so far as Shakespeare
,·ery playfulness of the poem (see my comments exceeds the Erasmian copia, shunning 'variation'
below on the chiasmus "most enjoy contented for the sake of tautologous recurrence, his verse
least" and the puns on "state") prevents its being palls" [John Kerrigan, ed., "The Sonnets" and "A
an actual speech-act of either "transcendent love" Lover's Complaint" (New York: Penguin, 1986),
or "a request for a couple of quid." The sonnet, 29]. See my commentary, on sonnet 105 for a
taken entire, is a fictional speech-act, of which the demonstration of how interesting the poem
intent is to mimic the motions of the mind when becomes once one admits criteria for lyric
it rises from low to high. In mimicking, in the excellence besides the presence or absence of
octave, the movement of the mind in agitated metaphor (though 105 is also one continued
depression and, in the sestet, the movement of the metaphor comparing erotic worship to Christian
~ind in relieved elation, the sonnet is fulfilling its worship, and blasphemously equating them).
purpose as a lyric. Shakespeare's skill in such To take another instance of Kerrigan's
;:>sychological mimicry ensures the continuing misreading (springing from his lack of interest in
;:>ower of the poem. A poet (as the contrast between linguistic variation), I cite his description of sonnet
octave and sestet shows) is the master of his 129 ("Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame").
discourses, not (as in Barrell's scenario) their He, like other critics preceding him, takes a
'lelpless performer. single-minded expository view of the poem, as
3. According to Fineman's theory, the object of though it were a self-consistent sermon: "While 116
desire as mirror image cannot generate dramatic deals with Love complexly, however, questioning
.:onflict, and so the poetry of the speaker's same-sex the absolute which it erects, 129 describes and enacts
object-relation remains mired in narcissism; but with single-minded, though cynically quibbling,
when the object of desire changes gender, and is forcefulness the distemperature of phallocentric
no longer worshipfully desired but rather is lust. Fitful and fretting, such a passion squanders
abhorred, a fruitful dissonance arises that the moral powers along with the semen, commit-
generates a new subjectivity. Fineman's more ting both to a 'waste of shame' and 'shameful
extravagant claims for the historical newness of waist.' ... It goads men towards satisfaction, yet,
the subject-position in the Dark Lady sequence once sated in the irrational frenzy of orgasm, it is
have generally not been adopted; but his queasy, woeful, and full of remorse .... Lust is
psychoanalytic criterion of value for poetry-that fixated by the moment: yearning towards emission,
-difference" is better than "sameness"-has it lies sullied and futile in its wake, sourly
apparently gone unquestioned. It is naturally foretasting hell, with nothing to hope for but
typical of Shakespeareans to prefer drama to lyric: further 'pursuit.' Its imaginative field is vorticose,
after all, they became Shakespeareans because centripetal, obsessive" [56]. Such a passage allows
they were drawn to drama. And Fineman's book for no change of mind in the course of the
on the Sonnets was not fundamentally concerned poem-but if there is one thing the poem does
with lyric, any more than his essay on The Rape of mimic, it is successive changes of mind in the cycle
Lucrece was about complaint; both were prefatory, of desire, changes of mind impossible in a
in their concern with character and will, to the homiletic diatribe such as Kerrigan represents the
book on Shakespeare's plays he did not live, alas, sonnet to be (see my comments on 129).
to write. 6. Every writer on the Sonnets owes gratitude to
4· [Roger Kuin, "The Gaps and the Whites: Stephen Booth's giant edition, which spells out in
Indeterminacy and Undecidability in the Sonnet more detail the principles guiding his critical book
Sequences of Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare," on the Sonnets. Yet in stressing the richness of
Spenser Studies 8 (1990).] implication of Shakespeare's language over the
5. One editor of the Sonnets, john Kerrigan, firmness of implied authorial instruction, Booth
betrays his restricted criterion of lyric value- gives up on the possibility of reliable internal
chiefly, that metaphor is necessary for a good guides for interpretation. Of course every
poem-as he writes of sonnet 105 that it is interpretive act brings special interests to the
"scrupulously and Shakespearianly dull, but it is poem, so that a psychoanalytic interpretation
dull nonetheless .... The text is stripped of foregrounds aspects that a historical interpretation
 140 may overlook. But any respectable account of a notice the contrast between the two sets, and to
poem ought to have considered closely its chief infer a change of mind in the speaker who is
SECTION 2 formal features. A set of remarks on a poem which uttering them about one and the same experience.
would be equally true of a prose paraphrase of that Any account of a poem ought to contemplate
MODELS OF LYRIC
poem is not, by my standards, interpretation at all. such implicit authorial instructions. Booth gives
Commentary on the propositional content of the up too easily on interpretation. Even in the
poem is something entirely different from the richness of Shakespeare's language, we are not left
interpretation of a poem, which must take into afloat on an uninterpretable set of"ideational
account the poem's linguistic strategies as well as static," not when the formal features of the Sonnets
its propositional statements. are there to guide us. It was her awareness of those
The extent of authorial instruction retrievable formal features that made the late Winifred
from a text is also disputed. Yet authorial Nowottny the best guide to the sequence; it is a
instruction is embedded, for instance, in the mere matter of deep regret to me that she did not
fact that one metaphor follows another. Sonnet 73 complete the Arden edition which she had
would have to be interpreted differently if we were undertaken, and left only a few brilliant essays as
given the twilight in quatrain 1, the fire in quatrain tokens of that effort. It is equally a matter for
2, and the autumn in quatrain 3. Shakespeare's rejoicing that the new Arden Sonnets will soon
arrangement of his metaphors is both cognitively appear, edited by Katherine Duncan- jones.
and morally meaningful; quatrains cannot be 7· [Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shake-
reordered at will. Authorial instruction is also speare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca, NY:
embedded in smaller units of every sonnet. To give Cornell University Press, 1987).]
one instance, it can be found in the parallels drawn 8. I do not include eclogues, debate-poems, etc.
between one part of the poem and another. The in the definition of normative single-speaker
grammatical parallel linking the four "moral lyric. Such poems are constructed against the
nouns"-expense, spirit, waste, and shame-that norm, and derive their originality from bringing
open sonnet 129 to the four "emotional" nouns- into the public (dramatic) arena of shared speech
bliss, woe, joy, and dream-replacing them in its thoughts that in normative lyric remain
sestet is an "authorial instruction" telling us to intrapsychic.

2.5 The Lyric as Poetic Norm (1953)

M. H. ABRAMS

The lyric form-used here to include elegy, song, sonnet, and ode-had long been par-
ticularly connected by critics to the state of mind of its author. Unlike the narrative and
dramatic forms, most lyrics do not include such elements as characters and plot, which
can be readily explained (according to the common mirror-interpretation of mimesis) as
imitations of external people and events. The majority of lyrics consist of thoughts and
feelings uttered in the first person, and the one readily available character to whom these
sentiments may be referred is the poet himself. 1 There soon developed a decided tendency
to decry, particularly in amatory and elegiac poems, the expression of feelings that lacked
conviction or were obviously engineered by the poet for the lyric occasion. Sir Philip Sid-
ney complained that many of the songs and sonnets of his day carried no persuasion of
actual passion in the author. Boileau disparaged elegists "Qui s'affligent par art"-

II faut que le coeur seul parle dans I' elegie.

Dr. Johnson taxed the elegies and love poems of Cowley with a similar defect, and ap- 141
proximated the idiom of contemporary primitivists in charging that "Lycidas" "is not to
be considered as the effusion of real passion." 2 2.5
The expressive character sometimes attributed to lyric poems offered no real challenge M. H. ABRAMs

to the mimetic and pragmatic definitions of poetry in general, so long as lyrics remained
the unconsidered trifles among the poetic kinds. Their lack of magnitude and of profitable
effect, and the very fact that, in lieu of representative elements, their subject matter was
considered to be principally the author's own feelings, consigned them to a lowly status in
the scale of the genres. In many critics, the attitude to these poems ran the narrow gamut
between contempt and condescension. According to Rapin, "A Sonnet, Ode, Elegy, Epi-
gram, and those little kind of Verses ... are ordinarily no more than the meer produc-
tions of Imagination, a superficial wit, with a little conversation of the World, is capable
of these things." 3 Temple held that among the moderns, wits who cannot succeed in he-
roic poetry content themselves "with the Scraps, with Songs and Sonnets, with Odes and
Elegies ..." 4
The soaring fortunes of the lyric may be dated from 1651, the year that Cowley's Pin-
dark "imitations" burst over the literary horizon and inaugurated the immense vogue of
the "greater Ode" in England. To account for the purported fire, impetuosity, and irregu-
larity of these poems, critics were wont to invoke Longinus' concept of the sublime and its
sources in enthusiasm and vehement passion; and to attribute this lofty quality to any po-
etic kind was inevitably to elevate its stature. The Pindaric and pseudo-Pindaric were
soon split off from pettier lyrics and lesser odes, and assigned a place next to the greatest
of the traditional forms. By 1704 John Dennis grouped together "Epick, Tragick, and the
greater Lyrick poetry" as the highest literary genres, to be distinguished from the lesser
Poetry of comedy, satire, "the little Ode," elegy, and pastoral; and Dennis' example was
soon followed even by more traditional theorists. 5 The prestige of the greater lyric, as well
as of the other lyric forms, was strongly abetted by the opinion that the poetry of the Bible
was mainly lyrical, and the claim that the Psalms of David, as well as passages from the
narrative books, were the Hebrew equivalent of the odes of Pindar. 6 Of course, those who
believed that poetry had originated in the overflow of feeling also believed that the earliest
poems were lyric-either proto-ode or proto-elegy, as the theorist assumed the religious
or erotic passions to have been the more powerful and compulsive to expression. And the
growing critical interest in the lyric had its counterpart in the increasing cultivation of its
various kinds by the poets in the generation of the Wartons, Gray, and Collins-

Trick' din antique ruff and bonnet,

Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.

All these forces showed themselves indirectly, in passing comments, and in critical
judgments which merely implied the alteration of critical premises, before they resulted in a
deliberate reconstruction of the bases of poetic theory. There was a conspicuous tendency,
for example, to identify as 'pure poetry,' or 'the most poetical poetry,' or 'la vraie poesie,'
those particular poems or passages which were thought to be peculiarly the product of pas-
sion and rapture. Because the great ode is the boldest and most rapturous by nature, Joseph
Trapp said, it "is, of all kinds of Poetry, the most poetical ... ""The ode, as it is the eldest
kind of poetry, so it is more spiritous, and more remote from prose, than any other,"
wrote Edward Young in his Preface to Ocean, An Ode (1728), and enthusiasm is its "soul." 7
A similar idea of what constitutes quintessential poetry was at the heart of Joseph
Warton's famous critical estimate of the writings of Pope. His finding that the "species of
poetry wherein Pope Excelled ... is not the most excellent one of the art" was one against
 142 which even the most rigorous neo-classic critic could not have demurred, but the grounds
on which Warton identified the highest species of poetry plainly indicate the newer direc-
SECTION 2 tions of critical thinking. As against the "Man of Wit" and the "Man of Sense," the "true
MoDELS oF LYRic Poet" and writer of"PURE POETRY" is stamped solely by "a creative and glowing !MAGI-
NATION, 'acer spiritus ac vis' ..." Warton's instances of poems that are "essentially poeti-
cal" include not only epic and drama, but an ode of Akenside, as well as Milton's ''L'Allegro"
and "II Penseroso." Pope did not write "the most poetic species ofpoetry" because he did not
"indulge" his imagination and stifled his "poetical enthusiasm." Hence Pope does not trans-
port the reader, and although he is foremost among the second order of poets, "he has writ-
ten nothing in a strain so truly sublime, as the Bard of Gray." 8
A few writers of the latter part of the century mark themselves off from their contem-
poraries because they deliberately set out to revise the bases of the neo-classic theory of
poetry. Sir William Jones is remembered chiefly as a liberal jurist and an Orientalist who
pioneered in the study of Sanskrit. But in 1772 he published a volume of translations and
'imitations' of Arabic, Indian, and Persian poems to which he added an important "Essay
on the Arts Called Imitative." There we find a conjunction of all the tendencies we have
been tracing: the ideas drawn from Longinus, the old doctrine of poetic inspiration, re-
cent theories of the emotional and imaginative origin of poetry, and a major emphasis on
the lyric form and on the supposedly primitive and spontaneous poetry of Oriental na-
tions. It was Jones's distinction, I think, to be the first writer in England to weave these
threads into an explicit and orderly reformulation of the nature and criteria of poetry and
of the poetic genres.
Jones opens his essay by rejecting unequivocally "the assertion of Aristotle, that all
poetry consists in imitation" -one of those maxims, he thinks, "repeated a thousand
times, for no other reason, than because they once dropped from the pen of a superior
genius." Of the arts of poetry and music, "we cannot give a precise definition ... till we
have made a few previous remarks on their origin'; and he goes on to offer evidence "that
poetry was originally no more than a strong and animated expression of the human pas-
sions."9 Like various critics half a century later, Jones conjectures that each poetic species
had its source in an appropriate emotion: religious and dramatic poetry originated in joy
at the wonders of the creation, elegies in grief, moral and epic poetry in the detestation of
vice, and satires in hate. There follows this definition:

Consistently with the foregoing principles, we may define original and native poetry to be
the language of the violent passions, expressed in exact measure, with strong accents and
significant words. 10

Plainly Jones employs the lyric not only as the original poetic form, but as the prototype
for poetry as a whole, and thereby expands what had occasionally been proposed as the
differentia of one poetic species into the defining attribute of the genus. As he says, "in
defining what true poetry ought to be ... we have described what it really was among the
Hebrews, the Greeks and Romans, the Arabs and Persians." Undeniably the lyrics, the
hymns, the elegies of the Greeks, like the "sacred odes, or psalms" of David, the Song of
Solomon, and the prophecies of the inspired writers, "are truly and strictly poetical; but
what did David or Solomon imitate in their divine poems? A man, who is really joyful or
afflicted, cannot be said to imitate joy or affliction."
Jones extends the expressive concept to music and painting. Even if we admit, he says,
the very dubious proposition that the descriptive elements in these forms are imitation, it
remains the fact "that mere description is the meanest part of both arts." He goes on to set up
a simple scale by which to measure the relative worth of the constituents of any work of art:
 If the arguments, used in this essay, have any weight, it will appear, that the finest parts of 143
poetry, musick, and painting, are expressive of the passions ... that the inferior parts of
them are descriptive of natural objects, and affect us chiefly by substitution. 11 2.5
M. H. ABRAMS
Jones's theory shows that inversion of aesthetic values which reached its climax in the
theory of John Stuart Mill, some sixty years later. The "imitative" elements, hitherto held
to be a defining attribute of poetry or art, become inferior, if not downright unpoetic; in
their place those elements in a poem that express feeling become at once its identifying
characteristic and cardinal poetic value.

NOTES

1. In the attempt to subsume each species of Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith, I, 154-5;
poetry under the mimetic principle, Batteux Cowley, Preface to Pindarique Odes, in The
claimed, in 1747, that even lyric poems, "the songs Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley (nth ed.; London,
of the Prophets, the psalms of David, the odes of 1710), I, 184.
Pindar and of Horace" are only to superficial 7· Trapp, Lectures on Poetry, p. 203; Young,
inspection "un cri du coeur, un elan, oil la Nature Poetical Works (Boston, 1870), II, 159, 165. Cf. Hurd,
fait tout, et l 'art, rien." Like all poetry, lyric poetry Horace's Art of Poetry (1750), in Works, I, 104:
is an imitation, but differs from the other forms in "Poetry, pure Poetry, is the proper language of
imitating sentiments rather than actions (Les Passion ... " Anna Seward, letter to Dr. Downman,
Beaux Arts, Paris, 1773, pp. 316-25). Thomas 15 Mar. 1792: "... what should be its essence,
Twining claimed, in 1789, that Batteux had here poetry, that is, the metaphors, allusions, and
extended the limits of imitation beyond "all imagery, are the natural product of a glowing and
reasonable analogy," for when the lyric poet "is raised imagination" (Letters, Edinburgh, 18u, III,
merely expressing his own sentiments, in his own 121). J. Moir, Gleanings (1785), I, 27= "All true Poetry
person, we consider him not as imitating ... " is the genuine effusion either of a glowing heart, or
(Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry, pp. 139-40). of an ardent fancy." And see Paul Van Tieghem,
2. Sidney, Apology for Poetry, in Elizabethan "La Notion de vraie poesie dans le preromantisme
Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, I, 201; Europeen," Le Preromantisme (Paris, 1924), I, 19ff.
Boileau, L'Art pot!tique, II, ll. 47, 57; johnson, 8. Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, I,
Works, IX, 39, 43-5, 152. See also joseph Trapp, iv-x; II, 477-8, 481.
Lectures on Poetry (1711-15), trans. William Bowyer 9. The Works of Sir William ]ones (London,
(London, 1742), p. 25. For the fortunes of the lyric 1807), VIII, 361-4.
in England, and a discussion of the relevance of the 10. Ibid. VIII, 371. Cf. the expressive theory of
Longinian current to the theory and practice of the the poetic species held by john Keble and
Pindaric Ode, see the excellent article by Norman Alexander Smith, as described in Chap. VI, sects.
Maclean, "From Action to Image: Theories of the iii and iv.
Lyric in the Eighteenth Century," Critics and 11. Ibid. pp. 372-6, 379. Of the various indices to
Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane, pp. 408-60. the changing directions of criticism in the last
3· Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie, tr. decades of the century, Thomas Barnes's paper
Rymer (London, 1694), p. 4· "On the Nature and Essential Characters of
4. "Of Poetry" (1690), Critical Essays of the Poetry" (1781) is of special interest. Like jones,
Seventeenth Century, ed. Spingarn, III, 99· Cf. . Barnes denies the validity of definitions of poetry
Hobbes, "Answer to Davenant," ibid. II, 57· as imitation, as fiction, or as "the art of giving
5. The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in Critical pleasure"; he appeals to the fact that "the original
Works, l, 338. See also, e.g., Joseph Trapp, Lectures language of mankind was poetical," because all
on Poetry, Lecture XII, and John Newbery, The Art perception in the infancy of the world excited
of Poetry, I, 54. In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson passion; and he proposes a pyramid of poetic
distinguished the "greater" from the "lesser" ode as value, in which "the bursts of honest nature, the
possessing "sublimity, rapture, and quickness of glow of animated feeling" are the properties of "the
transition." first order of poetic excellence." Memoirs of the
6. See Lowth, Lectures, esp. Chaps. XXII, Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, I
XXV-XXVIII. Also Sidney, Apology for Poetry, in (1785), pp. 55-6.
2.6 Dramatic Monologue and the
Overhearing of Lyric (1985)
HERBERT F. TucKER

His muse made increment of anything,

From the high lyric down to the low rational.
Don Juan Ill.Jxxxv.s-6

I would say, quoting Mill, "Oratory is heard, poetry is overheard." And he would answer,
his voice full of contempt, that there was always an audience; and yet, in his moments of
lofty speech, he himself was alone no matter what the crowd.
The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats

1.

"Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiar-

ity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is
feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude." "Lyric poetry, as it was the earli-
est kind, is also, if the view we are now taking of poetry be correct, more eminently and
peculiarly poetry than any other." 1 Thus wrote John Stuart Mill in 1833, with the wild
surmise of a man who had lately nursed himself through a severe depression, thanks to
published poetry and its capacity to excite intimate feeling in forms uncontaminated by
rhetorical or dramatic posturing. One listener Mill's characteristically analytic eloquence
is likely to have found at once was Robert Browning, who moved in London among lib-
eral circles that touched Mill's and who in the same year published his first work, the
problematically dramatic Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession, to which Mill drafted a
response Browning saw in manuscript. Browning's entire career-most notably the ge-
neric innovation for which he is widely remembered today, the dramatic monologue-
would affirm his resistance to the ideas about poetry contained in Mill's essays. Indeed,
as early as Pauline Browning was confessing to the open secret of spontaneous lyricism,
but in ways that disowned it. What follows is emphatically the depiction of a bygone
state:

And first I sang as I in dream have seen

Music wait on a lyrist for some thought,
Yet singing to herself until it came. (II. 377-79)

In this complex but typical retrospect the poet of Pauline figures as an eavesdropper on
his own Shelleyan juvenilia, themselves relics of a dream of disengaged and thoughtless
youth from which the sadder but wiser poet has on balance done well to awaken. Brown-
ing's enfolding of a lyrical interval into a narrative history sets the pattern for the estab-
lishment of character throughout his subsequent work, a pattern knowingly at odds with
the subjectivist convention that governed the reading of English poetry circa 1830 and to 145
which Mill's essay gave memorable but by no means unique voice. 2
To the most ambitious and original young poets of the day, Browning and Alfred Ten- 2.6
nyson, the sort of lyricism Mill admired must have seemed "overheard" in a sense quite HERBERT F. TucKER
other than Mill intended: heard overmuch, overdone, and thus in need of being done over
in fresh forms. Among their other generic experiments in the lyrical drama (Paracelsus,
Pippa Passes), the idyll ("Dora," "Morte d'Arthur"), and the sui generis historical epic form
of Sardella, during the 1830s Tennyson and Browning arrived independently at the first
recognizably modern dramatic monologues: "St. Simeon Stylites" (1842; written in 1833)
and the paired poems of 1837 that we now know as "Johannes Agricola in Meditation" and
"Porphyria's Lover." These early monologues were not only highly accomplished pieces;
within the lyrical climate of the day they were implicitly polemical as well. The ascetic
St. Simeon atop his pillar, exposed to the merciless assault of the elements, stands for an
exalted subjectivity ironically demystified by the historical contextualization that is the
generic privilege of the dramatic monologue and, I shall argue, one of its indispensable
props in the construction of character. Browning's imagination was less symbolically
brooding than Tennyson's and more historically alert, and he launched his dramatic
monologues with speakers whose insanities were perversions, but recognizably versions,
of the twin wellheads of the lyrical current that had come down to the nineteenth century
from the Reformation and the Renaissance. The historical figure Johannes Agricola is an
antinomian protestant lying against time as if his soul depended on it; and Porphyria's
lover, though fictive, may be regarded as a gruesomely literal-minded Petrarch bent on
possessing the object of his desire. Each of Browning's speakers, like St. Simeon Stylites,
utters a monomaniacal manifesto that shows subjectivity up by betraying its situation in
a history. The utterance of each stands revealed not as poetry, in Mill's terms, but as elo-
quence, a desperately concentric rhetoric whereby, to adapt Yeats's formulation from "Ego
Dominus Tuus," the sentimentalist deceives himself.
What gets "overheard" in these inaugural Victorian monologues is history dramati-
cally replayed. The charmed circle of lyric finds itself included by the kind of historical
particularity that lyric genres exclude by design, and in the process readers find them-
selves unsettlingly historicized and contextualized as well. The extremity of each monolo-
gist's authoritative assertion awakens in us with great force the counter-authority of com-
munal norms, through a reductio ad absurdum of the very lyric premises staked out in
Mill's essays, most remarkably in a sentence that Mill deleted when republishing "What
Is Poetry?": "That song has always seemed to us like the lament of a prisoner in a solitary
cell, ourselves listening, unseen in the next." 3 ("Ourselves"? How many of us in that next
cell? Does one eavesdrop in company? Or is that not called going to the theater, and is
Mill's overheard poetry not dramatic eloquence after all?) Tennyson's and Browning's first
monologues imply that Mill's position was already its own absurd reduction-a reduction
not just of the options for poetry but of the prerogatives of the unimprisoned self, which
ideas like Mill's have been underwriting, as teachers of undergraduate poetry classes can
attest, for the better part of two centuries. Tennyson and Browning wanted to safeguard
the self's prerogatives, and to that extent they shared the aims of contemporary lyrical
devotees. But both poets' earliest dramatic monologues compassed those aims through a
more subtle and eloquent design than the prevailing creed would admit: a design that might
preserve the self on the far side of, and as a result of, a contextual dismissal of attenuated
Romantic lyricism and its merely soulful claims; a design that might, as Browning was to
put it in the peroration to The Ring and the Book (1869), "Suffice the eye and save the soul
beside" (XII.863). St. Simeon, Johannes, and Porphyria's lover emerge through their
 146 monologues as characters: poorer souls than they like to fancy themselves but selves for
all that, de- and re-constructed selves strung on the tensions of their texts.
SECTION 2
MODELS OF lYRIC 2.
Both Tennyson and Browning proceeded at once to refine their generic discoveries,
though they proceeded in quite different directions. While Tennyson kept the dramatic
monologue in his repertoire, he turned to it relatively seldom; and with such memorable
ventures as "Ulysses" and "Tithonus" he in effect relyricized the genre, running its con-
textualizing devices in reverse and stripping his speakers of personality in order to facili-
tate a lyric drive. Browning, on the other hand, moved his dramatic monologues in the
direction of mimetic particularity, and the poems he went on to write continued to incor-
porate or "overhear" lyric in the interests of character-formation. "Johannes Agricola"
and "Porphyria's Lover" had been blockbusters, comparatively single-minded exercises in
the construction of a lurid character through the fissuring of an apparently monolithic
ego. The gain in verisimilitude of Browning's later monologues is a function of the nerve
with which he learned to reticulate the sort of pattern these strong but simple mono-
logues had first knit. The degree of intricacy varies widely, but the generic design remains
the same. Character in the Browningesque dramatic monologue emerges as an interfer-
ence effect between opposed yet mutually informative discourses: between an historical,
narrative, metonymic text and a symbolic, lyrical, metaphoric text that adjoins it and
jockeys with it for authority. While each text urges its own priority, the ensemble works
according to the paradoxical logic of the originary supplement: the alien voices of history
and of feeling come to constitute and direct one another. Typically Browning's monolo-
gists tell the story of a yearning after the condition oflyric, a condition that is itself in turn
unimaginable except as the object of, or pretext for, the yearning that impels the story plot-
ted against it. 4
What we acknowledge as the "life" of a dramatic monologue thus emerges through the
interdependence of its fictive autobiography and its elan vital, each of which stands as the
other's reason for being, and neither of which can stand alone without succumbing to
one of two deconstructive ordeals that beset character in this genre (and that arguably
first beset the self during the century in which this genre arose). The first ordeal lies
through history and threatens to resolve the speaking self into its constituent influences,
to unravel character by exposing it as merely a tissue of affiliations. At the same time,
character in the dramatic monologue runs an equal but opposite risk from what certain
Romantic poetics and hermeneutics would assert to be the self's very place of strength
and what we have been calling, after Mill, the privacy of lyric. A kind of sublime idiocy,
lyric isolation from context distempers character and robs it of contour, as Socrates said
long ago in the Ion (lyric poets are out of their minds), and as Sharon Cameron, with an
eye on Greek and earlier origins of lyric, has said again more recently: "the lyric is a de-
parture not only from temporality but also from the finite constrictions of identity." 5 We
find this lyric departure superbly dramatized in the valediction of Tennyson's Ulysses,
that most marginal of characters, whose discourse poises itself at "the utmost bound of
human thought" (!. 32). Insofar as we find Ulysses transgressing that bound-as for me he
does in the final paragraph, with its address to a bewilderingly mythical crew of Ithacan
mariners and with the concomitant evanescence of its "I" -we find Tennyson transgress-
ing the generic boundary of dramatic monologue as well.
One good reason why the dramatic monologue is associated with Browning's name
rather than with Tennyson's, who technically got to it first, is that in Browning the lyrical
flight from narrative, temporality, and identity appears through a characteristic, and
characterizing, resistance to its allure. Browning's Ulysses, had he invented one, would 147
speak while bound to the mast of a ship bound elsewhere; his life would take its bearing
from what he heard the Sirens sing, and their music would remain an unheard melody 2.6
suffusing his monologue without rising to the surface of utterance. 6 Such a plot of lyri- HERBERT F. TucKER
cism resisted would mark his poem as a dramatic monologue, which we should be justi-
fied in reading as yet another allegory of the distinctive turn on Romantic lyricism that
perennially recreated Browning's poetical character. "R. B. a poem" was the title he gave
in advance to this allegorical testament, in the fine letter, virtually an epistolary mono-
logue, that he addressed on the subject to Elizabeth Barrett; and by the time of "One
Word More" (1855) he could proudly affirm his wife's lyricism as the privately silencing
otherness his public character was to be known by?
Dramatic monologue in the Browning tradition is, in a word, anything but monologi-
cal. It represents modern character as a quotient, a ratio of history and desire, a function
of the division of the modern mind against itself. Our apprehension of character as thus
constituted is a Romantic affair; in Jerome Christensen's apt phrase for the processing of
the "lyrical drama" in Romanticism, it is a matter of learning to "read the differentials."
As a sampling of the dozens of poetry textbooks published in recent decades will con-
firm, the dramatic monologue is our genre of genres for training in how to read between
the lines-a hackneyed but valuable phrase that deserves a fresh hearing. 8 In the reading
of a dramatic monologue we do not so much scrutinize the ellipses and blank spaces of
the text as we people those openings by attending to the overtones of the different dis-
courses that flank them. Between the lines, we read in a no-man's-land the notes whose
intervals engender character. Perhaps the poet of the dramatic monologue gave a thought
to the generic framing of his own art when he had the musician Abt Vogler (1864) marvel
"That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star" (I. 52 ). The quantum
leap from text to fictive persona (the dramatic "star" of a monologue) is no less miracu-
lous for being, like Abt Vogler's structured improvisation, "framed," defined and sustained
as a put-up job. That such a process of character-construction tends to elude our received
means of exegesis is a contributing cause for the depression of Browning's stock among the
New Critics. But one way to begin explicating a dramatic monologue in the Browning
tradition is to identify a discursive shift, a moment at which either of the genre's constitu-
tive modes-historical line or punctual lyric spot-breaks into the other.

3·
Since the premier writer of dramatic monologues was, as usual in such matters, the most
ingenious, it is difficult to find uncomplicated instances in Browning that are also repre-
sentative. We might sample first a passage from "Fra Lippo Lippi" (1855), a sizeable blank-
verse monologue that happens to contain lyric literally in the form of stornel/i, lyrical
catches Englished in italics that Browning's artist monk emits at odd intervals during the
autobiography he is improvising for the night watch. In the following lines Lippo is
taking off those critics whom his new painterly realism has disturbed:

"It's art's decline, my son!

You're not of the true painters, great and old;
Brother Angelico's the man, you'll find;
Brother Lorenzo stands his single peer:
Fag on at flesh, you'll never make the third!"
Flower o' the pine,
You keep your mistr . .. manners, and I'll stick to mine!
 148 I'm not the third, then: bless us, they must know!
Don't you think they're the likeliest to know,
SECTION 2 They with their Latin? (II. 233-42)
MODELS OF LYRIC
The gap for interpretation to enter is, of course, the middle of the second italicized line,
marked typographically by ellipsis and prosodically by the wreckage of the embedded
snatch of song. Amid Lippo's tale of the modern artist's oppression by his superiors, by
religious and representational traditions, and by the Latin learning that backs up both
(poetry as overseen?), the apparently spontaneous individual talent bursts forth in a re-
bellious chant-which is then itself interrupted by a reminder, also apparently spontane-
ous, of Lippo's answerability to the authorities right in front of him. Lippo's lyric flower
breeds a canker: the poetry we and the police thought we were overhearing turns out to
be, through versatile revision or instant overdubbing, a rhetorically canny performance.
Or, if we take a larger view, it turns out to have been rhetoric all along, Lippo's premedi-
tated means of affirming solidarity with the unlettered night watch by ruefully policing
his own speech in advance and incorporating this police action into the larger speech act
that is his monologue.
The passage is intensely artificial yet intensely realistic, and we should note that its
success does not rely on our deciding whether the monologist has forecast his occasion or
stumbled upon it. The twist of the lyrical line against itself nets a speaking subject who is
tethered to circumstances and, for that very reason, is anything but tongue-tied. Here as
throughout the Browningesque monologue, character is not unfolded to comprehension
but enfolded in a text that draws us in. Even after nearly four hundred lines we do not
grasp Lippo's character as an essence and know what he is; but if we have negotiated the
text we know how he does. In the terms of the passage in question, we know his manners,
not least his manner of covering up his mistr . .. Lippo's character arises, in the differen-
tials between vitality and circumstances, as a way of life, a mazing text, a finely realized,
idiosyncratic instance of a generic method.
A similarly punctuated digression from story, or transgression into lyric, occurs at
the center of Browning's most famous monologue, "My Last Duchess" (1842):

She had
A heart-how shall I say?-too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace-all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,-good! but thanked
Somehow-I know not how-as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. (II. 21-34)

The framing hesitations of"How shall I say?" and "I know not how" may or may not come
under the Duke's rhetorical control; but a comparable tic or stammer invades his dis-
course more subtly with the appositional style of the middle lines, which do here with
syntax the work done otherwise in Fra Lippo's stornelli. Halfway through the monologue,
these lines constitute a lyrical interlude around which the Duke's despotic narrative may 149
be seen to circle, with a predatory envy that escapes his posture of condescension. Anaphora
and grammatical suspension, time-honored refuges of lyric, harbor recurrent images of 2.6
the daily and seasonal cycle, of natural affection, and of sexual generation that not only HERBERT F. TucKER
contradict the Duke's potent affiliation with art, culture, and domination but show these
contradictions within the text to be contradictions within the Duke. Or rather, to discard
the figuration of inside and outside that dramatic monologue at its best asks us to do
without, it is these textual contradictions that constitute the Duke's character. The poly-
morphous perversity he here attributes to his last Duchess is as much an attribute of his
own character as is the different, monomaniacal perversity with which he has put a stop
to her egalitarian smiles. Each perversity so turns on the other as to knot the text up into
that essential illusion we call character. Hence the Duke's characteristic inconsistency in
objecting to the "officious fool" who, in breaking cherries for the Duchess, was not break-
ing ranks at all but merely executing his proper "office" in the Duke's hierarchical world.
Hence, too, the undecidable ambiguity of "My favour at her breast": the phrase oscillates
between suggestions of a caress naturally given and of an heirloom possessively be-
stowed, and its oscillation is what makes the star of dramatic character shine. Such a se-
mantic forking of the ways, like the plotting of spontaneity against calculation in Fra
Lippo's "mistr . .. manners" revision, blocks reference in one direction, in order to refer
us to the textual production of character instead.
Because in grammatical terms it is a paratactic pocket, an insulated deviation from the
syntax of narrative line, the Duke's recounting of his Duchess's easy pleasures wanders
from the aims of the raconteur and foregrounds the speech impediments that make her
story his monologue. 9 Moreover, the Duke's listing is also a listening, a harkening after
the kind of spontaneous lyric voice that he, like the writer of dramatic monologues,
comes into his own by imperfectly renouncing. Lyric, in the dramatic monologue, is
what you cannot have and what you cannot forget-think of the arresting trope Brown-
ing invented for his aging poet Cleon (1855), "One lyric woman, in her crocus vest"
(l. 15)-and as an organizing principle for the genre, lyric becomes present through a
recurrent and partial overruling. This resisted generic nostalgia receives further figu-
ration intertextually, in "My Last Duchess" and many another monologue, with the
clustering of allusions at moments of lyric release. Here "The dropping of the daylight
in the West" falls into Browning's text from major elegies, or refusals to mourn, by
Milton ("Lycidas"), Wordsworth ("Tintern Abbey," "Intimations" ode), and Keats ("To
Autumn"); and the Duchess on her white mule so recalls Spenser's lyrically selfless Una
from the opening of The Faerie Queene as to cast the Duke as an archimage dubiously
empowered.
Amid the Duke's eloquence the overhearing of poetry, in this literary-historical sense
of allusion to prior poems, underscores the choral dissolution that lurks in lyric voice.
Furthermore, it reinstates the checking of such dissolution as the mark of the individual
self-of the dramatic speaker and also of the poet who, in writing him up, defines himself
in opposition to lyrical orthodoxy and emerges as a distinct "I," a name to conjure with
against the ominous: "This grew; I gave commands" (I. 45). Toward the end of his career,
in "House" (1876) Browning would in his own voice make more explicit this engagement
with the literary past and would defend literary personality, against Wordsworth on the
sonnet, as just the antithesis of unmediated sincerity:"' "With this same key I Shakespeare
unlocked his heart," once more!' I Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!" (II. 38-
40). Poetry of the unlocked heart, far from displaying character in Browning's terms,
undoes it: Browning reads his chief precursor in the English dramatic line as a type of the
 150 objective poet, the poetical character known through a career-long objection to the sealed
intimacies of the poem a clef.
SECTION 2
MODELS OF LYRIC 4·
In 1831 Arthur Hallam gave a promising description of the best of Tennyson's Poems,
Chiefly Lyrical (1830) as "a graft of the lyric on the dramatic." The Victorian dramatic
monologue that soon ensued from these beginnings was likewise a hybrid genre, a hardy
offshoot of the earlier hybrid genre in which the first Romantics had addressed the prob-
lem of how to write the long modern poem by making modern civilization and its discon-
tents, or longing and its impediments, into the conditions for the prolonging and further
hearing of poetry: the "greater Romantic lyric." The genre M. H. Abrams thus christened
some years ago has by now achieved canonical status, but a reconsideration of its given
name from the standpoint of the dramatic monologue may help us save it from assimilation
to orthodox lyricism by reminding us that the genre Abrams called "greater" was not more-
lyrical-than-lyric but rather more-than-lyrical. Despite a still high tide of assertions to the
contrary, the works of the first generations of Romantic poets were on the whole much less
lyrical than otherwise. 10 Once we conceive the Romantic tradition accordingly as a peren-
nial intermarriage, which is to say infighting, of poetic kinds, we can situate the Victorian
dramatic monologue as an eminently Romantic form. In correcting the literary-historical
picture we can begin, too, to see how fin-de-sh!cle and modernist reactions to the Brown-
ingesque monologue have conditioned the writing, reading, and teaching of poetry, liter-
ary theory, and literary history in our own time.
At the beginning of Browning's century Coleridge remarked, "A poem of any length
neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry." By the end of the century Oscar Wilde, looking
askance at Browning's achievement, took up Coleridge's distinction, but with a difference:
"If he can only get his music by breaking the strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they
snap in discord .... Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as
a medium for writing in prose." 11 The difference between Coleridge's and Wilde's ideas of
what a poem should be is in large part a difference that the dramatic monologue had
made in nineteenth-century poetry, a difference Browning inscribed into literary history
by inscribing it into the characteristic ratios of his texts. Wilde and others at the thresh-
old of modernism wanted Mill's pure lyricism but wanted it even purer. And through an
irony of literary history that has had far-reaching consequences for our century, the
Browningesque dramatic monologue gave them what they wanted. Symbolist and imag-
ist writers could extract from such texts as Pauline and "Fra Lippo Lippi"-and also, to
sketch in the fuller picture, from the Tennysonian idyll and most sophisticated Victorian
novels-lyrical gems as finely cut as anything from the allegedly naive eras, Romantic or
Elizabethan, upon which they bestowed such sentimental if creative regard. The hybrid
dramatic monologue, as a result of its aim to make the world and subjectivity safe for
each other in the interests of character, had proved a sturdy grafting stock for flowers of
lyricism; and the governing pressures of the genre, just because they governed so firmly,
had bred hothouse lyric varieties of unsurpassed intensity. These lyrical implants it was left
to a new generation of rhymers, scholars, and anthologists to imitate, defend, and excerpt in
a newly chastened lyric poetry, a severely purist poetics, and a surprisingly revisionist his-
tory of poetry. 12
The fin-de-siecle purism of Wilde, Yeats, Arthur Symons, and others was polemically
canted against the example of Browning; yet it remained curiously, even poignantly, in
his debt. Consider, for example, Symons's resumption of a rhetoric very like Mill's, as he
praises Verlaine in The Symbolist Movement (1899) for "getting back to nature itself":
"From the moment when his inner life may be said to have begun, he was occupied with 151
the task of an unceasing confession, in which one seems to overhear him talking to him-
self."13 The pivotally wishful "unceasing," which distinguishes Symons's formulation 2.6
from Mill's, also betrays a kind of elegiac overcompensation. Mill had dissolved audience HERBERT F. TucKER

in order to overhear poetry as if from an adjacent cell; Symons, writing at an appreciable

historical remove from the achievements of Verlaine, is by contrast trapped in time. Sy-
mons's overhearing of poetry resembles less Mill's eavesdropping than the belated Brown-
ingesque audition of a poignant echo, and the symbolist movement he hopes to propel is
fed by an overwhelming nostalgia that creates from its own wreck the thing it contem-
plates. The nostalgia for lyric that throbs through the influential versions of the poetic past
Symons and his contemporaries assembled sprang from a range of cultural causes we are
only beginning to understand adequately. 14 But we can observe here that the rhetorical
pattern into which their lyrically normed historiography fell was precisely that of the po-
etic genre that had preeminently confronted lyricism with history in their century: the
dramatic monologue. It is as if what Symons championed as the "revolt against exteriority,
against rhetoric," 15 having repudiated the "impure" Browning tradition in principle, was
condemned to reiterate its designs in writing. The symbolist and imagist schools wanted
to read in their French and English antecedents an expurgated lyric that never was on page
or lip. It was, rather, a generic back-formation, a textual constituent they isolated from the
dramatic monologue and related nineteenth-century forms; and the featureless poems the
fin-de-siecle purists produced by factoring out the historical impurities that had ballasted
these forms are now fittingly, with rare exceptions, works of little more than historical
interest.
Virtually each important modernist poet in English wrote such poems for a time; each
became an important poet by learning to write otherwise and to exploit the internal other-
ness of the dramatic monologue. When the lyrical bubble burst within its bell jar, poetry
became modern once again in its return to the historically responsive and dialogical mode
that Browning, Tennyson, and others had brought forward from the Romantics. 16 And
upon the establishment of Yeats's mask, Pound's personae, Frost's monologues and idylls,
and Eliot's impersonal poetry, it became a point of dogma among sophisticated readers
:hat every poem dramatized a speaker who was not the poet. "Once we have dissociated
:he speaker of the lyric from the personality of the poet, even the tiniest lyric reveals itself
as drama." 17 We recognize this declaration as dogma by the simple fact that we-at least
:nost of us-had to learn it, and had to trade for it older presuppositions about lyric sin-
~erity that we had picked up in corners to which New Critical light had not yet pierced.
-=-he new dogma took (and in my teaching experience it takes still) with such ease that it is
-.,·orth asking why it did (and does), and whether as professors of poetry we should not
:--tave second thoughts about promulgating an approach that requires so painless an ad-
justment of the subjectivist norms we profess to think outmoded.
The conversion educated readers now routinely undergo from lyrical to dramatic ex-
pectations about the poems they study recapitulates the history of Anglo-American liter-
ary pedagogy during our century, the middle two decades of which witnessed a great
awakening from which we in our turn are trying to awaken again. Until about 1940 teach-
ers promoted poetry appreciation in handbooks and anthologies that exalted lyric as "the
supreme expression of strong emotion ... the very real but inexplicable essence of po-
etry," and that throned this essential emotion in the equally essential person of the poet:
"Lyrical poetry arouses emotion because it expresses the author's feeling." 18 By 1960 the
end of instruction had shifted from appreciating to understanding poetry, and to this end
a host of experts marched readers past the author of a poem to its dramatic speaker. John
 152 Crowe Ransom's dictum that the dramatic situation is "almost the first head under which
it is advisable to approach a poem for understanding" had by the 1960s advanced from
SECTION 2 advice to prescription. In Laurence Perrine's widely adopted Sound and Sense the first order
Moons oF LYRIC of business is "to assume always that the speaker is someone other than the poet himself."
For Robert Scholes in Elements ofPoetry the speaker is the most elementary of assumptions:
"In beginning our approach to a poem we must make some sort of tentative decision about
who the speaker is, what his situation is, and who he seems to be addressing." 19
That such forthright declarations conceal inconsistencies appears in the instructions
of Robert W. Boynton and Maynard Mack, whose Introduction to the Poem promotes the
familiar dramatic principle but pursues its issues to the verge of a puzzling conclusion. The
authors begin dogmatically enough: "When we start looking closely at the dramatic char-
acter of poetry, we find that we have to allow for a more immediate speaker than the poet
himself, one whom the poet has imagined speaking the poem, as an actor speaks a part
written for him by a playwright." But then Boynton and Mack, with a candor unusual in
the handbook genre, proceed to a damaging concession that dissolves the insubstantial
pageant of the dramatic enterprise into thin air: "In some instances this imagined speaker
is in no way definite or distinctive; he is simply a voice." (When is a speaker not a speaker?
When he is a "voice," nay, an Arnoldian "lyric cry.") With this last sentence Boynton and
Mack offer an all but lyrical intimation of the mystification inherent in the critical fiction
of the speaker and suggest its collusion with the mysteries of the subjectivist norm it was
designed to supplant. 20 It may well be easier to indicate these mysteries than to solve
them; what matters is that with our New Critical guides we seem to have experienced as
little difficulty in negotiating the confusions entailed by the fiction of the speaker as we have
experienced in converting ourselves and our students from lyrically expressive to dramati-
cally objective norms for reading.
Why should we have made this conversion, and why do we continue to encourage it?
Why should our attempts at understanding poetry through a New Criticism rely on a fic-
tion that baffles the understanding? These are related questions, and their answers proba-
bly lie in considerations of pedagogical expediency. One such consideration must be the
sheer hard work of bringing culturally stranded students into contact with the historical
particularities from which a given poem arises. Life (and courses) being short, art being
long, and history being longer still, the fiction of the speaker at least brackets the larger
problem of context so as to define a manageable classroom task for literary studies. To such
institutional considerations as these, which have been attracting needed attention oflate, I
would add a consideration more metaphysical in kind. The fiction of the speaker, if it re-
moves from the study of poetry the burden, and the dignity, of establishing contact with
history, puts us in compensatory contact with the myth of unconditioned subjectivity we
have inherited from Mill and Symons in spite of ourselves. Through that late ceremony of
critical innocence, the readerly imagination of a self, we modern readers have abolished
the poet and set up the fictive speaker; and we have done so in order to boost the higher
gains of an intersubjective recognition for which, in an increasingly mechanical age that
can make Mill's look positively idyllic, we seem to suffer insatiable cultural thirst. The
mastery of New Critical tools may offer in this light a sort of homeopathic salve, the ap-
plication of a humanistic technology to technologically induced ills.
The thirst for intersubjective confirmation of the self, which has made the overhear-
ing of a persona our principal means of understanding a poem, would I suspect be less
strong if it did not involve a kind of bad faith about which Browning's Bishop Blougram
(1855) had much to say: "With me, faith means perpetual unbelief I Kept quiet like the
snake 'neath Michael's foot I Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe" (11. 666-68).
The New Criticism of lyric poetry introduced into literary study an anxiety of textuality 153
that was its legacy from the Higher Criticism of scripture a century before: anxiety over the
tendency of texts to come loose from their origins into an anarchy that the New Critics 2.6
half acknowledged and half sought to curb under the regime of a now avowedly fictive HERBERT F. TucKER

self, from whom a language on parole from its author might nonetheless issue as speech.
What is poetry? Textuality a speaker owns. The old king of self-expressive lyricism is dead:
Long live the Speaker King! At a king's ransom we thus secure our reading against the
subversive textuality of what we read; or as another handbook from the 1960s puts it with
clarity: "So strong is the oral convention in poetry that, in the absence of contrary indica-
tions, we infer a voice and, though we know we are reading words on a page, create for and
of ourselves an imaginary listener." 21 Imaginative recreation "for and of ourselves" here
depends upon our suppressing the play of the signifier beneath the hand of a convention "so
strong" as to decree the "contrary indications" of textuality absent most of the time.
Deconstructive theory and practice in the last decade have so directed our attention
to the persistence of "contrary indications" that the doctrine espoused in my last citation
no longer appears tenable. It seems incumbent upon us now to choose between intersub-
jective and intertextual modes of reading, between vindicating the self and saving the
text. Worse, I fear, those of us who are both teachers and critics may have to make differ-
ent choices according to the different positions in which we find ourselves-becoming by
turns intertextual readers in the study and intersubjective readers in the classroom-in
ways that not very fruitfully perpetuate a professional divide some latter-day Browning
might well monologize upon. I wonder whether it must be so; and I am fortified in my
doubts by the stubborn survival of the dramatic monologue, which began as a response to
lyric isolationism, and which remains to mediate the rivalry between intersubjective ap-
peal and intertextual rigor by situating the claims of each within the limiting context the
other provides.
In its charactered life the dramatic monologue can help us put in their places critical
reductions of opposite but complementary and perhaps even cognate kinds: on one hand,
the transcendentally face-saving misprisions that poetry has received from Victorian ro-
manticizers, Decadent purists, and New Critical impersonalists alike; on the other hand,
the abysmal disfigurements of a deconstruction that would convert poetry's most beauti-
ful illusion-the speaking presence-into a uniform textuality that is quite as "purist," in
its own way, as anything the nineteenth century could imagine. An exemplary teaching
genre, the dramatic monologue can teach us, among other things, that while texts do not
absolutely lack speakers, they do not simply have them either; they invent them instead as
they go. Texts do not come from speakers, speakers come from texts. Persona fit non nas-
citur. To assume in advance that a poetic text proceeds from a dramatically situated
speaker is to risk missing the play of verbal implication whereby character is engendered
in the first place through colliding modes of signification; it is to read so belatedly as to
arrive only when the party is over. At the same time, however, the guest the party con-
venes to honor, the ghost conjured by the textual machine, remains the articulate phe-
nomenon we call character: a literary effect we neglect at our peril. For to insist that tex-
tuality is all and that the play of the signifier usurps the recreative illusion of character is
to turn back at the threshold of interpretation, stopping our ears to both lyric cries and
historical imperatives, and from our studious cells overhearing nothing. Renewed stress
upon textuality as the basis for the Western written character is a beginning as important
to the study of poetry now as it has been for over a century to the writing of dramatic
monologues and to the modern tradition they can illuminate in both backward and for-
ward directions. But textuality is only the beginning.
 154
NOTES

SECTION 2 1. john Stuart Mill, Essays on Poetry, ed. F. the Development of the Soul," ELH, 47 (1980), 774:
MoDELS OF LYRIC Parvin Sharpless (Columbia, S.C., 1976), pp. 12, 36. "For Browning, historicity only prettifies a work ....
The quotations come from two essays of 1833, History, the creation of a concrete setting, has never
"What Is Poetry?" and "The Two Kinds of Poetry." been a major focus for Browning." I would reply that
2. Ideas like Mill's abound, for example, in history is indeed a major focus for Browning-one
Macaulay's 1825 essay "Milton," in Critical and of the two foci, to speak geometrically, that define
Historical Essays (London, 1883): "Analysis is not his notoriously elliptical procedures.
the business of the poet" (p. 3); "It is the part of the 5· Ion 534; Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time
lyric poet to abandon himself, without reserve, to (Baltimore and London, 1979), p. 208. See also the
his own emotions" (p. 6); "It is just when Milton quirky Victorian theorist E. S. Dallas, Poetics
escapes from the shackles of the dialogue, when he (London, 1852), p. 83: "The outpourings of the lyric
is discharged from the labour of uniting two should spring from the law of unconsciousness.
incongruous styles, when he is at liberty to indulge Personality or selfhood triumphs in the drama; the
his choral raptures without reserve, that he rises divine and all that is not Me triumphs in the lyric."
even above himself" (p. 8). Comparing Mill's 6. Although Browning never wrote such a
writings with T. S. Eliot's "The Three Voices of monologue, he glanced at its possibility in "The
Poetry" (1953), Elder Olson, American Lyric Poems Englishman in Italy" (1845), with its vision of
(New York, 1964), p. 2, concludes that "the study of "Those isles of the siren" (I. 199) and its audition of
the question has not advanced much in over a a song "that tells us/ What life is, so clear"; "The
hundred years." Olson's conclusion retains its force secret they sang to Ulysses I When, ages ago, I He
after two decades. See Barbara Hardy, The heard and he knew this life's secret I I hear and I
Advantage of Lyric (Bloomington and London, know" (II. 223-27). Life's secret, needless to add,
1977), p. 2: "Lyric poetry thrives, then, on exclusions. goes untold in Browning's text.
It is more than usually opaque because it leaves out 7· Letter of 11 February 1845, in Letters of Robert
so much of the accustomed context and conse- Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845-1846,
quences of feeling that it can speak in a pure, lucid, ed. Elvan Kintner, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1969),
and intense voice." I:J7.
3· Essays on Poetry, p. 14. 8. jerome Christensen, "'Thoughts That Do
4· Genre theorists have often observed this Often Lie Too Deep for Tears': Toward a Romantic
distinction, though usually in honoring the Concept of Lyrical Drama," Wordsworth Circle,
exclusivity of lyric. For Babette Deutsch, Potable 12:1 (1981), 61. For an appropriately genealogical
Gold (New York, 1929), p. 21, the essential testimonial to the pedagogical virtues of the
distinction lies between prose and poetry: "The dramatic monologue see Ina Beth Sessions's
one resembles a man walking toward a definite postscript to "The Dramatic Monologue," PMLA,
goal; the other is like a man surrendering himself 62 (1947), 516 n.: "One of the most interesting
to contemplation, or to the experience of walking comments concerning the dramatic monologue
for its own sake. Prose has intention; poetry has was made by Dr. j. B. Wharey of the University of
intensity." According to Kenneth Burke, A Texas in a letter to the writer on january 17, 1935:
Grammar of Motives (1947; Berkeley and Los 'The dramatic monologue is, I think, one of the
Angeles, 1969), p. 475, "The state of arrest in which best forms of disciplinary reading-that is, to use
we would situate the essence oflyric is not the words of the late Professor Genung, "reading
analogous to dramatic action at all, but is the pursued with the express purpose of feeding and
dialectical counterpart of action." Olson, "The stimulating inventive power."'" Among the earliest
Lyric," PMMLA, 1 (1969), 65, says oflyrics that systematic students of the genre in our century
"while they may contain within themselves a were elocution teachers; their professional
considerable narrative or dramatic portion, that pedigree broadly conceived goes back at least to
portion is subordinate to the lyrical whole .... Quintilian, who recommended exercises in
Once expression and address and colloquy become impersonation (prosopopoeia) as a means of
subservient to a further end as affecting their form imaginative discipline. See A. Dwight Culler,
as complete and whole in themselves, we have gone "Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue,"
beyond the bounds of the lyric." For a recent view PMLA, 90 (1975), 368.
of Browning opposed to that of the present essay 9. David I. Masson, "Vowel and Consonant
see David Bergman, "Browning's Monologues and Patterns in Poetry," in Essays on the Language of
Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Gayley and Benjamin Putnam Kurtz, Methods and 155
Levin (Boston, 1967), p. 3, observes that "where Materials of Literary Criticism (Boston, 1920), p.
lyrical feeling or sensuous description occurs in 122; W. K. Wimsatt, jr., and Cleanth Brooks, 2.6
European poetry, there will usually be found Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York,
HERBERT F. TUCKER
patterns of vowels and consonants." For more 1966), pp. 433, 751-52. For representative belletristic
general consideration of the linguistics of lyric, histories of poetry from a nostalgic, fin-de-siecle
see Edward Stankiewicz, "Poetic and Non-poetic perspective see john Addington Symonds, Essays
Language in Their Interrelation," in Poetics, ed. D. Speculative and Suggestive (London, 1893), pp. 393
Davie eta!. (Gravenhage, 1961), p. 17: "Lyrical ff.; Edmund Gosse, "Introduction" to Victorian
poetry presents the most interiorized form of Songs: Lyrics of the Affections and Nature, ed. E. H.
poetic language, in which the linguistic elements Garrett (Boston, 1895); and Arthur Symons, The
are most closely related and internally motivated." Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899; rpt. New
Note that Stankiewicz, following the Russian York, 1958) and The Romantic Movement in English
Formalists, here refers not to psychological Poetry (New York, 1909). On the influence of F. T.
inwardness but to the nonreferential, auto-mimetic Palgrave's Golden Treasury (1861; rev. 1981), an
interiority oflanguage itself. anthology that "established, retroactively and for
10. Arthur Hallam, "On Some of the Character- the future, the tradition of the English lyric," see
istics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems Christopher Clausen, The Place of Poetry
of Alfred Tennyson," in The Writings of Arthur (Lexington, 1981), p. 67.
Hallam, ed. T. Vail Motter (New York, 1943), p. 13. Symons, The Symbolist Movement, p. 49.
197; M. H. Abrams, "Structure and Style in the 14. Marxian approaches now offer the most
Greater Romantic Lyric," in From Sensibility to promising and comprehensive explanations of the
Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold fortunes of lyric as a product of industrial culture,
Bloom (New York, 1965), pp. 527-60. On the yet recently published Marxian analyses evaluate
Romantic mixture of lyric with other genres see the social functions of lyric very differently. For
Cameron, Lyric Time, p. 217; Christensen, Theodor W. Adorno, "Lyric Poetry and Society"
"Thoughts," pp. 60-62; Robert Langbaum, (1957; trans. Bruce Mayo, Telos, 20 [Summer 1974],
"Wordsworth's Lyrical Characterizations," Studies s6-71), "The subjective being that makes itself
in Romanticism, 21 (1982), 319-39. Langbaum's heard in lyric poetry is one which defines and
earlier book The Poetry of Experience (1957; rpt. expresses itself as something opposed to the
New York, 1963), which places the dramatic collective and the realm of objectivity" (p. 59); in
monologue within Romantic tradition, should be contrast, Hugh N. Grady, "Marxism and the Lyric,"
consulted, as should two responses that appeared, Contemporary Literature, 22 (1981), 555, argues that
almost concurrently, two decades later: Culler, "the lyric has become a specialized, though not
"Monodrama," and Ralph W. Rader, "The exclusive, genre of Utopian vision in the modern
Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms," era."
Critical Inquiry, 3 (1976), 131-51. 15. Symons, The Symbolist Movement, p. 65.
11. Coleridge is quoted in Frederick A. Pottle, 16. Olson, "The Lyric," p. 65, in distinguishing
The Idiom of Poetry (Ithaca, 1941), p. 82. Wilde's the "verbal acts" oflyric from those of more
comments occur in "The Critic as Artist" (1890), in elaborate forms, himself acts fatally on the
Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. Stanley strength of a simile: "The difference, if I may use a
Weintraub (Lincoln, Neb., 1968), p. 202. somewhat homely comparison, is that between a
12. Victorian writers were divided as to the balloon inflated to its proper shape, nothing
chronological priority of lyric over other genres. affecting it but the internal forces of the gas, and a
For Dallas, as for Mill, "Lyrics are the first-fruits of balloon subjected to the pressure of external forces
art" (p. 245), while Walter Bagehot contends that which counteract the internal." But a balloon
"poetry begins in Impersonality" and that lyric affected only by internal forces (i.e., a balloon in a
represents a later refinement ("Hartley Coleridge" vacuum) would not inflate but explode. That the
[1852], in Collected Works, ed. Norman St. "proper shape" of a poem, as of a balloon, arises
john-Stevas, I [Cambridge, Mass., 1965], pp. not from sheer afflatus but as a compromise
159-60). As to the normative status oflyric, between "internal" and "external" forces is
however, the later nineteenth century had little precisely my point about the framing of the
doubt. Summaries and bibliographical aids may be dramatic monologue-as it is, I think, the
found in Francis B. Gummere, The Beginnings of dramatic monologue's (deflationary) point about
Poetry (New York, 1901), p. 147; Charles Mill the lyric.
 156 17. Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism, p. equate the "voice" with "the poet." They thus
675; see also Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn return us through a backstage exit to Clement
SECTION 2 Warren, Understanding Poetry (1938; rev. ed. New Wood's definition of lyric in The Craft of Poetry
York, 1950), p.liv. Don Geiger, The Dramatic (New York, 1929), p. 189, as "the form in which the
MODELS OF LYRIC
Impulse in Modern Poetics (Baton Rouge, 1967), pp. poet utters his own dramatic monolog." Compare
85-95, provides a capable overview of the persona the dramatic metaphor in Benedetto Croce's 1937
poetics of the New Criticism. Encyclopedia Britannica article on "Aesthetic":
18. Oswald Doughty, English Lyric in the Age of "The lyric ... is an objectification in which the ego
Reason (London, 1922), p. xv; Walter Blair and sees itself on the stage, narrates itself, and
W. K. Chandler, eds., Approaches to Poetry dramatizes itself" (quoted in Wimsatt and Brooks,
(New York, 1935), p. 250. Literary Criticism, p. 510). For Geoffrey Crump,
19. Ransom is quoted in William Elton, A Speaking Poetry (London, 1953), p. 59, the reverse
Glossary of the New Criticism (Chicago, 1949), p. 38. seems true: "an element of the dramatic is present
Sound and Sense, 2nd ed. (New York, 1963), p. 21; in all lyrical poetry, because the speaker is to some
Elements of Poetry (New York, 1969), pp. !l-!2. extent impersonating the poet."
20. Robert W. Boynton and Maynard Mack, 21. jerome Beaty and William H. Matchett,
Introduction to the Poem (New York, 1965), p. 24. Poetry: From Statement to Meaning (New York,
On p. 45, to complete the circuit, the authors 1965), p. 103.
PART TWO

Twentieth-Century
Lyric Readers
SECTION 3

Anglo-American
New Criticism

~ew Criticism did not have one way of reading the lyric. The group of critics usually as-
'embled under that name has gradually expanded; these days, it is common to call many
.:ifferent kinds of critics of poetry in the twentieth century "New Critics" if they attended
~:osely to the formal characteristics of the poem, and especially when in doing so they
:xduded or ignored authorial intent, historical context, or the circumstances of composi-
::on, publication, and circulation. But not all kinds of close reading (or as Reuben Brower
.:escribed the practice when he coined it, of "slow reading") attended to poetic forms in
:ie same ways or for the same reasons. 1 In the United States, the label "New Criticism"
~egan to circulate broadly after John Crowe Ransom published a book by that title in 1941;
~:close range, the name was used to describe the work of Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate,
:;.andall Jarrell, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, Monroe Beardsley, Maynard Mack, and
.:::eanth Brooks; at longer range, it has been used to describe the work of many others after
:iem. In England, I. A. Richards and William Empson developed their own practices of
?ractical Criticism," which anticipated and influenced the early New Critics. Though
:;.ansom and his students Warren, Tate, and Brooks may have shared a certain ideology of
:.-:e poem as self-sustaining, this was not the same ideology shared by other critics called
~ew, nor was it the ideology of the Practical Criticism. New Critics and Practical Critics
:::ay have generally agreed that poems could be read as isolated artifacts or objects (as
·.-:imsatt and Beardsley put it, "a poem is like a pudding or a machine," or as Richards
-.-rote, "a book is a machine to think with"), but they did not agree on why or how poems
~dme to be or should be considered machines or puddings that could run on their own lyric
-:earn or contain their own lyric proof.
Within the context of The Lyric Theory Reader, New Criticism and the Practical
.::riticism may be understood as parts of a longer history of the abstraction or collapse of
. arious verse genres into a large idea of poetry as such. That history had been going on for
~ century and a half before Richards's Practical Criticism (1929) or Ransom's New Criti-
::mz (1941) set the terms for the reading of poems as self-sufficient forms, for "poetry as a
:iing in itself," as Brooks and Warren put it in Understanding Poetry. The trend toward
:'linking of all poetry as lyrically itself had more to do with the historical shifts in readers'
:=xpectations of poetic genres than it did with whether or not critics thought poems
 160 should or should not stand on their own. Mark Jeffreys has written that "lyric became the
dominant form of poetry only as poetry's authority was reduced to the cramped margins
SECTION 3 of culture," 2 but it is also true that lyric became the dominant idea of poetry as the idea of
ANGLo-AMERICAN lyric became so large that poetry became synonymous with it. That process had begun in
NEw CRITICISM the eighteenth century; by the middle of the twentieth century, the institutional consoli-
dation ofliterary criticism in the American postwar university placed critics like Ransom
and his students, Brooks and Warren, in a position to defend the marginalized authority
of the lyric (Murray Krieger famously called them "The New Apologists for Poetry"; crit-
ics like John Fekete identified them as Southerners defending the marginalized authority
of their own region in the name of poetry). 3 In England, Richards and his student Emp-
son responded to the class expansion of the modern university by devising ways of read-
ing for students from a range of backgrounds (after his dismissal from Cambridge, Emp-
son went to China, where he tested just how far that range could expand; Richards went
on to pursue the dissemination of a Basic English that could serve as a universally acces-
sible world language).
But none of these critics wrote about "the lyric" as such. Instead, they wrote about
poetry and assumed the lyric as a default genre into which all poetry could fit. Whereas
elegies, odes, hymns, eclogues, ballads, and verse epistles demand that we recognize their
metrical and generic histories and circumstances (if we don't know that hymns are made
of alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines, usually in quatrains, we won't recognize a
hymn when we see one), "poetry as a thing in itself" requires no special knowledge of the
reader. By making that self-sufficient version of poetry conform to the ideas of organic
unity and individual expression that had come to be associated with the lyric by the twen-
tieth century, these critics did not so much elevate the lyric as the privileged object of
critical reading as they made all poems into lyrics that everyone could (with the help of
the critic) learn to read.
In the 1920s, the Cambridge critic I. A. Richards began a series of experiments: he
gave poems to students and asked them to interpret them. He did not give the students
any information about the poems they were to analyze. Richards's experiments had the
de facto effect of removing authorial intention and historical context from the act of in-
terpretation, since students were not given that information when asked to analyze the
poem at hand. Richards published his experiments in 1929 as Practical Criticism, a mode
of analysis that was to have wide-ranging effects on poetic pedagogy on both sides of the
Atlantic. The object of Richards's experiments was to encourage students to attend to
"the words on the page"; his interest was in what he called "the poetic experience," on the
psychological state produced by close attention to difficult language. In reaction against
his belletristic colleagues, Richards wanted to train students to develop what he called the
"craft" or "technique" of reading. His exclusion of authors and historical context from his
experiments were means to that end, not ideological positions in themselves. Ultimately,
Richards's detailed and quirky descriptions of the experience of reading a poem positioned
poetry against the distractions of mass culture, since "among all the agents by which 'the
widening of the sphere of human sensibility' may be brought about, the arts are the most
powerful, since it is through them that men may most cooperate and in these experiences
that the mind most easily and with least interference organizes itself."
The essays we include here from Richards's 1924 Principles of Literary Criticism are in-
terested in "the analysis of the experience of reading a poem." In "The Analysis of a Poem,"
Richards gives a rather amazing representation (he calls it a "hieroglyph") of what we
might call your brain on poetry. Above the diagram, five "poetic" words appear: "Arcadia,
Night, a Cloud, Pan, and the Moon." Below the words, an elaborate, spidery network of
what turn out to be neurons descend toward what look like mechanical coils. On the mar- 161
gins of this zany line drawing, various elements of "the poetic experience" are represented
by roman numerals ("visual sensations," "emotions," etc.). This bizarre schema is indebted SecTION 3
to Richards's Cambridge colleague Sir Charles Sherrington, whose book The Integrative ANcto·AMERICAN

Action of the Nervous System (1906) was quite influential in its day. 4 Sherrington's theory New CRITICISM

of the "systemization of impulses" became Richards's theory of the systemization of the

act of lyric reading; Richards believed that learning to read a poem well could produce
"permanent modifications in the structure of the mind." Because each mind is different,
"no general prescription that in great poetry there must always be this or that,-deep
thought, superb sound or vivid imagery-is more than a piece of ignorant dogmatism."
What mattered for Richards was the experience, the process through which one passes in
the act of reading. The more saturated the experience, the better.
We also include here the short essay "The Definition of a Poem" to demonstrate how
Richards's particular account of reading produced (or was produced by) a particular idea of
poetry as lyric. Richards elaborates upon the idea that "men may most cooperate" through
close attention to the work of art by distinguishing between "standard or normal criticism
and erratic or eccentric criticism." If literary criticism were just a matter of whether one
liked or disliked a particular poem, it would not have (and perhaps has often not had)
much basis, according to Richards. But if "the only workable way of defining a poem" is
as "a class of experiences which do not differ in any character more than a certain
amount, varying for each character, from a standard experience," then each individual's
reading experience may be valued as unique and as an integral part of a community of
reading. Richards's student William Empson put pressure on the difficulty of maintain-
ing that equilibrium when he insisted, in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), that a reading
that focuses on single words could vary tremendously from one instance to another-
indeed, that there was so much variation between possible interpretations that there may
be no "standard experience" of even the smallest part of a poem.
In the United States, and particularly at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, the poten-
tial contradictions contained in Richards's vision of a standard reading experience ap-
peared to be resolved when Ransom and his students Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn
Warren discarded Richards's neuropsychological, pseudoscientific emphasis in favor of an
antiscientific approach to reading. Like Richards, these self-described "New Critics" con-
sidered the reading of poetry exemplary for all understanding, but rather than attempt-
ing to account for the "organization of the impulses" effected by such close reading, in the
many editions of Understanding Poetry (1937-76), Brooks and Warren created an enor-
mously influential pedagogy of poetry as a basic form of human communication. Rich-
ards, too, had insisted that poetry was made for communication, but Brooks and Warren
wanted to distinguish the kind of communication poetry is from "scientific thought ...
whose purpose, conscious or unconscious, is to give power to its possessor." In contrast,
poetry "springs from the most fundamental interests that human beings have" and thus
appeals equally to all of us. In order to emphasize poetry's universal appeal as human com-
munication, Brooks and Warren also made all poems into the genre they called "poetry":
rather than defining a poem as "a class of experiences," they define "a poem as a piece of writ-
ing which gives us a certain effect in which, we discover, the 'poetry' inheres." This tautology-
a poem is writing that contains poetry-has the benefit of erasing generic differences be-
tween poems, so that "arbitrary and irrational classifications" between sonnets, odes,
elegies, eclogues, hymns, etc. can be abandoned in favor of attention to "poetry as a thing
in itself worthy of study." Not incidentally, those generic differences that once marked the
characters of particular reading communities could give way to the community of the
 162 postwar classroom, in which readers could be trained to recognize a generic version of
"poetry as a thing in itself."
SECTION 3 Many aspects of Understanding Poetry tend to lyricize this generic reading experi-
ANGLo·AMERICAN ence, but perhaps none more effectively than Brooks and Warren's conception of the
NEw CRITICISM "dramatic aspect of poetry." In a move Richards had not made, Brooks and Warren insist
that "all poetry, including even short lyrics or descriptive pieces, involves a dramatic or-
ganization. This is clear when we reflect that every poem implies a speaker of the poem,
either the poet writing in his own person or someone into whose mouth the poem is put."
The use of the word "implies" here is interesting: according to this logic, all poems are
essentially lyric because on some level all poems assume that there is a person at the
center of the poem's organization. In place of Richards's neurons, Brooks and Warren
place a fictive persona, someone "into whose mouth the poem is put." The consequences
of this shift in the history of the lyricization of poetry are significant. Certainly there
were dramatic monologues in the nineteenth century that prefigured the idea that poems
imply fictive speakers, and one could further argue that dialect poetry at the end of the
century supposed such speakers as racial, ethnic, and national types; certainly poems by
Edgar Lee Masters or Robert Frost, or for that matter by Wordsworth or Tennyson or
Longfellow, represented the voices of one or more central characters. But in most poetry
before Brooks and Warren, those speakers were identified as such, with names or as fig-
ures. What Brooks and Warren proposed was an expansion of a poetic technique-a
technique that varied from genre to genre-into a principle of reading. If "every poem
implies a speaker of the poem," then all poems are equally fictional, and equally lyrical.
The New Critical fiction of the lyric speaker has become so fundamental to our teach-
ing of poetry that it has become virtually invisible as a norm. Most readers who have had
any secondary training in reading poems would be lost without the fiction of the speaker
as referent. Yet T. S. Eliot, whose ideas and practices became so influential for the later
New Criticism, still worried about what that fiction meant for poetry-and especially for
the idea of most poetry as lyric. In "The Three Voices of Poetry" (1953), the essay we in-
clude in this section, Eliot reflected late in his career on the difference between his com-
position of dramatic verse for the stage and of poetry to be read on the page. In an at-
tempt to distinguish between different sorts of fictional speakers in his poetry, Eliot
wrote that "the first voice is the voice of the poet speaking to himself-or nobody. The
second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience-whether large or small. The third
is the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in
verse." Why did Eliot bother to make such distinctions? The essay itself foregrounds his
work for the stage and comments on the difference between dramatic performance and
dramatic fiction. But it also gives him the occasion to qualify the alignment of his work
for the page with the emerging New Critical notion of the abstract speaker, since Eliot
indulges in a long digression about what his "first voice" of poetry is not. "I must make the
point that this poetry is not necessarily what we call loosely 'lyric poetry,' Eliot writes,
insisting that "the term 'lyric' itself is unsatisfactory." After observing that the Oxford En-
glish Dictionary merely defines lyric as "the name for short poems ... directly expressing
the poet's own thoughts and sentiments," Eliot retorts, "How short does a poem have to
be, to be called a 'lyric'? ... there is no necessary relation between brevity and the expres-
sion of the poet's own thoughts and feelings. 'Come unto these yellow sands' or 'Hark!
hark! the lark' are lyrics-are they not?-but what sense is there in saying that they ex-
press directly the poet's own thoughts and sentiments? London, The Vanity of Human
Wishes, and The Deserted Village are all poems which appear to express the poet's own
thoughts and sentiments, but do we ever think of such poems as 'lyrical'? They are cer-
tainly not short. Between them, all the poems I have mentioned seem to fail to qualify as 163
lyrics, just as Mr. Daddy Longlegs and Mr. Floppy Fly failed to qualify as courtiers."
Eliot's diatribe is funny, but it is also extremely anxious that "lyric" not become the SECTION 3
default genre for all his verse. Like Richards and Brooks and Warren, Eliot is concerned ANGLo-AMERICAN

with what poetic communication can and cannot be in an era of mass communication, but NEw CRITICISM

he strongly resists the Practical and New Critical attempts to reduce all poetry to one ge-
neric drama of"poetic" communication. He offers the phrase "meditative verse" in place
of the slippery or insufficient "lyric," but he also insists on a "second voice" of poetry not
written explicitly for the stage, and under the umbrella of that second voice Eliot places
all definite genres of nondramatic verse: the dramatic monologue, "all poetry, certainly,
that has a conscious social purpose," including any poetry that tells a story, points to a
moral, is a satire, or is an epic in ancient or modern form, since an "epic is essentially a tale
told to an audience." If a mode of public address defines most verse genres, then, Eliot was
at pains to define the poetry he and his contemporaries wrote as a mode of address not
subject to such generic expectations but also not subject to the abstraction of one poetic
"speaker"-yet still vitally engaged as a mode of communication. Essentially, Eliot wanted
to resist the process of lyricization at the same time that he acknowledged that his poetry
participated in it.
If some of the push and pull of Eliot's anxiety about the lyric can be traced to the New
Criticallyricization of poetry, it can also be linked to an anxiety of authorship, to a worry
about the poet's relation to the fictional "voice" of his poem at a time when critics were
working to detach that voice from the poet. At about the same time that Eliot gave his lec-
ture on "The Three Voices of Poetry," the American critics W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe
Beardsley were writing what would come to be thought of as a manifesto severing the
living poet from the voice of the poem. In "The Intentional Fallacy" (1947), Wimsatt and
Beardsley famously declared that "a poem is like a pudding or a machine" in the sense
that "one demands that it work": it "is detached from the author at birth and goes about
the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it." Eliot's insistence on the poet's
ability and responsibility to control poetic address gave way to the independence of the
poem's own address in Wimsatt and Beardsley's lyricized notion of"the verbal icon." Ac-
cording to this notion, "even a short lyric poem is dramatic, the response of a speaker (no
matter how abstractly conceived) to a situation (no matter how universalized). We ought
to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immediately to the dramatic speaker,
and if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference."
While Brooks and Warren also focused their discussion of poems on speakers rather
than authors, Wimsatt and Beardsley went one step further. Once all poems are rendered
as the responses of fictional speakers to universal situations, then it follows that "the poem
belongs to the public" and not to the poet who produced it or to the critic who interprets it.
Since the poem "is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is
about the human being, an object of public knowledge," then the speakers and their situ-
ations contained within the poem's language can only be understood in terms of the lan-
guage with which they are conveyed. The tendency to attribute that language to its author
is an error, according to Wimsatt and Beardsley, since the public can only have access to
the author's language and never to the author himself. Thus in "The Intentional Fallacy,"
Eliot's infamously allusive "The Waste Land" comes in for some scrutiny, since the impli-
cation of such allusions is that the public cannot have all the knowledge needed to under-
stand the poem. Wimsatt and Beardsley conclude that if Eliot's notes are considered as
part of the poem and not as evidence of the poet's intentions, then such knowledge might
be inherent in the poem itself, but they confess, "if Eliot and other contemporary poets
 164 have any characteristic fault, it may be in planning too much." Better by far in their view
to allow the poem to speak for itself. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, all poetry should be
SECTION 3 read as lyric, and those poems-as-lyrics should be read as sharing the same mode of ad-
ANGLO-AMERICAN dress. In this, as in other respects, the values the New Critics sought in poetry were the
NEw CRITICISM values held dear by postwar American culture.
But how or why or when can a poem speak for itself, without a poet to tell us his inten-
tion or a critic to offer us his interpretation? How can all kinds of poems-poems as full of
various texts and personae as "The Waste Land," poems directed in Eliot's "second voice"
in particular genres to particular audiences, poems made for particular historical cir-
cumstances or even for particular people-all speak in the same voice? Richards would
not have claimed that they could, and even Brooks and Warren distinguished between vari-
ous modes of address in various poems (part of the point of the many examples in Under-
standing Poetry is that not all poems can be understood in the same way). Wimsatt and
Beardsley tended to assert that poems could speak for themselves but did not explore the
dynamics of that fictional speech. That exploration became the project of Reuben Brower,
perhaps the most influential (though seldom acknowledged) critical reader of poetry of the
mid-twentieth century. When we speak these days of the poem's "speaker," or of a "close
reading" of a poem, it is by and large Brower's concepts of those ideas we employ, though
most readers who do so don't know how much they owe to Brower. Brower's ideas have be-
come an invisible norm not only because his students (Helen Vendler, Paul de Man, Richard
Poirier, Stephen Orgel) went on to have lots to say about how poetry could and should be read
but also because his technique of "slow reading" (later, "close reading") made some of the
contradictions and problems in the idea of a universally accessible poetic speaker disappear.
Whereas Eliot went to great lengths to distinguish a poem's drama from a play's drama,
Brower asserted that "a poem is a dramatic fiction no less than a play, and its speaker, like
a character in a play, is no less a creation of the words on the printed page." Brower took a
crucial step beyond Richards, Brooks, Warren, and Wimsatt and Beardsley, as he made
not only the poem's fictional speaker but the poem's actual reader characters in the
drama of the poem. "'The person spoken to' is also a fictional personage," according to
Brower; the object of the poem's address "is never the actual audience of 'you and me,'
and only in a special abstract sense is it the literary audience of a particular time and
place in history. The voice we hear in a lyric, however piercingly real, is not Keats's, or
Shakespeare's; or, if it seems to be ... we are as embarrassed and thrown off as if an actor
had stopped and spoken to the audience in his own person." Thus in one fell swoop,
Brower solved the riddle of poetic address that so troubled Eliot and that had complicated
all thinking about lyric address since Mill, whose metaphor of the poem on stage Brower
echoes. By making the poem's audience into a fiction that mirrored the fiction of the po-
em's speaker, Brower could read each poem as a drama sufficient unto itself. Further, he
could read those poetic genres as all equally "lyric." Brower's version of all poems as dra-
matic lyric fictions in which the characters of speaker and auditor play twin roles marked
a decisive shift in the definition of the lyric, a new chapter in the history of lyric reading.

NOTES
1. See especially Reuben Brower, "Reading in Telos 20 (Summer 1974): 2-51, and Murray
Slow Motion," in Brower and Poirier (1961), 3-21. Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry
2. Mark Jeffreys, "Ideologies of the Lyric: A (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
Problem of Genre in Anglophone Poetics," PMLA 1956). For a retrospective evaluation of such
110.2 (March 1995): 200. critiques, see Frank Lentricchia, After the New
3. See John Fekete, "The New Criticism: Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
Ideological Evolution of the Right Opposition," 1980).
 4. The insight about Sherrington is John "How Scholars Read," ADE Bulletin (Modern 165
Guillory's and is part of his forthcoming project on Language Association, 2009).
the history of close reading; see John Guillory, SECTION 3
ANGLO-AMERICAN
FURTHER READING
NEW CRITICISM
Blackmur, R. P. Language as Gesture: Essays in Jeffreys, Mark. "Ideologies of Lyric: A Problem of
Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952. Genre in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics."
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in PMLA 110.2 (1995): 196-205.
the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Krieger, Murray. The New Apologists for Poetry.
Brace, 1947. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956.
Brower, Reuben. The Fields of Light: An Experi- Lea vis, F. R. The Common Pursuit. London: Chat to
ment in Critical Reading. New York: Oxford and Windus, 1952.
University Press, 1963. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism.
Brower, Reuben, and Richard Poirier, eds. In Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Defense of Reading: A Reader's Approach to Pottle, Frederick. The Idiom of Poetry. Ithaca, NY:
Literary Criticism. New York: Dutton, 1961. Cornell University Press, 1941.
Davis, Garrick, ed. Praising It New: The Best of the Pound, Ezra. The ABC of Reading. New York: New
New Criticism. Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 2008. Directions, 1934.
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. London: Ransom, John Crowe, ed. The New Criticism. New
Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. York: New Directions, 1941.
Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism: A Study of
London: Chatto and Windus, 1930; reprint, New Literary judgment. London: Routledge and Paul,
York: New Directions, 1966. 1929.
--.The Structure of Complex Words. London: Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure: A Study
Chatto and Windus, 1951; reprint, London: of How Poems End. Chicago: University of
Penguin Books, 1995. Chicago Press, 1968.
Hollander, John. Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern Tate, Allen. Reactionary Essays on Poetry and
in Poetic Language. New Haven, CT: Yale Ideas. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936.
University Press, 1988. Wimsatt, W. K. Days of the Leopards: Essays in
- - . Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Defense of Poems. New Haven: Yale University
Form. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Press, 1976.
Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age. New York: Winters, Yvor. In Defense of Reason. Denver:
Knopf, 1952. Swallow Press, 1947.

The Analysis of a Poem and 3.1

The Definition of a Poem (1924)
I. A. RICHARDS

Chapter 16: The Analysis of a Poem

Toutes choses sont dites deja, mais com me personne n' ecoute il faut toujours recommencer.
Andre Gide

The qualifications of a good critic are three. He must be an adept at experiencing, without
eccentricities, the state of mind relevant to the work of art he is judging. Secondly, he
 166 must be able to distinguish experiences from one another as regards their less superficial
features. Thirdly, he must be a sound judge of values.
SECTION 3 Upon all these matters psychology, even in its present conjectural state, has a direct
ANGLo-AMERICAN bearing. The critic is, throughout, judging of experiences, of states of mind; but too often
NEw CRITICISM he is needlessly ignorant of the general psychological form of the experiences with which
he is concerned. He has no clear ideas as to the elements present or as to their relative
importance. Thus, an outline or schema of the mental events which make up the experi-
ence of "looking at" a picture or "reading" a poem, can be of great assistance. At the very
least an understanding of the probable structures of these experiences can remove cer-
tain misconceptions which tend to make the opinions of individuals of less service to
other individuals than need be.
Two instances will show this. There are certain broad features in which all agree a
poem of Swinburne is unlike a poem of Hardy. The use of words by the two poets is dif-
ferent. Their methods are dissimilar, and the proper approach for a reader differs corre-
spondingly. An attempt to read them in the same way is unfair to one of the poets, or to
both, and leads inevitably to defects in criticism which a little reflection would remove. It
is absurd to read Pope as though he were Shelley, but the essential differences cannot be
clearly marked out unless such an outline of the general form of a poetic experience, as is
here attempted, has been provided. The psychological means employed by these poets are
demonstrably different. Whether the effects are also dissimilar is a further question for
which the same kind of analysis is equally required.
This separation inside the poetic experience of certain parts which are means from
certain other parts which are the ends upon which the poetic value of the experience
depends, leads up to our other instance. It is unquestionable that the actual experiences,
which even good critics undergo when reading, as we say, the same poem, differ very
widely. In spite of certain conventions, which endeavor to conceal these inevitable dis-
crepancies for social purposes, there can be no doubt that the experiences of readers in
connection with particular poems are rarely similar. This is unavoidable. Some differ-
ences are, however, much more important than others. Provided the ends, in which the
value of the poem lies, are attained, differences in the means need not prevent critics
from agreement or from mutual service. Those discrepancies alone are fatal which affect
the fundamental features of experiences, the features upon which their value depends.
But enough is now known of the ways in which minds work for superficial and funda-
mental parts of experiences to be distinguished. One of the greatest living critics praises
the line:
The fringed curtain of thine eyes advance,
for the "ravishing beauty" of the visual images excited. This common mistake of exag-
gerating personal accidents in the means by which a poem attains its end into the chief
value of the poem is due to excessive trust in the commonplaces' of psychology.
In the analysis of the experience of reading a poem, a diagram, or hieroglyph, is con-
venient, provided that its limitations are clearly recognized. The spatial relations of the
parts of the diagram, for instance, are not intended to stand for spatial relations between
parts of what is represented; it is not a picture of the nervous system. Nor are temporal
relations intended. Spatial metaphors, whether drawn as diagrams or merely imagined,
are dangers only to the unwary. The essential service which pictures can give in abstract
matters, namely, the simultaneous and compact representation of states of affairs which
otherwise tend to remain indistinct and confused, is worth the slight risk of misunder-
standing which they entail.
 167

3.1
I. A. RICHARDS

I - VISUAL SENSATJON!:I Q AUDITORY VERBAL IMAGE

II_ TIED IMAGERY 0 ARTICULATORY VERBAL IMAGE
J0 _ FREE IMAGERY FREE I MAGER.Y
JV _ REFERENCE 5 REFERENCES
V- EMOTIONS EMOTIONS
VJ _ ATTITUDES ATTITUDES

We may begin then with a diagrammatic representation of the events which take
place when we read a poem. Other literary experiences will only differ from this in their
greater simplicity.
The eye is depicted as reading a succession of printed words. As a result there follows
a stream of reaction in which six distinct kinds of events may be distinguished.

I. The visual sensations of the printed words.

II. Images very closely associated with these sensations.
III. Images relatively free.
IV. References to, or "thinkings of," various things.
V. Emotions.
VI. Affective-volitional attitudes.

Each of these kinds of occurrences requires some brief description and explanation.
Upon the visual sensations of the printed words all the rest depends (in the case of a
reader not previously acquainted with the poem); but with most readers they have in them-
selves no great importance. The individual shapes of the letters, their size and spacing, have
only a minor effect upon the whole reaction. No doubt readers differ greatly in this respect;
with some, familiarity plays a great part. They find it unpleasant and disturbing to read a
poem in any but the edition in which they first became acquainted with it. But the major-
ity of readers are less exigent. Provided that the print is clear and legible, and allows the
habitual eye-movements of reading to be easily performed, the full response arises equally
well from widely differing sensations. Those for whom this is true have, in the present
 168 state of economic organization, a decided advantage over the more fastidious. This does
not show that good printing is a negligible consideration; and the primary place of cal-
SECTION 3 ligraphy in the Chinese arts is an indication to the contrary. It shows merely that printing
ANGLo-AMERICAN belongs to another branch of the arts. In the poetic experience words take effect through
NEw CRITICisM their associated images, and through what we are, as a rule, content to call their meaning.
What meaning is and how it enters into the experience we shall consider.

Tied Images.-Visual sensations of words do not commonly occur by themselves. They

have certain regular companions so closely tied to them as to be only with difficulty discon-
nected. The chief of these are the auditory image-the sound of the words in the mind's
ear-and the image of articulation-the feel in the lips, mouth, and throat, of what the
words would be like to speak.
Auditory images of words are among the most obvious of mental happenings. Any line
of verse or prose slowly read, will, for most people, sound mutely in the imagination some-
what as it would if read aloud. But the degree of correspondence between the image-
sounds, and the actual sounds that the reader would produce, varies enormously. Many
people are able to imagine word-sounds with greater delicacy and discrimination than
they can utter them. But the reverse case is also found. What importance then is to be at-
tached to clear, rich and delicate sound imagery in silent reading? How far must people
who differ in their capacity to produce such images differ in their total reactions to po-
ems? And what are the advantages of reading aloud? Here we reach one of the practical
problems of criticism for which this analysis is required. A discussion is best postponed
until the whole analysis has been given. The principal confusion which prevents a clear
understanding of the point at issue does, however, concern images and may be dealt with
here. It is of great importance in connection with the topic of the following section.
The sensory qualities of images, their vivacity, clearness, fullness of detail and so on,
do not bear any constant relation to their effects. Images differing in these respects may
have closely similar consequences. Too much importance has always been attached to the
sensory qualities of images. What gives an image efficacy is less its vividness as an image
than its character as a mental event peculiarly connected with sensation. It is, in a way
which no one yet knows how to explain, a relict of sensation and our intellectual and
emotional response to it depends far more upon its being, through this fact, a representa-
tive of a sensation, than upon its sensory resemblance to one. An image may lose almost
all its sensory nature to the point of becoming scarcely an image at all, a mere skeleton,
and yet represent a sensation quite as adequately as if it were flaring with hallucinatory
vividity. In other words, what matters is not the sensory resemblance of an image to the
sensation which is its prototype, but some other relation, at present hidden from us in the
jungles of neurology. (Cf. Chapter 14.)
Care then should be taken to avoid the natural tendency to suppose that the more clear
and vivid an image the greater will be its efficacy. There are trustworthy people who, ac-
cording to their accounts, never experience any imagery at all. If certain views commonly
expressed about the arts are true, by which vivid imagery is an all-important part of the
experience, then these people are incapable of art experiences, a conclusion which is con-
trary to the facts. The views in question are overlooking the fact that something takes the
place of vivid images in these people, and that, provided the image-substitute is effica-
cious, their lack of mimetic imagery is of no consequence. The efficacy required must, of
course, include control over emotional as well as intellectual reactions. Needless perhaps
to add that with persons of the image-producing types an increase in delicacy and vivac-
ity in their imagery will probably be accompanied by increased subtlety in effects. Thus it
is not surprising that certain great poets and critics have been remarkable for the vigour 169
of their imagery, and dependent upon it. No one would deny the usefulness of imagery to
some people; the mistake is to suppose that it is indispensable to all. 3.1
Articulatory imagery is less noticeable; yet the quality of silent speech is perhaps even 1. A. RICHARDs

more dependent upon these images than upon sound-images. Collocations of syllables
which are awkward or unpleasant to utter are rarely delightful to the ear. As a rule the
two sets of images are so intimately connected that it is difficult to decide which is the of-
fender. In "Heaven, which man's generation draws," the sound doubtless is as harsh as the
movements required are cramping to the lips.
The extent to which interference with one set of images will change the other may be
well seen by a simple experiment. Most people, if they attempt a silent recitation while
opening the mouth to its fullest stretch or holding the tongue firmly between the teeth,
will notice curious transformations in the auditory images. How the experiment should
be interpreted is uncertain, but it is of use in making the presence of both kinds of verbal
imagery evident to those who may have overlooked them hitherto. Images of articulation
should not, however, be confused with those minimal actual movements which for some
people (for all, as behaviorists maintain) accompany the silent rehearsing of words.
These two forms of tied imagery might also be called verbal images, and supply the
elements of what is called the "formal structure" of poetry. They differ from those to
which we now proceed in being images of words, not of things words stand for, and in
their very close connection with the visual sensations of printed words.

Free Imagery.-Free images, or rather one form of these, visual images, pictures in the
mind's eye, occupy a prominent place in the literature of criticism, to the neglect somewhat
of other forms of imagery, since, as was remarked in a preceding chapter, for every possible
kind of sensation there is a corresponding possible image.
The assumption, natural before investigation, that all attentive and sensitive readers
will experience the same images, vitiates most of the historical discussions from that of
Longinus to that of Lessing. Even in the present day, when there is no excuse for such igno-
rance, the mistake still thrives, and an altogether too crude, too hasty, and too superficial
form of criticism is allowed to pass unchallenged. It cannot be too clearly recognized that
individuals differ not only in the type of imagery which they employ, but still more in the
particular images which they produce. In their whole reactions to a poem, or to a single
line of it, their free images are the point at which two readings are most likely to differ,
and the fact that they differ may very well be quite immaterial. Fifty different readers will
experience not one common picture but fifty different pictures. If the value of the poem
derived from the value qua picture of the visual image excited then criticism might well
despair. Those who would stress this part of the poetic reaction can have but crude views
on pictures.
But if the value of the visual image in the experience is not pictorial, if the image is not
to be judged as a picture, how is it to be judged? It is improbable that the many critics, some
of them peculiarly well qualified in the visual arts, who have insisted upon the importance of
imagery, have been entirely wasting their time. It ought to be possible to give an account of
the place of free imagery in the whole poetic experience which will explain this insistence.
What is required will be found if we turn our attention from the sensory qualities of the
imagery to the more fundamental qualities upon which its efficacy in modifying the rest
of the experience depends. It has been urged above that images which are different in their
sensory qualities may have the same effects. If this were not the case the absence of glaring
differences between people of different image-types would be astonishing. But since
 170 images may represent sensations without resembling them, and represent them in the
sense of replacing them, as far as effects in directing thought and arousing emotion go,
SECTION 3 differences in their mimetic capacity become of minor importance. As we have seen, it is
ANGLO-AMERICAN natural for those whose imagery is vivid, to suppose that vivacity and clearness go to-
NEw CRITICISM gether with power over thought and feeling. It is the power of an image over these that is
as a rule being praised when an intelligent and sensitive critic appears merely to be prais-
ing the picture floating before his mind's eye. To judge the image as a picture is judged,
would, as we have seen, be absurd; and what is sought in poetry by those painters and
others whose interest in the world is primarily visual is not pictures but records of obser-
vation, or stimuli of emotion.
Thus, provided the images (or image-substitutes for the imageless) have the due ef-
fects, deficiencies in their sensory aspect do not matter. But the proviso is important. In
all forms of imagery sensory deficiencies are for many people signs and accompaniments
of defective efficacy, and the habit of reading so as to allow the fullest development to
imagery in its sensory aspect is likely to encourage the full development of this more es-
sential feature, its efficacy, if the freaks and accidents of the sensory side are not taken too
seriously.
Some exceptions to this general recommendation will occur to the reader. Instances
in plenty may be found in which a full development of the sensory aspect of images is
damaging to their effects. Meredith is a master of this peculiar kind of imagery:-
Thus piteously Love closed what he begat
The union of this ever diverse pair!
These two were rapid falcons in a snare,
Condemned to do the flitting of the bat.

The emotional as well as the intellectual effects of the various images here suggested
are much impaired if we produce them vividly and distinctly.

Impulses and References.-We have now to consider those more fundamental effects upon
which stress has been laid above as the true places of the values of the experience. It will
be well at this point to reconsult the diagram. The vertical lines which run capriciously
downwards from the visual sensations of the words, through their tied imagery and on-
ward to the bottom of the diagram, are intended to represent, schematically, streams of
impulses flowing through in the mind.
They start in the visual sensations, but the depiction of the tied imagery is intended to
show how much of their further course is due to it. The placing of the free imagery in the
third division is intended to suggest that while some free images may arise from visual
words alone, they take their character in a large part as a consequence of the tied imagery.
Thus the great importance of the tied imagery, of the formal elements, is emphasized in
the diagram.
These impulses are the weft of the experience, the warp being the pre-existing sys-
tematic structure of the mind, that organized system of possible impulses. The metaphor
is of course inexact, since weft and warp here are not independent. Where these impulses
run, and how they develop, depends entirely upon the condition of the mind, and this
depends upon the impulses which have previously been active in it. It will be seen then
that impulses-their direction, their strength, how they modify one another-are the es-
sential and fundamental things in any experience. All else, whether intellectual or emo-
tional, arises as a consequence of their activity. The thin trickle of stimulation which
comes in through the eye finds an immense hierarchy of systems of tendencies poised in
the most delicate stability. It is strong enough and rightly enough directed to disturb 171
some of these without assistance. The literal sense of a word can be grasped on the
prompting of the mere sight of it, without hearing it or mentally pronouncing it. But the 3.1
effects of this stimulation are immensely increased and widened when it is reinforced by I. A. RICHARDs

fresh stimulation from tied images, and it is through these that most of the emotional ef-
fects are produced. As the agitation proceeds new reinforcement comes with every fresh
system which is excited. Thus, the paradoxical fact that so trifling an irritation as the sight
of marks on paper is able to arouse the whole energies of the mind becomes explicable.
To turn now to references, the only mental happenings which are as closely connected
with visual words as their tied images are those mysterious events which are usually
called thoughts. Thus the arrow symbol in the hieroglyph should perhaps properly be
placed near the visual impression of the word. The mere sight of any familiar word is nor-
mally followed by a thought of whatever the word may stand for. This thought is sometimes
said to be the "meaning," the literal or prose "meaning" of the word. It is wise, however, to
avoid the use of"meaning" as a symbol altogether. The terms "thought" and "idea" are less
subtle in their ambiguities, and when defined may perhaps be used without confusion.
What is essential in thought is its direction or reference to things. What is this direc-
tion or reference? How does a thought come to be "of" one thing rather than another?
What is the link between a thought and what it is "of"? The outline of one answer to these
questions has been suggested in Chapter n. A further account must here be attempted.
Without a fairly clear, although, of course, incomplete view, it is impossible to avoid con-
fusion and obscurity in discussing such topics as truth in art, the intellect-versus-emotion
imbroglio, the scope of science, the nature of religion and many others with which criti-
cism must deal.
The facts upon which speculations as to the relations between thoughts and the
things which they are "of" have been based, have as a rule been taken from introspection.
But the facts which introspection yields are notoriously uncertain, and the special posi-
tion of the observer may well preclude success. Introspection is competent, in some cases,
to discover the relations between events which take place within the mind, but cannot by
itself give information as to the relations of these events with the external world, and it is
precisely this which we are inquiring into when we ask, What connection is there be-
tween a thought and that which it is thought of? For an answer to this question we must
look further.
There is no doubt that causal relations hold between events in the mind and events
outside it. Sometimes these relations are fairly simple. The striking of a clock is the cause
of our thinking of its striking. In such a case the external thing is linked with the thought
"of" it in a fairly direct fashion, and the view here taken is that to be a thought "of" the
striking is to be merely a thought caused in this fashion by the striking. A thought of the
striking is nothing else and nothing more than a thought caused by it.
But most thoughts are "of" things which are not present and not producing direct ef-
fects in the mind. This is so when we read. What is directly affecting the mind is words on
paper, but the thoughts aroused are not thoughts "of" the words, but of other things
which the words stand for. How, then, can a causal theory of thinking explain the relation
between these remote things and the thoughts which are "of" them? To answer this we
must look at the way in which we learn what words stand for. Without a process oflearn-
ing we should only think of the words.
The process oflearning to use words is not difficult to analyze. On a number of occa-
sions the word is heard in connection with objects of a certain kind. Later the word is
heard in the absence of any such object. In accordance with one of the few fundamental
 172 laws known about mental process, something then happens in the mind which is like
what would happen if such an object were actually present and engaging the attention.
SECTION 3 The word has become a sign of an object of that kind. The word which formerly was a part
ANGLo-AMERICAN of the cause of a certain effect in the mind is now followed by a similar effect in the ab-
NEw CRITICISM sence of the rest of the previous cause, namely, an object of the kind in question. This
kind of causation appears to be peculiar to living tissue. The relation now between the
thought and what it is "of" is more indirect, the thought is "of'" something which for-
merly was part cause, together with the sign, of similar thoughts. It is of the missing part
of the sign, or more strictly of anything which would complete the sign as a cause.
Thoughts by this account are general, they are of anything like such and such things,
except when the object thought of and the thought are connected by direct causal rela-
tions, as, for instance, when we think of a word we are hearing. Only when these direct
relations hold can we succeed in thinking simply of "That." We have to think instead of
"something of a kind." By various means, however, we can contrive that there shall only
be one thing of the kind, and so the need for particularity in our thoughts is satisfied. The
commonest way in which we do this is by thoughts which make the kind spatial and tem-
poral. A thought of "mosquito" becomes a thought of "mosquito there now" by combin-
ing a thought of "thing of mosquito kind" with a thought of "thing of there kind" and a
thought of "thing of now kind." The awkwardness of these phrases, it may be mentioned, is
irrelevant. Combined thoughts of this sort, we may notice, are capable of truth and falsity,
whereas a simple thought-of"whatever is now" for instance-can only be true. Whether a
thought is true or false depends simply upon whether there is anything of the kind referred
to, and there must be something now. It is by no means certain that there must be anything
there always. And most probably no mosquito is where we thought it was then.
The natural generality and vagueness of all reference which is not made specific by
the aid of space and time is of great importance for the understanding of the senses in
which poetry may be said to be true. (Cf. Chapter 35.)
In the reading of poetry the thought due simply to the words, their sense it may be
called, comes first; but other thoughts are not ofless importance. These may be due to the
auditory verbal imagery, and we have onomatopoeia, 2 but this is rarely independent of the
sense. More important are the further thoughts caused by the sense, the network of inter-
pretation and conjecture which arises therefrom, with its opportunities for aberrations
and misunderstanding. Poems, however, differ fundamentally in the extent to which such
further interpretation is necessary. The mere sense without any further reflection is very
often sufficient thought, in Swinburne, for instance, for the full response-

There glowing ghosts of flowers

Draw down, draw nigh;
And wings of swift spent hours
Take flight and fly;
She sees by formless gleams
She hears across cold streams
Dead mouths of many dreams that sing and sigh.

Little beyond vague thoughts of the things the words stand for is here required. They
do not have to be brought into intelligible connection with one another. On the other
hand, Hardy would rarely reach his full effect through sound and sense alone-

"Who's in the next room?-who?

I seemed to see
 Somebody in the dawning passing through 173
-Unknown to me."
-"Nay: you saw nought. He passed invisibly." 3.1
I. A. RICHARDS

Between these and even more extreme cases, every degree of variation in the relative
importance of sound, sense, and further interpretation, between form and content in
short, can be found. A temptation to which few do not succumb is to suppose that there is
some "proper relation" for these different parts of the experience, so that a poem whose
parts are in this relation must thereby be a greater or better poem than another whose parts
are differently disposed. This is another instance of the commonest of critical mistakes,
the confusion of means with ends, of technique with value. There is no more a "proper
place" for sound or for sense in poetry than there is one and only one "proper shape" for
an animal. A dog is not a defective kind of cat, nor is Swinburne a defective kind of Hardy.
But this sort of criticism is extraordinarily prevalent. The objection to Swinburne on the
ground of a lack of thought is a popular specimen.
Within certain types, needless to say, some structures are more likely to be successful
than others. Given some definite kind of effect as the goal, or some definite structure al-
ready being used, a good deal can of course be said as to the most probable means, or as
to what may or may not be added. Lyric cannot dispense with tied imagery, it is clear, nor
can we neglect the character of this imagery in reading it. A prose composition has to be
longer than a lyric to produce an equal definiteness of developed effect. Poems in which
there is much turmoil of emotion are likely to be strongly rhythmical and to be in meter,
as we shall see when we come to discuss rhythm and meter. Drama can hardly dispense
with a great deal of conjecture and further interpretation which in most forms of the novel
is replaced by analysis and explanation, and in narrative poetry is commonly omitted alto-
gether; and so on.
But no general prescription that in great poetry there must always be this or that,-
deep thought, superb sound or vivid imagery-is more than a piece of ignorant dogma-
tism. Poetry may be almost devoid even of mere sense, let alone thought, or almost without
sensory (or formal) structure, and yet reach the point than which no poem goes further.
The second case, however, is very rare. Almost always, what seems structureless proves to
have still a loose and tenuous (it may be an intermittent) structure. But we can for exam-
ple shift the words about very often in Walt Whitman without loss, even when he is al-
most at his best.
It is difficult to represent diagrammatically what takes place in thought in any satisfac-
tory fashion. The impulse coming in from the visual stimulus of the printed word must be
imagined as reaching some system in the brain in which effects take place not due merely
to this present stimulus, but also to past occasions on which it has been combined with
other stimulations. These effects are thoughts; and they in their groupings act as signs for
yet other thoughts. The little arrows are intended to symbolize these references to things
outside the mind.

Emotions, and Attitudes.-Feeling or emotion is not, we have insisted above, another and
a rival mode of apprehending nature. So far as a feeling or an emotion does refer to any-
thing, it refers in the way described, through its origin. Feelings, in fact, are commonly
signs, and the differences between those who "see" things by intuition, or "feel" them,
and those who reason them out, is commonly only a difference between users of signs and
users of symbols. Both signs and symbols are means by which our past experience assists
our present responses. The advantages of symbols, due to the ease with which they are
 174 controlled and communicated, their public nature, as it were, are obvious. Their disad-
vantages as compared with such relatively private signs as emotions or organic sensations
SECTION 3 are perhaps less, evident. Words, when used symbolically or scientifically, not figuratively
ANGLo-AMERICAN and emotively, are only capable of directing thought to a comparatively few features of
NEw CRITICISM the more common situations. But feeling is sometimes a more subtle way of referring,
more dangerous also, because more difficult to corroborate and to control, and more liable
to confusion. There is no inherent superiority, however, in feeling as opposed to thought,
there is merely a difference in applicability; nor is there any opposition or clash between
them except for those who are mistaken either in their thinking or in their feeling, or in
both. How such mistakes arise will be discussed in Chapter 34.
As regards emotions and attitudes little need be added to what has already been said.
Emotions are primarily signs of attitudes and owe their great prominence in the theory of
art to this. For it is the attitudes evoked which are the all-important part of any experi-
ence. Upon the texture and form of the attitudes involved its value depends. It is not the
intensity of the conscious experience, its thrill, its pleasure or its poignancy which gives it
value, but the organization of its impulses for freedom and fullness of life. There are
plenty of ecstatic instants which are valueless; the character of consciousness at any mo-
ment is no certain sign of the excellence of the impulses from which it arises. It is the
most convenient sign that is available, but it is very ambiguous and may be very mislead-
ing. A more rellable but less accessible set of signs can be found in the readiness for this or
that kind of behavior in which we find ourselves after the experience. Too great insistence
upon the quality of the momentary consciousness which the arts occasion has in recent
times been a prevalent critical blunder. The Epilogue to Pater's Renaissance is the locus
classicus. The after-effects, the permanent modifications in the structure of the mind,
which works of art can produce, have been overlooked. No one is ever quite the same
again after any experience; his possibilities have altered in some degree. And among all
the agents by which "the widening of the sphere of human sensibility" may be brought
about, the arts are the most powerful, since it is through them that men may most coop-
erate and in these experiences that the mind most easily and with least interference orga-
nises itself.

[ ... ]

Chapter 30: The Definition of a Poem

Men take the words they find in use among their neighbors, and that they may not seem ig-
norant what they stand for use them confidently without much troubling their heads about a
certain fixed meaning.... it being all one to draw these men out of their mistakes, who have
no settled notions, as to dispossess a Vagrant of his habitation, who has no settled abode.
This I guess to be so; and every one may observe in himself or others whether it be so or not.
Locke

It may be useful to collect here some of the results of the foregoing sections and consider
them from the point of view of the practicing critic. The most salient perhaps is the desir-
ability of distinguishing clearly between the communicative and the value aspects of a
work of art. We may praise or condemn a work on either ground or upon both, but if it
fails entirely as a vehicle of communication we are, to say the least, not well placed for
denying its value.
But, it may be said, it will then have no value for us and its value or disvalue for us is
all that we as critics pretend or should pretend to judge. To make such a reply, however, is
to abdicate as a critic. At the least a critic is concerned with the value of things for himself 175
and for people like him. Otherwise his criticism is mere autobiography. And any critic
worth attention makes a further claim, a claim to sanity. His judgment is only of general 3.1
interest in so far as it is representative and reflects what happens in a mind of a certain 1. A. RICHARDs

kind, developed in a certain fashion. The services of bad critics are sometimes not less
than those of good critics, but that is only because we can divine from their responses
what other people's responses are likely to be.
We must distinguish between standard or normal criticism and erratic or eccentric
criticism. As critics Lamb or Coleridge are very far from normal; none the less they are of
extraordinary fertility in suggestion. Their responses are often erratic even when of most
revelatory character. In such cases we do not take them as standards to which we endeavor
to approximate, we do not attempt to see eye to eye with them. Instead we use them as
means by which to make quite different approaches ourselves to the works which they
have characteristically but eccentrically interpreted.
The distinction between a personal or idiosyncratic judgment and a normative is some-
times overlooked. A critic should often be in a position to say, "I don't like this but I know it
is good," or "I like this and condemn it," or "This is the effect which it produces upon me, and
this quite different effect is the one it should produce." For obvious reasons he rarely makes
any such statements. But many people would regard praise of a work which is actually dis-
liked by the praiser as immoral. This is a confusion of ideas. Any honest reader knows fairly
well the points at which his sensibility is distorted, at which he fails as a normal critic and in
what ways. It is his duty to take these into consideration in passing judgment upon the value
of a work. His rank as a critic depends at least as much upon his ability to discount these
personal peculiarities as upon any hypothetical impeccability of his actual responses.
So far we have been considering those cases in which the vehicle is sufficiently ade-
quate and the critic sufficiently representative and careful for the response to be a good
index of the value of the poem. But these cases are comparatively rare. The superstition
which any language not intolerably prolix and uncouth encourages that there is some-
thing actual, the poem, which all readers have access to and upon which they pass judg-
ment, misleads us. We naturally talk about poems (and pictures, etc.) in a way which
makes it impossible for anybody to discover what it is we are talking about. Most critical
discussion, in other words, is primarily emotive with only a very loose and fourfold
equivocal reference. We may be talking about the artist's experience, such of it as is rele-
vant, or about the experience of a qualified reader who made no mistakes, or about an
ideal and perfect reader's possible experience, or about our own actual experience. All
four in most cases will be qualitatively different. Communication is perhaps never per-
fect, so the first and the last will differ. The second and third differ also, from the others
and from one another, the third being what we ought unrestrictedly to experience, or the
best experience we could possibly undergo, whereas the second is merely what we ought
to experience as things are, or the best experience that we can expect.
Which of these possible definitions of a poem shall we adopt? The question is one of
convenience merely; but it is by no means easy to decide. The most usual practice is to mean
by the poem either the first or the last; or, by forgetting what communication is, to mean
both confusedly together. The last involves the personal judgment to which exception
was taken on the previous page, and has the further disadvantage that there would be for
every sonnet as many poems as readers. A and B, discussing Westminster Bridge as they
thought, would unwittingly be discussing two different things. For some purposes, for
the disentanglement of some misunderstandings, it is convenient to define a poem tem-
porarily in this manner.
 176 To define the poem as the artist's experience is a better solution. But it will not do as it
stands since nobody but the artist has that experience. We must be more ingenious. We
SEcnoN 3 cannot take any single experience as the poem; we must have a class of more or less simi-
ANGLo-AMERICAN lar experiences instead. Let us mean by Westminster Bridge not the actual experience
NEw CRITICISM which led Wordsworth on a certain morning about a century ago to write what he did,
but the class composed of all actual experiences, occasioned by the words, which do not
differ within certain limits from that experience. Then anyone who has had one of the
experiences comprised in the class can be said to have read the poem. The permissible
ranges of variation in the class need (of course) very careful scrutiny. To work them out
fully and draw up a neat formal definition of a poem would be an amusing and useful oc-
cupation for any literary logician with a knowledge of psychology. The experiences must
evidently include the reading of the words with fairly close correspondence in rhythm
and tune. Pitch difference would not matter, provided that pitch relations were preserved.
Imagery might be allowed to vary indefinitely in its sensory aspect but would be narrowly
restricted otherwise. If the reader will run over the diagram of a poetic experience given
in Chapter 16 and consider in what respects his and his friends' experiences must agree if
they are to be able to refer to them indifferently as though they were one and the same
without confusion or misunderstanding, he will see what kind of thing a detailed defini-
tion of a poem would be.
This, although it may seem odd and complicated, is by far the most convenient, in
fact it is the only workable way of defining a poem; namely, as a class of experiences which
do not differ in any character more than a certain amount, varying for each character,
from a standard experience. We may take as this standard experience the relevant experi-
ence of the poet when contemplating the completed composition. 3
Anyone whose experience approximates in this degree to the standard experience
will be able to judge the poem and his remarks about it will be about some experience
which is included in the class. Thus we have what we want, a sense, namely, in which a
critic can be said to have not read the poem or to have misread it. In this sense unrecog-
nized failures are extremely common.
The justification for this outbreak of pedantry, as it may appear, is that it brings into
prominence one of the reasons for the backwardness of critical theory. If the definition of
a poem is a matter of so much difficulty and complexity, the discussion of the principles
by which poetry should be judged may be expected to be confused. Critics have as yet
hardly begun to ask themselves what they are doing or under what conditions they work.
It is true that a recognition of the critic's predicament need not be explicit in order to be
effective, but few with much experience ofliterary debate will underestimate the extent to
which it is disregarded or the consequences which ensue from this neglect. The discus-
sions in the foregoing chapters are intended as no more than examples of the problems
which an explicit recognition of the situation will admit and of the ways in which they
will be solved.

NOTES

1. The description of images belongs to the first discussion of some experimental investigations
steps in psychology, and it is often possible to judge into their utility, Spearman, The Nature of
the rank and standing of a psychologist by the Intelligence, Ch. XII, may be consulted.
degree of importance which he attaches to their 2. Two kinds of onomatopoeia should be

peculiarities. On theoretical grounds it seems distinguished. In one the sound of the words
probable that they are luxury products (cf. The (actual or imaginal) is like some natural sound (the
Meaning of Meaning, pp. 148-151) peculiarly buzzing of bees, galloping horses, and so forth). In
connected with the reproduction of emotion. For a the other it is not like any such sound but such as
merely to call up auditory images of the sounds in Kubla Khan merely "a psychological curiosity" 177
question. The second case is by far the more without poetic merits, and may have been justified
common. in some degree. If he was not, it is his dream
3· Difficulties even here arise, e.g. the poet may experience which we should presumably have to
be dissatisfied without reason. Coleridge thought take as our standard.

Introduction to Understanding 3.2

Poetry (1938)

CLEANTH BROOKS and ROBERT PENN WARREN

Poetry is a form of speech, or discourse, written or spoken. To the person who is not well
acquainted with poetry the differences between poetic speech and other forms may seem
to be more important than the similarities, but these differences should not be allowed to
obscure the fundamental resemblances, for only by an understanding of the resem-
blances can one appreciate the meaning of the differences. Poetry, like all discourse, is a
communication-the saying of something by one person to another person. But what is
that "something"? We usually identify it with information. As practical people going
about our affairs, we ask directions, read road signs, order a dinner from a menu, study
football scores or stock market reports. It is altogether natural, therefore, that we should
tend to think the important and central matter in all discourse to be information. But,
after all, we may do well to ask how much of the discourse of an average man in any given
day is primarily concerned with information for the sake of information. After he has
transacted his business, obeyed his road signs, ordered and eaten his dinner, and read the
stock market reports, he might be surprised to reflect on the number of non-practical
functions speech had fulfilled for him that day. He had told the office boy a joke; he had
commented on the weather to the traffic officer, who could observe the weather as well as
he; he had told an old friend that he was glad to see him again; he had chatted with his
wife on some subject on which there was already full knowledge and agreement. Even
when he had been at lunch with some business associates with whom the talk ran on in-
formational topics, the trend in the stock market, for instance, he had not intended to use
the information for buying or selling. The interest in the conversation had not been fi-
nally practical. This practical man might discover that a large part of the business of
discourse had been concerned with matters which are not ordinarily thought of as really
"practical," but with his relations to other people, that is, with such elusive matters as feel-
ings and attitudes.
That "something," then, conveyed by discourse is not necessarily information to be
used for practical purposes. But even when the man in question was concerned primarily
with a matter of practical interest, his discourse was colored by other considerations. If he
telephoned an associate to ask the price he probably prefaced his question by saying, "How
are you?" and concluded his conversation by saying, "Thank you," and "Goodbye." For even
 178 the most practical man a large part of discourse is not prompted by purely practical con-
siderations; another "something" is present.
SECTION 3 Moreover, even when a man is using speech for the purpose of conveying informa-
ANcLo-AMERICAN tion, and how difficult it is to make speech deal only with pure and exact information.
NEw CRITICISM Almost always a speaker conveys not only the pure information but an attitude toward
and a feeling about that information. For example, let us consider the case of a motorist
who stops a man driving a hay wagon to ask about the condition of the road ahead. The
man on the wagon says, "It's a tolerable good road, you won't have no trouble on it." The
motorist drives on, encouraged. But after a mile or so, having experienced a few substan-
tial jolts, he hails another motorist and asks the same question. This new man says, "It's a
devil of a road, it'll jerk your teeth out." Both the man on the hay wagon and the man in
the second automobile think that they are telling the truth. Both intend to be helpful and
to give exact information. And both feel that they know the road. But each man's lan-
guage reflects his own experience with the road. For the man with the hay wagon the road
was tolerably good, but for the second motorist, anxious to make time on his trip, the
road was devilishly bad.
If this seems to be a fairly obvious example of confusion about information in ordi-
nary speech, let us consider an example in which a trained scholar is trying to make an
exact statement.
For sentimental pacifism is, after all, but a return to the method of the jungle. It is in the
jungle that emotionalism alone determines conduct, and wherever that is true no other
than the law of the jungle is possible. For the emotion of hate is sure sooner or later to fol-
low on the emotion oflove, and then there is a spring for the throat. It is altogether obvious
that the only quality which really distinguishes man from the brutes is his reason. 1

The author of this statement is Robert Andrews Millikan, the internationally famous physi-
cist and winner of the Nobel Prize. He is making a plea for the scientific attitude in politi-
cal and international affairs, but when one inspects this statement carefully one finds
some propositions about human beings that cannot be proved by Mr. Millikan, or by any-
one else, in the same way that he can prove certain formulae of physics in his laboratory.
Furthermore, waiving this question of whether the propositions stated and implied are
really true or not, one finds that a very important part of the statement consists not in
information about human beings but in appeals to the reader to take a certain attitude
toward the statement. The comparisons concerning the jungle and the leap of one infu-
riated beast at the throat of another represent the sort of comparison one finds in po-
etry; for the comparisons are not based on scientific analogy-the resemblance is prompted
by the emotional attitude of the speaker and is calculated to incite a corresponding atti-
tude in the reader. But the coloring of the general statement-that is, the bringing in of
an implied interpretation of the statement-extends beyond the mere use of a "poetic"
comparison. In the first sentence, for example, the word pacifism is qualified by the
word sentimental. Presumably it is a particular sort of pacifism here defined to which
Mr. Millikan's objections apply; but does the adjective sentimental really set off a "bad
kind of pacifism" from a good kind? Could the reader determine from Mr. Millikan's
statement whether or not he would consider the pacifism of Jesus Christ, the Prince of
Peace, a sentimental or a non-sentimental sort? Since the only kind of pacifism that Mr.
Millikan sets over against his sentimental pacifism is a scientific pacifism operating
through an organization of sociologists and economists, one might conceivably assume
that Jesus Christ would fall into the former classification. Or, to state the matter other-
wise: is the basic argument for peace to be found in the fact that war is unprofitable or 179
is horrible, or in the belief that it is wrong to kill one's fellowman? As a matter of fact,
the adjective sentimental is, on logical grounds, a bogus qualification: its real function 3.2
is to set up an attitude in the reader that will forbid his inspection of the basis of the CLEANTH BRooKs

Statement. AND ROBERT

Whether or not the general statement is logically sound, Mr. Millikan has not stated PENN WARREN

it with scientific precision; in Mr. Millikan's defense it may be said that the proposition is
one that cannot be stated with scientific precision by anyone. Mr. Millikan, a scientist try-
ing to state the virtues of a scientific method in human relationships, is forced to resort to
devices which we associate with poetry. We should never find him coloring a mathemati-
cal formula by referring to a "sentimental figure four," or describing a well known chemical
reaction by saying that two ferocious atoms of hydrogen spring at the throat of one de-
tenseless atom of oxygen.

Limitations of Scientific Statement

The advantages of scientific statement are not to be had without the limitations of a scien-
tific statement also. The primary advantage of the scientific statement is that of absolute
precision. But we must remember that this precision is gained by using terms in special
and previously defined sense. The scientist carefully cuts away from his technical terms
all associations, emotional colorings and implications of judgment. He gives up, then, all
attempts to influence the reader's attitude toward his statement. For this reason, only cer-
tain kinds of statement and certain kinds of meaning are possible to true science. Science
tends, indeed, toward the condition of mathematics, and the really exact scientific state-
ments can be expressed in mathematical formulae. The chemist describes water as H 20-
two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. The formula, H 20, differs tremendously
from even the common word water, for the word water, neutral as it seems in connota-
tion, still may possess all sorts of different associations-drinking, bathing, boating, the
pull of the moon to create tides, the liquid from which the goddess Aphrodite rose, or, as
Keats put it,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round the earth's human shores.

As with the liquid itself, so with the word: the scientist needs a distilled product.
The language of science represents an extreme degree of specialization oflanguage in
the direction of a certain kind of precision. It is unnecessary, of course, to point out that
in this specialization tremendous advantages inhere, and that the man of the twentieth
century is rightly proud of this achievement. But it is more often necessary to point out that
scientific precision can be brought to bear only on certain kinds of materials. Literature in
general-poetry in particular-also represents a specialization of language for the purpose
of precision; but it aims at treating kinds of materials different from those of science.
We have already seen that science has to forego, because of its method, matters of at-
titude and interpretation; or that, when it does not forego them, it is so much the less sci-
ence. For better or worse, certain kinds of communication are not possible to scientific
statement. To return to the question raised at the beginning of this discussion, what is the
"something" which is conveyed by speech? We have already seen that it is not exclusively
information in the ordinary sense, and even less exclusively information in the scientific
sense. The speech of that ordinary citizen in an ordinary way conveys many things, atti-
tudes, feelings, and interpretations, that fall outside of these restrictions. These things,
 180 though they fill a large part of the speech of that ordinary citizen, are never stated very
clearly or precisely by him. The specialization of speech which we find in poetry aims at
SECTION 3 clarity and precision of statement in these matters.
ANGLO-AMERICAN That the communication of attitudes, feelings, and interpretations constitutes a
NEw CRITICISM real problem, and indeed, in one sense, a more difficult problem than that offered by the
communication of mere information, may be clearly illustrated by such an example as
the following. Suppose, for instance, that a student sitting on the front row in a class
room turns to his neighbor and whispers to him the information that it is ten minutes
to eleven. This information might be passed from one person to another in the same
manner through a whole class to the last man on the back row, and the probability is
that the last man would receive correctly the message: it is ten minutes to eleven. The
communication has been a relatively easy matter. But suppose that the first man on the
first row, instead of whispering a mere bit of information, had made even a relatively
simple statement involving a feeling or attitude: suppose he had said, for example,
"John Jones is a fine fellow, but I sometimes feel that he is a little stuck-up." In all prob-
ability the last man who received the message would get an entirely different view of
John's character from that intended by the original speaker. Indeed, anyone who is fa-
miliar with the distortions which often, and as a matter of fact, usually take place in the
transmission of gossip will not be surprised at whatever the version has become, by the
time it has been transmitted through thirty people. One of the reasons for the error is
simple. The original statement about John is an interpretation. The person who hears
it, naturally recognizes that it is an interpretation and not a statement of objective fact,
and therefore, in turn, interprets the remark in his own fashion. For example, the
last man makes an interpretation of an original interpretation which has been altered
more or less by twenty-eight intervening interpretations. The "something" of the
second piece of communication, unlike that of the first involves feelings which each
hearer has to define for himself. In ordinary life, a hearer unconsciously bases much of
his definition of such pieces of communication, not on the words themselves, but on
the gestures, tone of voice, and facial expression of the speaker, and on what he knows
about the speaker. For instance, every one understands how difficult it is to deal with
a delicate personal matter in a letter, for the letter has nothing but words-that is, sym-
bols written on paper and divorced from the tone of the voice, gestures, and facial
expressions.

Materials of Poetry
The basic problem of communication in poetry is, therefore, one of a totally different
character from that involved in communication of matters of fact, and we shall merely
confuse ourselves about the meaning of any poetry if we do not realize this distinction.
The specialization oflanguage in poetry is an attempt to deal with this problem.
But the very nature of the human being, the ordinary citizen in the ordinary day
speaks much of what we might call incipient poetry-he attempts to communicate atti-
tudes, feelin~s, a~d inter~retations. (Unfortunately, most of this poetry is bad poetry.)
And .poet:y I~ this sense IS not confined to the speech of the ordinary citizen. It appears
also In editonals, sermons, political speeches, magazine articles, and advertisements. We
have seen that Mr. Millikan's essay can be discussed as poetry rather than as science.
This, of course, is not apparent to everybody. Many a person would regard as mere poetry
the Biblical statement

All they that take the sword shall perish by the sword.
But such a person might, during the next minute, regard Mr. Millikan's paragraph as a so- 181
ber and verifiable scientific pronouncement. Or to take another case, this person might read
an avowed poem: 3.2
CLEANTH BROOKS
THE MAN HE KILLED
AND ROBERT

THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928) PENN WARREN

Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,

And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because-

Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,

Off-hand like-just as I-
Was out of work-had sold his traps-
No other reason why.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.

He might dismiss this as mere literature, failing to see that Mr. Millikan's paragraph is
"mere literature" also-and of course infinitely poorer literature. As has been indicated,
Mr. Millikan's argument is not "science." And, as a matter of fact, it is possible that Hardy
has, in his poem, put the case against war on a more solid basis than Mr. Millikan has
done in his argument.
Mr. Millikan might or might not have been aware that he was using some of the meth-
ods of poetry to color the attitude of his readers and bring them to his own point of view;
but any writer of advertising copy is perfectly aware of the fact that he is trying to per-
suade his readers to adopt a certain attitude.

Poetry as a Specialization of Ordinary Speech

From the examples already given we have seen that both the impulse of poetry-that is,
the impulse to communicate feelings, attitudes and interpretations-and some of the
methods of poetry-that is, comparisons, associations with words, etc.-appear in a great
deal of our discourse that is not ordinarily considered as poetic at all. It is important to
remember this fact because some people think of poetry as a thing entirely separate from
ordinary life and of the matters with which poetry deals as matters with which the ordi-
nary person is not concerned. More will have to be said about the special characteristics of
formal poetry-characteristics which set it off from this "stuff of poetry" appearing in or-
dinary life; but it is highly important to see that both the impulse and methods of poetry
 182 are rooted very deep in human experience, and that formal poetry itself represents, not a
distinction from, but a specialization of, thoroughly universal habits of human thinking
SECTION 3 and feeling.
ANGLO-AMERICAN

NEW CRITICISM Confusion between Scientific and Poetic Communication

The distinction earlier mentioned between the communication of science and the com-
munication of poetry is also an extremely important one. People, as we have seen, are
constantly confusing the two sorts of communication. They will often accept as sober
scientific doctrine what is essentially a poetic statement, or they will judge formal poetry
as if it were aiming at scientific truth.
An example of the first type of confusion has already been indicated in the quotation
from Mr. Millikan. Mr. Millikan does not rest his case on scientifically verifiable facts but
also makes an emotional appeal for a certain attitude concerning those facts. Mr. Millikan
is speaking, not as a professional scientist, but as a man, and he is thoroughly justified in
using this kind of speech; but it is important that the reader know exactly what Mr. Mil-
likan is doing. Even to the person who thinks that he has no interest in formal poetry an
awareness of this distinction is valuable, for he cannot move through the mass of conversa-
tion, sermons, editorials, historical and sociological writings, and advertisements without
encountering situations in which this distinction is fundamental to an understanding of
the actual meanings involved. The case of advertising, of course, raises the question in an
extreme form. Advertisers naturally are not content to rest on a statement of fact, whether
such a statement is verifiable or not. They will attempt to associate the attitude toward a
certain product with an attitude toward beautiful women, little children, or gray-haired
mothers; they will appeal to snobbishness, vanity, patriotism, religion, and morality. In ad-
dition to these appeals to the consumer's most basic and powerful feelings, the advertiser
often attempts to imply a scientific validity for his claims-a validity which may, or may
not, be justified by the product-by pictures of white-robed surgeons and research experts,
statements of abstruse scientific formulae, hints of recent discoveries, coy references to the
research laboratories of the plant involved, and very frequent use of the phrase "science tells
us." Even the man who cares nothing for "literature" will find that he constantly has to deal
with literary appeals and methods while living in the hard-headed, scientific, and practical
twentieth century.
The second type of confusion mentioned above-the confusion that causes people to
judge formal poetry as if it were science-is the source of most of the misunderstandings
of poetry and of literature in general. It is highly necessary, if one is to understand poetry,
to take up some of these typical misreadings.

1. "Message-Hunting"
"Message-hunting"-the business of looking only for the statement of an idea which the
reader thinks he can apply profitably in his own conduct-is one of the most ordinary
forms of this general confusion. Here is a poem by Longfellow that has been greatly ad-
mired by many people who read poetry in this fashion:

A PSALM OF LIFE

WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN SAID TO THE PSALMIST

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882)

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!-
 For the soul is dead that slumbers, 183
And things are not what they seem.
3.2
Life is real! Life is earnest!
CLEANTH BROOKS
And the grave is not its goal;
AND ROBERT
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
PENN WARREN
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!

Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,-act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learning to labor and to wait.

This poem seems to give a great deal of good advice. It tells the reader not to waste his time
but to be up and doing; not to be discouraged by failures but to have a heart for any fate; not
to judge life by temporary standards but to look to eternal reward. There are probably few
people who would quarrel with the moral value of these statements. But granting that the
advice is good advice, we can still ask whether or not the poem is a good poem. If the advice
is what the poem has to offer us, then we can ask why a short prose statement of the advice
itself is not as good as, or even better than, the poem, itself. But even the people who say they
like the poem because of its "message" will usually prefer the poem to a plain prose state-
ment. If such people would reject the prose summary in favor of the poem, they would also
reject certain other versions of the poetic statement. For instance, let us alter one of the
 184 stanzas of the poem, taking care in the alteration, however, to preserve the idea. The
original stanza is:
SECTION 3
Lives of great men all remind us
ANGLO-AMERICAN
We can make our lives sublime,
NEW CRITICISM
And departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.

An alteration might run:

Lives of all sorts of great men remind us

That we ourselves can make our lives sublime,
And when we die we can leave behind us
Noble recollections printed on the sands oftime.

The fact that any admirer of the poem would unhesitatingly choose the first version
proves that "something" aside from the mere value of the idea is involved in the choice.
The fact that we have just an idea in itself is not enough to make a poem, even when
the idea may be a worthy one. The neglect of this principle causes frequent misunder-
standings and misreadings of poems. But another type of misreading may result from the
fact that the reader does not happen to agree with an idea expressed in a poem. We may
treat this distinction by a concrete case: is an admirer of Longfellow's poem, even one who
says that his admiration is based on the worth of the idea, disqualified from admiring the
following poem, which states an idea rather opposed to some of the ideas in Longfellow's
poem?

EXPOSTULATION AND REPLY

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

"Why, William, on that old gray stone,

Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?"

"Where are your books?-that light bequeathed

To beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! And drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.

"You look round on your Mother Earth,

As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you."

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,

When life was sweet, I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply:

"The eye-it cannot choose but see;

We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will.
 "Nor less I deem that there are Powers 185
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours 3.2
In a wise passiveness. CLEANTH BROOKS

AND ROBERT
"Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
PENN WARREN
Of things forever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

"-Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,

Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old gray stone,
And dream my time away."

This poem seems to give the advice that one should neglect the "light bequeathed" by the
great men of the past in favor of what one can only learn for himself; that one should not
fritter away his time by being "up and doing" or by being a "hero in the strife"; and that
one should learn in contemplation to cultivate that "wise passiveness" by which, only, one
comes into harmony with the great powers of the universe. If the admirer of Longfellow's
poem means literally what he says when he praises the poem for the "message," then he is
absolutely disqualified from enjoying this poem, for its "message" is diametrically op-
posed to that of "The Psalm of Life." Of course, many people who describe their apprecia-
tion of poems in terms of the "messages" do not mean literally what they say; they are
simply groping for some ground to justify the fact that they like poetry at all. Since they
are accustomed to think of all communication as concerned with practical information,
they try to put their liking on some "practical" or "scientific" basis.
As a matter of fact, the place of ideas in poetry and their relation to the goodness of a
poem cannot be treated in such an over-simplified manner. We know, for example, that
devout Protestants can accept the poetry of the Catholic poet Dante, or that Catholics can
accept the poetry of the Protestant poet John Milton. The fact that the Protestant reader,
who holds his religious beliefs seriously, may still accept the poetry of Dante does not
mean that the reader regards poetry as merely trivial and unserious. This whole matter is
one that cannot be dismissed in a few sentences, but requires for a satisfactory under-
standing the analysis of many special poems. It will suffice to say here that the "message-
hunting" method of reading poetry breaks down even in the simplest cases.

2. "Pure Realization"
Many readers and critics of poetry, realizing the insufficiency of the "message-hunting"
approach to poetry, have adopted a view that poetry does not deal with any ideas or
truths all, but is an "expression of pure emotion," or "deals with emotion." This view is
sometimes put in other terms, as when one critic says that a poem is the expression of "a
moment of pure realization of being" -that is, it attempts merely to bring vividly to the
reader some scene or sensation.
When a critic trying to point out the distinguishing marks of poetry says that poetry
expresses an emotion or that poetry deals with emotion, exactly what does he mean?
Does he mean that a poem, about grief, for instance, would "express" the grief a poet
might feel, or have felt, in the same way as a burst of tears would express the emotion of
grief? Or does he mean that the reading of a poem about grief would provoke in the
reader an emotion of grief in the same way as would a personal bereavement? Quite
 186 obviously, the answer to both questions is "No." Certainly, writing of a poem would be no
substitute for the relief of a burst of tears; nor would the response to the reading of a poem
SECTION 3 be as intense as the experience of a real bereavement. There is some difference. On the
ANGLO-AMERICAN mere ground of emotional intensity the poem does not compete with the real experience.
NEw CRITICISM The justification of poetry as "pure realization," like its justification on the basis of
"message-hunting," breaks down even in simple cases, for the pure realization of an expe-
rience is the experience at the moment it occurs. For instance, the taste or the smell of a
real apple is always more intense than any poem describing the taste or smell of an apple.
The following passage from "Ode to a Nightingale," by John Keats has sometimes been
praised as a moment of"pure realization":

0 for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Proven<;al song, and sunburnt mirth!
0 for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth ....

Whatever "pure realization" there is here is certainly not the pure realization of wine as
such. The stanza is obviously not a substitute for an actual glass of wine: not only does it
fail to give the intensity of the sensation of actual wine-drinking but it gives an effect
thoroughly different in kind from the experience of drinking a glass of wine. If there is a
"pure realization" of anything it is of the poet's thinking about the wine as a thing which
represents to him a certain kind oflife-a warm, mirthful, carefree, healthy, pagan kind
of life, which in the total context of the poem stands in contrast to his own troubled and
fretful experience. As a matter of fact, when we inspect the passage we discover that it is
not so much a pictorial description of a beaker of wine, or a description of the sensation
of drinking wine, as it is a cluster of associations with the wine-associations which
suggest the kind of life we have mentioned. The poet is not saying, actually, that he is
thirsty for a drink of wine but that he wants a certain kind of life, the qualities of which
he implies.
We have seen that the attempt to conceive of poetry as the "expression of emotion" or
as "pure realization" represents an attempt to get away from the "message-hunting" ap-
proach to poetry. But in the case which we have just examined we have seen that experience
which is "realized" or communicated to the reader is far different from the experience of
a physical object (wine, in this instance), an emotional reaction, or a sensation. The
experience, we have seen, really involves an interpretation by the poet, so that in so far
as the term "realization" is used to imply an absence of interpretation it is thoroughly
inaccurate.

J. "Beautiful Statement of Some High Truth"

There is another confused conception of poetry arising from the attempt to combine in a
mechanical fashion the two false approaches which have just been discussed. This con-
fused conception is variously stated. For instance, it may be expressed in a definition of
poetry as "fine sentiments in fine language." Or as the "beautiful statement of some high
truth." Whatever the precise manner of description may be, the basic idea may be stated
as follows: poetry is a "truth" with "decorations," which may either be pleasant in them-
selves or dispose the reader to accept the truth.
 Most often victims of this general misconception have treated poetry as a kind of 187
·'sugar-coated pill." They have justified the characteristics of poetry-rhythmical lan-
guage, figures of speech, stories and dramatic situations, etc.-as a kind of bait that leads 3.2
the reader to expose himself to the influence of the "truth" contained in a poem. They CLEANTH BRooKs

value these characteristics only in so far as the characteristics lead to the acceptance of AND RoBERT

the "truth." The final value of a poem for such people would depend on the value of the PENN WARREN

"truth" contained-which leads us back to the mistake of the "message hunters," which
we examined with reference to Longfellow's poem.
But even if the person who regards poetry as "fine sentiments in fine language" says
that he values the language as much as he values the sentiments, or "truth," he is still us-
ing a mistaken approach to poetry. For he is apparently committed to saying that the lan-
guage, quite apart from its relation to some central idea or "truth," is valuable. He seems to
be saying that certain words, or certain objects suggested by the words, are in themselves
"poetic." He would be forced to consider a poem as simply a bundle of melodious word-
combinations and pretty pictures. He would probably be embarrassed if we asked him
what held these things together in any given poem, making it a poem rather than simply
a collection of pleasing items. And he would probably be further embarrassed if we asked
him to show us by what standard he would call a particular combination of sounds or a
particular set of pictures poetically fine. If he should say that he took as a standard for
poetical fitness the fact that any item-let us say, for instance, a rose-was pleasing in real
life, he would be making a dangerous confusion. It is certainly true that in real life vari-
ous combinations of word sounds and various objects and scenes, such as the rose, the
moon, the ruins of a mediaeval tower, a maiden standing on a balcony, etc., are pleasing.
But poetry does not consist merely in the use of objects of this sort or in the use of agree-
able word combinations. Nor does the mere presence of these things make poetry. But the
falsity of this conception can quickly be demonstrated by turning to great poetry from
Shakespeare or Milton where we find material that in real life would be disagreeable or
mean used for poetic effect The image of a man grunting and sweating under a burden
too heavy for him is not a poetic thing if judged by the above standard, but we will find it
used in a passage of great poetry that is universally admired. In Hamlet's most famous
speech we find these lines:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the wilL ...

In fact, none of the things used in this passage would be thought of as being pleasing in itself
in actual life. The passage does not give us a set of agreeable pictures that would be consid-
ered "poetic." Indeed, the more we examine good poetry the more difficult will appear the
attempt to say that certain objects or situations or even ideas are in themselves poetic.
The poetic effect depends not on the things themselves but on the kind of use the poet makes
of them.
 188
Organic Nature of Poetry
SEcnoN 3 We have seen, then, that a poem is not to be thought of as merely a bundle of things which
ANGLo-AMERICAN are "poetic" in themselves. Nor is it to be thought of, as the "message hunters" would seem
NEw CRITICISM to have it, as a kind of box, decorated or not, in which a "truth" or a "fine sentiment" is
hidden. We avoid such difficulties by thinking of a poem as a piece of writing which gives us
a certain effect in which, we discover, the "poetry" inheres.
This is very different from considering a poem as a group of mechanically combined
elements-meter, rime, figurative language, idea, etc.-which are put together to make a
poem as bricks are put together to make a wall. The question, then, about any element in
a poem is not whether it is in itself pleasing, or agreeable, or valuable, or "poetical," but
whether it works with the other elements to create the effect intended by the poet. The
relationship among the elements in a poem is therefore all important, and it is not a me-
chanical relationship but one which is far more intimate and fundamental. If we should
compare a poem to the make-up of some physical object it ought not to be a wall but to
something organic like a plant.
We may investigate this general principle by looking at some particular examples.
The following lines could scarcely be called melodious. Indeed, they may be thought to
have a sibilant, hissing quality rather than that of melody.
If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,
With his surcease, success, that but this blow
Might be the be-ali and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come.

This is the speech of Macbeth at the moment when he is debating the murder of Duncan; the
passage has been considered to be great poetry by innumerable critics and readers. We are
not to consider that the passage is great poetry in spite of its lack of ordinary melodious ef-
fects; but rather we are to see that the broken rhythms and tendency to harshness of sound
are essential to the communication that Shakespeare wished. For instance, the piling up of
the s sounds in the second, third, and fourth lines helps give an impression of desperate haste
and breathless excitement. The lines give the impression of a conspiratorial whisper. The
rhythm and sound effects of the passage, then, are poetic in the only sense which we have
seen to be legitimate: they are poetic because of a relation to the total effect of the passage.
Or we may approach the general problem in another way. Here are two lines by
Robert Burns which have been greatly admired by the poet William Butler Yeats:
The white moon is setting behind the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, 0!

Let us suppose that the lines had been written as follows:

The white moon is setting behind the white wave,
And Time, 0! is setting with me.

Literally considered, the two versions say exactly the same thing: they describe a scene
and give an exclamation provoked by it. If one will, however, read the two versions care-
fully with an ear for the rhythm he will discover that the transposition of the word 0 has
made a great difference in the movement.
 But this difference is not finally important merely because the first version may be in 189
itself more melodious than the second. The movement of the first version is superior pri-
marily because it contributes to the total effect, or to what we might call the total interpre- 3.2
tation, of the scene. The placing of the cry at the emphatic position of a line-end implies CLEANTH BRooKs

that the speaker had scarcely realized the full force of his own statement until he had made AND RoBERT

it. The lingering rhythm caused by the position of the exclamation at the end of the second PENN WARREN

line coincides with the fact that the poet sees in the natural scene a representation of the
pathos of the passing of Time and of his own life. By placing the exclamation anywhere
else we impair this relationship between the rhythm and the other elements involved-the
image of the moonset and the poet's statement about the passing of Time. Yeats has sum-
marized the general effect of the passage and the relationship of the parts as follows:

Take from them [the lines] the whiteness of the moon and of the waves, whose relation to
the setting of Time is too subtle for the intellect, and you take from them their beauty. But,
when all are together, moon and wave and whiteness and setting Time and the last melan-
choly cry, they evoke an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other arrangement of
colors and sounds and forms. 2

The remarks by Yeats here apply, as we can see, to the elements of the scene itself as
well as to the rhythm. He is not praising the lines merely because the scene of the white
moon setting behind the white wave gives in itself a pretty picture. As a matter fact, a
white moon may not appear as beautiful as a golden moon, but if we rewrite the lines with
a golden moon we have lost something from them:

The gold moon is setting behind the gold wave,

And Time is setting for me, 0!

The "something" that has been lost obviously depends on the relationship of the color to
the other elements in the general effect. The whiteness of the moon and the wave in con-
nection with the idea of "setting" and then more specifically in connection with the idea
of the irrevocable passage of Time, suggests, even though unconsciously to most readers,
a connection with the paleness of something waning or dying. The connection is not a
logical connection, as Yeats intimates when he says the "relation ... is too subtle for the
intellect," but it is nonetheless a powerful one. All of this merely means that Yeats is say-
ing that the beauty-by which he means the total poetic effect-of the lines depends on
the relationship of the parts to each other.
This last point may be amply proved, as we have already hinted in discussing the pas-
sage from Hamlet, by considering a passage of great poetry in which the pictures used,
unlike that in the lines from Burns, would be considered in ordinary life as positively
ugly or at least neutral.

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great -sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devoured
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done: perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honor bright: to have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery....
(From Troilus and Cressida)
 190 This is a speech which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of a character, Ulysses, who is
trying to persuade Achilles to take part again in the war against the Trojans and not to
SECTION 3 rest on the reputation for valor he has already made. The pictures given here are definitely
ANGLO-AMERICAN unattractive: a beggar putting alms in his sack, a monster, scraps of food, a rusty suit of ar-
NEw CRITICISM mor. The poetic effect of the passage, then, cannot depend on the intrinsic prettiness of any
of the objects mentioned. If we speak of the beauty of the passage, as Yeats speaks of the
beauty of the lines from Burns, we must mean the relation of the objects to each other and
to the idea of the passage.
Let us try to see what these relationships are. Ulysses is saying that a reputation for
good deeds is quickly forgotten. Good deeds are like alms given to an ungrateful beggar,
or are like scraps of food which the beggar forgets as soon as he has satisfied his appetite.
The picture is poetically good because it accurately indicates the attitude which Ulysses
wishes Achilles to take toward his past achievements. If Ulysses had merely given Achil-
les the general statement that the public forgets good deeds, he could not have stirred the
feelings which Achilles, the hero and aristocrat, must have felt toward beggars and bro-
ken scraps of food. He plays on this contempt and disgust. The images of the first five
lines, as we have seen, are closely bound together to define a certain attitude. Then, after
a general statement that perseverance is necessary to keep honor bright, the image of the
coat of mail is introduced: a man who bases his claim to honor merely on a deed done in
the past like a suit of mail that, although it is hung up as a trophy of some great event,
simply rusts. It is important to see that this is not a mere representation of the general
point made about perseverance, but that it also develops and adds to the idea, for it carries
with it a special urgency to immediate action. There is not only the application, as it were,
of the general idea in a concrete image that can be seen as a picture, but also an applica-
tion appropriate to the special situation, the need for Achilles to put on his armor and
return to the battle.
The use of images in this passage, then, represents not only a close-knit organization
because of the relation of the images to each other and to the intention of the passage, but
also a psychological development, for the images lead from one attitude and state of mind
to another. One can show the closeness of the organization of the passage even in the use
of a single word. For example, take the word monumental in the last line. A great deal of
the "meaning" of the passage is concentrated in this one word. The word monumental
literally means, of course, the quality of something that stands as a monument. The coat
of rusty mail which Ulysses uses in his comparison is one hung up as a trophy or monu-
ment to past achievement. But the word monumental is also used to indicate something
tremendous in size. The word, then, as it appears in the present context suggests two ap-
plications to the reader: the mail is hung up as a monument and the mockery is monu-
mental, or tremendous, in size. The fact that the word suggests to the reader these two
applications gives a somewhat ironical, or sarcastic, effect to the passage-which is ex-
actly what is intended by the speaker.
The purpose in giving the passages and comments above is to illustrate the principle
that in judging the various elements of a poem or of a passage of poetry-rhythm, image,
diction, etc.-one must consider not the elements taken in isolation but in relation to the
total organization and intention. That is, the elements must play an organic part in the
poem.

Dramatic Aspect of Poetry

It may be objected that most of the examples given above are drawn from plays and do not
represent poetry as we more ordinarily find it. But the principle illustrated by these ex-
amples applies to all other poetry. It applies because all poetry, including even short lyrics 191
or descriptive pieces, involves a dramatic organization. This is clear when we reflect that
every poem implies a speaker of the poem, either the poet writing in his own person or 3.2
someone into whose mouth the poem is put, and that the poem represents the reaction of CLEANTH BRooKs

such a person to a situation, a scene, or an idea. In reading poetry it is well to remember AND RoBERT

this dramatic aspect and to be sure that one sees the part it plays in any given poem. PENN WARREN

What Good Is Poetry?

But even if one understands the principles by which poetry is to be read, one may still ask,
"What good is poetry?" The value of science we all know. But we have attempted in the
preceding pages to show how different the organization of poetry is from that of science,
and how different are their objectives. It is only fair to admit that what makes science
valuable cannot be held to make poetry valuable also. Science gives us a certain kind of
description of the world-a description which is within its own terms verifiable-and
gives us a basis for more effective practical achievement. Science is, as Bertrand Russell
has called it, "power-knowledge."

But scientific thought is ... essentially power-thought-the sort of thought, that is to say,
whose purpose, conscious or unconscious, is to give power to its possessor. Now power is a
causal concept, and to obtain power over any given material one need only understand the
causal laws to which it is subject. This is an essentially abstract matter, and the more ir-
relevant details we can omit from our purview, the more powerful our thoughts will be-
come. The same sort of thing can be illustrated in the economic sphere. The cultivator,
who knows every corner of his farm, has a concrete knowledge of wheat, and makes very
little money; the railway which carries his wheat views it in a slightly more abstract way,
and makes rather more money; the stock exchange manipulator, who knows it only in its
purely abstract aspect of something which may go up or down, is, in his way, as remote
from concrete reality as the physicist, and he, of all those concerned in the economic
sphere, makes the most money and has the most power. So it is with science, though the
power which the man of science seeks is more remote and impersonal than that which is
sought on the stock exchange. 3

But we have seen, and can see in real life every day, how much of our experience
eludes the statements science can make; and how merely practical statements or state-
ments that approximate a scientific form satisfy only a part of our interests. One does not
have to look farther than the fact that this wide domain of human interests exists to find
a justification for poetry. Most people are thoroughly satisfied to admit the value of any
activity which satisfies a basic and healthy human interest. It may be well, however, to
take a few moments to remind the reader that this interest exists, and to make plain that
it is this interest which poetry seeks to satisfy.
We have already seen how often talk that is apparently practical really attempts to
satisfy a non-practical interest. It is easy to point out many other aspects of our experi-
ence that testify to the fact that people-even people who think that they care nothing for
poetry-really have interests which are the same as those satisfied by poetry. Very few
people indeed depend for the satisfaction of these interests merely on their routine activi-
ties. Instead, they listen to speeches, go to church, listen to radio programs, read magazine
stories or the gossip columns of newspapers. Such people do not see any relation between
these activities and poetry, but poetry does concern the same impulses and the same inter-
ests. Why and how good poetry, and good literature in general, give a fuller satisfaction
to these impulses and interests is a matter which can best be stated in connection with
 192 concrete examples before us, and the attempt in this book to state this matter will be
gradually developed by the study of examples. But the fundamental point, namely, that
SEcnoN 3 poetry has a basis in common human interests, must not be forgotten at the beginning of
ANGLO-AMERICAN any attempt tO Study poetry.
NEw CRITICISM The question of the value of poetry, then, is to be answered by saying that it springs
from a basic human impulse and fulfills a basic human interest. To answer the question
finally, and not immediately, one would have to answer the question as to the value of
those common impulses and interests. But that is a question which lies outside of the
present concern. As we enter into a study of poetry it is only necessary to see that poetry
is not an isolated and eccentric thing, but springs from the most fundamental interests
which human beings have.

NOTES

1. "Science and Modern Life," The Atlantic 3· The Scientific Outlook, by Bertrand Russell,
Monthly, April, 1928. London: Allen and Unwin, p. 86.
2. "The Symbolism of Poetry," Essays, New York:

Macmillan, p. 191.

3.3 The Three Voices ofPoetry1 (1953)

T. S. ELIOT

The first voice is the voice of the poet talking to himself-or to nobody. The second is the
voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small. The third is the voice of
the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse; when he is say-
ing, not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the limits of
one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character. The distinction be-
tween the first and the second voice, between the poet speaking to himself and the poet
speaking to other people, points to the problem of poetic communication; the distinction
between the poet addressing other people in either his own voice or an assumed voice, and
the poet inventing speech in which imaginary characters address each other, points to the
problem of the difference between dramatic, quasi-dramatic, and non-dramatic verse.
I wish to anticipate a question that some of you may well raise. Cannot a poem be writ-
ten for the ear, or for the eye, of one person alone? You may say simply, "Isn't love poetry at
times a form of communication between one person and one other, with no thought of a
further audience?"
There are at least two people who might have disagreed with me on this point: Mr.
and Mrs. Robert Browning. In the poem "One Word More," written as an epilogue to
Men and Women, and addressed to Mrs. Browning, the husband makes a striking value
judgment:

Rafael made a century of sonnets,

Made and wrote them in a certain volume,
 Din ted with the silver-pointed pencil 193
Else he only used to draw Madonnas:
3.3
These, the world might view-but one, the volume.
T. S. ELIOT
Who that one, you ask? Your heart instructs you . ..
You and I would rather read that volume . . .
Would we not? than wonder at Madonnas . . .

Dante once prepared to paint an angel:

Whom to please? You whisper 'Beatrice' . ..
You and I would rather see that angel,
Painted by the tenderness of Dante,
Would we not?-than read a fresh Inferno.

I agree that one Inferno, even by Dante, is enough; and perhaps we need not too much re-
gret the fact that Rafael did not multiply his Madonnas: but I can only say that I feel no
curiosity whatever about Rafael's sonnets or Dante's angel. If Rafael wrote, or Dante
painted, for the eyes of one person alone, let their privacy be respected. We know that Mr.
and Mrs. Browning liked to write poems to each other, because they published them, and
some of them are good poems. We know that Rossetti thought that he was writing his
"House of Life" sonnets for one person, and that he was only persuaded by his friends to
disinter them. Now, I do not deny that a poem may be addressed to one person: there is a
well-known form, not always amatory in content, called The Epistle. We shall never have
conclusive evidence: for the testimony of poets as to what they thought they were doing
when they wrote a poem, cannot be taken altogether at its face value. But my opinion is,
that a good love poem, though it may be addressed to one person, is always meant to be
overheard by other people. Surely, the proper language of love-that is, of communica-
tion to the beloved and to no one else-is prose.
Having dismissed as an illusion the voice of the poet talking to one person only, I
think that the best way for me to try to make my three voices audible, is to trace the gen-
esis of the distinction in my own mind. The writer to whose mind the distinction is most
likely to occur is probably the writer like myself, who has spent a good many years in
writing poetry, before attempting to write for the stage at all. It may be, as I have read,
that there is a dramatic element in much of my early work. It may be that from the begin-
ning I aspired unconsciously to the theatre-or, unfriendly critics might say, to Shaftes-
bury Avenue and Broadway. I have, however, gradually come to the conclusion that in
writing verse for the stage both the process and the outcome are very different from what
they are in writing verse to be read or recited. Twenty years ago I was commissioned to
write a pageant play to be called The Rock. The invitation to write the words for this
spectacle-the occasion of which was an appeal for funds for church-building in new
housing areas-came at a moment when I seemed to myself to have exhausted my meager
poetic gifts, and to have nothing more to say. To be, at such a moment, commissioned to
write something which, good or bad, must be delivered by a certain date, may have the
effect that vigorous cranking sometimes has upon a motor car when the battery is run
down. The task was clearly laid out: I had only to write the words of prose dialogue for
scenes of the usual historical pageant pattern, for which I had been given a scenario. I had
also to provide a number of choral passages in verse, the content of which was left to my
own devices: except for the reasonable stipulation that all the choruses were expected to
have some relevance to the purpose of the pageant, and that each chorus was to occupy a
precise number of minutes of stage time. But in carrying out this second part of my task,
 194 there was nothing to call my attention to the third, or dramatic voice: it was the second
voice, that of myself addressing-indeed haranguing-an audience, that was most dis-
SECTION 3 tinctly audible. Apart from the obvious fact that writing to order is not the same thing as
ANGLo-AMERICAN writing to please oneself, I learnt only that verse to be spoken by a choir should be differ-
NEw CRITICISM ent from verse to be spoken by one person; and that the more voices you have in your choir,
the simpler and more direct the vocabulary, the syntax, and the content of your lines must
be. This chorus of The Rock was not a dramatic voice; though many lines were distributed,
the personages were unindividuated. Its members were speaking for me, not uttering
words that really represented any supposed character of their own.
The chorus in Murder in the Cathedral does, I think, represent some advance in dra-
matic development: that is to say, I set myself the task of writing lines, not for an anony-
mous chorus, but for a chorus of women of Canterbury-one might almost say, charwomen
of Canterbury. I had to make some effort to identify myself with these women, instead of
merely identifying them with myself. But as for the dialogue of the play, the plot had the
drawback (from the point of view of my own dramatic education) of presenting only one
dominant character; and what dramatic conflict there is takes place within the mind of
that character. The third, or dramatic voice, did not make itself audible to me until I first
attacked the problem of presenting two (or more) characters, in some sort of conflict,
misunderstanding, or attempt to understand each other, characters with each of whom I
had to try to identify myself while writing the words for him or her to speak. You may
remember that Mrs. Cluppins, in the trial of the case of Bardell v. Pickwick, testified that
"the voices was very loud, sir, and forced themselves upon my ear." "Well, Mrs. Cluppins,"
said Sergeant Buzfuz, "you were not listening, but you heard the voices." It was in 1938,
then, that the third voice began to force itself upon my ear.
At this point I can fancy the reader murmuring: "''m sure he has said all this before."
I will assist memory by supplying the reference. In a lecture on "Poetry and Drama," de-
livered exactly three years ago and subsequently published, I said:
In writing other verse (i.e. non-dramatic verse) I think that one is writing, so to speak, in
terms of one's own voice: the way it sounds when you read it to yourself is the test. For it is
yourself speaking. The question of communication, of what the reader will get from it, is not
paramount. ...

There is some confusion of pronouns in this passage, but I think that the meaning is
clear; so clear, as to be a glimpse of the obvious. At that stage, I rioted only the difference
between speaking for oneself, and speaking for an imaginary character; and I passed on
to other considerations about the nature of poetic drama. I was beginning to be aware of
the difference between the first and the third voice, but gave no attention to the second
voice, of which I shall say more presently. I am now trying to penetrate a little further into
the problem. So, before going on to consider the other voices, I want to pursue for a few
moments the complexities of the third voice.
In a verse play, you will probably have to find words for several characters differing
widely from each other in background, temperament, education, and intelligence. You
cannot afford to identify one of these characters with yourself, and give him (or her) all
the "poetry" to speak. The poetry (I mean, the language at those dramatic moments when
it reaches intensity) must be as widely distributed as characterization permits; and each
of your characters, when he has words to speak which are poetry and not merely verse,
must be given lines appropriate to himself. When the poetry comes, the personage on the
stage must not give the impression of being merely a mouthpiece for the author. Hence
the author is limited by the kind of poetry, and the degree of intensity in its kind, which
can be plausibly attributed to each character in his play. And these lines of poetry must 195
also justify themselves by their development of the situation in which they are spoken.
Even if a burst of magnificent poetry is suitable enough for the character to which it is 3.3
assigned, it must also convince us that it is necessary to the action; that it is helping to T. s. ELIOT
extract the utmost emotional intensity out of the situation. The poet writing for the the-
atre may, as I have found, make two mistakes: that of assigning to a personage lines of
poetry not suitable to be spoken by that personage, and that of assigning lines which,
however suitable to the personage, yet fail to forward the action of the play. There are, in
some of the minor Elizabethan dramatists, passages of magnificent poetry which are in
both respects out of place-fine enough to preserve the play for ever as literature, but yet
so inappropriate as to prevent the play from being a dramatic masterpiece. The best-
known instances occur in Marlowe's Tamburlaine.
How have the very great dramatic poets-Sophocles, or Shakespeare, or Racine-
dealt with this difficulty? This is, of course, a problem which concerns all imaginative
fiction-novels and prose plays-in which the characters may be said to live. I can't see,
myself, any way to make a character live except to have a profound sympathy with that
character. Ideally, a dramatist, who has usually far fewer characters to manipulate than a
novelist, and who has only two hours or so of life to allow them, should sympathize pro-
foundly with all of his characters: but that is a counsel of perfection, because the plot of a
play with even a very small cast may require the presence of one or more characters in
whose reality, apart from their contribution to the action, we are uninterested. I wonder,
however, whether it is possible to make completely real a wholly villainous character one
toward whom neither the author. nor anyone else can feel anything but antipathy. We
need an admixture of weakness with either heroic virtue or satanic villainy, to make char-
acter plausible. Iago frightens me more than Richard III; I am not sure that Parolles, in
All's Well That Ends Well, does not disturb me more than Iago. (And I am quite sure that
Rosamund Viney, in Middlemarch, frightens me far more than Goneril or Regan.) It
seems to me that what happens, when an author creates a vital character, is a sort of give-
and-take. The author may put into that character, besides its other attributes, some trait
of his own, some strength or weakness, some tendency to violence or to indecision, some
eccentricity even, that he has found in himself. Something perhaps never realized in his
own life, something of which those who know him best may be unaware, something not
restricted in transmission to characters of the same temperament, the same age, and,
least of all, of the same sex. Some bit of himself that the author gives to a character may be
the germ from which the life of that character starts. On the other hand, a character
which succeeds in interesting its author may elicit from the author latent potentialities of
his own being. I believe that the author imparts something of himself to his characters,
but I also believe that he is influenced by the characters he creates. It would be only too
easy to lose oneself in a maze of speculation about the process by which an imaginary
-:haracter can become as real for us as people we have known. I have penetrated into this
maze so far only to indicate the difficulties, the limitations, the fascination, for a poet who
is used to writing poetry in his own person, of the problem of making imaginary person-
ages talk poetry. And the difference, the abyss, between writing for the first and for the
third voice.
The peculiarity of my third voice, the voice of poetic drama, is brought out in another
,,·ay by comparing it with the voice of the poet in non-dramatic poetry which has a dra-
matic element in it-and conspicuously in the dramatic monologue. Browning, in an
uncritical moment, addressed himself as "Robert Browning, you writer of plays." How
:nany of us have read a play by Browning more than once; and, if we have read it more
 196 than once, was our motive the expectation of enjoyment? What personage, in a play by
Browning, remains living in our mind? On the other hand, who can forget Fra Lippo Lippi,
SECTION 3 or Andrea del Sarto, or Bishop Blougram, or the other bishop who ordered his tomb? It
ANGLo-AMERICAN would seem without further examination, from Browning's mastery of the dramatic
NEw CRITICISM monologue, and his very moderate achievement in the drama, that the two forms must be
essentially different. Is there, perhaps, another voice which I have failed to hear, the voice
of the dramatic poet whose dramatic gifts are best exercised outside of the theatre? And
certainly, if any poetry, not of the stage, deserves to be characterized as "dramatic," it is
Browning's.
In a play, as I have said, an author must have divided loyalties; he must sympathize
with characters who may be in no way sympathetic to each other. And he must allocate
the 'poetry' as widely as the limitations of each imaginary character permit. This neces-
sity to divide the poetry implies some variation of the style of the poetry according to the
character to whom it is given. The fact that a number of characters in a play have claims
upon the author, for their allotment of poetic speech, compels him to try to extract the
poetry from the character, rather than impose his poetry upon it. Now, in the dramatic
monologue we have no such check. The author is just as likely to identify the character
with himself, as himself with the character: for the check is missing that will prevent him
from doing so-and that check is the necessity for identifying himself with some other
character replying to the first. What we normally hear, in fact, in the dramatic mono-
logue, is the voice of the poet, who has put on the costume and make-up either of some
historical character, or of one out of fiction. His personage must be identified to us-as an
individual, or at least as a type-before he begins to speak. If, as frequently with Brown-
ing, the poet is speaking in the role of an historical personage, like Lippo Lippi, or in the
role of a known character of fiction, like Cali ban, he has taken possession of that charac-
ter. And the difference is most evident in his "Caliban upon Setebos". In The Tempest, it is
Caliban who speaks; in "Caliban upon Setebos," it is Browning's voice that we hear, Brown-
ing talking aloud through Caliban. It was Browning's greatest disciple, Mr. Ezra Pound,
who adopted the term "persona" to indicate the several historical characters through whom
he spoke: and the term is just.
I risk the generalization also, which may indeed be far too sweeping, that dramatic
monologue cannot create a character. For character is created and made real only in an
action, a communication between imaginary people. It is not irrelevant that when the dra-
matic monologue is not put into the mouth of some character already known to the reader-
from history or from fiction-we are likely to ask the question "Who was the original?"
About Bishop Blougram people have always been impelled to ask, how far was this in-
tended to be a portrait of Cardinal Manning, or of some other ecclesiastic? The poet,
speaking, as Browning does, in his own voice, cannot bring a character to life: he can only
mimic a character otherwise known to us. And does not the point of mimicry lie in the
recognition of the person mimicked, and in the incompleteness of the illusion? We have
to be aware that the mimic and the person mimicked are different people: if we are actu-
ally deceived, mimicry becomes impersonation. When we listen to a play by Shakespeare,
we listen not to Shakespeare but to his characters; when we read a dramatic monologue
by Browning, we cannot suppose that we are listening to any other voice than that of
Browning himself.
In the dramatic monologue, then, it is surely the second voice, the voice of the poet
talking to other people, that is dominant. The mere fact that he is assuming a role, that he
is speaking through a mask, implies the presence of an audience: why should a man put
on fancy dress and a mask only to talk to himself? The second voice is, in fact, the voice
most often and most clearly heard in poetry that is not of the theatre: in all poetry, cer- 197
tainly, that has a conscious social purpose-poetry intended to amuse or to instruct, po-
etry that tells a story, poetry that preaches or points a moral, or satire which is a form of 3.3
preaching. For what is the point of a story without an audience, or of a sermon without a T. s. ELIOT
congregation? The voice of the poet addressing other people is the dominant voice of epic,
though not the only voice. In Homer, for instance, there is heard also, from time to time,
the dramatic voice: there are moments when we hear, not Homer telling us what a hero
said, but the voice of the hero himself. The Divine Comedy is not in the exact sense an
epic, but here also we hear men and women speaking to us. And we have no reason to
suppose that Milton's sympathy with Satan was so exclusive as to seal him of the Devil's
Party. But the epic is essentially a tale told to an audience, while drama is essentially an
action exhibited to an audience.
Now, what about the poetry of the first voice-that which is not primarily an attempt
to communicate with anyone at all?
I must make the point that this poetry is not necessarily what we call loosely "lyric
poetry." The term "lyric" itself is unsatisfactory. We think first of verse intended to be
sung-from the songs of Campion and Shakespeare and Burns, to the arias of W. S. Gil-
bert, or the words of the latest "musical number." But we apply it also to poetry that was
never intended for a musical setting, or which we dissociate from its music: we speak of
the "lyric verse" of the metaphysical poets, ofVaughan and Marvell as well as Donne and
Herbert. The very definition of "lyric", in the Oxford Dictionary, indicates that the word
cannot be satisfactorily defined:
Lyric: Now the name for short poems, usually divided into stanzas or strophes, and di-
rectly expressing the poet's own thoughts and sentiments.

How short does a poem have to be, to be called a "lyric"? The emphasis on brevity, and
the suggestion of division into stanzas, seem residual from the association of the voice
with music. But there is no necessary relation between brevity and the expression of the
poet's own thoughts and feelings. "Come unto these yellow sands" or "Hark! hark! the
lark" are lyrics-are they not?-but what sense is there in saying that they express di-
rectly the poet's own thoughts and sentiments? London, The Vanity of Human Wishes,
and The Deserted Village are all poems which appear to express the poet's own thoughts
and sentiments, but do we ever think of such poems as "lyrical"? They are certainly not
short. Between them, all the poems I have mentioned seem to fail to qualify as lyrics, just
as Mr. Daddy Longlegs and Mr. Floppy Fly failed to qualify as courtiers:

One never more can go to court,

Because his legs have grown too short;
The other cannot sing a song,
Because his legs have grown too long!

It is obviously the lyric in the sense of a poem "directly expressing the poet's own
thoughts and sentiments," not in the quite unrelated sense of a short poem intended to be
set to music, that is relevant to my first voice-the voice of the poet talking to himself-or
to nobody. It is in this sense that the German poet Gottfried Benn, in a very interesting
lecture entitled Probleme der Lyrik, thinks of lyric as the poetry of the first voice: he in-
cludes, I feel sure, such poems as Rilke's Duinese Elegies and Valery's La feune Parque.
Where he speaks of"lyric poetry," then, I should prefer to say "meditative verse."
What, asks Herr Benn in this lecture, does the writer of such a poem, "addressed to
no one," start with? There is first, he says, an inert embryo or "creative germ" (ein dumpfer
 198 schopferischer Keirn) and, on the other hand, the Language, the resources of the words at
the poet's command. He has something germinating in him for which he must find words;
SECTION 3 but he cannot know what words he wants until he has found the words; he cannot identify
ANGLo-AMERICAN this embryo until it has been transformed into an arrangement of the right words in the
NEw CRITICISM right order. When you have the words for it, the "thing" for which the words had to be
found has disappeared, replaced by a poem. What you start from is nothing so definite as
an emotion, in any ordinary sense; it is still more certainly not an idea; it is-to adapt two
lines of Beddoes to a different meaning-a
bodiless childful of life in the gloom
Crying with frog voice, 'what shall I be?'

I agree with Gottfried Benn, and I would go a little further. In a poem which is neither di-
dactic nor narrative, and not animated by any other social purpose, the poet may be con-
cerned solely with expressing in verse-using all his resources of words, with their history,
their connotations, their music-this obscure impulse. He does not know what he has to
say until he has said it; and in the effort to say it he is not concerned with making other
people understand anything. He is not concerned, at this stage, with other people at all:
only with finding the right words or, anyhow, the least wrong words. He is not concerned
whether anybody else will ever listen to them or not, or whether anybody else will ever
understand them if he does. He is oppressed by a burden which he must bring to birth in
order to obtain relief. Or, to change the figure of speech, he is haunted by a demon, a de-
mon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no
name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of form of exorcism of this
demon. In other words again, he is going to all that trouble, not in order to communicate
with anyone, but to gain relief from acute discomfort; and when the words are finally ar-
ranged in the right way-or in what he comes to accept as the best arrangement he can
find-he may experience a moment of exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of
something very near annihilation, which is in itself indescribable. And then he can say to
the poem: "Go away! Find a place for your self in a book-and don't expect me to take any
further interest in you."
I don't believe that the relation of a poem to its origins is capable of being more clearly
traced. You can read the essays of Paul Valery, who studied the workings of his own mind
in the composition of a poem more perseveringly than any other poet has done. But if, ei-
ther on the basis of what poets try to tell you, or by biographical research, with or without
the tools of the psychologist, you attempt to explain a poem, you will probably be getting
further and further away from the poem without arriving at any other destination. The
attempt to explain the poem by tracing it back to its origins will distract attention from the
poem, to direct it on to something else which, in the form in which it can be apprehended
by the critic and his readers, has no relation to the poem and throws no light upon it. I
should not like you to think that I am trying to make the writing of a poem more of a mys-
tery than it is. What I am maintaining is, that the first effort of the poet should be to
achieve clarity for himself, to assure himself that the poem is the right outcome of the
process that has taken place. The most bungling form of obscurity is that of the poet who
has not been able to express himself to himself; the shoddiest form is found when the poet
is trying to persuade himself that he has something to say when he hasn't.
So far I have been speaking, for the sake of simplicity, of the three voices as if they
were mutually exclusive: as if the poet, in any particular poem, was speaking either to
himself or to others, and as if neither of the first two voices was audible in good dramatic
verse. And this indeed is the conclusion to which Herr Benn's argument appears to lead
him: he speaks as if the poetry of the first voice-which he considers, moreover, to be on 199
the whole a development of our own age-was a totally different kind of poetry from that
of the poet addressing an audience. But tor me the voices are most often found together- 3.3
the first and second, I mean, in non-dramatic poetry; and together with the third in dra- T. s. ELIOT
matic poetry too. Even though, as I have maintained, the author of a poem may have
written it primarily without thought of an audience, he will also want to know what the
poem which has satisfied him will have to say to other people. There are, first of all, those
few friends to whose criticism he may wish to submit it before considering it completed.
They can be very helpful, in suggesting a word or a phrase which the author has not been
able to find for himself; though their greatest service perhaps is to say simply "this pas-
sage won't do"-thus confirming a suspicion which the author had been suppressing
from his own consciousness. But I am not thinking primarily of the few judicious friends
whose opinion the author prizes, but of the larger and unknown audience-people to
whom the author's name means only his poem which they have read. The final handing
over, so to speak, of the poem to an unknown audience, for what that audience will make
of it, seems to me the consummation of the process begun in solitude and without
thought of the audience, the long process of gestation of the poem, because it marks the
final separation of the poem from the author. Let the author, at this point, rest in peace.
So much for the poem which is primarily a poem of the first voice. I think that in every
poem, from the private meditation to the epic or the drama, there is more than one voice
to be heard. If the author never spoke to himself, the result would not be poetry, though it
might be magnificent rhetoric; and part of our enjoyment of great poetry is the enjoy-
ment of overhearing words which are not addressed to us. But if the poem were exclu-
sively for the author, it would be a poem in a private and unknown language; and a poem
which was a poem only for the author would not be a poem at all. And in poetic drama, I
am inclined to believe that all three voices are audible. First, the voice of each character-
an individual voice different from that of any other character: so that of each utterance we
can say, that it could only have come from that character. There may be from time to
time, and perhaps when we least notice it, the voices of the author and the character in
unison, saying something appropriate to the character, but something which the author
could say for himself also, though the words may not have quite the same meaning for
both. That may be a very different thing from the ventriloquism which makes the charac-
ter only a mouthpiece for the author's ideas or sentiments.
To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow . ..

Is not the perpetual shock and surprise of these hackneyed lines evidence that Shake-
speare and Macbeth are uttering the words in unison, though perhaps with somewhat
different meaning? And finally there are the lines, in plays by one of the supreme poetic
dramatists, in which we hear a more impersonal voice still than that of either the charac-
ter or the author.

Ripeness is all

or

Simply the thing I am

Shall make me live.

And now I should like to return for a moment to Gottfried Benn and his unknown,
dark psychic material-we might say, the octopus or angel with which the poet struggles. I
suggest that between the three kinds of poetry to which my three voices correspond there is
 200 a certain difference of process. In the poem in which the first voice, that of the poet talking
to himself, dominates, the "psychic material" tends to create its own form-the eventual
SECTION 3 form will be to a greater or less degree the form for that one poem and for no other. It is
ANGLo-AMERICAN misleading, of course, to speak of the material as creating or imposing its own form: what
NEw CRITICISM happens is a simultaneous development of form and material; for the form affects the mate-
rial at every stage; and perhaps all the material does is to repeat "not that! not that!" in the
face of each unsuccessful attempt at formal organization; and finally the material is identi-
fied with its form. But in poetry of the second and in that of the third voice, the form is al-
ready to some extent given. However much it may be transformed before the poem is fin-
ished, it can be represented from the start by an outline or scenario. Ifi choose to tell a story,
I must have some notion of the plot of the story I propose to tell; ifl undertake satire, moral-
izing, or invective, there is already something given which I can recognize and which exists
for others as well as myself. And ifi set out to write a play, I start by an act of choice: I settle
upon a particular emotional situation, out of which characters and a plot will emerge, and I
can make a plain prose outline of the play in advance-however much that outline may be
altered before the play is finished, by the way in which the characters develop. It is likely, of
course, that it is in the beginning the pressure of some rude unknown psychic material that
directs the poet to tell that particular story, to develop that particular situation. And on the
other hand, the frame, once chosen, within which the author has elected to work, may itself
evoke other psychic material; and then, lines of poetry may come into being, not from the
original impulse, but from a secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind. All that mat-
ters is, that in the end the voices should be heard in harmony; and, as I have said, I doubt
whether in any real poem only one voice is audible.
The reader may well, by now, have been asking himself what I have been up to in all
these speculations. Have I been toiling to weave a labored web of useless ingenuity? Well,
I have been trying to talk, not to myself-as you may have been tempted to think-but to
the reader of poetry. I should like to think that it might interest the reader of poetry to
test my assertions in his own reading. Can you distinguish these voices in the poetry you
read, or hear recited, or hear in the theatre? If you complain that a poet is obscure, and
apparently ignoring you, the reader, or that he is speaking only to a limited circle of initi-
ates from which you are excluded-remember that what he may have been trying to do,
was to put something into words which could not be said in any other way, and therefore
in a language which may be worth the trouble of learning. If you complain that a poet is
too rhetorical, and that he addresses you as if you were a public meeting, try to listen for
the moments when he is not speaking to you, but merely allowing himself to be over-
heard: he may be a Dryden, a Pope, or a Byron. And if you have to listen to a verse play,
take it first at its face value, as entertainment, for each character speaking for himself
with whatever degree of reality his author has been able to endow him. Perhaps, if it is a
great play, and you do not try too hard to hear them, you may discern the other voices too.
For the work of a great poetic dramatist, like Shakespeare, constitutes a world. Each char-
acter speaks for himself, but no other poet could have found those words for him to
speak. If you seek for Shakespeare, you will find him only in the characters he created; for
the one thing in common between the characters is that no one but Shakespeare could
have created any of them. The world of a great poetic dramatist is a world in which the
creator is everywhere present, and everywhere hidden.

NOTE
The eleventh Annual Lecture of the National
1. the N.B.L. by the Cambridge University Press.
Book League, delivered in 1953 and published for
The Intentional Fallacy (r9+6) 3.4
\V. K. WIMSATT and MONROE BEARDSLEY

He owns with toil he wrote the following scenes;

But, if they're naught, ne'er spare him for his pains:
Damn him the more; have no commiseration
For dullness on mature deliberation.
William Congreve, Prologue to The Way of the World

The claim of the author's "intention" upon the critic's judgment has been challenged in a
number of recent discussions, notably in the debate entitled The Personal Heresy, between
Professors Lewis and Til! yard. But it seems doubtful if this claim and most of its romantic
.::orollaries are as yet subject to any widespread questioning. The present writers, in a
short article entitled "Intention" for a Dictionary! ofliterary criticism, raised the issue but
._,-ere unable to pursue its implications at any length. We argued that the design or inten-
:ion of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success
)fa work of literary art, and it seems to us that this is a principle which goes deep into
;orne differences in the history of critical attitudes. It is a principle which accepted or re-
·ccted points to the polar opposites of classical "imitation" and romantic expression. It
entails many specific truths about inspiration, authenticity, biography, literary history
and scholarship, and about some trends of contemporary poetry, especially its allusive-
ness. There is hardly a problem of literary criticism in which the critic's approach will not
be qualified by his view of"intention."
Intention, as we shall use the term, corresponds to what he intended in a formula
which more or less explicitly has had wide acceptance. "In order to judge the poet's per-
formance, we must know what he intended." Intention is design or plan in the author's
mind. Intention has obvious affinities for the author's attitude toward his work, the way
he felt, what made him write.
We begin our discussion with a series of propositions summarized and abstracted to
a degree where they seem to us axiomatic.

1. A poem does not come into existence by accident. The words of a poem, as Pro-
fessor Stoll has remarked, come out of a head, not out of a hat. Yet to insist on the
designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as
a standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet's performance.
2. One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to the question about inten-
tion. How is he to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in do-
ing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did
not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go out-
side the poem-for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the
poem. "Only one caveat must be borne in mind," says an eminent intentionalist 2
 202 in a moment when his theory repudiates itself; "the poet's aim must be judged at
the moment of the creative act, that is to say, by the art of the poem itself."
SECTION 3 J. Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it
ANGLO·AMERICAN work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention of an arti-
NEW CRITICISM ficer. "A poem should not mean but be." A poem can be only through its
meaning-since its medium is words-yet it is, simply is, in the sense that we
have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant. Poetry is a feat of
style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at once. Poetry succeeds
because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has
been excluded, like lumps from pudding and "bugs" from machinery. In this
respect poetry differs from practical messages, which are successful if and only
if we correctly infer the intention. They are more abstract than poetry.
4· The meaning of a poem may certainly be a personal one, in the sense that a
poem expresses a personality or state of soul rather than a physical object like
an apple. But even a short lyric poem is dramatic, the response of a speaker
(no matter how abstractly conceived) to a situation (no matter how universal-
ized). We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immedi-
ately to the dramatic speaker, and if to the author at all, only by an act of bio-
graphical inference.
5. There is a sense in which an author, by revision, may better achieve his original
intention. But it is a very abstract sense. He intended to write a better work, or
a better work of a certain kind, and now has done it. But it follows that his for-
mer concrete intention was not his intention. "He's the man we were in search
of, that's true," says Hardy's rustic constable, "and yet he's not the man we were
in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted."

"Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "a judge, who does not explore his own con-
sciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will,
a contract, or the constitution? The poem is not the critic's own." He has accurately diag-
nosed two forms of irresponsibility, one of which he prefers. Our view is yet different. The
poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth
and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem
belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public,
and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge. What is said about the
poem is subject to the same scrutiny as any statement in linguistics or in the general sci-
ence of psychology.
A critic of our Dictionary article, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, has argued 3 that there
are two kinds of inquiry about a work of art: (1) whether the artist achieved his inten-
tions; (2) whether the work of art "ought ever to have been undertaken at all" and so
"whether it is worth preserving." Number (2), Coomaraswamy maintains, is not "criti-
cism of any work of art qua work of art," but is rather moral criticism; number (1) is
artistic criticism. But we maintain that (2) need not be moral criticism: that there is
another way of deciding whether works of art are worth preserving and whether, in a
sense, they "ought" to have been undertaken, and this is the way of objective criticism
of works of art as such, the way which enables us to distinguish between a skillful mur-
der and a skillful poem. A skillful murder is an example which Coomaraswamy uses,
and in his system the difference between the murder and the poem is simply a "moral"
one, not an "artistic" one, since each if carried out according to plan is "artistically"
successful. We maintain that (2) is an inquiry of more worth than (1), and since (2) and
not (1) is capable of distinguishing poetry from murder, the name "artistic criticism" is 203
properly given to (2).
3.4
II W. K. WIMSATT AND

It is not so much a historical statement as a definition to say that the intentional fallacy is MONROE BEARDSLEY

a Romantic one. When a rhetorician of the first century A.D. writes: "Sublimity is the
echo of a great soul," or when he tells us that "Homer enters into the sublime actions of
his heroes" and "shares the full inspiration of the combat," we shall not be surprised to
find this rhetorician considered as a distant harbinger of romanticism and greeted in the
warmest terms by Saintsbury. One may wish to argue whether Longinus should be called
romantic, but there can hardly be a doubt that in one important way he is.
Goethe's three questions for "constructive criticism" are "What did the author set out
to do? Was his plan reasonable and sensible, and how far did he succeed in carrying it
out?" If one leaves out the middle question, one has in effect the system of Croce-the
culmination and crowning philosophic expression of romanticism. The beautiful is the
successful intuition-expression, and the ugly is the unsuccessful; the intuition or private
part of art is the aesthetic fact, and the medium or public part is not the subject of aes-
thetic at all.
The Madonna of Cimabue is still in the Church of Santa Maria Novella; but does she
speak to the visitor of today as to the Florentines of the thirteenth century?
Historical interpretation labors ... to reintegrate in us the psychological conditions which
have changed in the course of history. It ... enables us to see a work of art (a physical
object) as its author saw it in the moment of production. 4

The first italics are Croce's, the second ours. The upshot of Croce's system is an am-
biguous emphasis on history. With such passages as a point of departure a critic may
write a nice analysis of the meaning or "spirit" of a play by Shakespeare or Corneille-a
process that involves close historical study but remains aesthetic criticism-or he may,
with equal plausibility, produce an essay in sociology, biography, or other kinds of non-
aesthetic history.

III
I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts .... I took them some of the most
elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them ....
Will you believe me? ... there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better
about their poetry than they did themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets
write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration.
Plato, Apology

That reiterated mistrust of the poets which we hear from Socrates may have been part of
a rigorously ascetic view in which we hardly wish to participate, yet Plato's Socrates saw a
truth about the poetic mind which the world no longer commonly sees-so much criti-
cism, and that the most inspirational and most affectionately remembered, has proceeded
from the poets themselves.
Certainly the poets have had something to say that the critic and professor could not
say; their message has been more exciting: that poetry should come as naturally as leaves
to a tree, that poetry is the lava of the imagination, or that it is emotion recollected in
tranquility. But it is necessary that we realize the character and authority of such testi-
mony. There is only a fine shade of difference between such expressions and a kind of
earnest advice that authors often give. Thus Edward Young, Carlyle, Walter Pater:
 204 I know two golden rules from ethics, which are no less golden in Composition, than in life.
1. Know thyself; 2dly, Reverence thyself
SECTION 3
This is the grand secret for finding readers and retaining them: let him who would move
ANGLO-AMERICAN
and convince others, be first moved and convinced himself. Horace's rule, Si vis me jlere, is
NEW CRITICISM
applicable in a wider sense than the literal one. To every poet, to every writer, we might
say: Be true, if you would be believed.

Truth! there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the
long run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of
speech to that vision within.

And Housman's little handbook to the poetic mind yields this illustration:
Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon-beer is a sedative to the brain, and my after-
noons are the least intellectual portion of my life-I would go out for a walk of two or three
hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around
me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden
and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at
once.

This is the logical terminus of the series already quoted. Here is a confession of how
poems were written which would do as a definition of poetry just as well as "emotion
recollected in tranquility" -and which the young poet might equally well take to heart as
a practical rule. Drink a pint of beer, relax, go walking, think on nothing in particular,
look at things, surrender yourself to yourself, search for the truth in your own soul, listen
to the sound of your own inside voice, discover and express the vraie verite.
It is probably true that all this is excellent advice for poets. The young imagination
fired by Wordsworth and Carlyle is probably closer to the verge of producing a poem
than the mind of the student who has been sobered by Aristotle or Richards. The art of
inspiring poets, or at least of inciting something like poetry in young persons, has
probably gone further in our day than ever before. Books of creative writing such as
those issued from the Lincoln School are interesting evidence of what a child can do. 5
All this, however, would appear to belong to an art separate from criticism-to a psy-
chological discipline, a system of self-development, a yoga, which the young poet per-
haps does well to notice, but which is something different from the public art of evalu-
ating poems.
Coleridge and Arnold were better critics than most poets have been, and if the critical
tendency dried up the poetry in Arnold and perhaps in Coleridge, it is not inconsistent
with our argument, which is that judgment of poems is different from the art of produc-
ing them. Coleridge has given us the classic "anodyne" story, and tells what he can about
the genesis of a poem which he calls a "psychological curiosity," but his definitions of
poetry and of the poetic quality "imagination" are to be found elsewhere and in quite
other terms.
It would be convenient if the passwords of the intentional school, "sincerity," "fidel-
itY," "spontaneity," "authenticity," "genuineness," "originality," could be equated with terms
'"..!Ch as "integrity," "relevance," "unity," "function," "maturity," "subtlety," "adequacy," and
:'ler more precise terms of evaluation-in short, if"expression" always meant aesthetic
.:e\·ement. But this is not so .
.-\esthetic" art, says Professor Curt Ducasse, an ingenious theorist of expression, is
- : : ::scious objectification of feelings, in which an intrinsic part is the critical moment.
The artist corrects the objectification when it is not adequate. But this may mean that the 205
earlier attempt was not successful in objectifying the self, or "it may also mean that it was
a successful objectification of a self which, when it confronted us clearly, we disowned 3.4
and repudiated in favor of another." 6 What is the standard by which we disown or accept W. K. WIMSATT AND
the self? Professor Ducasse does not say. Whatever it may be, however, this standard is an MoNROE BEARDSLEY

element in the definition of art which will not reduce to terms of objectification. The
evaluation of the work of art remains public; the work is measured against something
outside the author.

IV
There is criticism of poetry and there is author psychology, which when applied to the
present or future takes the form of inspirational promotion; but author psychology can be
historical too, and then we have literary biography, a legitimate and attractive study in
itself, one approach, as Professor Tillyard would argue, to personality, the poem being only
a parallel approach. Certainly it need not be with a derogatory purpose that one points out
personal studies, as distinct from poetic studies, in the realm of literary scholarship. Yet
there is danger of confusing personal and poetic studies; and there is the fault of writing
the personal as if it were poetic.
There is a difference between internal and external evidence for the meaning of a
poem. And the paradox is only verbal and superficial that what is (1) internal is also pub-
lic: it is discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem; through our habitual
knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which
is the source of dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture;
while what is (2) external is private or idiosyncratic; not a part of the work as a linguis-
tic fact: it consists of revelations (in journals, for example, or letters or reported conver-
sations) about how or why the poet wrote the poem-to what lady, while sitting on what
lawn, or at the death of what friend or brother. There is (3) an intermediate kind of evi-
dence about the character of the author or about private or semiprivate meanings at-
tached to words or topics by an author or by a coterie of which he is a member. The
meaning of words is the history of words, and the biography of an author, his use of a
word, and the associations which the word had for him, are part of the word's history
and meaning? But the three types of evidence, especially (2) and (3), shade into one
another so subtly that it is not always easy to draw a line between examples, and hence
arises the difficulty for criticism. The use of biographical evidence need not involve
intentionalism, because while it may be evidence of what the author intended, it may
also be evidence of the meaning of his words and the dramatic character of his utter-
ance. On the other hand, it may not be all this. And a critic who is concerned with evi-
dence of type (1) and moderately with that of type (3) will in the long run produce a
different sort of comment from that of the critic who is concerned with (2) and with (3)
where it shades into (2).
The whole glittering parade of Professor Lowes' Road to Xanadu, for instance, runs
along the border between types (2) and (3) or boldly traverses the romantic region of (2).
"'Kubla Khan,'" says Professor Lowes, "is the fabric of a vision, but every image that rose
up in its weaving had passed that way before. And it would seem that there is nothing
haphazard or fortuitous in their return." This is not quite clear-not even when Professor
Lowes explains that there were clusters of associations, like hooked atoms, which were
drawn into complex relation with other clusters in the deep well of Coleridge's memory,
and which then coalesced and issued forth as poems. If there was nothing "haphazard or
 206 fortuitous" in the way the images returned to the surface, that may mean (1) that Coleridge
could not produce what he did not have, that he was limited in his creation by what he
SECTION 3 had read or otherwise experienced, or (2) that having received certain clusters of associa-
ANGLO-AMERICAN tions, he was bound to return them in just the way he did, and that the value of the
NEw CRITICISM poem may be described in terms of the experiences on which he had to draw. The latter
pair of propositions (a sort of Hartleyan associationism which Coleridge himself repu-
diated in the Biographia) may not be assented to. There were certainly other combina-
tions, other poems, worse or better, that might have been written by men who had read
Bartram and Purchas and Bruce and Milton. And this will be true no matter how many
times we are able to add to the brilliant complex of Coleridge's reading. In certain
flourishes (such as the sentence we have quoted) and in chapter headings like "The
Shaping Spirit," "The Magical Synthesis," "Imagination Creatrix," it may be that Pro-
fessor Lowes pretends to say more about the actual poems than he does. There is a cer-
tain deceptive variation in these fancy chapter titles; one expects to pass on to a new
stage in the argument, and one finds-more and more sources, more and more about
"the streamy nature of association." 8
"Wohin der Weg?" quotes Professor Lowes for the motto of his book. "Kein Weg! Ins
Unbetretene." Precisely because the way is unbetreten, we should say, it leads away from
the poem. Bartram's Travels contains a good deal of the history of certain words and of
certain romantic Floridian conceptions that appear in "Kubla Khan." And a good deal
of that history has passed and was then passing into the very stuff of our language. Per-
haps a person who has read Bartram appreciates the poem more than one who has not.
Or, by looking up the vocabulary of "Kubla Khan" in the Oxford English Dictionary, or
by reading some of the other books there quoted, a person may know the poem better.
But it would seem to pertain little to the poem to know that Coleridge had read Bar-
tram. There is a gross body of life, of sensory and mental experience, which lies behind
and in some sense causes every poem, but can never be and need not be known in the
verbal and hence intellectual composition which is the poem. For all the objects of our
manifold experience, for every unity, there is an action of the mind which cuts off
roots, melts away context-or indeed we should never have objects or ideas or anything
to talk about.
It is probable that there is nothing in Professor Lowes' vast book which could detract
from anyone's appreciation of either The Ancient Mariner or "Kubla Khan." We next
present a case where preoccupation with evidence of type (3) has gone so far as to distort
a critic's view of a poem (yet a case not so obvious as those that abound in our critical
journals).
In a well-known poem by John Donne appears this quatrain:

Moving of th' earth brings harmes and feares,

Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheares,
Though greater farre, is innocent.

A recent critic in an elaborate treatment of Donne's learning has written of this quatrain
as follows:

He touches the emotional pulse of the situation by a skillful allusion to the new and the old
astronomy.... Of the new astronomy, the "moving of the earth" is the most radical princi-
ple; of the old, the "trepidation of the spheres" is the motion of the greatest complexity....
 The poet must exhort his love to quietness and calm upon his departure; and for this pur- 207
pose the figure based upon the latter motion (trepidation), long absorbed into the tradi-
tional astronomy, fittingly suggests the tension of the moment without arousing the 3.4
"harmes and feares" implicit in the figure of the moving earth. 9 W. K. WIMSATT AND

MONROE BEARDSLEY

The argument is plausible and rests on a well substantiated thesis that Donne was deeply
interested in the new astronomy and its repercussions in the theological realm. In various
works Donne shows his familiarity with Kepler's De Stella Nova, with Galileo's Siderius
Nuncius, with William Gilbert's De Magnete, and with Clavius' commentary on the De
Sphaera of Sacrobosco. He refers to the new science in his Sermon at Paul's Cross and in
a letter to Sir Henry Goodyer. In The First Anniversary he says the "new philosophy calls
all in doubt." In the Elegy on Prince Henry he says that the "least moving of the center"
makes "the world to shake."
It is difficult to answer argument like this, and impossible to answer it with evidence
of like nature. There is no reason why Donne might not have written a stanza in which
the two kinds of celestial motion stood for two sorts of emotion at parting. And if we be-
come full of astronomical ideas and see Donne only against the background of the new
science, we may believe that he did. But the text itself remains to be dealt with, the analyz-
able vehicle of a complicated metaphor. And one may observe: (1) that the movement of
the earth according to the Copernican theory is a celestial motion, smooth and regular,
and while it might cause religious or philosophic fears, it could not be associated with the
crudity and earthiness of the kind of commotion which the speaker in the poem wishes
to discourage; (2) that there is another moving of the earth, an earthquake, which has just
these qualities and is to be associated with the tear-floods and sigh-tempests of the sec-
ond stanza of the poem; (3) that "trepidation" is an appropriate opposite of earthquake,
because each is a shaking or vibratory motion; and "trepidation of the spheres" is "greater
far" than an earthquake, but not much greater (if two such motions can be compared as
to greatness) than the annual motion of the earth; (4) that reckoning what it "did and
meant" shows that the event has passed, like an earthquake, not like the incessant celes-
tial movement of the earth. Perhaps a knowledge of Donne's interest in the new science
may add another shade of meaning, an overtone to the stanza in question, though to say
even this runs against the words. To make the geocentric and heliocentric antithesis the
core of the metaphor is to disregard the English language, to prefer private evidence to
public, external to internal.

v
If the distinction between kinds of evidence has implications for the historical critic, it
has them no less for the contemporary poet and his critic. Or, since every rule for a poet
is but another side of a judgment by a critic, and since the past is the realm of the scholar
and critic, and the future and present that of the poet and the critical leaders of taste, we
may say that the problems arising in literary scholarship from the intentional fallacy are
matched by others which arise in the world of progressive experiment.
The question of "allusiveness," for example, as acutely posed by the poetry of Eliot,
is certainly one where a false judgment is likely to involve the intentional fallacy. The
frequency and depth of literary allusion in the poetry of Eliot and others has driven so
many in pursuit of full meanings to the Golden Bough and the Elizabethan drama that it
has become a kind of commonplace to suppose that we do not know what a poet means
unless we have traced him in his reading-a supposition redolent with intentional
 208 implications. The stand taken by F. 0. Matthiessen is a sound one and partially forestalls
the difficulty.
SECTION 3
If one reads these lines with an attentive ear and is sensitive to their sudden shifts in move-
ANGLO-AMERICAN
ment, the contrast between the actual Thames and the idealized vision of it during an age
NEW CRITICISM
before it flowed through a megalopolis is sharply conveyed by that movement itself,
whether or not one recognizes the refrain to be from Spenser. 10

Eliot's allusions work when we know them-and to a great extent even when we do not
know them, through their suggestive power.
But sometimes we find allusions supported by notes, and it is a nice question whether
the notes function more as guides to send us where we may be educated, or more as in-
dications in themselves about the character of the allusions. "Nearly everything of im-
portance ... that is apposite to an appreciation of The Waste Land," writes Matthiessen
of Miss Weston's book, "has been incorporated into the structure of the poem itself, or
into Eliot's Notes." And with such an admission it may begin to appear that it would not
much matter if Eliot invented his sources (as Sir Walter Scott invented chapter epigraphs
from "old plays" and "anonymous" authors, or as Coleridge wrote marginal glosses for
The Ancient Mariner). Allusions to Dante, Webster, Marvell, or Baudelaire doubtless
gain something because these writers existed, but it is doubtful whether the same can
be said for an allusion to an obscure Elizabethan: "The sound of horns and motors,
which shall bring I Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring." "Cf. Day, Parliament of Bees:"
says Eliot,
When of a sudden, listening, you shall hear,
A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring
Actaeon to Diana in the spring,
Where all shall see her naked skin.

The irony is completed by the quotation itself; had Eliot, as is quite conceivable, com-
posed these lines to furnish his own background, there would be no loss of validity. The
conviction may grow as one reads Eliot's next note: "I do not know the origin of the ballad
from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia." The im-
portant word in this note-on. Mrs. Porter and her daughter who washed their feet in
soda water-is "ballad." And if one should feel from the lines themselves their "ballad"
quality, there would be little need for the note. Ultimately, the inquiry must focus on the
integrity of such notes as parts of the poem, for where they constitute special information
about the meaning of phrases in the poem, they ought to be subject to the same scrutiny
as any of the other words in which it is written. Matthiessen believes the notes were the
price Eliot "had to pay in order to avoid what he would have considered muffling the en-
ergy of his poem by extended connecting links in the text itself." But it may be questioned
whether the notes and the need for them are not equally muffling. F. W. Bateson has plau-
sibly argued that Tennyson's "The Sailor Boy" would be better if half the stanzas were
omitted, and the best versions of ballads like "Sir Patrick Spens" owe their power to the
very audacity with which the minstrel has taken for granted the story upon which he
comments. What then if a poet finds he cannot take so much for granted in a more recon-
dite context and rather than write informatively, supplies notes? It can be said in favor of
this plan that at least the notes do not pretend to be dramatic, as they would if written in
verse. On the other hand, the notes may look like unassimilated material lying loose be-
side the poem, necessary for the meaning of the verbal symbol, but not integrated, so that
the symbol stands incomplete.
 We mean to suggest by the above analysis that whereas notes tend to seem to justify 209
themselves as external indexes to the author's intention, yet they ought to be judged like
any other parts of a composition (verbal arrangement special to a particular context), and 3.4
when so judged their reality as parts of the poem, or their imaginative integration with W. K. WIMSATT AND

the rest of the poem, may come into question. Mathiessen, for instance, sees that Eliot's MoNROE BEARDSLEY

titles for poems and his epigraphs are informative apparatus, like the notes. But while he
is worried by some of the notes and thinks that Eliot "appears to be mocking himself for
writing the note at the same time that he wants to convey something by it," Matthiessen
believes that the "device" of epigraphs "is not at all open to the objection of not being suf-
ficiently structural." "The intention," he says, "is to enable the poet to secure a condensed
expression in the poem itself." "In each case the epigraph is designed to form an integral
part of the effect of the poem." And Eliot himself, in his notes, has justified his poetic
practice in terms of intention.

The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because
he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate
him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V.... The
man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbi-
trarily, with the Fisher King himself.

And perhaps he is to be taken more seriously here, when off guard in a note, than when in
his Norton Lectures he comments on the difficulty of saying what a poem means and adds
playfully that he thinks of prefixing to a second edition of Ash Wednesday some lines from
Don juan:

I don't pretend that I quite understand

My own meaning when I would be very fine;
But the fact is that I have nothing planned
Unless it were to be a moment merry.

If Eliot and other contemporary poets have any characteristic fault, it may be in planning
too much.
Allusiveness in poetry is one of several critical issues by which we have illustrated
the more abstract issue of intentionalism, but it may be for today the most important
illustration. As a poetic practice allusiveness would appear to be in some recent poems
an extreme corollary of the romantic intentionalist assumption, and as a critical issue it
challenges and brings to light in a special way the basic premise of intentionalism. The
following instance from the poetry of Eliot may serve to epitomize the practical impli-
cations of what we have been saying. In Eliot's Love Song of]. Alfred Prufrock, toward
the end, occurs the line: "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each," and this
bears a certain resemblance to a line in a Song by John Donne, "Teach me to heare Mer-
maides singing," so that for the reader acquainted to a certain degree with Donne's
poetry, the critical question arises: Is Eliot's line an allusion to Donne's? Is Prufrock
thinking about Donne? Is Eliot thinking about Donne? We suggest that there are two
radically different ways oflooking for an answer to this question. There is (1) the way of
poetic analysis and exegesis, which inquires whether it makes any sense if Eliot-
Prufrock is thinking about Donne. In an earlier part of the poem, when Prufrock asks,
"Would it have been worth while, ... To have squeezed the universe into a ball," his
words take half their sadness and irony from certain energetic and passionate lines of
:'vlarvell's To His Coy Mistress. But the exegetical inquirer may wonder whether mer-
maids considered as "strange sights" (to hear them is in Donne's poem analogous to
 210 getting with child a mandrake root) have much to do with Prufrock's mermaids, which
seem to be symbols of romance and dynamism, and which incidentally have literary
SECTION 3 authentication, if they need it, in a line of a sonnet by Gerard de Nerval. This method of
ANGLo-AMERICAN inquiry may lead to the conclusion that the given resemblance between Eliot and Donne
NEw CRITICISM is without significance and is better not thought of, or the method may have the disad-
vantage of providing no certain conclusion. Nevertheless, we submit that this is the
true and objective way of criticism, as contrasted to what the very uncertainty of exege-
sis might tempt a second kind of critic to undertake: (2) the way of biographical or ge-
netic inquiry, in which, taking advantage of the fact that Eliot is still alive, and in the
spirit of a man who would settle a bet, the critic writes to Eliot and asks what he meant,
or if he had Donne in mind. We shall not here weigh the probabilities-whether Eliot
would answer that he meant nothing at all, had nothing at all in mind-a sufficiently
good answer to such a question-or in an unguarded moment might furnish a clear and,
within its limit, irrefutable answer. Our point is that such an answer to such an inquiry
would have nothing to do with the poem "Prufrock"; it would not be a critical inquiry.
Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this way. Critical inquiries are not set-
tled by consulting the oracle.

NOTES

1. Dictionary of World Literature, joseph T. Inspiration (Cambridge, 1940); julius Portnoy, A

Shipley, ed. (New York, 1942), 326-29. Psychology of Art Creation (Philadelphia, 1942);
2. j. E. Spingarn, "The New Criticism," in Rudolf Arnheim and others, Poets at Work (New
Criticism in America (New York, 1924), 24-25. York, 1947); Phyllis Bartlett, Poems in Process
3. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "Intention," in (New York, 1951); Brewster Ghiselin (ed.), The
American Bookman, I (1944), 41-48. Creative Process: A Symposium (Berkeley and Los
4. It is true that Croce himself in his Ariosto, Angeles, 1952).
Shakespeare and Corneille (London, 1920), chap. 6. Curt Ducasse, The Philosophy of Art (New
VII, "The Practical Personality and the Poetical York, 1929), n6.
Personality," and in his Defence of Poetry (Oxford, 7· And the history of words after a poem is
1933), 24, and elsewhere, early and late, has delivered written may contribute meanings which if relevant
telling attacks on emotive geneticism, but the main to the original pattern should not be ruled out by a
drive of the Aesthetic is surely toward a kind of scruple about intention.
cognitive intentionalism. 8. Chapters VIII, "The Pattern," and XVI, "The
5. See Hughes Mearns, Creative Youth (Garden Known and Familiar Landscape," will be found of
City, 1925), esp. 10, 27-29. The technique of most help to the student of the poem.
inspiring poems has apparently been outdone 9. Charles M. Coffin, john Donne and the New
more recently by the study of inspiration in Philosophy (New York, 1927), 97-98.
successful poets and other artists. See, for instance, 10. F. 0. Matthiessen, An Essay on the Nature of
Rosamond E. M. Harding, An Anatomy of Poetry (New York, 1935), 46.
The Speaking Voice (1951) 3.5
REUBEN BROWER

Everything written is as good as it is dramatic . ... A dramatic necessity goes deep into the
nature of the sentence. Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they
are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speak-
ing tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the
imagination. That is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save prose from itselp
Robert Frost

I. The Speaker
Every poem is "dramatic" in Frost's sense: someone is speaking to someone else. For a poem
is a dramatic fiction no less than a play, and its speaker, like a character in a play, is no less a
creation of the words on the printed page. The "person spoken to" is also a fictional person-
age and never the actual audience of "you and me," and only in a special abstract sense is it
the literary audience of a particular time and place in history. The voice we hear in a lyric,
however piercingly real, is not Keats's or Shakespeare's; or, if it seems to be, as in

the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is fam' d to do, deceiving elf

we are embarrassed and thrown off as if an actor had stopped and spoken to the audience
in his own person. As Keats once remarked of men's lives, poems are "continual allego-
ries"; and if they have biographical meaning it is at least one remove from the actual man
who wrote. For the poet is always wrapping himself up in some guise, if only the guise of
being a poet.
Shelley in the "Ode to the West Wind" appears in his familiar character of priest-poet-
prophet, as his language everywhere reminds us. From the opening "0" through the "thous"
and the "oh, hears!" which follow, we are spectators of a religious drama, a rite that moves
from prayerful incantation to a demand for mystic union and the gift of poetic prophecy.
The priest prays in the language of litany, enumerating the powers of the wind spirit:

0 thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds ...

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean ...

Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms ...

Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit!
 212 At one point,

SECTION 3 I fall upon the thorns oflife! I bleed!

ANGLO-AMERICAN
the dramatic fiction slips disturbingly: the allegory refers us too directly to Shelley's biog-
NEW CRITICISM
raphy. But it is only after the poem's high commotion is past that we feel the lapse, so
compelling is the dramatic incantation of this verse. That Shelley takes us with him so
completely, securing assent for what we may later reject, is largely due to this constant
shaping of a role through the detail of his expression.
Shelley is of course creating not one character but two, and a whole set of relations
between them-in short a complete dramatic situation. The situation, more closely re-
garded, is a series of swiftly changing situations, which gives the sense of dramatic
movement already noted above. We must not confuse the full dramatic situation of
this or any poem with the mere setting or scene, though one is always implied, if
only the "setting" of the poet's mind. The setting in Shelley's poem, for instance, is lit-
tle more than the earth and sky. A comparable poem by Robert Frost will remind us
even more forcibly that the dramatic situation is the relationship of fictional speaker and
auditor "entangled in the words" and not the physical scene, however vividly realized:

ONCE BY THE PACIFIC

The shattered water made a misty din.

Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.

The blend of crashing sounds and stormy lights, the felt counter-thrusts of land and
water, the terror of the night of wrath are so present to us in reading "Once by the Pacific"
that we may easily overlook the dramatic artifice of the poem. But though unobtrusive it
is not unimportant, for to experience such a vision through Frost's special "voice" makes
all the difference. Strictly speaking the situation is not that of the watcher by the sea, but
(as indicated by the tenses) that of the reminiscent poet speaking after the event to no one
in particular or to a receptive listening self. The speaker has a character of complete defi-
niteness, which is why the poem is so palpable when read aloud. His character takes its
distinctive form and pressure from the speculative way of talking, from the flow and ar-
rest of American speech:

You could not tell, and yet it looked as if

and again,

It looked as if ...
But this reckoning voice has other strains sounding through it-pronouncements of the 213
Old Testament, talk about the end of the world, and echoes of older mythological styles.
There may even be a reminiscence of Shelley's maenad in those clouds 3.5
REUBEN BROWER

Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.

II. Tone
As I have just been illustrating, to show exactly who is speaking in a poem it is necessary
to consider how he speaks. In other words, it is necessary to define his tone. By tone I refer
to: (1) the implied social relationship of the speaker to his auditor and (2) the manner he
adopts in addressing his auditor. Whether we talk in terms of"tone" or of"dramatic situ-
ation" indicates that we are considering expressions for different purposes or considering
different expressions. In "Once by the Pacific," the phrase "you could not tell" may be re-
garded as defining both dramatic situation and tone; the past tenses, on the other hand,
are primarily effective in fixing the situation.
It is important to remember that when we speak of the dramatic situation, we are
thinking of all the relations implied between the fictional speaker and auditor in a poem,
any connection one has with the other. In many poems, as in "Once by the Pacific," the
main connection implied is that the second is listening to the first. In others, for example
Browning's monologues, there are hints of a complicated history of loves and hates or of
subtler attractions and aversions, the makings of a play or novel. Under the first aspect of
tone I refer to a single relation within the whole dramatic complex, the social relation,
where in the social hierarchy the fictional speaker and auditor stand. To take random
examples, they may be lover and beloved, brother and sister, man and wife, servant and
master. Under the second aspect of tone I refer to the manner the speaker adopts within
this social relationship. The lover may speak in a manner more or less intimate, formal,
casual, heroic, chivalric, et cetera.
Frost's control of this aspect of tone is where he shows his art most fully. He succeeds
in maintaining a wonderful blend of manners, a poise between two voices, the high-
poetic-apocalyptic and the down-to-earth, cautiously speculative. This nice duplicity
appears in the word "din" at the end of the first line, where we are almost ready for a
grander word-almost, because the subtle exaggeration of"shattered" points the way to a
less simple form of expression. Those solemn "'great waves ... thought of doing some-
thing to the shore" ('Til do something to you" -a voice in a very human quarrel); and the
Shelleyesque "locks" were oddly enough "low and hairy in the skies." By these and simi-
lar touches Frost prepares us for the climactic last line with its stroke of parody across the
solemnity of Fiat lux.
While describing the special blend of manners in "Once by the Pacific," we have in-
troduced an important principle in the analysis of tone. We evaluated Frost's tone by
making more or less overt comparisons with the high-poetic-apocalyptic style and every-
day speech of reckoning. Our recognition of a manner always depends on a silent refer-
ence to a known way of speaking and on our perceiving variations from it. The poet-
Frost notably in the poem we have been reading-relies on such norms and on our
familiarity with them. The implied norm may be as vaguely definable as everyday speech
or as relatively fixed as the idiom of eighteenth-century heroic poetry. Certainly our fin-
est perception of a norm and of variations from it lies beyond our powers of expression.
To define even one level of speech precisely would require an elaborate excursion in liter-
ary and social history. But without attempting so monstrous a task we can make helpful
indications of a norm and so place the tonal level. We can point out an allusion or show
 214 how a phrase in the immediate context recalls some larger context and with it certain
conventions of speech; we can quote comparable expressions from other pieces of litera-
SECTION 3 ture or from any realm of discourse whatsoever. Once a norm has been indicated, the
ANGLo-AMERICAN cruder variations are evident, but to define subtle variations from a literary manner is
NEw CRITICISM certainly a less a simple assignment. Literary critics have the pleasant task of making such
measurements.
I am hardly suggesting that the delineation of tone can be reduced to a single for-
mula to be applied on any and all occasions. The application and choice of methods
must be at least as flexible as the poet's manipulation of tone. In the two examples that
follow I shall stress the usefulness of following certain grammatical and rhetorical cues
in assaying the tone of a poem, but I shall also use other methods, including those just
outlined.
The poems for analysis are two sonnets, John Donne's "Show me deare Christ, thy
spouse, so bright and clear" and Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Thou art indeed just, Lord, if
I contend." Since the poems have similar situations, comparison will show more clearly
what we mean by tonal pattern and how differences in tonal pattern are expressive of dif-
ferences in attitude.
Both Donne and Hopkins appear as devout Christians addressing the Deity; both are
puzzled by a religious problem; and both ask for a solution. But the relation in which each
stands to God and the manner in which each addresses God are utterly different. Here is
how Donne poses his problem:
Show me deare Christ, thy spouse, so bright and clear.
What! is it She, which on the other shore
Goes richly painted? or which rob' d and tore
Laments and mournes in Germany and here?
Sleepes she a thousand, then peepes up one yeare?
Is she selfe truth and errs? now new, now outwore?
Doth she, and did she, and shall she evermore
On one, on seaven, or on no hill appeare?
Dwells she with us, or like adventuring knights
First travaile we to seeke and then make Love?
Betray kind husband thy spouse on our sights
And let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove,
Who is most trew, and pleasing to thee, then
When she' is embrac'd and open to most men.

Donne is speaking within the seventeenth-century religious situation, as one familiar

with all the historic varieties of the Christian Church. What is distinctive and surprising
is the tone this theologian-controversialist assumes in talking with God. While approach-
ing Christ in his consecrated role as the bridegroom of the Church, Donne talks as a man
of the world in pursuit of a beautiful woman, and his manner combines worldly polite-
ness with downright insolence. Let us see how his tone is defined through the language of
the poem.
"Show me, deare Christ, thy spouse ..." Donne begins with a bold command and
an affectionate though polite address. (Verb forms, whether personal or impersonal,
and forms of address are worth noting as cues to tone.) He uses "thy," which as
Grierson observes is in Donne "the pronoun of feeling and intimacy." Both the inti-
macy and directness of the wooer appear again in the offhand, impatient "What!" of
the first of his questions. Although the tone now becomes less personal, the "she's," the
unflattering adjectives, and above all "peepes" recall the freedom of the opening com- 215
mand. But balance is maintained by the literary elegance and chivalrous sophistica-
tion of 3.5
REUBEN BROWER
Dwells she with us, or like adventuring knights
First travaile we to seeke and then make Love?

The lover is making just the right gesture of removal in view of his next request:

Betray kind husband thy spouse to our sights

And let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove ...

He has advanced from "deare Christ" to "husband" and "kind husband," at that! With
the erotic pun of the final line of the sonnet, decency (in an eighteenth-century sense) is
abandoned. But not quite, because of the knightly decorum of the immensely beautiful
"let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove." (Note the politeness indicated by using
·'my soule" rather than the more personal "me.") Though there is a progress in insolence,
equilibrium is never quite lost throughout the while poem.
If we consider similar cues in Hopkins' sonnet, especially forms of address and the
persons of verbs, we shall find great differences in the tone assumed by each poet and in
the over-all management of tone:

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum:

verumtatem justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum
prosperatur? etc.
Thou art indeed just, Lord, ifi contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, 0 thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, bands and brakes
Now, leaved how thick! laced they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build-but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, 0 thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

The dramatic situation at the beginning of the poem, as indicated by the Latin quotation
and by Hopkins' adaptation ("contends," "plead," "just") is a legal debate in which the plain-
tiff puts his case before the Lord (notice the capital letter). The value of the opening "thou"
as compared with Donne's use of the pronoun is changed completely. The seventeenth-
century "amorous" relationship of worshipper and deity no longer holds. There are no loving
graces to temper the dignity of "thou" in Hopkins' line:

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend ...

Yet if judged by Victorian standards Hopkins has his insolence too: he "sirs" the Lord,
which is respectful though not quite worshipful. (His insolence may be further measured
by comparing Auden's brash echo, "Sir, no man's enemy.")
 216 After the debate of the first four lines the tone moves with swift jumps and backward
turnings to a conclusion which is as right as it is surprising. Asides break in with a poi-
SECTION 3 gnant and unexpected intimacy:
ANGLO-AMERICAN
Wert thou my enemy, 0 thou my friend,
NEW CRITICISM
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me?

As the questions shift from impersonal forms to the accusing "thous," the pleader sacri-
fices dignity, though he recovers it for a moment in "I that spend,/ Sir, life upon thy cause."
A burst of springtime imagery marks a new situation and a completely new tone:

See, banks and brakes

Now, leaved how thick! laced they are again
With fretty chervil, look ...

"See" is less to the Lord than to the poet's wondering self, while "look" is only an in-
ward noting of the puzzling fact. Hence the sudden force of the real imperative in "send
my roots rain." For this demand the address, "0 thou lord of life," is beautifully right.
Debating decorum is forgotten, questionings and asides are dropped as Hopkins calls
directly on God for help. He calls him 'lord,' not 'Lord,' yet with a new accent of awe
perfectly in harmony with the metaphor which has been growing since early in the
poem. The bitter and sweet contrast of his own straining barrenness and the thick,
building liveliness of created things presses in our ears with "0 thou lord oflife, send my
roots rain."
Both of these poems show that tone is fixed and so revealed at similar points in ex-
pression, and both show how pervasive the control of tone may be. But they differ enor-
mously in the relationships implied, in the manner which each poet assumes, and in what
may be called the total tonal pattern. Although Donne combines politeness and candor,
throughout the sonnet he is shaping a voice of consistent, stable character. But Hopkins
in his alternations of tone expresses a confusion of tongues: how is he to speak? He finds
a way at last, but, as the sequence shows, the victory is hardly won and perhaps only tem-
porary. We have in these contrasting patterns clear symbols of the religious attitudes be-
ing expressed by the two poets: Donne, for all his queries certain of his close and passion-
ate relation to Christ; Hopkins, tortured at the very center of his faith.
We shall next consider a religious poem that shows a further complexity of tonal
pattern and another sort of relationship between this pattern and the attitude finally
expressed:

LOVE

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If! lack'd any thing.

A guest, I answer' d, worthy to be here:

Love said, you shall be he.
I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare,
I cannot look on thee.
 Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, 217
Who made the eyes but I?
3.5
Truth Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
REUBEN BROWER
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sa yes Love, who bore the blame?
My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
George Herbert

~here are two situations here, the story-teller's and that of the drama he narrates; and
·.,·ithin the drama there are the distinct and exactly complementary tones of the guest and
0f Love. In a tone of almost feminine intimacy the guest carries on sweet converse with
:he gently humorous host:

Ah mydeare,
I cannot look on thee ...
My deare, then I will serve.

:-J:e is the humblest of guests and sinners, not "worthy to be here," "unkinde, ungrateful!."
:..ove's accent is questioning, not accusing; here grammatical mood is imperative not in
:ts brusque form, but softened with "you" and "shall" and "must." Hers is sweet question-
:ng and sweet commanding.
The manner in which the guest-sinner tells the story needs a different description.
The narrator does not speak to anyone; he merely tells what was said and done, rarely
:wting a look or a gesture and making hardly any comment on his own reactions. His
statement, unobtrusively balanced in form, could be written as prose, with only one or
:wo changes in order. As the story2 goes on, it approaches the level of naive colloquial
:1arrative: "I answer' d ... Love said ... sayes Love ... sa yes Love."
We must consider now what is the effect in the complete poem of this trio in tones-
:he reserved decently colloquial manner of the narrator and within the story the inti-
:nate, deprecatory voice of the guest and the exquisite politeness and assurance of the
iost. Regarded as a whole the poem is a little drama of conversion. A sinner conscious of
iis guilt, feeling the pull of Christ's love ("Ah my deare") but unable to accept it, rediscov-
ers the meaning of Christ's sacrifice and is redeemed. In relation to this sequence, the
~cserve of the telling becomes extreme: the full reversal of feelings at the climax is indi-
~ated only by a colon:

You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:

So I did sit and eat.

The restraint, the intimacy, and sweet politeness bring out by contrast the conflict and
resolution which is so quietly presented. Hence the surprising tension and strength of a
seemingly gentle poem.
When reading Herbert's lyric, we do not experience tension in the abstract; we hear
the drama through the voice-or voices-which we have been describing. Our whole aim
in analysis of tone is to delineate the exact speaking voice in every poem we read, but we
can succeed only by attending to the special, often minute language signs by which the
poet fixes the tone for us. The methods used in this chapter are intended to direct atten-
tion to a few of the commoner signs and to offer some questions that we may put to
a poem in determining its tone. By answering questions such as "What is the social
 Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, 217
Who made the eyes but I?
3.5
Truth Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
REUBEN BROWER
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?
My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
George Herbert

There are two situations here, the story-teller's and that of the drama he narrates; and
within the drama there are the distinct and exactly complementary tones of the guest and
of Love. In a tone of almost feminine intimacy the guest carries on sweet converse with
the gently humorous host:

Ah mydeare,
I cannot look on thee ...
My deare, then I will serve.

He is the humblest of guests and sinners, not "worthy to be here," "unkinde, ungrateful!."
Love's accent is questioning, not accusing; here grammatical mood is imperative not in
its brusque form, but softened with "you" and "shall" and "must." Hers is sweet question-
ing and sweet commanding.
The manner in which the guest-sinner tells the story needs a different description.
The narrator does not speak to anyone; he merely tells what was said and done, rarely
noting a look or a gesture and making hardly any comment on his own reactions. His
statement, unobtrusively balanced in form, could be written as prose, with only one or
two changes in order. As the story 2 goes on, it approaches the level of na·ive colloquial
narrative: "I answer' d ... Love said ... sayes Love ... sayes Love."
We must consider now what is the effect in the complete poem of this trio in tones-
the reserved decently colloquial manner of the narrator and within the story the inti-
mate, deprecatory voice of the guest and the exquisite politeness and assurance of the
host. Regarded as a whole the poem is a little drama of conversion. A sinner conscious of
his guilt, feeling the pull of Christ's love ("Ah my deare") but unable to accept it, rediscov-
ers the meaning of Christ's sacrifice and is redeemed. In relation to this sequence, the
reserve of the telling becomes extreme: the full reversal of feelings at the climax is indi-
cated only by a colon:
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

The restraint, the intimacy, and sweet politeness bring out by contrast the conflict and
resolution which is so quietly presented. Hence the surprising tension and strength of a
seemingly gentle poem.
When reading Herbert's lyric, we do not experience tension in the abstract; we hear
the drama through the voice-or voices-which we have been describing. Our whole aim
in analysis of tone is to delineate the exact speaking voice in every poem we read, but we
can succeed only by attending to the special, often minute language signs by which the
poet fixes the tone for us. The methods used in this chapter are intended to direct atten-
tion to a few of the commoner signs and to offer some questions that we may put to
a poem in determining its tone. By answering questions such as "What is the social
 218 relationship implied?" or "What is the writer's manner?" we may clarify and express the
set of relations which project the tone of the poet-speaker, and which taken together may
SECTION 3 be regarded as a tonal pattern.
ANGLo-AMERICAN As the tonal relations change-and they must in a living poem-they take their place
NEw CRITICISM in the sequence of relations we have called the dramatic movement, the succession of
changing dramatic situations. All of these ordered relations together make up the dramatic
design of a poem.

NOTES
1.From the Introduction to "A Way Out." example above shows, statements in a work of
2. I have not attempted here or later to treat story literature of what someone says or does (pure
or narrative as a completely separate type of narrative statements) are always expressive of a
design, since I regard narrative as one of the dramatic relationship.
patterns that make up dramatic design. As the
SECTION 4

Structuralist Reading

Since the Practical and New Criticism were largely Anglo-American phenomena, it is not
surprising that some of the strongest challenges to these approaches came from France,
Germany, and Eastern Europe, particularly from thinkers who worked not just in litera-
ture but between several disciplines in the social sciences. Structuralism was a name for a
broad movement of such thinkers, though like the New Critics, structuralists tended to
have more differences than similarities, and the Anglo-American reception of structural-
ism was already interwoven with different strands of post-structuralist theory, as Jona-
than Culler noted in Structuralist Poetics (1975). For a basic definition of structuralism,
Culler turns to Roland Barthes, who described structuralism in 1967 "in its most special-
ized and consequently most relevant version" as "a mode of analysis of cultural artifacts
which originated in the methods of modern linguistics." 1 That's as good a definition as
any, though linguistics offered a very broad methodological model for a very diverse ar-
ray of approaches. Since Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (published
posthumously in 1916) distinguished between individual speech acts (Ia parole) and the
system of a language (Ia langue), it had become possible to think about a language as a set
of signifying relations sufficient unto itself. For thinkers as different as Barthes, Mikhail
Bakhtin, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Emile Benveniste, Tzvetan Todorov, Jacques
Lacan, and Noam Chomsky, modern linguistics provided a paradigm for the study of other
cultural phenomena. But that paradigm also reached far beyond linguistics, of course. For
example, the selections from Gerard Genette and Northrop Frye in section 1, "Genre
Theory," are also broadly structuralist. By thinking about institutions, cultures, psyches,
narratives, and genres as defined by a network of relations analogous to the sets of rela-
tions that define a language, structuralists could make ambitious claims not only about
particular instances but also about how those instances worked in social relations.
While such large structural concerns could eventually lead to Foucault's view that all
cultural institutions are discursive, it is also not hard to see how structuralist logic also
led to a rigorous form of poetic close reading that posed an alternative to the New Criti-
cism. Whereas New Critics tended to emphasize the importance of analyzing the "tone"
of the fictional speaker, structuralists concentrated on the interaction between pronouns
or prepositions or the number of verbs or even the number of phonemes in a poem or a
 220 stanza or a line. Like Richards and the practical critics, structuralists were interested in
poems as systems of communication, but they were not primarily interested in the read-
SECTION 4 er's experience of and participation in that system (your brain on poetry). Instead, as
STRUCTURALIST Roman Jakobson writes in "Linguistics and Poetics," structuralist critics assumed that
READING "poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of painting is con-
cerned with pictorial structure. Since linguistics is the global science of verbal structure,
poetics may be regarded as an integral part oflinguistics." If for Richards the structure of
a poem could organize the way we think, and if for the New Critics the structure of a
poem could be appreciated as "a verbal icon" or a drama of consciousness, for structural-
ist readers the poem was an iconic example of linguistic structure, and linguistic struc-
ture was the iconic example of the way in which all aspects of culture-not just your ex-
perience, and not just the poem's drama-work.
Given the enormous amount of structuralist criticism that paid very close attention
to poems as exemplary verbal structures, it may seem odd for this section to begin with a
critic who paid little attention to poems or poetry in any form. Mikhail Bakhtin is best
known as a thinker who pushed Saussurean structural linguistics toward historical lin-
guistics; his revolutionary work on Rabelais and Dostoevsky introduced the notions of
the carnivalesque, of dialogism, heteroglossia, and chronotope into the study of the novel
in particular. Always concerned with the ethical consequences of literature's inclusion of
many perspectives and voices, Bakhtin tended to dismiss poetry as "monologic" and ex-
clusive. Yet we include "The Problem of Speech Genres" because in it Bakhtin offers an
important perspective on lyric as one among many "speech genres" used with remark-
able fluidity in literature and life-in fact, exchanged in all forms of human communica-
tion. According to Bakhtin, "each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each
sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utter-
ances. These we may call speech genres." The problem with literary criticism, according
to Bakhtin, is that it has tended to consider genres "in terms of their specific literary and
artistic features, in terms of the differences that distinguish one from the other (within
the realm of literature), and not as specific types of utterances distinct from other types,
but sharing with them a common verbal (language) nature." Once the latter move is made,
literary genres become dialectical, representing but also represented by the common
verbal frame of all human experience. Bakhtin does make a distinction between the
"primary (simple) genres that have taken form in unmediated speech communion"-the
ways in which we communicate with one another in everyday life-and what he calls
the "secondary (complex) speech genres-novels, dramas, all kinds of scientific research,
major genres of commentary, and so forth-[which] arise in more complex and com-
paratively highly developed and organized cultural communication (primarily written)
that is artistic, scientific, sociopolitical, and so on." According to Bakhtin, secondary
genres feed off of primary genres, altering the primary genres in the process. In this
sense, "the novel as a whole is an utterance just as rejoinders in everyday dialogue or
private letters are (they do have a common nature), but unlike these, the novel is a sec-
ondary (complex) utterance."
But if for Bakhtin the novel is the secondary speech genre par excellence because it
takes all primary genres into itself and makes them more complex, then what sort of
speech genre is a lyric poem? Bakhtin's contribution to lyric theory is not a delineation of
the properties of the lyric or anything parallel to his landmark contributions to the study
of the novel. Instead, his contribution is in placing lyric poetry into the system of speech
genres that all suppose not only social expression but also social response. Once consid-
ered as a speech genre, a poem on a page must be considered in a set of social relations.
While we may not respond to a poem by answering its questions or performing its im- 221
peratives, lyrical genres suppose "a silent responsive understanding," according to
Bakhtin. Poems are made to produce speech or action in the reader or listener, but it will SECTION 4
be "a responsive understanding with a delayed reaction." In this way, Bakhtin placed lyric STRUCTURALIST

poems not only within the individual circuit of communication idealized by the New READING

Critics but also back into the heterogeneous diversity of ordinary communication and
mass culture from which the Practical and New Critics wanted to protect the poem and
its reader.
Bakhtin's theory certainly implied a sociology or ethnography of communication
based on the analysis of speech genres as myriad forms of social recognition, but the Rus-
sian structuralist thinker who had the most direct influence on the study of the semiotics
of culture (particularly in linguistic anthropology) was the linguist and literary theorist
Roman Jakobson. Like Bakhtin, Jakobson regarded what he called "the poetic function"
as one among many things language could do, and he viewed poetics as part and parcel of
linguistic analysis, which was itself part and parcel of cultural analysis. Perhaps the most
influential of Jakobson's linguistic paradigms of poetic discourse was his distinction be-
tween metaphor and metonymy, or between relations of contiguity and substitution, axes
he saw as concentrated in poetry but foundational for all discourse. Given his ambition
for poetics, it may seem surprising that Jakobson's analysis of poetic language could be-
come so detailed, even microscopic in its focus. In "Linguistics and Poetics," the essay we
include in this section, Jakobson begins at the macro rather than the micro level, delin-
eating the large "functions oflanguage," since for him poetics can only be understood as
one of those functions. Jackobson sketches a communicative structure in which an
.-'.. DDRESSER (the capital letters are Jakobson's way of distinguishing these as registers of
communication) sends a message to an ADDRESSEE in a particular CONTEXT of com-
munication by means of a CONTACT. Jakobson then goes on to describe the different
linguistic functions he ascribes to each part of this communicative structure. Interest-
ingly, what Jakobson describes as "the poetic function" of language moves between the
points in this structure, since the poetic function is defined as the "focus on the message
for its own sake."
This does not mean that such a focus can only be achieved in poems-on the con-
trary, since "this function cannot be productively studied out of touch with the general
problems of language, and, on the other hand, the scrutiny of language requires a thor-
ough consideration of its poetic function, any attempt to reduce the sphere of poetic
:·unction to poetry or to confine poetry to poetic function would be a delusive oversimpli-
:ication." This strong claim makes poetics part of the larger study oflinguistics for Jako-
Json, and it also makes poems into exemplary models for linguistic study. Since the eigh-
:centh century, prosodists had been attending at least as closely as does Jakobson to the
?lacement of metrical stresses, or to the relation between figures of sound and upbeats
and downbeats, and most prosodists had devised their own elaborate systems of versifica-
:ion that led to elaborate debates. But for Jakobson, the minute details of a poem's meter
and syllabic arrangement are important to attend to in detail primarily because "poetic
:neter ... has so many intrinsically linguistic particularities that it is most convenient to
describe it from a purely linguistic point of view" -so much so that "no linguistic prop-
erty of the verse design should be disregarded." Thus in addition to meter, Jakobson
;crutinizes every grammatical and phonological particular of a poem. Many literary crit-
:cs have agreed with Jonathan Culler's assessment in Structuralist Poetics that "Jakobson
~as made an important contribution to literary studies in drawing attention to the variet-
:cs of grammatical figures and their potential functions, but his own analyses are vitiated
 222 by the belief that linguistics provides an automatic discovery procedure for poetic pat-
terns and by his failure to perceive that the central task is to explain how poetic structures
SEcnoN 4 emerge from the multiplicity of potential linguistic structures" (86). Such complaints on
STRUCTURALIST behalf of literary criticism attest to Jakobson's challenge to the assumptions of the field:
READING why should "poetic structures" be privileged over the system of signification (Ia langue)
from which they spring? It is a question that unsettles from within deeply held modern
assumptions about poetry, and it works against the lyricizing tendencies of most twentieth-
century literary criticism.
In the United States, literary critics writing in the wake ofJakobson responded by try-
ing to turn his close linguistic analysis back toward the literary critical privileging of the
poem as lyricized aesthetic object, and toward poetic rather than linguistic structure as
the object of critical analysis. Michael Riffaterre began his career in the mid-196os by ar-
guing that many of Jakobson's patterns involve linguistic aspects that cannot be per-
ceived by the reader and thus are really outside poetic structure-a qualification Richards
and the New Critics would have appreciated. 2 In "The Significance of a Poem," included
in this section, Riffaterre argues for "the difference we perceive empirically between po-
etry and nonpoetry" as a departure from the tendency of structural linguistics to make
poetry into an instance of larger forces rather than a special case. Instead of examining
what a poem has in common with other forms of communication, Riffaterre focuses on
"the formal and semantic unity" of the poem, which he calls "the poem's significance." In
a note, Riffaterre writes that "significance, to put it simply, is what the poem is really
about." Such resort to first principles recalls New Critical calls to make poetry at once
special and publicly accessible, and it clearly reacted to the challenge structural linguis-
tics posed to literary criticism as a separate discipline. At the same time, Riffaterre's ac-
tual analyses of poems rival the minute examinations of Jakobson, since if for Jakobson
all elements of the poem are relevant to its linguistic functions, for Riffaterre "all signs
within a text [are] relevant to its poetic quality."
Thus Riffaterre's semiotic analysis of poetic significance may seem a lot like Jakob-
son's linguistic analysis of the poetic function-and it should, since Riffaterre's departure
from structural linguistics retained Jakobson's methodology but inscribed that method-
ology within the poem as a lyric whole. Riffaterre also added a focus on the reader of the
poem, and especially on the various levels of reading that contribute to "the poem's sig-
nificance." That readerly focus was of course nothing new, but to this fairly traditional
notion of levels of interpretation Riffaterre also added semiotics, since in structuralist
fashion, he claimed that we cannot "understand the semiosis [of the poem] until we have
ascertained the place of the text now perceived as one sign within a system (a sign for-
mally complex but monosemic), for by definition a sign cannot be isolated. A sign is only
a relationship to something else. It will not make sense without a continuous translatabil-
ity from component to component of a network. A consequence of the system's latent exis-
tence is that every signifying feature of the poem must be relatable to that system." Such
prose was structuralist dogma, yet unlike Bakhtin and Jakobson-but like many literary
critics before and after him-Riffaterre insisted on finding even the place of the poem
within a larger semiotic context within the boundaries of the poem itself. For him, there
is no outside, no social world that influences the poem's semiotic structure. Instead, his
minute examination of the details of poems is meant to attest to poems as self-sufficient
lyric structures that generate their own unique forms of "significance."
Much of Riffaterre's reading has to do with the myriad ways in which poems work to
repress mimesis, or representation, and replace it with semiosis, or a chain of signification
that refers only to itself. "The reader's perception of what is poetic is based wholly upon 223
reference to texts," he concludes, thus warding off the threat posed by structuralist
thought to the study of poems as verbal icons, as lyric wholes. Yet it is worth noticing the SECTION 4
lengths to which Riffaterre needs to go to subdue that threat. It is also worth keeping in STRUCTURALIST

mind that although in the twenty-first century, structuralism may seem a thing of the past, READING

it may still offer powerful tools for thinking about the history oflyricization, not least when
critics try to use those tools to insist that poems remain the self-sufficient lyrics that they
had become for literary criticism by the second half of the twentieth century. Riffaterre's
essay shows one way structuralist technique could be used against the grain of the large
sociocultural ambition of structuralism, but it is not necessarily typical in its reaction. For
many critics in the United States especially, structuralism offered a way out of New Criti-
cal reading and a way into a sociological and historical understanding of poetics. For
those critics, thinking about poems as parts of other social discourses remains the struc-
turalist challenge we have not yet met.

NOTES

1. From Roland Barthes, "Science 2. Michael Riffaterre, "Describing Poetic

versus Literature," paraphrased by Culler Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire's 'Les

(2002), 4- Chats,"' Yale French Studies 36-37 (1966): 200-242.

FURTHER READING

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An
Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York:
Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Vintage, 1994.
Press, 1981. Genette, Gerard. Figures of Literary Discourse.
Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. Translated Translated by Alan Sheridan. London:
by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Blackwell, 1982.
Hill and Wang, 1977- jakobson, Roman. Language in Literature. Edited
- - . S/Z: An Essay. Translated by Richard by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy.
Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. University Press, 1987.
Translated by Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables, FL: jakobson, Roman, and Claude Levi-Strauss,
University of Miami Press, 1971. "Charles Baudelaire's 'Les Chats.'" Translated by
Culler, jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Katie Furness- Lane, in Lane (1970), 204-21.
Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study jameson, Fredric. The Prison house of Language:
of Literature. London: Routledge and A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian
Kegan Paul, 1975; reprint, New York: Rout- Formalism. Princeton, Nj: Princeton University
ledge, 2002. Press, 1972.
De Man, Paul. "Hypogram and Inscription: jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Social
Michael Riffaterre's Poetics of Reading." Norms. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapo-
Diacritics 11:4 (Winter 1981): 17-35. lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
De Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Lacan, jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin. Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
Edited by Haun Saussy and Perry Lane, Michael, ed. Introduction to Structuralism.
Meisel. New York: Columbia University Press, New York: Basic Books, 1970.
2011. Lemon, Lee T., and Marion j. Reis, eds. Russian
De leuze, Giles. "A quoi reconnait-on le structural- Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln:
isme?" in Histoire de Ia phi/osophie, idees, University of Nebraska Press, 1965.
doctrines, vol. 8: Le XXe siecle, 299-335. Paris: Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of
Hachette, 1973. Kinship. New York: Beacon Press, 1971.
East hope, Antony. Poetry as Discourse. London: Mukarovsky, jan. Structure, Sign, and Function:
Methuen, 1983. Selected Essays by jan Mukarovsky. Edited by
 224 john Burbank and Peter Steiner. New Haven, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
CT: Yale University Press, 1978. Press, 1981.
Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban, eds. Natural Voloshinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy
Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of of Language. Translated by Ladislav Matejka
Chicago Press, 1996. and I. R. Titunik. New York: Seminar Press,
Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction to Poetics. 1973-

4.1 The Problem of Speech Genres

(1953; trans. 1986)

MIKHAIL BAKHTIN Translated by Vern W. McGee

1. Statement of the Problem and Definition of Speech Genres

All the diverse areas of human activity involve the use of language. Quite understand-
ably, the nature and forms of this use are just as diverse as are the areas of human activity.
This, of course, in no way disaffirms the national unity oflanguage. 1 Language is realized
in the form of individual concrete utterances (oral and written) by participants in the
various areas of human activity. These utterances reflect the specific conditions and goals
of each such area not only through their content (thematic) and linguistic style, that is,
the selection of the lexical, phraseological, and grammatical resources of the language,
but above all through their compositional structure. All three of these aspects-thematic
content, style, and compositional structure-are inseparably linked to the whole of the
utterance and are equally determined by the specific nature of the particular sphere of
communication. Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which
language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances. These we may
call speech genres.
The wealth and diversity of speech genres are boundless because the various possi-
bilities of human activity are inexhaustible, and because each sphere of activity contains
an entire repertoire of speech genres that differentiate and grow as the particular sphere
develops and becomes more complex. Special emphasis should be placed on the extreme
heterogeneity of speech genres (oral and written). In fact, the category of speech genres
should include short rejoinders of daily dialogue (and these are extremely varied depend-
ing on the subject matter, situation, and participants), everyday narration, writing (in all
its various forms), the brief standard military command, the elaborate and detailed order,
the fairly variegated repertoire of business documents (for the most part standard), and
the diverse world of commentary (in the broad sense of the word: social, political). And
we must also include here the diverse forms of scientific statements and all literary genres
(from the proverb to the multivolume novel). It might seem that speech genres are so het-
erogeneous that they do not have and cannot have a single common level at which they
can be studied. For here, on one level of inquiry, appear such heterogeneous phenomena
as the single-word everyday rejoinder and the multivolume novel, the military command
that is standardized even in its intonation and the profoundly individual lyrical work,
and so on. One might think that such functional heterogeneity makes the common fea- 225
tures of speech genres excessively abstract and empty. This probably explains why the
general problem of speech genres has never really been raised. Literary genres have been 4.1
studied more than anything else. But from antiquity to the present, they have been stud- MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

ied in terms of their specific literary and artistic features, in terms of the differences that
distinguish one from the other (within the realm of literature), and not as specific types
of utterances distinct from other types, but sharing with them a common verbal (lan-
guage) nature. The general linguistic problem of the utterance and its types has hardly
been considered at all. Rhetorical genres have been studied since antiquity (and not much
has been added in subsequent epochs to classical theory). At that time, more attention was
already being devoted to the verbal nature of these genres as utterances: for example, to
such aspects as the relation to the listener and his influence on the utterance, the specific
verbal finalization of the utterance (as distinct from its completeness of thought), and so
forth. But here, too, the specific features of rhetorical genres (judicial, political) still over-
shadowed their general linguistic nature. Finally, everyday speech genres have been stud-
ied (mainly rejoinders in everyday dialogue); and from a general linguistic standpoint (in the
school ofSaussure and among his later followers-the Structuralists, the American behavior-
ists, and, on a completely different linguistic basis, the Vosslerians). 2 But this line of inquiry
could not lead to a correct determination of the general linguistic nature of the utterance ei-
ther, since it was limited to the specific features of everyday oral speech, sometimes being di-
rectly and deliberately oriented toward primitive utterances (American behaviorists).
The extreme heterogeneity of speech genres and the attendant difficulty of determin-
ing the general nature of the utterance should in no way be underestimated. It is espe-
cially important here to draw attention to the very significant difference between primary
(simple) and secondary (complex) speech genres (understood not as a functional differ-
ence). Secondary (complex) speech genres-novels, dramas, all kinds of scientific research,
major genres of commentary, and so forth-arise in more complex and comparatively
highly developed and organized cultural communication (primarily written) that is ar-
tistic, scientific, sociopolitical, and so on. During the process of their formation, they
absorb and digest various primary (simple) genres that have taken form in unmediated
speech communion. These primary genres are altered and assume a special character
when they enter into complex ones. They lose their immediate relation to actual reality
and to the real utterances of others. For example, rejoinders of everyday dialogue or let-
ters found in a novel retain their form and their everyday significance only on the plane
of the novel's content. They enter into actual reality only via the novel as a whole, that is,
as a literary-artistic event and not as everyday life. The novel as a whole is an utterance
just as rejoinders in everyday dialogue or private letters are (they do have a common na-
ture), but unlike these, the novel is a secondary (complex) utterance.
The difference between primary and secondary (ideological) genres is very great and
fundamental, 3 but this is precisely why the nature of the utterance should be revealed and
defined through analysis of both types. Only then can the definition be adequate to the
complex and profound nature of the utterance (and encompass its most important facets).
A one-sided orientation toward primary genres inevitably leads to a vulgarization of the
entire problem (behaviorist linguistics is an extreme example). The very interrelations
between primary and secondary genres and the process of the historical formation of the
latter shed light on the nature of the utterance (and above all on the complex problem of
the interrelations among language, ideology, and world view).
A study of the nature of the utterance and of the diversity of generic forms of utter-
ances in various spheres of human activity is immensely important to almost all areas of
 226 linguistics and philology. This is because any research whose material is concrete
language-the history of a language, normative grammar, the compilation of any kind of
SECTION 4 dictionary, the sty lis tics of language, and so forth-inevitably deals with concrete utter-
STRUCTURALIST ances (written and oral) belonging to various spheres of human activity and communica-
READING tion: chronicles, contracts, texts of laws, clerical and other documents, various literary,
scientific, and commentarial genres, official and personal letters, rejoinders in everyday
dialogue (in all of their diverse subcategories), and so on. And it is here that scholars find
the language data they need. A clear idea of the nature of the utterance in general and of
the peculiarities of the various types of utterances (primary and secondary), that is, of
various speech genres, is necessary, we think, for research in any special area. To ignore
the nature of the utterance or to fail to consider the peculiarities of generic subcategories
of speech in any area of linguistic study leads to perfunctoriness and excessive abstract-
ness, distorts the historicity of the research, and weakens the link between language and
life. After all, language enters life through concrete utterances (which manifest language)
and life enters language through concrete utterances as well. The utterance is an excep-
tionally important node of problems. We shall approach certain areas and problems of
the science of language in this context.
First of all, stylistics. Any style is inseparably related to the utterance and to typical
forms of utterances, that is, speech genres. Any utterance-oral or written, primary or
secondary, and in any sphere of communication-is individual and therefore can reflect
the individuality of the speaker (or writer); that is, it possesses individual style. But not all
genres are equally conducive to reflecting the individuality of the speaker in the language
of the utterance, that is, to an individual style. The most conducive genres are those of
artistic literature: here the individual style enters directly into the very task of the utter-
ance, and this is one of its main goals (but even within artistic literature various genres
offer different possibilities for expressing individuality in language and various aspects of
individuality). The least favorable conditions for reflecting individuality in language ob-
tain in speech genres that require a standard form, for example, many kinds of business
documents, military commands, verbal signals in industry, and so on. Here one can re-
flect only the most superficial, almost biological aspects of individuality (mainly in the
oral manifestation of these standard types of utterances). In the vast majority of speech
genres (except for literary-artistic ones), the individual style does not enter into the intent
of the utterance, does not serve as its only goal, but is, as it were, an epiphenomenon of the
utterance, one of its by-products. Various genres can reveal various layers and facets of
the individual personality, and individual style can be found in various interrelations
with the national language. The very problem of the national and the individual in lan-
guage is basically the problem of the utterance (after all, only here, in the utterance, is the
national language embodied in individual form). The very determination of style in gen-
eral, and individual style in particular, requires deeper study of both the nature of the
utterance and the diversity of speech genres.
The organic, inseparable link between style and genre is clearly revealed also in the
problem of language styles, or functional styles. In essence, language, or functional, styles
are nothing other than generic styles for certain spheres of human activity and commu-
nication. Each sphere has and applies its own genres that correspond to its own specific
conditions. There are also particular styles that correspond to these genres. A particular
function (scientific, technical, commentarial, business, everyday) and the particular
conditions of speech communication specific for each sphere give rise to particular
genres, that is, certain relatively stable thematic, compositional, and stylistic types of
utterances. Style is inseparably linked to particular thematic unities and-what is espe-
cially important-to particular compositional unities: to particular types of construction 227
of the whole, types of its completion, and types of relations between the speaker and other
participants in speech communication (listeners or readers, partners, the other's speech, 4.1
and so forth). Style enters as one element into the generic unity of the utterance. Of MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

course, this does not mean that language style cannot be the subject of its own indepen-
dent study. Such a study, that is, of language stylistics as an independent discipline, is
both feasible and necessary. But this study will be correct and productive only if based on
a constant awareness of the generic nature of language styles, and on a preliminary study
of the subcategories of speech genres. Up to this point the stylistics of language has not
had such a basis. Hence its weakness. There is no generally recognized classification of
language styles. Those who attempt to create them frequently fail to meet the fundamen-
tal logical requirement of classification: a unified basis. 4 Existing taxonomies are ex-
tremely poor and undifferentiated. 5 For example, a recently published academy grammar
of the Russian language gives the following stylistic subcategories of language: bookish
speech, popular speech, abstract-scientific, scientific-technical, journalistic-commentarial,
official-business, and familiar everyday speech, as well as vulgar common parlance. In
addition to these linguistic styles, there are the stylistic subcategories of dialectical words,
archaic words, and occupational expressions. Such a classification of styles is completely
random, and at its base lies a variety of principles (or bases) for division into styles. More-
over, this classification is both inexhaustive and inadequately differentiated. All this is a
direct result of an inadequate understanding of the generic nature of linguistic styles, and
the absence of a well-thought-out classification of speech genres in terms of spheres of
human activity (and also ignorance of the distinction between primary and secondary
genres, which is very important for stylistics).
It is especially harmful to separate style from genre when elaborating historical prob-
lems. Historical changes in language styles are inseparably linked to changes in speech
genres. Literary language is a complex, dynamic system of linguistic styles. The propor-
tions and interrelations of these styles in the system of literary language are constantly
changing. Literary language, which also includes nonliterary styles, is an even more
complex system, and it is organized on different bases. In order to puzzle out the complex
historical dynamics of these systems and move from a simple (and, in the majority of
cases, superficial) description of styles, which are always in evidence and alternating with
one another, to a historical explanation of these changes, one must develop a special his-
tory of speech genres (and not only secondary, but also primary ones) that reflects more
directly, clearly, and flexibly all the changes taking place in social life. Utterances and
their types, that is, speech genres, are the drive belts from the history of society to the his-
tory oflanguage. There is not a single new phenomenon (phonetic, lexical, or grammati-
cal) that can enter the system of language without having traversed the long and compli-
cated path of generic-stylistic testing and modification. 6
In each epoch certain speech genres set the tone for the development of literary
language. And these speech genres are not only secondary (literary, commentarial, and
scientific), but also primary (certain types of oral dialogue-of the salon, of one's own
circle, and other types as well, such as familiar, family-everyday, sociopolitical, philo-
sophical, and so on). Any expansion of the literary language that results from drawing on
various extraliterary strata of the national language inevitably entails some degree of
penetration into all genres of written language (literary, scientific, commentarial, conver-
sational, and so forth) to a greater or lesser degree, and entails new generic devices for the
construction of the speech whole, its finalization, the accommodation of the listener or
partner, and so forth. This leads to a more or less fundamental restructuring and renewal
 228 of speech genres. When dealing with the corresponding extraliterary strata of the national
language, one inevitably also deals with the speech genres through which these strata are
SECTION 4 manifested. In the majority of cases, these are various types of conversational-dialogical
STRUCTURALIST genres. Hence the more or less distinct dialogization of secondary genres, the weakening
READING of their monological composition, the new sense of the listener as a partner-interlocutor,
new forms of finalization of the whole, and so forth. Where there is style there is genre.
The transfer of style from one genre to another not only alters the way a style sounds,
under conditions of a genre unnatural to it, but also violates or renews the given genre.
Thus, both individual and general language styles govern speech genres. A deeper
and broader study of the latter is absolutely imperative for a productive study of any sty-
listic problem.
However, both the fundamental and the general methodological question of the in-
terrelations between lexicon and grammar (on the one hand) and stylistics (on the other)
rests on the same problem of the utterance and of speech genres.
Grammar (and lexicon) is essentially different from stylistics (some even oppose it to
stylistics), but at the same time there is not a single grammatical study that can do with-
out stylistic observation and excursus. In a large number of cases the distinction between
grammar and stylistics appears to be completely erased. There are phenomena that some
scholars include in the area of grammar while others include them in the area of stylis-
tics. The syntagma is an example.
One might say that grammar and stylistics converge and diverge in any concrete lan-
guage phenomenon. If considered only in the language system, it is a grammatical phe-
nomenon, but if considered in the whole of the individual utterance or in a speech genre,
it is a stylistic phenomenon. And this is because the speaker's very selection of a particu-
lar grammatical form is a stylistic act. But these two viewpoints of one and the same
specific linguistic phenomenon should not be impervious to one another and should not
simply replace one another mechanically. They should be organically combined (with,
however, the most clear-cut methodological distinction between them) on the basis of the
real unity of the language phenomenon. Only a profound understanding of the nature of
the utterance and the particular features of speech genres can provide a correct solution
to this complex methodological problem.
It seems to us that a study of the nature of the utterance and of speech genres is of
fundamental importance for overcoming those simplistic notions about speech life, about
the so-called speech flow, about communication and so forth-ideas which are still cur-
rent in our language studies. Moreover, a study of the utterance as a real unit of speech
communion will also make it possible to understand more correctly the nature of language
units (as a system): words and sentences.
We shall now turn to this more general problem.

II. The Utterance as a Unit of Speech Communion: The Difference between

This Unit and Units of Language (Words and Sentences)
Nineteenth-century linguistics, beginning with Wilhelm von Humboldt, while not deny-
ing the communicative function of language, tried to place it in the background as some-
thing secondary? What it foregrounded was the function of thought emerging indepen-
dently of communication. The famous Humboldtian formula goes like this: "Apart from
the communication between one human and another, speech is a necessary condition for
reflection even in solitude." Others, Vosslerians for example, emphasize the so-called ex-
pressive function. With all the various ways individual theoreticians understand this
function, it essentially amounts to the expression of the speaker's individual discourse.
Language arises from man's need to express himself, to objectify himself. The essence of 229
any form of language is somehow reduced to the spiritual creativity of the individuum.
Several other versions of the function of language have been and are now being sug- 4.1
gested, but it is still typical to underestimate, if not altogether ignore, the communicative MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

function oflanguage. Language is regarded from the speaker's standpoint as if there were
only one speaker who does not have any necessary relation to other participants in speech
communication. If the role of the other is taken into account at all, it is the role of a lis-
tener, who understands the speaker only passively. The utterance is adequate to its ob-
ject (i.e., the content of the uttered thought) and to the person who is pronouncing the
utterance. Language essentially needs only a speaker-one speaker-and an object for
his speech. And if language also serves as a means of communication, this is a second-
ary function that has nothing to do with its essence. Of course, the language collective,
the plurality of speakers, cannot be ignored when speaking of language, but when de-
fining the essence of language this aspect is not a necessary one that determines the
nature of language. Sometimes the language collective is regarded as a kind of collec-
tive personality, "the spirit of the people," and so forth, and immense significance is
attached to it (by representatives of the "psychology of nations"), 8 but even in this case
the plurality of speakers, and others with respect to each given speaker, is denied any
real essential significance.
Still current in linguistics are such fictions as the "listener" and "understander" (part-
ners of the "speaker"), the "unified speech flow," and so on. These fictions produce a
completely distorted idea of the complex and multifaceted process of active speech com-
munication. Courses in general linguistics (even serious ones like Saussure's) frequently
present graphic-schematic depictions of the two partners in speech communication-the
speaker and the listener (who perceives the speech)-and provide diagrams of the active
speech processes of the speaker and the corresponding passive processes of the listener's
perception and understanding of the speech. One cannot say that these diagrams are
false or that they do not correspond to certain aspects of reality. But when they are put
forth as the actual whole of speech communication, they become a scientific fiction. The
fact is that when the listener perceives and understands the meaning (the language mean-
ing) of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He either
agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its
execution, and so on. And the listener adopts this responsive attitude for the entire dura-
tion of the process of listening and understanding, from the very beginning-sometimes
literally from the speaker's first word. Any understanding of live speech, a live utterance,
is inherently responsive, although the degree of this activity varies extremely. Any under-
standing is imbued with response and necessarily elicits it in one form or another: the
listener becomes the speaker. A passive understanding of the meaning of perceived speech
is only an abstract aspect of the actual whole of actively responsive understanding, which
is then actualized in a subsequent response that is actually articulated. Of course, an ut-
terance is not always followed immediately by an articulated response. An actively re-
sponsive understanding of what is heard (a command, for example) can be directly real-
ized in action (the execution of an order or command that has been understood and
accepted for execution), or it can remain, for the time being, a silent responsive under-
standing (certain speech genres are intended exclusively for this kind of responsive un-
derstanding, for example, lyrical genres), but this is, so to speak, responsive understand-
ing with a delayed reaction. Sooner or later what is heard and actively understood will
find its response in the subsequent speech or behavior of the listener. In most cases, genres
of complex cultural communication are intended precisely for this kind of actively
 230 responsive understanding with delayed action. Everything we have said here also per-
tains to written and read speech, with the appropriate adjustments and additions.
SECTION 4 Thus, all real and integral understanding is actively responsive, and constitutes noth-
STRUCTURALJST ing other than the initial preparatory stage of a response (in whatever form it may be ac-
READJNG tualized). And the speaker himself is oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive
understanding. He does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only dupli-
cates his own idea in someone else's mind. Rather, he expects response, agreement, sym-
pathy, objection, execution, and so forth (various speech genres presuppose various inte-
gral orientations and speech plans on the part of the speakers or writers). The desire to
make one's speech understood is only an abstract aspect of the speaker's concrete and
total speech plan. Moreover, any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser
degree. He is not, after all, the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the
universe. And he presupposes not only the existence of the language system he is using,
but also the existence of preceding utterances-his own and others'-with which his
given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another (builds on them, polemicizes
with them, or simply presumes that they are already known to the listener). Any utter-
ance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances.

[ ... ]

But the utterance is related not only to preceding, but also to subsequent links in the chain
of speech communion. When a speaker is creating an utterance, of course, these links do
not exist. But from the very beginning, the utterance is constructed while taking into ac-
count possible responsive reactions, for whose sake, in essence, it is actually created. As
we know, the role of the others for whom the utterance is constructed is extremely great.
We have already said that the role of these others, for whom my thought becomes actual
thought for the first time (and thus also for my own self as well) is not that of passive lis-
teners, but of active participants in speech communication. From the very beginning, the
speaker expects a response from them, an active responsive understanding. The entire
utterance is constructed, as it were, in anticipation of encountering this response.
An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed to
someone, its addressivity. As distinct from the signifying units of a language-words and
sentences-that are impersonal, belonging to nobody and addressed to nobody, the utter-
ance has both an author (and, consequently, expression, which we have already discussed)
and an addressee. This addressee can be an immediate participant-interlocutor in an ev-
eryday dialogue, a differentiated collective of specialists in some particular area of cul-
tural communication, a more or less differentiated public, ethnic group, contemporaries,
like-minded people, opponents and enemies, a subordinate, a superior, someone who is
lower, higher, familiar, foreign, and so forth. And it can also be an indefinite, uncon-
cretized other (with various kinds of monological utterances of an emotional type). All
these varieties and conceptions of the addressee are determined by that area of human
activity and everyday life to which the given utterance is related. Both the composition
and, particularly, the style of the utterance depend on those to whom the utterance is ad-
dressed, how the speaker (or writer) senses and imagines his addressees, and the force of
their effect on the utterance. Each speech genre in each area of speech communication
has its own typical conception of the addressee, and this defines it as a genre.
The addressee of the utterance can, so to speak, coincide personally with the one (or
ones) to whom the utterance responds. This personal coincidence is typical in everyday dia-
logue or in an exchange of letters. The person to whom I respond is my addressee, from
whom I, in turn, expect a response (or in any case an active responsive understanding). But 231
in such cases of personal coincidence one individual plays two different roles, and the differ-
ence between the roles is precisely what matters here. After all, the utterance of the person to 4.1
whom I am responding (I agree, I object, I execute, I take under advisement, and so forth) is MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

already at hand, but his response (or responsive understanding) is still forthcoming. When
constructing my utterance, I try actively to determine this response. Moreover, I try to act in
accordance with the response I anticipate, so this anticipated response, in turn, exerts an ac-
tive influence on my utterance (I parry objections that I foresee, I make all kinds of provisos,
and so forth). When speaking I always take into account the apperceptive background of the
addressee's perception of my speech: the extent to which he is familiar with the situation,
whether he has special knowledge of the given cultural area of communication, his views
and convictions, his prejudices (from my viewpoint), his sympathies and antipathies-
because all this will determine his active responsive understanding of my utterance. These
considerations also determine my choice of a genre for my utterance, my choice of composi-
tional devices, and, finally, my choice of language vehicles, that is, the style of my utterance.
For example, genres of popular scientific literature are addressed to a particular group of
readers with a particular apperceptive background of responsive understanding; special ed-
ucationalliterature is addressed to another kind of reader, and special research work is ad-
dressed to an entirely different sort. In these cases, accounting for the addressee (and his
apperceptive background) and for the addressee's influence on the construction of the utter-
ance is very simple: it all comes down to the scope of his specialized knowledge.
In other cases, the matter can be much more complicated. Accounting for the addressee
and anticipating his responsive reaction are frequently multifaceted processes that intro-
duce unique internal dramatism into the utterance (in certain kinds of everyday dia-
logue, in letters, and in autobiographical and confessional genres). These phenomena are
crucial, but more external, in rhetorical genres. The addressee's social position, rank, and
importance are reflected in a special way in utterances of everyday and business speech
communication. Under the conditions of a class structure and especially an aristocratic
class structure, one observes an extreme differentiation of speech genres and styles, de-
pending on the title, class, rank, wealth, social importance, and age of the addressee and
the relative position of the speaker (or writer). Despite the wealth of differentiation, both
of basic forms and of nuances, these phenomena are standard and external by nature:
they cannot introduce any profound internal dramatism into the utterance. They are in-
teresting only as instances of very crude, but still very graphic expressions of the ad-
dressee's influence on the construction and style of the utterance. 9
Finer nuances of style are determined by the nature and degree of personal proximity
of the addressee to the speaker in various familiar speech genres, on the one hand, and in
intimate ones, on the other. With all the immense differences among familiar and inti-
mate genres (and, consequently, styles), they perceive their addressees in exactly the same
way: more or less outside the framework of the social hierarchy and social conventions,
"without rank," as it were. This gives rise to a certain candor of speech (which in familiar
styles sometimes approaches cynicism). In intimate styles this is expressed in an apparent
desire for the speaker and addressee to merge completely. In familiar speech, since speech
constraints and conventions have fallen away, one can take a special unofficial, volitional
approach to reality. 10 This is why during the Renaissance familiar genres and styles could
play such a large and positive role in destroying the official medieval picture of the world.
In other periods as well, when the task was to destroy traditional official styles and world
views that had faded and become conventional, familiar styles became very significant in
literature. Moreover, familiarization of styles opened literature up to layers of language
 232 that had previously been under speech constraint. The significance of familiar genres and
styles in literary history has not yet been adequately evaluated. Intimate genres and styles
SECTION 4 are based on a maximum internal proximity of the speaker and addressee (in extreme
STRUCTURALIST instances, as if they had merged). Intimate speech is imbued with a deep confidence in
READING the addressee, in his sympathy, in the sensitivity and goodwill of his responsive under-
standing. In this atmosphere of profound trust, the speaker reveals his internal depths.
This determines the special expressiveness and internal candor of these styles (as distinct
from the loud street-language candor of familiar speech). Familiar and intimate genres
and styles (as yet very little studied) reveal extremely clearly the dependence of style on a
certain sense and understanding of the addressee (the addressee of the utterance) on the
part of the speaker, and on the addressee's actively responsive understanding that is an-
ticipated by the speaker. These styles reveal especially clearly the narrowness and incor-
rectness of traditional stylistics, which tries to understand and define style solely from
the standpoint of the semantic and thematic content of speech and the speaker's expressive
attitude toward this content. Unless one accounts for the speaker's attitude toward the
other and his utterances (existing or anticipated), one can understand neither the genre
nor the style of speech. But even the so-called neutral or objective styles of exposition that
concentrate maximally on their subject matter and, it would seem, are free of any consid-
eration of the other still involve a certain conception of their addressee. Such objectively
neutral styles select language vehicles not only from the standpoint of their adequacy to
the subject matter of speech, but also from the standpoint of the presumed apperceptive
background of the addressee. But this background is taken into account in as generalized
a way as possible, and is abstracted from the expressive aspect (the expression of the
speaker himself is also minimal in the objective style). Objectively neutral styles presup-
pose something like an identity of the addressee and the speaker, a unity of their view-
points, but this identity and unity are purchased at the price of almost complete forfeiture
of expression. It must be noted that the nature of objectively neutral styles (and, conse-
quently, the concept of the addressee on which they are based) is fairly diverse, depending
on the differences between the areas of speech communication.
This question of the concept of the speech addressee (how the speaker or writer senses
and imagines him) is of immense significance in literary history. Each epoch, each liter-
ary trend and literary-artistic style, each literary genre within an epoch or trend, is typi-
fied by its own special concepts of the addressee of the literary work, a special sense and
understanding of its reader, listener, public, or people. A historical study of changes in
these concepts would be an interesting and important task. But in order to develop it
productively, the statement of the problem itself would have to be theoretically clear.
It should be noted that, in addition to those real meanings and ideas of one's ad-
dressee that actually determine the style of the utterances (works), the history of literature
also includes conventional or semi-conventional forms of address to readers, listeners,
posterity, and so forth, just as, in addition to the actual author, there are also conven-
tional and semiconventional images of substitute authors, editors, and various kinds of
narrators. The vast majority of literary genres are secondary, complex genres composed
of various transformed primary genres (the rejoinder in dialogue, everyday stories, let-
ters, diaries, minutes, and so forth). As a rule, these secondary genres of complex cultural
communication play out various forms of primary speech communication. Here also is
the source of all literary/conventional characters of authors, narrators, and addressees.
But the most complex and ultra-composite work of a secondary genre as a whole (viewed
as a whole) is a single integrated real utterance that has a real author and real addressees
whom this author perceives and imagines.
 Thus, addressivity, the quality of turning to someone, is a constitutive feature of the 233
utterance; without it the utterance does not and cannot exist. The various typical forms
this addressivity assumes and the various concepts of the addressee are constitutive, de- 4.1
finitive features of various speech genres. MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

NOTES

1. "National unity oflanguage" is a shorthand [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1933], p.
way of referring to the assemblage of linguistic and vii). Two prominent linguists sometimes
:ranslinguistic practices common to a given region. associated with the descriptivists, Edward Sapir
It is, then, a good example of what Bakhtin means (1884-1939) and his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf
:,y an open unity. See also Otto Jesperson, (1897-1941), differ from Bloomfield insofar as
.\fankind, Nation, and Individual (Bloomington: behaviorism plays a relatively minor role in their
Indiana University Press, 1964). [Editor's note] work.
2. Saussure's teaching is based on a distinction "Vosslerians" refers to the movement named
jetween language (Ia /angue)-a system of after the German philologist Karl Vossler
:nterconnected signs and forms that normatively (1872-1949), whose adherents included Leo Spitzer
determine each individual speech act and are the (1887-1960). For Vosslerians, the reality of
special object of linguistics-and speech (Ia language is the continuously creative, constructive
pam/e)-individual instances of language use. activity that is prosecuted through speech acts; the
Bakhtin discusses Saussure's teachings in Marxism creativity oflanguage is likened to artistic creativity,
.md the Philosophy of Language as one of the two and stylistics becomes the leading discipline. Style
main trends in linguistic thought (the trend of takes precedence over grammar, and the standpoint
-abstract objectivism") that he uses to shape his of the speaker takes precedence over that of the
own theory of the utterance. See V. N. Voloshinov, listener. In a number of aspects, Bakhtin is close to
.\farxism and the Philosophy of Language, tr. the Vosslerians, but differs in his understanding of
Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York: the utterance as the concrete reality of language
Seminar Press, 1973), esp. pp. 58-61. life. Bakhtin does not, like the Vosslerians,
"Behaviorists" here refers to the school of conceive the utterance to be an individual speech
psychology introduced by the Harvard physiologist act; rather, he emphasizes the "inner sociality" in
). B. Watson in 1913. It seeks to explain animal and speech communication-an aspect that is
human behavior entirely in terms of observable objectively reinforced in speech genres. The
and measurable responses to external stimuli. concept of speech genres is central to Bakhtin,
Watson, in his insistence that behavior is a then, in that it separates his translinguistics from
physiological reaction to environmental stimuli, both Saussureans and Vosslerians in the philoso-
denied the value of introspection and of the phy of language. [Editor's note]
concept of consciousness. He saw mental processes 3. "Ideology" should not be confused with the
as bodily movements, even when unperceived, so politically oriented English word. Ideology as it is
that thinking in his view is subvocal speech. There used here is essentially any system of ideas. But
is a strong connection as well between the ideology is semiotic in the sense that it involves the
behaviorist school of psychology and the school of concrete exchange of signs in society and history.
American descriptive linguistics, which is what Every word/discourse betrays the ideology of its
Bakhtin is referring to here. The so-called speaker; every speaker is thus an ideologue and
decriptivist school was founded by the eminent every utterance an ideologeme. [Editor's note]
anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942). Its 4. A unified basis for classifying the enormous
closeness to behaviorism consists in its insistence diversity of utterances is an obsession of
on careful observation unconditioned by Bakhtin's, one that relates him directly to
presuppositions or categories taken from Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), the first in
traditional language structure. Leonard Bloomfield the modern period to argue systematically that
(1887-1949) was the chief spokesman for the school language is the vehicle of thought. He calls
and was explicit about his commitment to a language the "labor of the mind" (Arbeit des
"mechanist approach" (his term for the behaviorist Geistes) in his famous formulation "[language]
school of psychology): "Mechanists demand that itself is not [mere] work (ergon), but an activity
the facts be presented without any assumption of (energeia) ... it is in fact the labor of the mind
such auxiliary factors [as a version of the mind]. that otherwise would eternally repeat itself to
I have tried to meet this demand ...." (Language make articulated sound capable of the expression
 234 of thought" (Uber die Verschiedenheit des Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971). [Editor's
mensch lichen Sprachbaues, in Werke, vol. 7 note]
SECTION 4 [Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968], p. 46). What is 8. The phrase "psychology of nations" refers to a
important here is that for Bakhtin, as for von school organized around the nineteenth-century
STRUCTURALIST
Humboldt, the diversity of languages is itself journal Zeitschrift fiir Volkerpsychologie und
READING
of philosophical significance, for if thought and Sprachwissenschaft, whose leading spokesman,
speech are one, does not each language embody Kermann Steinthal, was among the first to
a unique way of thinking? It is here that introduce psychology (especially that of the
Bakhtin also comes very close to the work of Kantian biologist Herbart) into language (and vice
Sapir and, especially, ofWhorf. See Benjamin versa). Steinthal was attracted to von Humboldt's
Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, ed. idea of"innere Sprachform" and was important in
john B. Carroll (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Potebnya's attempts to wrestle with inner speech.
Press, 1956), esp. pp. 212-19 and 239-45. [Editor's [Editor's note]
note] 9. I am reminded of an apposite observation
5. The same kinds of classifications of language of Gogol's: "One cannot enumerate all the
styles, impoverished and lacking clarity, with a nuances and fine points of our communica-
fabricated foundation, are given by A. N. Gvozdev tion ... we have slick talkers who will speak
in his book Ocherki po stilistike russkogo jazyka quite differently with a landowner who has 200
(Essays on the stylistics of the Russian language) souls than with one who has 300, and again he
(Moscow, 1952, pp. 13-15). All of these classifica- will not speak the same way with one who has
tions are based on an uncritical assimilation of 300 as he will with one who has 500, and he will
traditional ideas about language styles. not speak the same way with one who has 500 as
[Bakhtin's note] he will with one who has 8oo; in a word, you
6. This thesis of ours has nothing in common can go up to a million and you will still find
with the Vosslerian idea of the primacy of the different nuances" (Dead Souls, chapter 3).
stylistic over the grammatical. Our subsequent [Bakhtin's note]
exposition will make this completely clear. 10. The loud candor of the streets, calling things
[Bakhtin's note] by their real names, is typical of this style.
7. See Wilhelm von Humboldt, Linguistic [Bakhtin's note]
Variability and Intellectual Development (Coral

4.2 Closing Statement: Linguistics

and Poetics (r96o)
ROMAN ]AKOBSON

I have been asked for summary remarks about poetics in its relation to linguistics. Poetics
deals primarily with the question, What makes a verbal message a work of art? Because the
main subject of poetics is the differentia specific a of verbal art in relation to other arts and in
relation to other kinds of verbal behavior, poetics is entitled to the leading place in literary
studies.
Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of painting is con-
cerned with pictorial structure. Since linguistics is the global science of verbal structure,
poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics.
 Arguments against such a claim must be thoroughly discussed. It is evident that many 235
devices studied by poetics are not confined to verbal art. We can refer to the possibility of
transposing Wuthering Heights into a motion picture, medieval legends into frescoes and 4.2
miniatures, or L'apres-midi d'un faune into music, ballet, and graphic art. However ludi- RoMAN )AKOBSON

crous may appear the idea of the Iliad and Odyssey in comics, certain structural features of
their plot are preserved despite the disappearance of their verbal shape. The question
whether Blake's illustrations to the Divina Com media are or are not adequate is a proof that
different arts are comparable. The problems of baroque or any other historical style trans-
gress the frame of a single art. When handling the surrealistic metaphor, we could hardly
pass by Max Ernst's pictures or Luis Bufiuel's films, The Andalusian Dog and The Golden
Age. In short, many poetic features belong not only to the science of language but to the
whole theory of signs, that is, to general semiotics. This statement, however, is valid not only
for verbal art but also for all varieties of language since language shares many properties
with some other systems of signs or even with all of them (pansemiotic features).
Likewise a second objection contains nothing that would be specific for literature: the
question of relations between the word and the world concerns not only verbal art but
actually all kinds of discourse. Linguistics is likely to explore all possible problems of re-
lation between discourse and the "universe of discourse": what of this universe is verbal-
ized by a given discourse and how is it verbalized. The truth values, however, as far as
they are-to say with the logicians-"extralinguistic entities," obviously exceed the bounds
of poetics and of linguistics in general.
Sometimes we hear that poetics, in contradistinction to linguistics, is concerned with
evaluation. This separation of the two fields from each other is based on a current but er-
roneous interpretation of the contrast between the structure of poetry and other types of
verbal structure: the latter are said to be opposed by their "casual," designless nature to
the "noncasual," purposeful character of poetic language. In point of fact, any verbal be-
havior is goal-directed, but the aims are different and the conformity of the means used
to the effect aimed at is a problem that evermore preoccupies inquirers into the diverse
kinds of verbal communication. There is a close correspondence, much closer than critics
believe, between the question of linguistic phenomena expanding in space and time and
the spatial and temporal spread ofliterary models. Even such discontinuous expansion as
the resurrection of neglected or forgotten poets-for instance, the posthumous discovery
and subsequent canonization of Gerard Manley Hopkins (d. 1889), the tardy fame ofLau-
tn!amont (d. 1870) among surrealist poets, and the salient influence of the hitherto ig-
nored Cyprian Norwid (d. 1883) on Polish modern poetry-find a parallel in the history
of standard languages which are prone to revive outdated models, sometimes long forgot-
ten, as was the case in literary Czech which toward the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury leaned to sixteenth-century models.
Unfortunately the terminological confusion of"literary studies" with "criticism" tempts
the student ofliterature to replace the description of the intrinsic values of a literary work
by a subjective, censorious verdict. The label "literary critic" applied to an investigator of
literature is as erroneous as "grammatical (or lexical) critic" would be applied to a lin-
guist. Syntactic and morphologic research cannot be supplanted by a normative gram-
mar, and likewise no manifesto, foisting a critic's own tastes and opinions on creative litera-
ture, may act as substitute for an objective scholarly analysis of verbal art. This statement is
not to be mistaken for the quietist principle of laissez faire; any verbal culture involves
programmatic, planning, normative endeavors. Yet why is a clear-cut discrimination
made between pure and applied linguistics or between phonetics and orthoepy but not
between literary studies and criticism?
 236 Literary studies, with poetics as their focal portion, consist like linguistics of two sets
of problems: synchrony and diachrony. The synchronic description envisages not only
SECTION 4 the literary production of any given stage but also that part of the literary tradition which
STRUCTURALIST for the stage in question has remained vital or has been revived. Thus, for instance,
READING Shakespeare on the one hand and Donne, Marvell, Keats, and Emily Dickinson on the
other are experienced by the present English poetic world, whereas the works of James
Thomson and Longfellow, for the time being, do not belong to viable artistic values. The
selection of classics and their reinterpretation by a novel trend is a substantial problem of
synchronic literary studies. Synchronic poetics, like synchronic linguistics, is not to be
confused with statics; any stage discriminates between more conservative and more in-
novatory forms. Any contemporary stage is experienced in its temporal dynamics, and,
on the other hand, the historical approach both in poetics and in linguistics is concerned
not only with changes but also with continuous, enduring, static factors. A thoroughly
comprehensive historical poetics or history of language is a superstructure to be built on
a series of successive synchronic descriptions.
Insistence on keeping poetics apart from linguistics is warranted only when the
field of linguistics appears to be illicitly restricted, for example, when the sentence is
viewed by some linguists as the highest analyzable construction or when the scope of
linguistics is confined to grammar alone or uniquely to nonsemantic questions of ex-
ternal form or to the inventory of denotative devices with no reference to free varia-
tions. Voegelin has clearly pointed out the two most important and related problems
which face structural linguistics, namely, a revision of "the monolithic hypothesis of
language" and a concern with "the interdependence of diverse structures within one
language." No doubt, for any speech community, for any speaker, there exists a unity
of language, but this over-all code represents a system of interconnected subcodes; each
language encompasses several concurrent patterns which are each characterized by a
different function.
Obviously we must agree with Sapir that, on the whole, "ideation reigns supreme in
language ... ", 1 but this supremacy does not authorize linguistics to disregard the "sec-
ondary factors." The emotive elements of speech which, as Joos is prone to believe, cannot
be described "with a finite number of absolute categories," are classified by him "as non-
linguistic elements of the real world." Hence, "for us they remain vague, protean, fluctu-
ating phenomena," he concludes, "which we refuse to tolerate in our science." 2 Joos is in-
deed a brilliant expert in reduction experiments, and his emphatic requirement for an
"expulsion" of the emotive elements "from linguistic science" is a radical experiment in
reduction-reductio ad absurdum.
Language must be investigated in all the variety of its functions. Before discussing
the poetic function we must define its place among the other functions of language. An
outline of these functions demands a concise survey of the constitutive factors in any
speech event, in any act of verbal communication. The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to
the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to ("refer-
ent" in another, somewhat ambiguous, nomenclature), seizable by the addressee, and
either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common
to the addresser and addressee (or in other words, to the encoder and decoder of the
message); and, finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection
between the addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in
communication. All these factors inalienably involved in verbal communication may be
schematized as follows:
 CONTEXT 237
ADDRESSER MESSAGE ADDRESSEE
4.2
CONTACT
ROMAN jAKOBSON
CODE

Each of these six factors determines a different function of language. Although we

distinguish six basic aspects of language, we could, however, hardly find verbal messages
that would fulfill only one function. The diversity lies not in a monopoly of some one of
these several functions but in a different hierarchical order of functions. The verbal
structure of a message depends primarily on the predominant function. But even though
a set (Einstellung) toward the referent, an orientation toward the CONTEXT-briefly the
so-called REFERENTIAL, "denotative," "cognitive" function-is the leading task of nu-
merous messages, the accessory participation of the other functions in such messages
must be taken into account by the observant linguist.
The so-called EMOTIVE or "expressive" function, focused on the ADDRESSER, aims a
direct expression of the speaker's attitude toward what he is speaking about. It tends to
produce an impression of a certain emotion whether true or feigned; therefore, the term
"emotive," launched and advocated by Marty has proved to be preferable to "emotional." 3
The purely emotive stratum in language is presented by the interjections. They differ
from the means of referential language both by their sound pattern (peculiar sound se-
quences or even sounds elsewhere unusual) and by their syntactic role (they are not com-
ponents but equivalents of sentences). "Tut! Tut! said McGinty": the complete utterance of
Conan Doyle's character consists of two suction clicks. The emotive function, laid bare in
the interjections, flavors to some extent all our utterances, on their phonic, grammatical,
and lexical level. If we analyze language from the standpoint of the information it carries,
we cannot restrict the notion of information to the cognitive aspect of language. A man,
using expressive features to indicate his angry or ironic attitude, conveys ostensible in-
tormation, and evidently this verbal behavior cannot be likened to such nonsemiotic, nu-
tritive activities as "eating grapefruit" (despite Chatman's bold simile). The difference
between [big] and the emphatic prolongation of the vowel [bi:g] is a conventional, coded
linguistic feature like the difference between the short and long vowel in such Czech pairs
as [vi] 'you' and [vi:] 'knows,' but in the latter pair the differential information is phone-
mic and in the former emotive. As long as we are interested in phonemic invariants, the
English Iii and /i:/ appear to be mere variants of one and the same phoneme, but if we are
.:oncerned with emotive units, the relation between the invariant and variants is reversed:
length and shortness are invariants implemented by variable phonemes. Saporta's surmise
that emotive difference is a nonlinguistic feature, "attributable to the delivery of the mes-
>age and not to the message," arbitrarily reduces the informational capacity of messages.
A former actor of Stanislavskij's Moscow Theater told me how at his audition he was
asked by the famous director to make forty different messages from the phrase Segodnja
·:eeerom 'This evening,' by diversifying its expressive tint. He made a list of some forty
emotional situations, then emitted the given phrase in accordance with each of these situ-
ations, which his audience had to recognize only from the changes in the sound shape of
:he same two words. For our research work in the description and analysis of contempo-
~ary Standard Russian (under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation) this actor was
.1sked to repeat Stanislavskij's test. He wrote down some fifty situations framing the same
elliptic sentence and made of it fifty corresponding messages for a tape record. Most of
 238 the messages were correctly and circumstantially decoded by Moscovite listeners. May I
add that all such emotive cues easily undergo linguistic analysis.
SECTION 4 Orientation toward the ADDRESSEE, the CONATIVE function, finds its purest gram-
STRUCTURALIST matical expression in the vocative and imperative, which syntactically, morphologically,
READING and often even phonemically deviate from other nominal and verbal categories. The im-
perative sentences cardinally differ from declarative sentences: the latter are and the for-
mer are not liable to a truth test. When in O'Neill's play The Fountain, Nano, "(in a fierce
tone of command)," says "Drink!"-the imperative cannot be challenged by the question
"is it true or not?" which may be, however, perfectly well asked after such sentences as
"one drank," "one will drink," "one would drink." In contradistinction to the imperative
sentences, the declarative sentences are convertible into interrogative sentences: "did one
drink?" "will one drink?" "would one drink?"
The traditional model of language as elucidated particularly by Biihler4 was confined
to these three functions emotive, conative, and referential-and the three apexes of this
model-the first person of the addresser, the second person of the addressee, and the
"third person," properly-someone or something spoken of. Certain additional verbal
functions can be easily inferred from this triadic model. Thus the magic, incantatory
function is chiefly some kind of conversion of an absent or inanimate "third person" into
an addressee of a conative message. "May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu" (Lithuanian spell
69). 5 "Water, queen river, daybreak! Send grief beyond the blue sea, to the sea-bottom, like a
grey stone never to rise from the sea-bottom, may grief never come to burden the light
heart of God's servant, may grief be removed and sink away." (North Russian incantation
217f.).6 "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Aj-a-lon. And
the sun stood still, and the moon stayed ..." (Josh. 10.12). We observe, however, three
further constitutive factors of verbal communication and three corresponding functions
oflanguage.
There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue
communication, to check whether the channel works ("Hello, do you hear me?"), to at-
tract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention ("Are you
listening?" or in Shakespearean diction, "Lend me your ears!"-and on the other end of
the wire "Urn-hum!"). This set for CONTACT, or in Malinowski's terms PHATIC func-
tion? may be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by entire dia-
logues with the mere purport of prolonging communication. Dorothy Parker caught
eloquent examples:" 'Well!' the young man said. 'Well!' she said. 'Well, here we are,' he
said. 'Here we are,' she said, 'Aren't we?' 'I should say we were,' he said, 'Eeyop! Here we
are.' 'Well!' she said. 'Well!' he said, 'well.'" The endeavor to start and sustain commu-
nication is typical of talking birds; thus the phatic function of language is the only
one they share with human beings. It is also the first verbal function acquired by in-
fants; they are prone to communicate before being able to send or receive informative
communication.
A distinction has been made in modern logic between two levels oflanguage, "object
language" speaking of objects and "metalanguage" speaking of language. But metalan-
guage is not only a necessary scientific tool utilized by logicians and linguists; it plays also
an important role in our everday language. Like Moliere's Jourdain who used prose with-
out knowing it, we practice metalanguage without realizing the metalingual character of
our operations. Whenever the addresser and/or the addressee need to check up whether
they use the same code, speech is focused on the CODE: it performs a METALINGUAL (i.e.,
glossing) function. "I don't follow you-what do you mean?" asks the addressee, or in
Shakespearean diction, "What is't thou say'st?" And the addresser in anticipation of such
recapturing questions inquires: "Do you know what I mean?'' Imagine such an exasperat- 239
ing dialogue: "The sophomore was plucked." "But what is plucked?" "Plucked means the
same as flunked." "And flunked?" "To be flunked is to fail in an exam." "And what is sopho- 4.2
more?" persists the interrogator innocent of school vocabulary. "A sophomore is (or RoMAN jAKossoN
means) a second-year student." All these equational sentences convey information merely
about the lexical code of English; their function is strictly metalingual. Any process of
language learning, in particular child acquisition of the mother tongue, makes wide use
of such metalingual operations; and aphasia may often be defined as a loss of ability for
metalingual operations.
We have brought up all the six factors involved in verbal communication except the
message itself. The set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message
for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language. This function cannot he produc-
tively studied out of touch with the general problems of language, and, on the other
hand, the scrutiny oflanguage requires a thorough consideration of its poetic function.
Any attempt to reduce the sphere of poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to
poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. Poetic function is not the sole
function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other
verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. This function, by promot-
ing the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.
Hence, when dealing with poetic function, linguistics cannot limit itself to the field of
poetry.
"Why do you always say Joan and Margery, yet never Margery and Joan? Do you prefer
Joan to her twin sister?" "Not at all, it just sounds smoother." In a sequence of two coordi-
nate names, as far as no rank problems interfere, the precedence of the shorter name suits
the speaker, unaccountably for him, as a well-ordered shape of the message.
A girl used to talk about "the horrible Harry." "Why horrible?" "Because I hate him."
"But why not dreadful, terrible,frightfu/, disgusting?" "I don't know why, but horrible fits
him better." Without realizing it, she clung to the poetic device of paronomasia.
The political slogan "I like Ike" /ay layk ayk/, succinctly structured, consists of three
monosyllables and counts three diphthongs /ay/, each of them symmetrically followed by
one consonantal phoneme, /.. l..k .. k/. The make-up of the three words presents a varia-
tion: no consonantal phonemes in the first word, two around the diphthong in the sec-
ond, and one final consonant in the third. A similar dominant nucleus /ay/ was noticed
by Hymes in some of the sonnets of Keats. Both cola of the trisyllabic formula "I like I Ike"
rhyme with each other, and the second of the two rhyming words is fully included in the
first one (echo rhyme), /layk/-/ayk/, a paronomastic image of a feeling which totally en-
velops its object. Both cola alliterate with each other, and the first of the two alliterating
words is included in the second: /ay/-/ayk/, a paronomastic image of the loving subject
enveloped by the beloved object. The secondary, poetic function of this electional catch
phrase reinforces its impressiveness and efficacy.
As we said, the linguistic study of the poetic function must overstep the limits of po-
etry, and, on the other hand, the linguistic scrutiny of poetry cannot limit itself to the
poetic function. The particularities of diverse poetic genres imply a differently ranked
participation of the other verbal functions along with the dominant poetic function. Epic
poetry, focused on the third person, strongly involves the referential function of lan-
guage; the lyric, oriented toward the first person, is intimately linked with the emotive
function; poetry of the second person is imbued with the conative function and is either
supplicatory or exhortative, depending on whether the first person is subordinated to the
second one or the second to the first.
 240 Now that our cursory description of the six basic functions of verbal communication
is more or less complete, we may complement our scheme of the fundamental factors by a
SECTION 4 corresponding scheme of the functions:
STRUCTURALIST

READING REFERENTIAL

EMOTIVE POETIC CONATIVE

PH ATIC

METALINGUAL

What is the empirical linguistic criterion of the poetic function? In particular, what is
the indispensable feature inherent in any piece of poetry? To answer this question we
must recall the two basic modes of arrangement used in verbal behavior, selection and
combination. If "child" is the topic of the message, the speaker selects one among the ex-
tant, more or less similar, nouns like child, kid, youngster, tot, all of them equivalent in a
certain respect, and then, to comment on this topic, he may select one of the semanti-
cally cognate verbs-sleeps, dozes, nods, naps. Both chosen words combine in the speech
chain. The selection is produced on the base of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity,
synonymity and antonymity, while the combination, the build up of the sequence, is based
on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selec-
tion into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the
sequence. In poetry one syllable is equalized with any other syllable of the same sequence;
word stress is assumed to equal word stress, as unstress equals unstress; prosodic long is
matched with long, and short with short; word boundary equals word boundary, no
boundary equals no boundary; syntactic pause equals syntactic pause, no pause equals no
pause. Syllables are converted into units of measure, and so are morae or stresses.
It may be objected that metalanguage also makes a sequential use of equivalent units
when combining synonymic expressions into an equational sentence: A= A ("Mare is the
female of the horse"). Poetry and metalanguage, however, are in diametrical opposition to
each other: in metalanguage the sequence is used to build an equation, whereas in poetry
the equation is used to build a sequence.
In poetry, and to a certain extent in latent manifestations of poetic function, se-
quences delimited by word boundaries become commensurable whether they are sensed
as isochronic or graded. "Joan and Margery" showed us the poetic principle of syllable
gradation, the same principle which in the close of Serbian folk epics has been raised to a
compulsory law. 8 Without its two dactylic words the combination "innocent bystander"
would hardly have become a hackneyed phrase. The symmetry of three disyllabic verbs
with an identical initial consonant and identical final vowel added splendor to the laconic
victory message of Caesar: "Veni, vidi, vici."
Measure of sequences is a device which, outside of poetic function, finds no applica-
tion in language. Only in poetry with its regular reiteration of equivalent units is the time
of the speech flow experienced, as it is-to cite another semiotic pattern-with musical
time. Gerard Manley Hopkins, an outstanding searcher in the science of poetic language,
defined verse as "speech wholly or partially repeating the same figure of sound." 9 Hop-
kins' subsequent question, "but is all verse poetry?" can be definitely answered as soon as
poetic function ceases to be arbitrarily confined to the domain of poetry. Mnemonic lines
cited by Hopkins (like "Thirty days hath September"), modern advertising jingles, and
versified medieval laws, mentioned by Lotz, or finally Sanscrit scientific treatises in verse
which in Indic tradition are strictly distinguished from true poetry (kavya)-all these 241
metrical texts make use of poetic function without, however, assigning to this function
the coercing, determining role it carries in poetry. Thus verse actually exceeds the limits 4.2
of poetry, but at the same time verse always implies poetic function. And apparently no RoMAN jAKoasoN
human culture ignores versemaking, whereas there are many cultural patterns without
"applied" verse; and even in such cultures which possess both pure and applied verses, the
latter appear to be a secondary, unquestionably derived phenomenon. The adaptation of
poetic means for some heterogeneous purpose does not conceal their primary essence,
just as elements of emotive language, when utilized in poetry, still maintain their emotive
tinge. A filibusterer may recite Hiawatha because it is long, yet poeticalness still remains
the primary intent of this text itself. Self-evidently, the existence of versified, musical, and
pictorial commercials does not separate the questions of verse or of musical and pictorial
form from the study of poetry, music, and fine arts.
To sum up, the analysis of verse is entirely within the competence of poetics, and the
latter may be defined as that part of linguistics which treats the poetic function in its re-
lationship to the other functions oflanguage. Poetics in the wider sense of the word deals
with the poetic function not only in poetry, where this function is superimposed upon
the other functions of language, but also outside of poetry, when some other function is
superimposed upon the poetic function.
The reiterative "figure of sound," which Hopkins saw to be the constitutive principle
of verse, can be further specified. Such a figure always utilizes at least one (or more than
one) binary contrast of a relatively high and relatively low prominence effected by the dif-
ferent sections of the phonemic sequence.
Within a syllable the more prominent, nuclear, syllabic part, constituting the peak of
the syllable, is opposed to the less prominent, marginal, nonsyllabic phonemes. Any syllable
contains a syllabic phoneme, and the interval between two successive syllabics is in some
languages always and in others overwhelmingly carried out by marginal, nonsyllabic pho-
nemes. In the so-called syllabic versification the number of syllabics in a metrically delim-
ited chain (time series) is a constant, whereas the presence of a nonsyllabic phoneme or
cluster between every two syllabics of a metrical chain is a constant only in languages with
an indispensable occurrence of nonsyllabics between syllabics and, furthermore, in those
verse systems where hiatus is prohibited. Another manifestation of a tendency toward a
uniform syllabic model is the avoidance of closed syllables at the end of the line, observable,
for instance, in Serbian epic songs. The Italian syllabic verse shows a tendency to treat a se-
quence of vowels unseparated by consonantal phonemes as one single metrical syllable. 10
In some patterns of versification the syllable is the only constant unit of verse mea-
sure, and a grammatical limit is the only constant line of demarcation between measured
sequences, whereas in other patterns syllables in turn are dichotomized into more and
less prominent, and/or two levels of grammatical limits are distinguished in their metri-
cal function, word boundaries and syntactic pauses.
Except the varieties of the so-called vers libre that are based on conjugate intonations
and pauses only, any meter uses the syllable as a unit of measure at least in certain sections
of the verse. Thus in the purely accentual verse ("sprung rhythm" in Hopkins' vocabulary),
the number of syllables in the upbeat (called "slack" by Hopkins) may vary, but the down-
beat (ictus) constantly contains one single syllable.
In any accentual verse the contrast between higher and lower prominence is achieved
by syllables under stress versus unstressed syllables. Most accentual patterns operate pri-
marily with the contrast of syllables with and without word stress, but some varieties of
accentual verse deal with syntactic, phrasal stresses, those which Wimsatt and Beardsley
 242 cite as "the major stresses of the major words" and which are opposed as prominent t~
syllables without such major, syntactic stress.
SECTION 4 In the quantitative ("chronemic") verse, long and short syllables are mutually opposed
STRUCTURALIST as more and less prominent. This contrast is usually carried out by syllable nuclei, phone-
READING mically long and short. But in metrical patterns like Ancient Greek and Arabic, which
equalize length "by position" with length "by nature," the minimal syllables consisting of
a consonantal phoneme and one mora vowel are opposed to syllables with a surplus (a
second mora or a closing consonant) as simpler and less prominent syllables opposed to
those that are more complex and prominent.
The question still remains open whether, besides the accentual and the chronemic verse,
there exists a "tonemic" type of versification in languages where differences of syllabic into-
nations are used to distinguish word meanings." In classical Chinese poetry, 12 syllables with
modulations (in Chinese tse, 'deflected tones') are opposed to the nonmodulated syllables
(p'ing, 'level tones'), but apparently a chronemic principle underlies this opposition, as was
suspected by Polivanov13 and keenly interpreted by Wang Li; 14 in the Chinese metrical tradi-
tion the level tones prove to be opposed to the deflected tones as long tonal peaks of syllables
to short ones, so that verse is based on the opposition oflength and shortness.
Joseph Greenberg brought to my attention another variety of tonemic versification-
the verse of Efik riddles based on the level feature. In the sample cited by Simmons, 15 the
query and the response form two octosyllables with an alike distribution of h(igh)- and
/(ow)- tone syllabics; in each hemistich, moreover, the last three of the four syllables pres-
ent an identical tonemic pattern: lhhl!hhhl!/lhhl!hhhl/1. Whereas Chinese versification
appears as a peculiar variety of the quantitative verse, the verse of the Efic riddles is
linked with the usual accentual verse by an opposition of two degrees of prominence
(strength or height) of the vocal tone. Thus a metrical system of versification can be based
only on the opposition of syllabic peaks and slopes (syllabic verse), on the relative level of
the peaks (accentual verse), and on the relative length of the syllabic peaks or entire syl-
lables (quantitative verse).
In textbooks of literature we sometimes encounter a superstitious contraposition of
syllabism as a mere mechanical count of syllables to the lively pulsation of accentual
verse. If we examine, however, the binary meters of the strictly syllabic and at the same
time, accentual versification, we observe two homogeneous successions of wavelike peaks
and valleys. Of these two undulatory curves, the syllabic one carries nuclear phonemes in
the crest and usually marginal phonemes in the bottom. As a rule the accentual curve su-
perposed upon the syllabic curve alternates stressed and unstressed syllables in the crests
and bottoms respectively.
For comparison with the English meters which we have lengthily discussed, I bring to
your attention the similar Russian binary verse forms which for the last fifty years have
verily undergone an exhaustive investigation. 16 The structure of the verse can be very
thoroughly described and interpreted in terms of enchained probabilities. Besides the
compulsory word boundary between the lines, which is an invariant throughout all Rus-
sian meters, in the classic pattern of Russian syllabic accentual verse ("syllabo-tonic" in
native nomenclature) we observe the following constants: (1) the number of syllables in the
line from its beginning to the last downbeat is stable; (2) this very last down-beat always
carries a word stress; (3) a stressed syllable cannot fall on the upbeat if a downbeat is ful-
filled by an unstressed syllable of the same word unit (so that a word stress can coincide
with an upbeat only as far as it belongs to a monosyllabic word unit).
Along with these characteristics compulsory for any line composed in a given meter,
there are features that show a high probability of occurrence without being constantly
present. Besides signals certain to occur ("probability one"), signals likely to occur 243
("probabilities less than one") enter into the notion of meter. Using Cherry's description
of human communication, 17 we could say that the reader of poetry obviously "may be un- 4.2
able to attach numerical frequencies" to the constituents of the meter, but as far as he RoMAN jAKossoN
conceives the verse shape, he unwittingly gets an inkling of their "rank order."
In the Russian binary meters all odd syllables counting back from the last downbeat-
briefly, all the upbeats-are usually fulfilled by unstressed syllables, except some very low
percentage of stressed monosyllables. All even syllables, again counting back from the
last downbeat, show a sizable preference for syllables under word stress, but the probabili-
ties of their occurrence are unequally distributed among the successive downbeats of the
line. The higher the relative frequency of word stresses in a given downbeat, the lower the
ratio shown by the preceding downbeat. Since the last downbeat is constantly stressed,
the next to last gives the lowest percentage of word stresses; in the preceding downbeat
their amount is again higher, without attaining the maximum, displayed by the final
downbeat; one downbeat further toward the beginning of the line, the amount of the
stresses sinks once more, without reaching the minimum of the next-to-last downbeat;
and so on. Thus the distribution of word stresses among the downbeats within the line,
the split into strong and weak downbeats, creates a regressive undulatory curve super-
posed upon the wavy alternation of downbeats and upbeats. Incidentally, there is a capti-
vating question of the relationship between the strong downbeats and phrasal stresses.
The Russian binary meters reveal a stratified arrangement of three undulatory curves: (I)
alternation of syllabic nuclei and margins; (II) division of syllabic nuclei into alternating
downbeats and upbeats; and (III) alternation of strong and weak downbeats. For example,
Russian masculine iambic tetrameter of the nineteenth and present centuries may be repre-
sented by Figure 1, and a similar triadic pattern appears in the corresponding English forms.

III

II

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Three of five downbeats are deprived of word stress in Shelley's iambic line "Laugh
with an inextinguishable laughter." Seven of sixteen downbeats are stressless in the fol-
lowing quatrain from Pasternak's recent iambic tetrameter Zemlja ("Earth"):

I ulica za panibnita
S ok6nnicej podslepovatoj,
I be!oj n6ci i zakatu
Ne razminut 'sja u reki.
 244 Since the overwhelming majority of downbeats concur with word stresses, the listener or
reader of Russian verses is prepared with a high degree of probability to meet a word
SECTION 4 stress in any even syllable of iambic lines, but at the very beginning of Pasternak's qua-
STRUCTURALIST train the fourth and, one foot further, the sixth syllable, both in the first and in the fol-
READING lowing line, present him with a frustrated expectation. The degree of such a "frustration"
is higher when the stress is lacking in a strong downbeat and becomes particularly out-
standing when two successive downbeats are carrying unstressed syllables. The stress-
lessness of two adjacent downbeats is the less probable and the most striking when it
embraces a whole hemistich as in a later line of the same poem: "Ctoby za gorodskjou
gran' ju" [stabyzagarackoju gran'ju]. The expectation depends on the treatment of a given
downbeat in the poem and more generally in the whole extant metrical tradition. In the
last downbeat but one, unstress may, however, outweigh the stress. Thus in this poem
only 17 of 41 lines have a word stress on their sixth syllable. Yet in such a case the inertia
of the stressed even syllables alternating with the unstressed odd syllables prompts some
expectancy of stress also for the sixth syllable of the iambic tetrameter.
Quite naturally it was Edgar Allan Poe, the poet and theoretician of defeated antici-
pation, who metrically and psychologically appraised the human sense of gratification for
the unexpected arising from expectedness, both of them unthinkable without the oppo-
site, "as evil cannot exist without good." 18 Here we could easily apply Robert Frost's for-
mula from "The Figure a Poem Makes": "The figure is the same as for love." 19
The so-called shifts of word stress in polysyllabic words from the downbeat to the
upbeat ("reversed feet"), which are unknown to the standard forms of Russian verse, ap-
pear quite usually in English poetry after a metrical and/or syntactic pause. A noticeable
example is the rhythmical variation of the same adjective in Milton's "Infinite wrath and
infinite despair." In the line "Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee," the stressed syl-
lable of one and the same word occurs twice in the upbeat, first at the beginning of the
line and a second time at the beginning of a phrase. This license, discussed by Jespersen 20
and current in many languages, is entirely explainable by the particular import of the
relation between an upbeat and the immediately preceding downbeat. Where such an im-
mediate precedence is impeded by an inserted pause, the upbeat becomes a kind of syl-
laba anceps.
Besides the rules which underlie the compulsory features of verse, the rules govern-
ing its optional traits also pertain to meter. We are inclined to designate such phenomena
as unstress in the downbeats and stress in upbeats as deviations, but it must be remem-
bered that these are allowed oscillations, departures within the limits of the law. In Brit-
ish parliamentary terms, it is not an opposition to its majesty the meter but an opposition
of its majesty. As to the actual infringements of metrical laws, the discussion of such vio-
lations recalls Osip Brik, perhaps the keenest of Russian formalists, who used to say that
political conspirators are tried and condemned only for unsuccessful attempts at a forc-
ible upheaval, because in the case of a successful coup it is the conspirators who assume
the role of judges and prosecutors. If the violences against the meter take root, they
themselves become metrical rules.
Far from being an abstract, theoretical scheme, meter-or in more explicit terms,
verse design-underlies the structure of any single line-or, in logical terminology, any
single verse instance. Design and instance are correlative concepts. The verse design de-
termines the invariant features of the verse instances and sets up the limits of variations.
A Serbian peasant reciter of epic poetry memorizes, performs, and, to a high extent, im-
provises thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of lines, and their meter is alive in his
mind. Unable to abstract its rules, he nonetheless notices and repudiates even the slight-
est infringement of these rules. Any line of Serbian epics contains precisely ten syllables 245
and is followed by a syntactic pause. There is furthermore a compulsory word bound-
ary before the fifth syllable and a compulsory absence of word boundary before the 4.2
fourth and tenth syllable. The verse has, moreover, significant quantitative and accen- RoMAN )AKOBSON

tual characteristics. 21
This Serbian epic break, along with many similar examples presented by comparative
metrics, is a persuasive warning against the erroneous identification of a break with a syn-
tactic pause. The obligatory word boundary must not be combined with pause and is not
even meant to be perceptible by the ear. The analysis of Serbian epic songs phonographi-
cally recorded proves that there are no compulsory audible clues to the break, and yet any
attempt to abolish the word boundary before the fifth syllable by a mere insignificant
change in word order is immediately condemned by the narrator. The grammatical fact
that the fourth and fifth syllables pertain to two different word units is sufficient for the ap-
praisal of the break. Thus verse design goes far beyond the questions of sheer sound shape;
it is a much wider linguistic phenomenon, and it yields to no isolating phonetic treatment.
I say "linguistic phenomenon" even though Chatman states that "the meter exists as a
system outside the language." Yes, meter appears also in other arts dealing with time se-
quence. There are many linguistic problems-for instance, syntax-which likewise over-
step the limit of language and are common to different semiotic systems. We may speak
even about the grammar of traffic signals. There exists a signal code, where a yellow light
when combined with green warns that free passage is close to being stopped and when
combined with red announces the approaching cessation of the stoppage; such a yellow
signal offers a close analogue to the verbal completive aspect. Poetic meter, however, has
so many intrinsically linguistic particularities that it is most convenient to describe it
from a purely linguistic point of view.
Let us add that no linguistic property of the verse design should be disregarded. Thus,
for example, it would be an unfortunate mistake to deny the constitutive value of intona-
tion in English meters. Not even speaking about its fundamental role in the meters of
such a master of English free verse as Whitman, it is impossible to ignore the metrical
significance of pausal intonation ("final juncture"), whether "cadence" or "anticadence," 22
in poems like "The Rape of The Lock" with its intentional avoidance of enjambments. Yet
even a vehement accumulation of enjambments never hides their digressive, variational
status; they always set off the normal coincidence of syntactic pause and pausal intona-
tion with the metrical limit. Whatever is the reciter's way of reading, the intonational
constraint of the poem remains valid. The intonational contour inherent to a poem, to a
poet, to a poetic school is one of the most notable topics brought to discussion by the Rus-
sian formalists. 23
The verse design is embodied in verse instances. Usually the free variation of these
instances is denoted by the somewhat equivocal label "rhythm." A variation of verse in-
stances within a given poem must be strictly distinguished from the variable delivery
instances. The intention "to describe the verse line as it is actually performed" is oflesser
use for the synchronic and historical analysis of poetry than it is for the study of its recita-
tion in the present and the past. Meanwhile the truth is simple and clear: "There are
:nany performances of the same poem-differing among themselves in many ways. A
?erformance is an event, but the poem itself, if there is any poem, must be some kind of
enduring object." This sage memento of Wimsatt and Beardsley belongs indeed to the
essentials of modern metrics.
In Shakespeare's verses the second, stressed syllable of the word "absurd" usually falls
Jn the downbeat, but once in the third act of Hamlet it falls on the upbeat: "No, let the
 246 candied tongue lick absurd pomp." The reciter may scan the word "absurd" in this line
with an initial stress on the first syllable or observe the final word stress in accordance
SEcTioN 4 with the standard accentuation. He may also subordinate the word stress of the adjective
STRUCTURALIST in favor of the strong syntactic stress of the following head word, as suggested by Hill:
READING "No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp," 24 as in Hopkins' conception of English
antispasts-"regret never." 25 There is finally a possibility of emphatic modifications either
through a "fluctuating accentuation" (schwebende Betonung) embracing both syllables or
through an exclamational reinforcement of the first syllable [ab-surd]. But whatever solu-
tion the reciter chooses, the shift of the word stress from the downbeat to the upbeat with
no antecedent pause is still arresting, and the moment of frustrated expectation stays vi-
able. Wherever the reciter put the accent, the discrepancy between the English word
stress on the second syllable of "absurd" and the downbeat attached to the first syllable
persists as a constitutive feature of the verse instance. The tension between the ictus and
the usual word stress is inherent in this line independently of its different implementa-
tions by various actors and readers. As Gerard Manley Hopkins observes, in the preface
to his poems, "two rhythms are in some manner running at once." 26 His description of
such a contrapuntal run can be reinterpreted. The superinducing of an equivalence prin-
ciple upon the word sequence or, in other terms, the mounting of the metrical form upon
the usual speech form, necessarily gives the experience of a double, ambiguous shape to
anyone who is familiar with the given language and with verse. Both the convergences
and the divergences between the two forms, both the warranted and the frustrated expec-
tations, supply this experience.
How the given verse-instance is implemented in the given delivery instance depends
on the delivery design of the reciter; he may cling to a scanning style or tend toward prose-
like prosody or freely oscillate between these two poles. We must be on guard against
simplistic binarism which reduces two couples into one single opposition either by sup-
pressing the cardinal distinction between verse design and verse instance (as well as be-
tween delivery design and delivery instance) or by an erroneous identification of delivery
instance and delivery design with the verse instance and verse design.

"But tell me, child, your choice; what shall I buy

You?"-"Father, what you buy me I like best."

These two lines from "The Handsome Heart" by Hopkins contain a heavy enjambment
which puts a verse boundary before the concluding monosyllable of a phrase, of a sen-
tence, of an utterance. The recitation of these pentameters may be strictly metrical with a
manifest pause between "buy" and "you" and a suppressed pause after the pronoun. Or,
on the contrary, there may be displayed a prose-oriented manner without any separation
of the words "buy you" and with a marked pausal intonation at the end of the question.
None of these ways of recitation may, however, hide the intentional discrepancy between
the metrical and syntactic division. The verse shape of a poem remains completely inde-
pendent of its variable delivery, whereby I do not intend to nullify the alluring question of
Autorenleser and Selbstleser launched by Sievers. 27
No doubt, verse is primarily a recurrent "figure of sound." Primarily, always, but never
uniquely. Any attempts to confine such poetic conventions as meter, alliteration, or rhyme
to the sound level are speculative reasonings without any empirical justification. The
projection of the equational principle into the sequence has a much deeper and wider
significance. Valery's view of poetry as "hesitation between the sound and the sense" 28 is
much more realistic and scientific than any bias of phonetic isolationism.
 Although rhyme by definition is based on a regular recurrence of equivalent pho- 247
nemes or phonemic groups, it would be an unsound oversimplification to treat rhyme
merely from the standpoint of sound. Rhyme necessarily involves the semantic relation- 4.2
ship between rhyming units ("rhyme-fellows" in Hopkins' nomenclature). In the scrutiny RoMAN jAKOasoN
of a rhyme we are faced with the question of whether or not it is a homoeoteleuton, which
confronts similar derivational and/or inflexional suffixes (congratulations-decorations),
or whether the rhyming words belong to the same or to different grammatical categories.
Thus, for example, Hopkins' fourfold rhyme is an agreement of two nouns-"kind" and
"mind" both contrasting with the adjective "blind" and with the verb "find." Is there a
semantic propinquity, a sort of simile between rhyming lexical units, as in dove-love,
light-bright, place-space, name-fame? Do the rhyming members carry the same syntactic
function? The difference between the morphological class and the syntactic application
may be pointed out in rhyme. Thus in Poe's lines, "While I nodded, nearly napping,
suddenly there came a tapping, As of someone gently rapping," the three rhyming words,
morphologically alike, are all three syntactically different. Are totally or partly hom-
onymic rhymes prohibited, tolerated, or favored? Such full homonyms as son-sun,
I-eye, eve-eave, and on the other hand, echo rhymes like December-ember, infinite-
night, swarm-warm, smiles-miles? What about compound rhymes (such as Hopkins'
"enjoyment-toy meant" or "began some-ransom"), where a word unit accords with a
word group?
A poet or poetic school may be oriented toward or against grammatical rhyme;
rhymes must be either grammatical or antigrammatical; an agrammatical rhyme, indif-
ferent to the relation between sound and grammatical structure, would, like any agram-
matism, belong to verbal pathology. If a poet tends to avoid grammatical rhymes, for him,
as Hopkins said, "There are two elements in the beauty rhyme has to the mind, the like-
ness or sameness of sound and the unlikeness or difference of meaning." 29 Whatever the
relation between sound and meaning in different rhyme techniques, both spheres are
necessarily involved. After Wimsatt's illuminating observations about the meaningful-
ness of rhyme 30 and the shrewd modern studies of Slavic rhyme patterns, a student in
poetics can hardly maintain that rhymes signify merely in a very vague way.
Rhyme is only a particular, condensed case of a much more general, we may even say
the fundamental, problem of poetry, namely parallelism. Here again Hopkins, in his stu-
dent papers of 1865, displayed a prodigious insight into the structure of poetry:

The artificial part of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces itself to the
principle of parallelism. The structure of poetry is that of continuous parallelism, ranging
from the technical so-called Parallelisms of Hebrew poetry and the antiphons of Church
music up to the intricacy of Greek or Italian or English verse. But parallelism is of two
kinds necessarily-where the opposition is clearly marked, and where it is transitional
rather or chromatic. Only the first kind, that of marked parallelism, is concerned with the
structure of verse-in rhythm, the recurrence of a certain sequence of syllables, in metre,
the recurrence of a certain sequence of rhythm, in alliteration, in assonance and in
rhyme. Now the force of this recurrence is to beget a recurrence or parallelism answering
to it in the words or thought and, speaking roughly and rather for the tendency than the
invariable result, the more marked parallelism in structure whether of elaboration or of
emphasis begets more marked parallelism in the words and sense .... To the marked
or abrupt kind of parallelism belong metaphor, simile, parable, and so on, where the ef-
fect is sought in likeness of things, and antithesis, contrast, and so on, where it is sought
in unlikeness. 31
 248 Briefly, equivalence in sound, projected into the sequence as its constitutive principle,
inevitably involves semantic equivalence, and on any linguistic level any constituent of
SECTION 4 such a sequence prompts one of the two correlative experiences which Hopkins neatly
STRUCTURALIST defines as "comparison for likeness' sake" and "comparison for unlikeness' sake.
READING
NOTES
1. Edward Sapir, Language (New York: Harcourt, 15. D. C. Simmons, "Specimens ofEfik folklore,"
Brace and Company, 1921), 40. Folk-Lore 66 (1955): 228.
2. Martin Joos, "Description of Language 16. See particularly, K. Taranovski, Ruski
Design," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America dvodelni ritmovi (Belgrade: 1955).
22 (1950): 701-708. 17. E. Colin Cherry, On Human Communication
3. Anton Marty, Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung (New York: Technology Press of Massachusetts
der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie, Institute of Technology, 1957).
Vol. 1 (Halle: Verlag von Max Niemeyer, 1908). 18. Edgar A. Poe, "Marginalia," Works (New
4. Karl Biihler, "Die Axiomatik der Sprachwis- York, 1855), V, 492.
senschaft," Kant-Studien 38 (1933): 19-90. 19. Robert Frost, Collected Poems (New York:
5· V. T. Mansikka, Litauische Zaubersprilche, Henry Holt, 1939).
Folklore Fellows communications 87 (1929): 69. 20. Otto Jespersen, "Cause psychologique de
6. P. N. Rybnikov, Pesni (Moscow, 1910), Vol. 3, quelques phenomenes de met rique germanique,"
217-18. Psychologie du langage (Paris: F. Alean, 1933).
7· Bronislaw Malinowski, "The Problem of 21. See Roman Jakobson, "Studies in Compara-
Meaning in Primitive Languages," in C. K. Ogden tive Slavic Meters," Oxford Slavonic Papers 3 (1952):
and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (New 21-66 and "Uber den Versbau der serbokroatischen
York: Harcourt Brace, 1923), 296-336. Volksepen," Archives m!erlandaises de phont!tique
8. See T. Maretic, Metrika narodnih nasih experimentale 7-9 (1933): 44-53.
pjesama (Zagreb, 1907), sections 81-83. 22. S. Karcevskij, "Sur Ia phonologie de Ia

9. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals and phrase," Travaux du cerc/e linguistique de Prague 4
Papers, ed. H. House (London: Oxford University (1931): 188-223.
Press, 1959), 289. 23. B. Ejxenbaum, Melodika stixa (Leningrad:
10. See A. Levi, "Della versificazione ita Iiana," 1922), and Viktor Zirmunskij, Voprosy teorii
Archivum Romanicum 14 (1930): 449-526, literatury (Leningrad: 1928).
especially sections 8-9. 24. Archibald A. Hill, Review in Language 29
11. See Roman Jakobson, 0 i'esskom stixe (1953): 549-561.
preimusi'estvenno v sopostavlenii s russkim 25. Hopkins, Journals and Papers, 276.
[Sborniki po teorii poeticeskogo jazyka, or On 26. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems, ed. W. H.
Czech verse, especially in comparison with Gardner (New York and London: Oxford
Russian verse] (Berlin and Moscow: 1923), 5· University Press, 1948), 46.
12. J. L. Bishop, "Prosodic elements in T'ang 27. Eduard Sievers, Zie/e und Wege der
poetry," Indiana University conference on Schallanalyse (Heidelberg, 1924).
Oriental-Western literary relations (Chapel Hill: 28. See Paul Valery, The art of poetry, Bollingen
University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 49-63. series 45 (New York: 1958).
13. E. D. Pol iva nov, "0 metriceskom xaraktere 29. Hopkins, Journals and Papers, 286.
kitajskogo stixoslozenija," Doklady Rossijskoj 30. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Verbal Icon
Akademii Nauk, serija V, (1924): 156-158. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky,
14. Wang Li, Han-yil shih-li1-hsi1eh [Versification 1954), 152-66.
in Chinese] (Shanghai: 1958). 31. Hopkins, Journals and Papers, 85.
The Poem's Significance (1978) 4.3
MICHAEL RIFFATERRE

The language of poetry differs from common linguistic usage-this much the most unso-
phisticated reader senses instinctively. Yet, while it is true that poetry often employs
words excluded from common usage and has its own special grammar, even a grammar
not valid beyond the narrow compass of a given poem, it may also happen that poetry
uses the same words and the same grammar as everyday language. In all literatures with
a long enough history, we observe that poetry keeps swinging back and forth, tending
first one way, then the other. The choice between alternatives is dictated by the evolution
of taste and by continually changing esthetic concepts. But whichever of the two trends
prevails, one factor remains constant: poetry expresses concepts and things by indirec-
tion. To put it simply, a poem says one thing and means another.
I therefore submit that the difference we perceive empirically between poetry and
nonpoetry is fully explained by the way a poetic text carries meaning. It is my purpose
here to propose a coherent and relatively simple description of the structure of meaning
in a poem.
I am aware that many such descriptions, often founded upon rhetoric, have already
been put forward, and I do not deny the usefulness of notions like figure and trope. But
whether these categories are well defined, like metaphor or metonymy, or are catchalls,
like symbol (in the loose sense critics give it-not in the semiotic acceptation), they can
be arrived at independently of a theory of reading or the concept of text.
The literary phenomenon, however, is a dialectic between text and reader. 1 If we are to
formulate rules governing this dialectic, we shall have to know that what we are describ-
ing is actually perceived by the reader; we shall have to know whether he is always obliged
to see what he sees, or if he retains a certain freedom; and we shall have to know how
perception takes place. Within the wider realm of literature it seems to me that poetry is
peculiarly inseparable from the concept of text: if we do not regard the poem as a closed
entity, we cannot always differentiate poetic discourse from literary language.
My basic principle will therefore be to take into account only such facts as are acces-
sible to the reader and are perceived in relation to the poem as a special finite context.
Under this twofold restriction, there are three possible ways for semantic indirection
to occur. Indirection is produced by displacing, distorting, or creating meaning. Displac-
ing, when the sign shifts from one meaning to another, when one word "stands for" an-
other, as happens with metaphor and metonymy. Distorting, when there is ambiguity,
contradiction, or nonsense. Creating, when textual space serves as a principle of organi-
zation for making signs out of linguistic items that may not be meaningful otherwise (for
instance, symmetry, rhyme, or semantic equivalences between positional homologues in
a stanza).
Among these three kinds of indirection signs, one factor recurs: all of them threaten
the literary representation of reality, or mimesis. 2 Representation may simply be altered vis-
ibly and persistently in a manner inconsistent with verisimilitude or with what the context
 250 leads the reader to expect. Or it may be distorted by a deviant grammar or lexicon (for
instance, contradictory details), which I shall call ungrammaticality. Or else it may be
SECTION 4 cancelled altogether (for instance, nonsense).
STRUCTURALIST Now the basic characteristic of mimesis is that it produces a continuously changing
READING semantic sequence, for representation is founded upon the referentiality of language,
that is, upon a direct relationship of words to things. It is immaterial whether or not
this relationship is a delusion of those who speak the language or of readers. What mat-
ters is that the text multiplies details and continually shifts its focus to achieve an ac-
ceptable likeness to reality, since reality is normally complex. Mimesis is thus variation
and multiplicity.
Whereas the characteristic feature of the poem is its unity: a unity both formal and
semantic. Any component of the poem that points to that "something else" it means will
therefore be a constant, and as such it will be sharply distinguishable from the mimesis.
This formal and semantic unity, which includes all the indices of indirection, I shall call
the significance. 3 I shall reserve the term meaning for the information conveyed by the
text at the mimetic level. From the standpoint of meaning the text is a string of successive
information units. From the standpoint of significance the text is one semantic unit.
Any sign4 within that text will therefore be relevant to its poetic quality, which ex-
presses or reflects a continuing modification of the mimesis. Only thus can unity be dis-
cerned behind the multiplicity of representations. 5
The relevant sign need not be repeated. It suffices that it be perceived as a variant in a
paradigm, a variation on an invariant. In either case the perception of the sign follows
from its ungrammaticality.
These two lines from a poem by Paul Eluard:

De tout ce que j'ai dit de moi que reste-t-il

J'ai conserve de faux tresors dans des armoires vides 6

[Of all I have said about myself, what is left? I have been keeping false treasures in empty
wardrobes]

owe their unity to the one word left unspoken-a disillusioned "nothing," the answer to
the question, an answer that the speaker cannot bring himself to give in its literal form.
The distich is built of images that flow logically from the question: "what is left" implies
"something that has been saved"; a meliorative or positive version might be "something
that was worth saving." In fact the images translate into figurative language a hypotheti-
cal and tautological sentence: "keep what's worth keeping [figuratively: tn!sors] in the
place where things are kept that are worth keeping [figuratively: armoires]." You might
expect this tautology to yield "strongbox" rather than "wardrobe," but armoire is much
more than just another piece of bedroom furniture. The French sociolect makes it the
place for hoarding within the privacy of the home. It is the secret glory of the traditional
household mistress-linens scented with lavender, lace undies never seen-a metonym
for the secrets of the heart. Popular etymology makes the symbolism explicit: Pere Goriot
mispronounces it armoire, the place for or, for gold, for treasure. The distressed version
we have in Eluard's second line negativizes the predicate, changing not only tresors into
faux tresors, but also armoires into armoires vides. We are faced with a contradiction, for,
in reality, "treasures" of illusory value would fill a closet just as well as genuine ones-
witness the table drawers in any home, full of shoddy souvenirs. But of course the text is
not referential: the contradiction exists only in the mimesis. The phrases in question are
variants of the answer's key word-they repeat "nothing." They are the constant of a peri-
phrastic statement of disillusionment (all these things amount to zero), and as the con- 251
stant element they convey the significance of the distich.
A lesser case of ungrammaticality-compensated for by a more conspicuous kind of 4.3
repetition, a more visible paradigm of synonyms-is the mimesis devoid of contradic- MICHAEL RJFFATERRE

tions but obviously spurious; such are these lines from Baudelaire's "Mort des amants":

Nos deux coeurs seront deux vastes flambeaux,

Qui reflechiront leurs doubles lumieres
Dans nos deux esprits, ces miroirs jumeaux

[Our two hearts will be two great torches that reflect their double lights in our two minds,
twin mirrors]

The context of furniture reinforces the concreteness of the image: these are real mantel-
piece candlesticks. The image metaphorizes a torrid love scene, quite obviously, but the
significance lies in the insistent variation on two. This makes it even more obvious that
the description aims only to unfold the duality paradigm, until the duality is resolved in
the next stanza by the oneness of sex ("nous echangerons un eclair unique" [we shall ex-
change a lightning like no other]). 7 The mimesis is only a ghost description, and through
the ghost's transparency the lovers are visible.
The ungrammaticalities spotted at the mimetic level are eventually integrated into
another system. As the reader perceives what they have in common, as he becomes aware
that this common trait forms them into a paradigm, and that this paradigm alters the
meaning of the poem, the new function of the ungrammaticalities changes their nature,
and now they signify as components of a different network of relationships. 8 This transfer
of a sign from one level of discourse to another, this metamorphosis of what was a signi-
fying complex at a lower level of the text into a signifying unit, now a member of a more
developed system, at a higher level of the text, this functional shift is the proper domain
of semiotics. 9 Everything related to this integration of signs from the mimesis level into
the higher level of significance is a manifestation of semiosis. 10
The semiotic process really takes place in the reader's mind, and it results from a sec-
ond reading. If we are to understand the semiotics of poetry, we must carefully distin-
guish two levels or stages of reading, since before reaching the significance the reader has
to hurdle the mimesis. Decoding the poem starts with a first reading stage that goes on
from beginning to end of the text, from top to bottom of the page, and follows the syntag-
matic unfolding. This first, heuristic reading is also where the first interpretation takes
place, since it is during this reading that meaning is apprehended. The reader's input is his
linguistic competence, which includes an assumption that language is referential-and at
this stage words do indeed seem to relate first of all to things. It also includes the reader's
ability to perceive incompatibilities between words: for instance, to identify tropes and
figures, that is, to recognize that a word or phrase does not make literal sense, that it
makes sense only if he (and he is the only one around to do it) performs a semantic trans-
fer, only if he reads that word or phrase as a metaphor, for example, or as a metonymy.
Again, the reader's perception (or rather production) of irony or humor consists in his
double or bilinear deciphering of the single, linear text. But this reader input occurs only
because the text is ungrammatical. To put it otherwise, his linguistic competence enables
him to perceive ungrammaticalities; but he is not free to bypass them, for it is precisely
this perception over which the text's control is absolute. The ungrammaticalities stem
from the physical fact that a phrase has been generated by a word that should have ex-
cluded it, from the fact that the poetic verbal sequence is characterized by contradictions
 252 between a word's presuppositions and its entailments. Nor is linguistic competence the
sole factor. Literary competence'' is also involved: this is the reader's familiarity with the
SecTION 4 descriptive systems, 12 with themes, with his society's mythologies, and above all with
STRUCTURALIST other texts. Wherever there are gaps or compressions in the text-such as incomplete
READING descriptions, or allusions, or quotations-it is this literary competence alone that will en-
able the reader to respond properly and to complete or fill in according to the hypogram-
matic model. It is at this first stage of reading that mimesis is fully apprehended, or rather,
as I said before, is hurdled: there is no reason to believe that text perception during the
second stage necessarily involves a realization that the mimesis is based upon the referen-
tial fallacy.
The second stage is that of retroactive reading. This is the time for a second interpreta-
tion, for the truly hermeneutic reading. As he progresses through the text, the reader re-
members what he has just read and modifies his understanding of it in the light of what
he is now decoding. As he works forward from start to finish, he is reviewing, revising,
comparing backwards. He is in effect performing a structural decoding:D as he moves
through the text he comes to recognize, by dint of comparisons or simply because he is
now able to put them together, that successive and differing statements, first noticed as
mere ungrammaticalities, are in fact equivalent, for they now appear as variants of the
same structural matrix. The text is in effect a variation or modulation of one structure-
thematic, symbolic, or whatever-and this sustained relation to one structure constitutes
the significance. The maximal effect of retroactive reading, the climax of its function as
generator of significance, naturally comes at the end of the poem; poeticalness is thus a
function coextensive with the text, linked to a limited realization of discourse, bounded
by clausula and beginning (which in retrospect we perceive as related). This is why,
whereas units of meaning may be words or phrases or sentences, the unit of significance is
the text. To discover the significance at last, the reader must surmount the mimesis hur-
dle: in fact this hurdle is essential to the reader's change of mind. The reader's acceptance
of the mimesis 14 sets up the grammar as the background from which the ungrammati-
calities will thrust themselves forward as stumbling blocks, to be understood eventually
on a second level. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the obstacle that threatens
meaning when seen in isolation at first reading is also the guideline to semiosis, the key
to significance in the higher system, where the reader perceives it as part of a complex
network.
A tendency toward polarization (more of this anon) makes the guidelines for reader
interpretation more obvious: it is when the description is most precise that the departures
from acceptable representation induced by structures make the shift toward symbolism
more conspicuous. Where the reader most expects words to toe the line of nonverbal real-
ity, things are made to serve as signs, and the text proclaims the dominion of semiosis. It
would be hard to find French descriptive poetry more representative than Theophile
Gautier's Espana (1845), a collection of poems written after a journey through Spain. The
traveler translated his trip into prose reports for the newspaper financing the adventure,
and into verse vignettes, like the poem "In Deserto," composed after he had crossed
Spain's lonely, arid sierras. A village with a demonstrably exotic name is given as the
place of composition: this must refer to actual experience and is thus a way of labeling
the poem" descriptive." In fact the learned editor of the one and only critical edition that
we have finds nothing better to do than compare the verse with the prose version, and
the prose with other travelers' accounts of the sierra. He comes to the conclusion that
Gautier is fairly accurate, although he does seem to have made the sierra more of a desert
than it really is. 15
 This is puzzling. However verifiable the text's mimetic accuracy by comparison with 253
other writers' observations, it also consistently distorts facts or at least shows a bias in
favor of details able to converge metonymically on a single concept: pessimism. Gautier 4.3
makes this unmistakable with bold statements of equivalence; first when he actually MicHAEL RJFFATERRE

speaks of despair as a landscape: "Ce grand jour frappant sur ce grand desespoir" [line 14:
daylight striking upon this vast expanse of despair]. Just before this the desert was used
as an illustration of the traveler's own lonely life, but the simile structure necessarily kept
the setting separate from the character, the one reflecting the other. Now this separate-
ness is cancelled, and the metaphor mingles the traveler's inner with the world's outer
barrenness. In spite of this, our scholar, a seasoned student of literature, pursues his habit
of checking language against reality. He seems little concerned about what language does
to reality. This is proof at least that no matter what the poem ultimately tells us that may
be quite different from ordinary ideas about the real, the message has been so constructed
that the reader has to leap the hurdle of reality. He is first sent off in the wrong direction,
he sets lost in his surroundings, so to speak, before he finds out that the landscape here, or
the description in general, is a stage set for special effects.
In the Gautier poem the desert is there, of course, but only as long as it can be used as
a realistic code for representing loneliness and its attendant aridity of heart-as opposed
to the generous overflowing that comes oflove. The first, naturally enough, is represented
by a plain, direct, almost simplistic comparison with the desert itself; the second by a
hypothetical description of what an oasis would be like, combined with a variation on the
theme of Moses striking the rock. Thus we have an opposition, but still within natural
climatic and geographic circumstances, or within the logic or verisimilitude of desert
discourse.
The first pole of the opposition appears to rest upon straightforward mimesis:

IN DESERTO

Les pitons des sierras, les dunes du desert

Oil ne pousse jamais un seul brin d'herbe vert;
Les monts aux flancs zebres de tuf, d'ocre et de marne,
Et que I' eboulement de jour en jour decharne;
Le gres plein de micas papillotant aux yeux,
Le sable sans profit buvant les pleurs des cieux, (s)
Le rocher refrogne dans sa barbe de ronce,
L'ardente solfatare avec Ia pierre-ponce,
Sont moins sees et moins morts aux vegetations
Que le roc de mon coeur ne !'est aux passions. (10)

[The pitons of the sierras, the desert dunes, where never a single blade of green grass
grows; the mountainsides striped with tufa, ochre, and marl [literally: with chalky, rusty,
and yellowish stripes; but the code is entirely geological], daily stripped of flesh by
landslides; sandstone studded with mica glittering before your eyes; sand vainly drinking
in the tears of heaven; rock scowling into its bramble beard; sulphur spring and pumice
stone; these are less dry, less dead to vegetation than the rock of my heart is to passion.]

But two factors transform this step-by-step scanning of a landscape into an iterative para-
digm of synonyms that points insistently to barrenness (both figurative and physical). The
transformation is especially obvious when this part of the text is looked at in retrospect,
from the vantage point of the opposition's second pole-the last section of the poem. The
first factor is the selection of visual details with disagreeable connotations not necessarily
 254 typical of the sierra (in any case readers may not recognize their aptness unless they know
Spain). They make up a catalogue of hostile connotations: the sulphur spring, for in-
SecTION 4 stance, more "fire and brimstone" in landscape lexicon than a clear, apt, or visualizable
STRUCTURALIST depiction for most readers, even if it happens to be an accurate detail; or the earth's skel-
READING eton, a traditional literary motif in descriptions of rock formation; or the three special-
ists' words (tuf, acre, marne), doubly technical as names of painter's colors and of soil
types, but above all three words any French speaker will find cacophonic; or zebre, which
does describe stripes and is presumably correct for strata, but also-and perhaps better-
fits the stripes left by a whiplash.
The second factor of semiosis that slants representation toward another, symbolic
meaning is the way the text is built: we do not know this is all a simile until the last two
lines, when everything suddenly changes its function and calls for a moral, human inter-
pretation. The suspense and the semantic overturn are space- or sequence-induced phe-
nomena, inseparable from the physical substance of the text or from its paradoxical
retroversion-the end regulating the reader's grasp of the beginning.
The second pole of the opposition is where the semiosis takes over (lines 29-44). In
between there are eighteen entirely descriptive, seemingly objective lines, resuming the
enumeration of the physical features of aridity. But of course this objectivity, unchallenge-
able as it may be within its own domain (lines 11-28), is now cancelled or made subservient
to another representation, because the reader now knows that the whole sequence is not an
independent description allegiant only to the truth of the outside world, but is the con-
stituent of a trope. All the realism depends grammatically upon an unreality and devel-
ops not the desert we were initially invited to think real (before we discovered it was the
first leg of a simile), but a desert conjured up to confirm contextually the metaphor pre-
pared by the simile: le roc demon coeur [the rock of my heart]. Everything is now ostensi-
bly derived from an exclusively verbal given, the cliche a heart of stone. In line 29 an ex-
plicit allusion is made to the latent verbal association that has overdetermined, in desert
context, the rock-of-the-heart image: a simile brings the rock Moses struck to the surface
of the text, and this simile now triggers the unfolding of a new code for reverie about what
love could do for this parched heart, and how it could make this desert bloom:

Tel etait le rocher que Moise, au desert,

Toucha de sa baguette, et dont le flanc ouvert,
Tressaillant tout a coup, fit jaillir en arcade
Surles levres du peuple une fraiche cascade.
Ah! s'il venait a moi, dans mon aridite,
Quelque reine des coeurs, quelque divinite,
Une magicienne, un Moise femelle,
Trainant dans le desert les peuples apres elle,
Qui frappat le rocher dans mon coeur endurci,
Comme de !'autre roche, on en verrait aussi
Sortir en jets d'argent des eaux etincelantes,
Ou viendraient s'abreuver les racines des plantes;
Ou les pat res errants conduiraient leurs troupeaux,
Pour se coucher a l'ombre et prendre le repos;
Ou, com me en un vivier, les cigognes fideles
Plongeraient leurs grands bees et laveraient leurs ailes.

[Such was the rock that Moses touched in the desert with his rod. And the rock's open
flank shuddered all at once and sent an arc of water gushing to the people's lips in a cool
 cascade. If only some queen of hearts would come to me in my arid ness, some divinity, a 255
sorceress, a female Moses, dragging the peoples through the desert after her; if she would
only strike the rock in my hardened heart, you would see leaping up, as from that other 4.3
rock, silver jets of sparkling water; there the roots of plants would come to slake their MICHAEL RIFFATERRE

thirst; there wandering shepherds would lead their flocks, to lie down in the shade and
take their rest; there, as in a fishpond, the faithful storks would plunge their long beaks
and wash their wings.]

Now the semiosis triumphs completely over mimesis, for the text is no longer attempting
to establish the credibility of a description. Any allusion to the desert landscape, or to the
oasis born of the miraculous fountain, is derived entirely from the name Moi"se, taken less
as an actual wanderer who crossed the Sinai than as a literary theme, or derived from the
female variant of Moi"se, which is of course a metaphor in desert code for Woman as a foun-
tain of life. The code itself is not a metaphor: we cannot assign a literal tenor to the fountain
vehicle; even less can we find a term-for-term relationship between the descriptive vi-
gnettes about the drinkers at that spring (roots, shepherds, storks) and certain tenors that
would be metonymic of the revived and transfigured speaker.
We must therefore see the code of the poem as symbolic. It definitely represents some-
thing that is not the desert to which the description is still referring. Everything points to
a hidden meaning, one evidently derived from a key word-fecundity-which is the exact
opposite of the first key word, barrenness. But there is no similarity, even partial, between
fecundity, even in the moral sense, and the speaker as the text enables us to imagine him.
If the reader simply assumes (since this is the chief rationalization in any reading experi-
ence) that the first-person narrator, so long as he remains unnamed, must be the poet him-
self, fecundity will refer to poetic inspiration, indeed often associated with love at last re-
quited. But the description of the oasis still does not match any of the traits, real or
imaginary, of a creative writer.
All we can say, then, is that the text's final passage symbolizes the miraculous effects of
Jove on life. The selection offertility as the key to that symbol is determined by the reversal
of the symbol used to describe life before the miracle. The last part of the poem is a re-
verse version of the forms actualized in the first part. The positive "conversion" that ac-
complishes this affects every textual component regardless of its previous marking or
meaning. This is why contradictions or incompatibilities or nonsense abound in the de-
scription: such details as flanc ouvert or flanc . .. tressaillant (lines 30-31), phrases prop-
erly applied only to a pregnant woman who feels the child move in her womb for the first
time, bring to the fore the repressed sexual implications of the Moses-rod story, as do the
storks (43), flown out of nowhere (out of the implied womb, that is)-for, without this
displaced determination, why not just any bird, so long as it is a positive sign? These de-
tails do not fit the male character who has now slipped into the metaphoric rock. Yet they
are contradictory only as descriptions, only if we keep trying to interpret them as mime-
sis; they cease to be unacceptable when we see them as the logical and cogent conse-
quences of the positivization of desert code.
Other ungrammaticalities are simply the mimetic face of the semiotic grammaticality;
the astonishing Moise femelle, the nonsense of vegetable roots endowed with animal mo-
bility, the Et in Arcadia ego connotations of the scene around the spring, after the manner
of Poussin-all these conform to the conversion according to an indirect, implicit, but
continuously present love code. The amplification of Moise femelle as a sexual pied piper-
"Trainant dans le desert les peuples apres elle"-is intertextually determined by a line
from Racine, Phedre's amorous description of her lover's seductive power: "Trainant tous
 256 les coeurs apres soi" [dragging all hearts after him]. It translates into a phrase an essential
seme oflove-its irresistible magnetism-and the same applies to the miracle of the roots,
SECTION 4 this time overdetermined by another association intersecting the first chain: the hyper-
STRUCTURALIST bolic positive fountain also involves the cliche of the spot that irresistibly draws every
READING living creature. Upon the oasis oxymorically derived from "aridity," love symbolism su-
perimposes its own theme of the locus amoenus.
We cannot, however, understand the semiosis until we have ascertained the place of
the text now perceived as one sign within a system (a sign formally complex but mono-
semic), for by definition a sign cannot be isolated. A sign is only a relationship to some-
thing else. It will not make sense without a continuous translatability from component to
component of a network. A consequence of the system's latent existence is that every sig-
nifying feature of the poem must be relatable to that system. Here everything the text says
must be fitted back into the initial code, into the desert code, even though it is represented
in the end only conversely. Failing this we cannot relate the end and the beginning, we
cannot recognize that text and significance are coextensive, we cannot discover that the
clausula dovetails with the title. The one feature pervading the whole clausula (from line
33 on) is grammatical: every verb is in the conditional mood; that is, it expresses an action
or state of things not yet realized, a wish unfulfilled, a hope frustrated, a dream dreamt in
vain-in short, life still the desert of life, a familiar theme. But this verbal mood's being
the grammatical icon of unfulfillment raises the question of the speaker's voice. For the
poem is spoken in the first person, and we do not know where from. Then suddenly the
puzzle is solved, everything falls into place, indeed the whole poem ceases to be descrip-
tive, ceases to be a sequence of mimetic signs, and becomes but a single sign, perceived
from the end back to its given as a harmonious whole, wherein nothing is loose, wherein
every word refers to one symbolic focus.
This epiphany of the semiosis occurs when the lost voice is found again, thanks to the
hint signalled by the title, misunderstood until the end: this signal is the title's language.
In French, Dans le desert would be a self-sufficient title and perfectly appropriate for a
mere travelogue. The Latin In deserto does not make sense unless read, as it must be, as
an incomplete quotation. In deserto is only the second half of the familiar phrase for
words shouted in vain, the voice crying in the wilderness: vox clamans in deserto. From
this repressed, despairing voice the whole poem is derived; from this bereft speaker issues
the dream's unreality. This one conventional symbol, erased from the title, founds a
whole new symbolism defining only this work of art; and the text, raised from the ashes
of familiar description, is made into a novel and unique significance.
Significance, and let me insist on this, now appears to be more than or something
other than the total meaning deducible from a comparison between variants of the
given. That would only bring us back to the given, and it would be a reductionist proce-
dure. Significance is, rather, the reader's praxis of the transformation, a realization that
it is akin to playing, to acting out the liturgy of a ritual-the experience of a circuitous
sequence, a way of speaking that keeps revolving around a key word or matrix reduced
to a marker (the negative orientation whose semiotic index is the frustration implied by
vox clamans in deserto). It is a hierarchy of representations imposed upon the reader,
despite his personal preferences, by the greater or lesser expansion of the matrix's com-
ponents, an orientation imposed upon the reader despite his linguistic habits, a bounc-
ing from reference to reference that keeps on pushing the meaning over to a text not
present in the linearity, to a paragram or hypogram 16-a dead landscape that refers to a
live character, a desert traveled through that represents the traveler rather than itself, an
oasis that is the monument of a negated or nonexistent future. The significance is shaped 257
like a doughnut, the hole being either the matrix of the hypogram or the hypogram as
matrix. 4.3
The effect of this disappearing act is that the reader feels he is in the presence of true MICHAEL RIFFATERRE
originality, or of what he believes to be a feature of poetic language, a typical case of ob-
scurity. This is when he starts rationalizing, finds himself unable to bridge the semantic
gap inside the text's linearity, and so tries to bridge it outside of the text by completing the
verbal sequence. He resorts to nonverbal items, such as details from the author's life, or to
verbal items, such as preset emblems or lore that is well established but not pertinent to
the poem. All this just misguides the reader and compounds his difficulties. Thus, what
makes the poem, what constitutes its message, has little to do with what it tells us or with
the language it employs. It has everything to do with the way the given twists the mimetic
codes out of shape by substituting its own structure for their structures.
The structure of the given (from now on I shall refer to it as the matrix), like all struc-
tures, is an abstract concept never actualized per se: it becomes visible only in its variants,
the ungrammaticalities. The greater the distance between the inherently simple matrix
and the inherently complex mimesis, the greater the incompatibility between ungram-
maticalities and mimesis. This was already obvious, I think, in the discrepancy between
"nothing" and Eluard's thesaurization sequence, between "couple" or "lovers" and Baude-
laire's furniture sequence. In all these cases the discrepancy is made graphic by the fact
that the mimesis occupies a lot of space while the matrix structure can be summed up in
a single word.
This basic conflict, the locus of literariness (at least as literariness manifests itself in
poetry) may reach a point where the poem is a form totally empty of "message" in the
usual sense, that is, without content-emotional, moral, or philosophical. At this point
the poem is a construct that does nothing more than experiment, as it were, with the
grammar of the text, or, perhaps a better image, a construct that is nothing more than a
calisthenics of words, a verbal setting-up exercise. The mimesis is now quite spurious and
illusory, realized only for the sake of the semiosis; and conversely, the semiosis is a refer-
ence to the word nothing (the word, since the concept "nothingness" would be heavy meta-
physical stuffing indeed).
This is an extreme case but exemplary, for it may tell us much about poetry's being
more of a game than anything else. I shall use three short texts as illustrations, all of them
about paintings or scenes, all three pictorial descriptions, all three reading like picture
plaques in a parodic museum. The first is supposedly a "Combat de Senegalais !a nuit
dans un tunnel" [Night combat of Senegalese tribesmen inside a tunnel]. The second:
"Recolte de Ia tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de Ia Mer Rouge" [Apo-
plectic cardinals picking tomatoes on the shores of the Red Sea]. The third: "Perdu dans
une exposition de blanc encadree de momies" [Lost at a white sale surrounded by Egyp-
tian mummies]. 17 The first one is a joke familiar in relatively intellectual French circles; it
is usually rationalized as a satire on certain monochromatic modern paintings. Every
character, every scenic detail being black, you see nothing. The second is from a humor-
ous piece by Alphonse Allais, a minor writer not unlike Alfred Jarry, his contemporary,
but without Jarry's genius. Allais is generally credited with being one of the creators of
humor as a genre in French literature. Here again: red-faced, red-robed princes of the
church, their red harvest, the red locale-redness cancels all the shape, line, and contrast
that must set the cardinals off from their surroundings, if they are to be seen. There is
nothing here but a one-color continuum.
 258 True, the red of the Red Sea is only a convention, not a real color mimesis; still, it
purports to refer to a geographical reality, so that the principle of mimesis, the differen-
SECTION 4 tiation, is at work, and it is indeed cancelled here. In the third quotation, from a poem by
STRUCTURALIST the surrealist Benjamin Peret, the white sale again is more metaphorically than literally
READING white; yet once more the effect is to blend all representation into a uniform whiteness.
One may wonder why I have chosen these three examples to prove a point about po-
etic discourse. I reply that these and others like them are commonplaces; that the durabil-
ity of even the oral joke, the first, unsigned text, reminds us that a mere joke is an elemen-
tary form of literature, since it is as lasting, and as protected against tampering when
quoted, as a more highbrow text. The fact that these lines are intended, or perceived, as
jokes reflects only their obviousness of purpose (they are so obviously a game); and the
cancellation of mimetic features leads to a pointless semiosis: we do not see where gener-
alized blackness, redness, or whiteness can possibly be taking us. But of course the signifi-
cance really lies in the gratuitousness of the transformation: it exemplifies that process it-
self, the artifact per se. It also demonstrates the essential conflict that makes a literary text:
no variation-cancelling conversion, no direct decoding of the invariant (here the color)
can take place until the representing, mimetic variants to be cancelled have first been
stated. No breaking of the rule without a rule.
I am quite sure that even if they agree these jokes may in fact possess the features of
literariness, most readers will be unable to resist the temptation to jump from a negative
value judgment (these are examples oflowbrow literature or bad literature) to a complete
denial that they are literature at all. But other texts evidence the very same "weaknesses"
and no doubt is cast on their poetic status, so long as our attention is diverted from circu-
larity, so long as we are able to spot in the text something we recognize as a commonly
accepted literary feature-be it a stylistic form, or a form of content like, say, a theme. The
text then "passes" unscathed, and yet the formal alteration of the mimesis is no less dras-
tic than that of our jokes, and the semiosis is just as pointless. Take for example this
blackness sequence in a Robert Desnos poem, the cause of much emotional upset among
critics. It is a portrait of the speaker, head, heart, thoughts, waking moments, and now
sleep:

Un bon sommeil de boue

Ne du cafe et de Ia nuit et du charbon et du crepe des veuves
Et de cent millions de negres
Et de I'etreinte de deux negres dans une ombre de sapins
Et de I' ebene et des multitudes de corbeaux sur les carnages 18

[A good muddy sleep born of coffee and night and coal and ink and widow's weeds and of
a hundred million negroes and of two negroes embracing in the shade of fir trees, and of
ebony and multitudes of ravens hovering over fields of carnage]

Or again (since I have no "redness" example at hand, and for officially poetic "white-
ness" Gautier's "Symphonie en blanc majeur" would be too long to quote), let us take this
"transparency" text, a passage from Andre Breton's Revolver acheveux blancs:

On vient de mourir mais je suis vivant et cependant je n'ai plus d'ame. Je n'ai plus qu'un
corps transparent a l'interieur duquel des colombes transparentes se jettent sur un poig-
nard transparent tenu par une main transparente. 19
 [There has just been a death, but I am alive, and yet I no longer have a soul. All I have left 259
is a transparent body with transparent doves inside throwing themselves on a transparent
dagger held by a transparent hand.] 4.3
MICHAEL RIFFATERRE
Here we are ready to pass over the representational nonsense because death is eminently
literary. We have no trouble rationalizing that this disembodiment is a legitimate way of
representing the afterlife. And of course the question of genuine literariness will not be
raised with Mallarme: for instance the sonnet beginning "Ses purs ongles tres haut dedi-
ant leur onyx." The question does not arise, first, because the challenge to mimesis is not
so complete that the reader has no chance at all to read the poem as a representation. The
lofty language makes up for the circularity. And the obscurity makes less glaring the ab-
sence of the symbolism that should compensate us for accepting such detours from
straightforward referentiality. Or better, the obscurity hides the fact that the text's impli-
cations are just as short range, just as slight, as in a joke. The tone, the style make the
difference. But that difference lies in the reader's attitude, in his greater willingness to
accept a suspension of mimesis when he thinks no one is trying to pull his leg. Actually
there is no difference in the text, for the structure of Mallarme's sonnet is the same con-
version found in all three jokes and in Breton and Desnos.
In the joke subgenre there is no way for the reader to get beyond the laugh, once it has
been laughed, any more than he can get beyond the solution once he has solved a riddle.
Such forms self-destruct immediately after consumption. The sonnet, on the contrary, leaves
the reader free to keep on building, so long as his constructs are not wholly incompatible
with the text. The first stanza, ''L'Angoisse, ce minuit" [anguish at midnight), seems to
adumbrate a meditation upon the problems of life or upon artistic creation. This looks so
serious that the reader expects the poem to be about reality, physical or conceptual, espe-
cially when the second quatrain presents the familiar livingroom interior:
Sur les credences, au salon vide: nul ptyx,
Aboli bibelot d'inanite sonore,
(Carle Maitre est aile puiser des pleurs au Styx
Avec ce seul objet dont le Neant s'honore.)

[On the sideboards, in the empty livingroom: no ptyx, abolished bibelot of sonorous
inanity (for the Master has gone to draw tears from the Styx, bearing with him this only
curio that Nothingness takes pride in).]

The mimesis has hardly been offered, however, when reference is withdrawn, so that the
structure is a polar opposition of representation vs. nothing. The text first sets up a par-
ticularly tangible kind of reality: the pride of bourgeois life, the ultimate actualization of
presence in a house, of its completeness as social status symbol, the furniture. But at the
same time the text, an Indian giver, snatches back this reality by repeating Nothingness
with each descriptive item. The resulting polarization is the poem's significance, aptly
described by Mallarme himself: "une eau-forte pleine de reve et de vide" [an etching full
of dream and emptiness]. 20 That phrase itself is a variant of the significance structure,
since eau-forte in its telling technicality expresses the mimesis hyperbolically, and full of
emptiness actualizes the other pole, the cancellation of mimesis. (This other pole is, as it
should be, equally hyperbolic, because "full of emptiness" is an oxymoron, and as such
repeats and integrates the whole of the opposition over again-fullness vs. emptiness.) I
need not underline that this commentary on the sonnet-eau-forte pleine de vide-fits
equally well as metalanguage for my three comedy paintings of nothing, and for Andre
Breton's pseudo-representation of afterlife invisibility. Such, then, is the semiosis of the
 260 poem, and by happy coincidence it exemplifies the rule that literature, by saying some-
thing, says something else. The rule in its reductio ad aburdum: by saying something lit-
SECTION 4 erature can say nothing (or, ifi may once more indulge in my irreverent simile: no longer
STRUCTURALIST the doughnut around its hole, but the doughnut as a hole).
READING The mechanism of mimesis cancellation in Mallarme's sonnet calls for close scrutiny,
being comparable to that of Eluard's armoires vides, and susceptible of generalization
(later it will be recognized as obeying the rule of conversion): 21 that is, every mention of a
thing is marked with a zero index. Salon modified by vide serves as a model for a striking
series of synonymous assertions of void. Within the narrow compass of a quatrain salon
vide is repeated five times: once through the symbolic disappearance of its owner, who is
dead or gone to Hell, an eminently dramatic way of not being around, 22 and then through
a fourfold variation on the nonexistence of a knickknack. The bibelot is a nonfunctional
object, at most a conversation piece, and yet the ultimate filler of emptiness during peri-
ods like Mallarme's, when household esthetics prescribe that every nook and cranny be
stuffed with ornaments, that every bit of space be crammed with the shapes of things. But
this object is named only to be cancelled as a sign, not just mentioned as a thing gone. The
equivalence of vide and bibelot is insured the first time by nul ptyx. Not only because nut
annuls ptyx, but because ptyx is a nonobject, a word unknown in any language, as Mal-
larme himselfboasted, 23 a pure ad hoc product of the sonnet's rhyming constraints. Hav-
ing imposed upon himself a difficult rhyme, !iks/, 24 the poet patently runs out of words.
With its outlandish spelling and its boldly non-French initial consonantal cluster, ptyx,
like everything else in the sonnet, combines high visibility, an almost obtrusive physical
presence as a form, and an equally obtrusive absence as meaning. The second equivalence
of presence and absence is aboli bibelot, as meaning, as the French variant of the semi-
Greek nul ptyx, and as paronomasia, making bibelot an approximate phonetic mirror
image of aboli, thus a reflection of absence. 25 The third equivalence: inanite sonore, a
phrase made the more effective by being a cliche or literary quotation about empty words
going back to Latin: inania verba. The fourth equivalence: the semiotic nonexistence of
the object whose existence is asserted by description is translated into a mimesis of philo-
sophical Nothingness itself (dont le Neant s'honore), with a pun to top it off, since Neant
s'honore sounds like neant sonore, "sonorous nothingness." Finally, this emptiness, these
nonobjects, are paralleled by the graphemic symbolism of the rhyme, since y and x are the
signs of conventional abstractness and of algebraic unknowns.
Such is the force of habit, such the power of the everyday context of cognitive lan-
guage, that commentators have unanimously endeavored to connect the quatrain with
actual representation. Even though it should be impossible to miss the meaning-an ex-
ercise in verbal exercise 26 -we find at work here a nostalgia for referentiality that prom-
ises us no reader will ever get used to nonlanguage. The efforts of scholars to palliate it
only enflame the outrage of words cancelling themselves. The vase dont le Neant s'honore
has been interpreted as a vial of poison, thus a vial of death, or a vessel of Nothingness as
a tangible, physical cause of death. And ptyx, despite Mallarme's own statement, has been
forcibly twisted into a full-fledged representation, by way of a Greek word meaning, sup-
posedly, a "fold" or "shell shaped like a fold." The trouble is that the word ptyx itself is a
hypothesis oflexicographers, deduced from a rare Greek word found only in the plural or
in oblique-declension cases, ptykhes; Mallarme could not have known of this. His ptyx
does have a model: a word Hugo had used a few years earlier for the sake of strangeness
per se, since in his poem it is supposed to be the name of an actual mountain translated
into the language of the Gods-neat proof that ptyx has no meaning in any human lan-
guage.27 Turn where we may, the picture of reality is erased, so that these varied but rep-
etitious cancellations add up to the one significance so ringingly proclaimed by the title 261
of the sonnet's first version: "Sonnet allegorique de soi-meme" [Sonnet allegoric of itself],
a text referring to its own shape, absolute form. It takes the whole sonnet to unroll the 4.3
description and to annul it, point by point. The destruction of the mimesis, or its obverse, MICHAEL RJFFATERRE

the creation of the semiosis, is thus exactly coextensive with the text: it is the text.
An extreme example, obviously, and most poems are closer to the model of Eluard's
distich, but the principle is, I believe, the same in all cases. From this principle I shall now
try to deduce the fundamentals of my interpretation of poetry's semiotic system.

Postulates and Definitions

Poetic discourse is the equivalence established between a word and a text, or a text and
another text.
The poem results from the transformation of the matrix, a minimal and literal sen-
tence, into a longer, complex, and non literal periphrasis. The matrix is hypothetical, being
only the grammatical and lexical actualization of a structure. The matrix may be epito-
mized in one word, in which case the word will not appear in the text. 28 It is always actual-
ized in successive variants; the form of these variants is governed by the first or primary
actualization, the model. Matrix, model, and text are variants of the same structure.
The poem's significance, both as a principle of unity and as the agent of semantic in-
direction, is produced by the detour the text makes as it runs the gauntlet of mimesis,
moving from representation to representation (for example, from metonym to metonym
within a descriptive system), with the aim of exhausting the paradigm of all possible
variations on the matrix. The harder it is to force the reader to notice the indirection and
to lead him step by step through distortion, away from mimesis, the longer the detour
must be and the more developed the text. The text functions something li\<e a neurosis: as
the matrix is repressed, the displacement produces variants all through the text, just as
suppressed symptoms break out somewhere else in the body.
To clarify matrix and model further, I shall use an example of limited relevance to
poetry; its very limitations, however, make its mechanics more obvious and practical for
the purposes of my preliminary definitions. This is an echoing sequence in a Latin verse
by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher: 29

Tibi vero gratias agam quo clamore? Amore more ore re.

[How shall I cry out my thanks to Thee? [the question being addressed to the Almighty.
who replies:] With thy love, thy wont, thy words, thy deeds.]

Each word in the answer accords with the model provided by the preceding word, so that
every component is repeated several times over. For each member of the paradigm, it
would be easy to imagine a development wholly regulated by the nuclear word of the one
preceding. The question clamore serves as a model for the reply am ore, and amore serves
as a model for the entire sequence-it is the seed of the text, so to speak, and summarizes
it in advance .. The matrix here is thanksgiving, a verbal statement that presupposes a di-
\·ine Providence (as benefactor), a believer (as beneficiary), and the gratefulness of the
latter to the former. The model is crying out (to), not a random choice, but one already
determined by a literary theme: the outcry, the spontaneous outburst, is a common sign
of sincerity and open-heartedness in moralistic text, especially in meditations or essays
on prayer. The model generates the text by formal derivation affecting both syntax and
morphology; every word of the text is in the same case, the ablative; every word of it is
contained in the first variant of the model (clamore). The conformity of the text to the
 262 generating model makes it a unique artifact, in terms of language, since the associative
chain issuing from clam ore does not work as do normal associations, playing out a string
SECTION 4 of semantically related words. Instead it functions as if it were creating a special lexicon of
STRUCTURALIST cognates of clamor. The linguistic anomaly is thus the means of transforming the seman-
READING tic unity of the statement into a formal unity, of transforming a string of words into a
network of related and unified shapes, into a "monument" of verbal art. This formal
monumentality entails changes of meaning. Independent of their respective senses, the
ways of giving thanks here enumerated appear to be subsumed under love, since the word
for love contains them and love appears as the essence of prayer, since prayer is contained
in the word for love. In both cases these verbal relations reflect the principles of Christian
living as taught by the Church, so that the very fact of the derivation is a semiotic system
created ad hoc for these principles: the way the sentence functions is their icon.
The matrix alone would not suffice to explain textual derivation, nor would the
model taken separately, since only the two in combination create the special language
wherein everything the believer does that is pertinent to what defines him as a believer is
expressed in love code. Hence the text as a whole is indeed a variant of the verb for the
activity typical of the faithful (to give thanks). The text in its complexity does no more
than modulate the matrix. The matrix is thus the motor, the generator of the textual deri-
vation, while the model determines the manner of that derivation.
The Kircher example is of course highly exceptional, since the paronomasia, like an
extended pun, might be said to extract the significant variation from the mimesis itself:
the ungrammaticality consists in the dispersion of one descriptive word, in the building
of the paradigm out of the pieces of that one lexeme drawn and quartered. Paronoma-
sia, when it does occur, is rarely so pervasive. The usual detour around the repressed
matrix, being made of separate, distinct ungrammaticalities, looks like a series of inap-
propriate, twisted wordings, so that the poem may be regarded as a generalized, all-
encompassing, all-contaminating catachresis.
This catachresis has overdetermination as its corollary. It is a fact that no matter how
strange a departure from usage a poem may seem to be, its deviant phraseology keeps its
hold on the reader and appears not gratuitous but in fact strongly motivated; discourse
seems to have its own imperative truth; the arbitrariness of language conventions seems
to diminish as the text becomes more deviant and ungrammatical, rather than the other
way around. This overdetermination is the other face of the text's derivation from one
matrix: the relationship between generator and transforms adds its own powerful con-
nection to the normal links between words-grammar and lexical distribution. The
functions of overdetermination are three: to make mimesis possible; to make literary
discourse exemplary3° by lending it the authority of multiple motivations for each word
used; and to compensate for the catachresis. The first two functions are observable in lit-
erature in general, the last only in poetic discourse. The three together confer upon the
literary text its monumentality: it is so well built and rests upon so many intricate rela-
tionships that it is relatively impervious to change and deterioration of the linguistic
code. Because of the complexity of its structures and the multiple motivations of its
words, the text's hold on the reader's attention is so strong that even his absentminded-
ness or, in later eras, his estrangement from the esthetic reflected in the poem or its genre,
cannot quite obliterate the poem's features or their power to control his decoding.
I shall distinguish between two different semiotic operations: the transformation of
mimetic signs into words or phrases relevant to significance, and the transformation from
matrix to text. The rules governing these operations may work together or separately in
overdetermining the verbal sequences from the incipit to the clausula of the poem.
 For describing the verbal mechanisms of sign integration from mimesis to signifi- 263
cance level, I shall propose a single hypogrammatic rule telling us under what conditions
the lexical actualization of semic features, stereotypes, or descriptive systems produces 4.3
poetic words or phrases whose poeticity is either limited to one poem or is conventional MICHAEL RIFFATERRE

and therefore a literary marker in any context.

Two rules apply to production of the text: conversion and expansion (chapter 3). The
texts overdetermined according to these rules may be integrated into larger ones by em-
bedding. The components of the significance-bearing paradigm may therefore be such
embedded texts. The signs of specialized poetic usage (conventional poetic words) and
perhaps others as well may be said to stand for texts: their significance issues from this
vicarious textuality.
In all cases the concept of poeticity is inseparable from that of the text. And the
reader's perception of what is poetic is based wholly upon reference to texts.

NOTES
1. On the role of text-reader dialectics, see in his letter to Lady Welby of 12 October 1904: a
Stanley Fish, "Literature in the Reader: Affective sign is something knowing which we know something
Stylistics," New Literary History 2 (1970): 123-62; more.
and Michael Riffaterre, Essais de stylistique 5. The last class, idiolectic signs and space-
structurale (Paris: Flam marion, 1971). oriented signs, may provide an answer. But that
2. Or at least challenge its premises, such as the would still leave unexplained the relationship
establishment of a verisimilitude level (like the between the other two categories (by far the more
effet de reel of French critical terminology, see numerous signs) and the poem as a whole. Also,
Roland Barthes, S/Z [Paris: Larousse, 1970]), which the very definition of the third-class signs seems to
becomes the norm for a given text and by demand preliminary knowledge of what makes a
opposition to which we can perceive departures-- text a closed, structured unit-hence the serious
e.g., the fantastic or the supernatural. risk of circularity.
3. Significance, to put it simply, is what the poem 6. Paul Eluard, "Com me deux gouttes d'eau"
is really about: it arises through retroactive reading (1933), in Oeuvres completes, ed. Marcelle Dumas
when the discovery is made that representation (or and Lucien Scheler (Paris: Bib!. De !a Pleiade,
mimesis) actually points to a content that would 1968), vol. I, p. 412.
demand a different representation in nonliterary 7· Lightning is a Second Empire euphemism for
language. Yet my use of significance, however orgasm: Michele!, for example, in his treatise on
specialized, does not contradict Webster: "the love published seven years after the sonnet, alludes
subtle, hidden implications of something, as to the sexual act as a tenebreux eclair [dark
distinguished from its openly expressed meaning." lightning] (L'Amour, p. 201); and later on, prompted
4. For an exact definition of sign, especially the by the Baudelaire intertext, Charles Cros will write:
difference between index, icon, and symbol, see C. "La mort perpetuera !'eclair d'amour vainqueur"
S. Peirce 3.361-62; also Douglas Greenlee, Peirce's [Death will make eternal the lightning flashes of
Concept of Sign (Paris: Seuil, 1973), and Thomas A. love triumphant].
Sebeok, "Six Species of Signs: Some Propositions 8. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, p. 126:
and Strictures," Semiotica 13 (1975): vol. 3, 233-60. "every item in the code maintains a double set of
Strictly speaking, Umberto Eco, A Theory of relations, a systematic one with all the items of its
Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, own plane (content or expression) and a signifying
1976), p. 16 ("everything that, on the grounds of a one with one or more items of the correlated
previously established social convention, can be plane."
taken as something standing for something else") 9. See ibid., pp. 314 ff. Also pp. 48 ff. (especially
would exclude poetic signs valid only within the p. 57).
idiolect of the text: they are then only context- 10. As defined by Peirce 5.484. Cf. Umberto Eco,
established (of course Eco deepens his definition A Theory of Semiotics, pp. 71-72, 121-29.
considerably, and his whole book, especially the 11. On literary competence, see also )ens Ihwe,

"Theory of Codes" chapter, is essential in this "Kompetenz und Performanz in der Literaturtheo-
connection). I rather like Peirce's pithy definition rie," Text, Bedeutung, Aesthetik, ed. Siegfried).
 264 Schmidt (Munich: Bayerischer Schulbuch Verlag, These features can be defined as variants of a
1970). semantic structure that need not be realized in a
SECTION 4 12. See my definition in chapter 2, pp. 39 ff. and key word present intact or as membra disiecta in
note 24. the text, so long as decoding emphases and other
STRUCTURALIST
13. Since the text is a multilevelled discourse, the formal distortions sensitize the reader to their
READING
perception of sign-functions (in Hjelmslev's sense, recurrences and hence to their equivalences, and
1943, p. 58) necessarily changes, the correlation of thus make him perceive them not just as forms but
functives being transitory: it depends upon the as variants of an invariant. This natural decoding
reader's gradual discovery of new coding rules, procedure should obviate the difficulty of proving
that is, upon his working his way back to the the existence of a key word, because the struc-
structures that generate the text (the reader is ture's complex network of relations is self-defining
performing an abduction, in Peirce's sense: Peirce outside of and above any word that may imple-
2.623). ment it.
14. Which should not be confused with 17. Cf. the American joke-a polar bear in a
adherence to the referential fallacy. This is a matter snow storm. Alphonse Allais, Album Primo-
of effect. Whether the reader believes the mimesis Avrilesque (1897), in Oeuvres postumes, vol. 2
is grounded in a genuine reference of words to (Paris: La Table ronde, 1966), pp. 371-79; Benjamin
things, or realizes the mimesis is illusory and is in Peret, "A\16," in Je sublime (Paris: Editions
truth built upon entirely verbal, self-sufficient surrealistes, 1936). Allais's piece is in the parodic
system, the impact of the representation of reality catalog of an imaginary Salon of paintings, in
upon his imagination is the same. It has to be a which every exhibit is monochromatic. He offers
norm before the well-formedness of any of its his own version of the first of our three jokes. The
components can appear questionable. plaques on five other "paintings" function similarly
15. Maurice Jasinski, ed., Gautier, Espana (Paris: to the one I commented on here, but raise
Vuibert, 1929), pp. 142-45. problems irrelevant to my point.
16. I prefer hypogram to paragram, since the 18. Robert Desnos, "Apparition," in Fortunes
latter is identified with Saussure's forgotten (Poesie) (Paris: NRF, 1942), p. 62. Thus a Desnos
concept, brought back to life in jean Starobinski, exegete: "strange, violent, fascinating poem,
Les mots so us les mots. Les anagrammes de F. de modulating one long shout," etc., etc. (Rosa Bucholle,
Saussure (Paris: NRF, 1971). In Saussure, the L'evolution poetique de R. Desnos [Brussels:
matrix of the para gram (his locus princeps) is Academie royal de langue et litterature fran~aises,
lexical or graphemic, and the paragram is made 1956], p. 156.) The de boue repeats both the
out of fragments of the key words scattered along beginning ("born of dirt," i.e. clay, a new Adam),
the sentence, each embedded in the body of a and a hypogram: dormir debout [to be sleepy
word. (My hypogram, on the contrary, appears enough to sleep standing up, fast asleep on his
quite visibly in the shape of words embedded in feet]. The raven details, for instance, cannot be
sentences whose organization reflects the mimetic; they are not even apt in context, they are
presuppositions of the matrix's nuclear word.) simply a periphrastic hyperbole of the ideal raven
Saussure was never able to prove that the key (and, indirectly, exemplary blackness).
word's role implies "une plus grande somme de 19. Andre Breton, "La Foret dans la hache," in Le
coincidences que celles du premier mot venu" Revolver a cheveux blancs (1932).
(Starobinski,Les mots so us les mots, p. 132). Such 20. Mallarme, Oeuvres completes, Bibl. de la
proof must be looked for, and the question asked Pleiade, p. 1489. There is a thicket of studies that try
is hard to reconcile with the reader's natural vainly to make sense of the sonnet at the mimetic
experience of a literary text, namely, his greater level. Only a few have arrived at a perception of the
awareness of the way things are said than of rien significance (M.-j. Lefebve, "La Mise en abyme
exactly what is meant. The fact that the saturation mallarmeenne," Syntheses 258 [1967]: 81-85; Roger
of the text by a phonic paraphrase of a key word is Dragonetti, "La Litterature et la lettre," Lingua et
more assumed than perceived is hard to reconcile Stile 4 [1969]: 205-22; Ellen Burt, "Mallarme's
with the poetic function as defined by Mukarovsky, Sonnet en -yx," Yale French Studies 54 [1977]: 55-82).
and followed by jakobson, as a focussing of the But they still leave much latitude to the reader's
language system on the form of the message. interpretation and concede too much ambiguity.
These problems, it seems to me, can be avoided if Both latitude and ambiguity, I believe, are avoided
the analyst starts from what the surface features of by the concept of the poem as derivative by
the text, that is, its style, force him to perceive. expansion-conversion from a matrix.
 21. On conversion, see pp. 63-80. "maybe"; allegorical pictures, but on non-existent 265
22. But in a way nothing more than a transform myths; a mirror described as "framed forgetful-
of the formula that cancels the function of the ness." The only presence not cancelled is the 4.3
home as symbol of social intercourse-the septuor of scintillations, the Big Dipper; the
MICHAEL RIFFATERRE
servant's response to a caller: "Monsieur n'y est musical term suggests that the constellation is also
pas" [Monsieur is not at home]. of the sonnet's seven rhyme pairs: the only reality
23. Mallarme, Oeuvres, p. 1488. of the poem is its rhyming pattern.
24. The rhyme is difficult because !iks! is an 27. For a very incomplete account of the tempest
infrequent ending in French, but above all because ptyx stirred up in scholarly teapots, see the Mondor
the required alternation of feminine and and jean-Aubry edition, Pleaide, pp. 1490-91.
masculine rhymes in a sonnet makes it necessary Hugo's poem is the illustrious "Satyre," published
to find variants of liksl that do not end with a mute eight years before our sonnet (line 19: an
-e. The only possibility is -ix or -yx with the x enumeration of sylvan gods leads to Chrysis/
voiced, and that narrows the choice down to Sylvain du Ptyx que l'homme appelle fanicule).
learned words of Greek origin and spelling. Hugo himself knew not of the alleged *ptyx,
25. A model for another image of nothing: the "shell"; he first tried phtyx as an ad hoc coinage, to
empty mirror of the second tercet, empty of the sound like ancient Greek with a vengeance (see
reflection of a dead, therefore absent character. Ugende des Siecles, ed. Paul Berret [Paris:
26. A prose version entitled Igitur contains its Hachette, 1922], vol. 2, pp. 573, 576).
own commentary in relatively straightforward 28. Cf. pp. 12 and 17·
French. Mallarme himself (letter to Cazalis, 29. Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia (1662).
Pleiade, pp. 1489-90) discusses what he meant to 30. On overdetermination as a substitute for effet
say. But the only relevance of poetics is to the text de reel, see Michael Riffaterre, "Le Poeme comme
itself, not to the author's intention: good method representation," Poetique 4 (1970): 401-18; Michael
demands that arguments be based on the poem Riffaterre, "Systeme d'un genre descriptif," Poetique
alone, and this sonnet is quite self-sufficient. The 9 (1972): 15-30; Michael Riffaterre, "Interpretation
sestet unfolds a description whose every detail and Descriptive Poetry: A Reading of Words-
cancels itself out: an open window, but described worth's Yew-Trees," New Literary History 4 (1973):
as vacante, "empty"; a light, but dying (un or 229-56; and Philippe Hamon, "Texte litteraire et
agonise); a setting, but modified by peut-etre, metalanguage," Poetique 31 (1977): 261-84.
SECTION 5

I?e>st-Sttllctllralist
Reading

The model of a linguistic system as a self-sufficient set of signifying relations was tremen-
dously generative for structuralist thought across many disciplines, but it was inevitable
that challenges to that concept of self-sufficiency should arise. So, for example, Michel
Foucault's theory of social institutions as forms of discourse may have had its roots in
structuralism, but Foucault rejected that association in favor of a view of social dis-
courses as open-ended and erratic rather than bounded and systematic. On this logic,
we might expect that post-structuralism would lead to a rejection of the idea of the
poem as a paradigmatically self-enclosed verbal icon, and to some extent that is true. But
post-structuralist critics did and do not necessarily have post-structuralist views of
lyric. As we suggested in the previous section, even if structuralist critics often treated
poems as closed systems, the potential to read poetry across linguistic functions or dis-
courses was always there. In contrast, the critics loosely grouped as post-structuralist
often hold strong views of poems as isolated lyrics. The post-structuralist critic's aim is
to open or unravel that lyric structure-but in order to show that lyric closure is an illu-
sion, the critic must assume that we assume that poems have such formal coherence in
the first place.
In the United States especially, the post-structuralist reading of poetry reacted more
strongly to the legacy of New Criticism than it did to structuralism per se. That reaction
explains something about why post-structuralist reading has so often been focused on
lyric poetry in particular. With the exception of Derrida, all the critics we include in this
section were trained to read poems as New Critics. Paul de Man, whose training was not
by and large in the United States, may seem an exception to this rule, but in his graduate
work at Harvard, de Man absorbed the New Critical paradigms of the 1950s (especially
those of Reuben Brower), and much of de Man's early career was devoted to writing in
response and reaction to those paradigms. For example, in "Form and Intent in the
American New Criticism," a lecture first given at Johns Hopkins in the late 1960s, de Man
wrote that New Criticism "was never able to overcome the anti-historical bias that pre-
sided over its beginnings" and so never benefited from "a close contact with European
methods" that emphasized a more historical approach. 1 In drawing this contrast, de Man
was narrating his own intellectual biography and outlining the contours of his own criti-
cism. De Man was himself New Criticism's point of European contact-though the result 267
of that contact was not necessarily to make formalist analysis more historical. Instead,
the result was "a radical questioning of the autonomy of literature as an aesthetic activ- SECTION 5
ity," a challenge de Man attributed to French structuralism but which could more accu- PosT-STRUCTURALIST

rately describe the post-structuralist approaches to poetry de Man and his colleagues at READING

Yale would pursue in the 1970s. Yet while such questioning characterized post-structuralist
practice, that practice actually tended to respond to its own radical challenges by reaffirm-
ing literature's aesthetic autonomy, albeit in precarious terms.
The name that stuck to the contradictions of post-structuralist criticism was Decon-
struction. In the preface to a volume of essays by the Yale critics and Derrida entitled
Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), Geoffrey Hartman wrote, "Deconstruction, as it has
come to be called, refuses to identify the force of literature with any form of embodied
meaning and shows how deeply such logocentric or incarnationist perspectives have in-
fluenced the way we think about art. We assume that, by the miracle of art, the 'presence
of the word' is the presence of meaning. But the opposite can also be urged, that the word
carries with it a certain absence or indeterminacy of meaning" (viii). If Derridean words
like "logocentric" or "incarnationist" signaled deconstructive criticism's signature depar-
tures, it is also true that, as Hartman himself states, the idea that language is indetermi-
nate was hardly new: "to suggest that meaning and language do not coincide, and to draw
from that noncoincidence a peculiar strength, is merely to restate what literature has al-
ways revealed."
In the essay from Deconstruction and Criticism we include in this section, Harold
Bloom elaborately demonstrates the post-structuralist emphasis on the "noncoincidence"
between meaning and language and likewise insists that the disjunction is constitutive of
poetry-specifically, oflyric poetry. Bloom wants to defend the lyric against structuralist
and post-structuralist attempts to reduce it to language or rhetoric, since "rhetoric has
always been unfitted to the study of poetry, though most critics continue to ignore this
incompatibility. Rhetoric arose from the analysis of political and legal orations, which are
absurd paradigms for lyric poems." Bloom's strongest challenge to structuralist poetics-
and, as we shall see, also to the deconstructive poetics of Derrida and de Man-is to re-
turn to the New Critical privileging of lyric form as sui generis. For Bloom, lyric is not a
genre among other speech genres, but a genre with special rights and its own peculiar
pathos, what Bloom calls the "agon" of the lyric's internal struggle to achieve and simul-
taneously disrupt its own aesthetic form. The pitch of that struggle makes Bloom's sense
of lyric poetry larger than life, a version of the lyric as the meta-poetic, as an "archi-
genre" in Genette's sense.
In order to describe the "poetic warfare" that characterizes all lyric, "to show that the
lustres of poetic meaning come ... from the breaking apart of form," Bloom turns to the
Gnostic exegesis of Scripture, to Kabbalah, and to Freud. Bloom calls these "properly
drastic models for creative reading and creative writing"; such resorts are meant to coun-
ter "Deconstruction's ironies," in which figurative language is revealed as empty, as an
elaborate illusion. For Bloom, Deconstruction goes too far-or not far enough-when it
focuses on pure figuration at the expense of the energy and invention within or behind
that figuration. In order to exemplify that energy and invention, Bloom offers a reading of
John Ashbery's long poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a poem Bloom dramatically
lyricizes in his own terms by reading it as a struggle within and against the Emersonian
tradition in American poetry, a struggle in which the poet ultimately "rejects the paradise
of art, but with enormous nostalgias coloring farewell." The pathos of Bloom's own version
of deconstructive lyric reading is thus realized in his rendition of Ashbery's rendition
 268 of the self-portrait of Parmigiani no. According to Bloom, Ashbery elects "a supermime-
sis achieved by an art that will not abandon the self to language." That "supermimesis" or
SECTION 5 meta-representation turns out to be lyric form itself, or rather "the poetic breaking of
PosT-STRUCTURALIST poetic form." This aspiration toward a lyric form that is more than a mere form and much
READING more than a mere genre recalls Mill's idealization of the lyric, but unlike Mill, Bloom's
antithetical criticism admits that the ideal lyric horizon to which his reading passionately
aspires is impossible. That impossibility is what aligns Bloom's reading with other decon-
structive critics and what allows him to supersize the lyric in the process.
Thus this section begins with a post-structuralist critic who resists "a theory of lan-
guage that teaches the dearth of meaning, as in Derrida or de Man," with a deconstruc-
tive critic who writes against Deconstruction. That resistance serves to characterize De-
construction, and it also situates it in a complex critical conversation. What Bloom wants
to offer is not post-structuralist doctrine but what he calls "a theory of poetry," a phrase
he takes from Curti us, who wrote that "the history of the theory of poetry coincides nei-
ther with the history of poetics nor with the history of literary criticism. The poet's con-
ception of himself ... or the tension between poetry and science ... are major themes of
a history of the theory of poetry, not of a history of poetics." 2 For Bloom, the theory of
poetry has everything to do with "the poet's conception of himself." That conception
takes place within a tradition, but Bloom is less concerned with "a history of the theory of
poetry" than was Curtius, or for that matter than is The Lyric Theory Reader.
In this anthology, Bloom's theory is presented as a moment in the history of the the-
ory of poetry, a moment that needs to be examined next to other moments in twentieth-
century lyric reading to be understood. We also place it next to an instance oflyric theory
that partakes of a very different history. We include Derrida's "Che cos' e Ia poesia?" be-
cause, as Bloom's frequent invocation of his work attests, Derrida came to be seen as the
presiding influence in Deconstruction (which Derrida somewhat inadvertently named)
and post-structuralism. While Derrida's general philosophical influence would be hard
to overstate, it is not true that Derrida's own theory of poetry played a particularly large
part in post-structuralist lyric reading. In fact, Derrida wrote very little about poetry per
se. The essay we include here is Derrida's brief response to an invitation by the Italian
poetry journal Poesia in 1988. The journal provided the title, and under this rubric Der-
rida characteristically offered a meditation on the difficulty of the question rather than
the definition the question requested.
That meditation is also a reflection on the history of the theory of poetry. As Timothy
Clark has pointed out, Derrida's comparison of poetry to a hedgehog, "the animal thrown
into the road, absolute, solitary, rolled up in a ball, next to (it)self," owes something to Schle-
gel's Romantic description of a transcendental poetry, "a poetry that will have no empiri-
cal referent but would exist as the essential or absolute poem, the self-presentation of po-
etic creativity (or poeisis) itself." 3 In relation to such an ideal, Schlegel writes that each
actual poetic fragment is "complete in itself like a hedgehog." In using Schlegel's hedge-
hog, Derrida is invoking the problem with the Italian journal's question: Since we inherit
such an idealized notion of what poetry is (or, literally, what thing poetry is), how can we
think about a theory of poetry in any other terms? Derrida's implicit question is philo-
sophical, and places itself in a history that intersects with the history of literary criticism
in which Bloom writes but is not identical to it. For Derrida, the philosophical use of po-
etry as example has an inescapably idealist history, and yet the transmission of poetry has
an inescapably practical history. Derrida puns on the practice of learning poems "by
heart," a phrase that describes the dictation and memorization routine of French Colo-
nial education but that also invokes the subjective landscape of expressive, post-romantic
poetics. The metaphor of the poem as hedgehog allows Derrida to toggle back and forth 269
between the pathetic image of the poem as an animal curled in on itself and the transcen-
dental ideas of poetry inherent in the history of poetics (including Heidegger's character- SECTION 5
ization of the poem as "the thing in itself," an idea we will discuss in section 7). Like Bloom, PosT-STRUCTURALIST

Derrida is not interested in resolving this contradiction; on the contrary, the essay makes READING

the difference between the little hedgehog at risk of being squashed on the autoroute
and the grand ideas associated with poetry into an occasion for widening the gap be-
tween the two.
Unlike Bloom, however, Derrida does not stake a claim for the lyric as the genre that
dramatizes "the poetic breaking of poetic form"; because Derrida's idea of the lyric is not
derived from New Criticism but from the legacy of post-romantic poetics-especially
from the modern inheritors of that legacy, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Husserl-his way of
figuring the poem as thing-in-itself lyricizes poetry by default. The poem-hedgehog be-
comes the little thing at risk of being run over by poetics, by all of the ways of thinking
about that history. It is small enough to learn "by heart" and compact enough to be imag-
ined as a tiny animal. On the one hand, that staging makes philosophical approaches to
poetry look absurd; on the other hand, it makes the lyricized poem as Heideggerian "thing-
in-itself" look absurd, since in curling up in the middle of the road, the poem-hedgehog
"thinks it is defining itself, and it loses itself." Caught between the extremes of philoso-
phy's claims to knowledge about poetry and the poem's claim to ignorance about itself
("it is more threatened than ever in its retreat"), we are faced with an impossible choice.
In order to say "what thing poetry is," according to Derrida, "you will have to disable
memory, disarm culture, know how to forget knowledge, set fire to the library of poetics."
That is one way to complain about a question that the history of philosophy has taken
such pleasure in answering over and over, but it is interesting that Derrida's characteristic
engagement with and resistance to that history takes the form of such a figurative ideal-
ization of the notion of the poem as autotelic and self-enclosed, as in need of protection
from "the circus or the menagerie of poiesis: nothing to be done (poiein), neither 'pure
poetry,' nor pure rhetoric, nor reine Sprache, nor 'setting-forth-of-the-truth-in-the-work.'"
From classical notions of the idea of poetic making to late-nineteenth-century ideas of
pure poetry to Frankfurt School ideas of a pure language to Heidegger's idea of the poem
as imminent disclosure, Derrida attempts to move to an idea of the poem as "the very
ashes of this genealogy. Not the phoenix, not the eagle, but the herisson, very lowly, low
down, close to the earth," an unlyricallyric.
Yet the figure intended to be too far beneath the history of thinking about poetry to
be susceptible to that history's transcendental formulations is also very much part of that
history, the occasion for identification, expression, pathos, all kinds of significance: "to-
ken of election confided as legacy, it can attach itself to any word at all, to the thing, living
or not, to the name of herisson, for example, between life and death, at nightfall or at day-
break, distracted apocalypse, proper and common, public and secret." In effect, Derrida's
attempt to defend the poem from all the things poems have been made to mean delivers
the little hedgehog back into the traffic of the very ideas the figure is supposed to resist,
and thus idealizes the poem's obstinate or futile sacrifice to those ideas. "By announcing
that which is just as it is," the question "Che cos' e!a poesia?" that begins Derrida's essay
"salutes the birth of prose" at the end of the essay, since by that point the lyric poem has
become the thing run over by the ongoing stream of theories about it. Derrida is aware
that his way of framing the problem of definition risks making the poem into an ideal of
resistance to definition. The use of the hedgehog as the character of that resistance is
reminiscent of the tactics of the poet Francis Ponge (on whom Derrida wrote), but that
 270 poetic riff on poetics leaves intact the question of why such resistance to definition should
be so valued in the first place.
SECTION 5 Paul de Man, the post-structuralist lyric theorist who had most in common with Der-
PosT-STRUCTURALIST rida, took a different route to the discovery of such lyricized resistance to grand ideas
READING about the lyric. In "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric," de Man begins by join-
ing poetry and philosophy in common cause. While Derrida tried (and failed) to separate
the poem from poetics, de Man begins his essay by claiming that "the gesture that links
epistemology with rhetoric in general" belongs to Keats as well as to Nietzsche. But what
philosophers and poets turn out to have in common for de Man is not a belief that mean-
ing and language coincide but a tendency to complicate "the assimilation of truth to
trope" that they may seem to proclaim. When Nietzsche, for example, famously answers
the question "What is truth?" by describing it as "a mobile army of metaphors, metony-
mies, anthropomorphisms," he may be taken to be saying that meaning and language are
the same thing. 4 But as Barbara Johnson will put it, "de Man wants to show in what ways
Nietzsche is not simply saying this." At the same time, de Man puts the lyric in the posi-
tion of always saying this, so much so that when the coincidence between truth and trope
is interrupted, the result can no longer be a lyric.
If truth comes down to an organized bunch of tropes, why, de Man asks, is the last of
the tropes Nietzsche lists so "odd"?" 'Anthropomorphism' is not just a trope but an iden-
tification on the level of substance," de Man contends, since "it takes one entity for another
and thus implies the constitution of specific entities prior to their confusion, the taking of
something for something else that can then appear to be given." When we make rocks or
stones or trees into human beings, we rely on "systems of interpretation" attached to those
human beings rather than to the rocks or stones or trees; in this way, anthropomorphism
stands for the way in which "tropes are the producers of ideologies that are no longer
true." According to de Man, though Nietzsche says as much, lyric poems offer "less sche-
matically compressed, more elaborated and dramatized instances of similar disjunc-
tions." Unsurprisingly, de Man chooses Baudelaire, the poet often dubbed the father of
modern poetry (as Nietzsche is dubbed the father of modern philosophy); no doubt de Man
had in mind as well Walter Benjamin's meditations on Baudelaire as "the poet of modern
life" (excerpted in section 6). Benjamin had claimed that Baudelaire "envisaged readers to
whom the reading oflyric poetry would present difficulties"; de Man claims that for mod-
ern critical readers, lyric poetry should (but too often does not) present difficulties, since
the noncoincidence of meaning and language suggested by the philosopher undermines
the lyric from within.
The pressure that de Man places on Baudelaire's poetry to perform the epistemologi-
cal crises of modern philosophy is thus matched by the pressure that he places on that
poetry to be representatively lyric. Baudelaire's "canonical and programmatic sonnet 'Cor-
respondances'" fits the bill as a lyric par excellence, both because of its "canonical" place
in literary history and because of its canonical place in lyric theory. 5 De Man uses it to
argue that the extraordinary anthropomorphic claims made by the sonnet, in which man
and nature seem to perfectly 'correspond,' are not sustained by the language of the son-
net, in which metaphor gives way to metonymy, comparison to enumeration. Whereas
Bloom might call such disjunction "the poetic breaking of poetic form," and so an ag-
grandizement of lyric capacity, and Derrida might see in such disjunction the poem's
stubborn (and prickly) resistance to its own poetics, de Man draws a more startling con-
clusion: "The lyric is not a genre, but one name among several to designate the defensive
motion of understanding, the possibility of a future hermeneutics." In de Man's reading,
when Baudelaire's most famous sonnet undermines its own transcendent claims to align
truth and language, meaning and human experience, it undermines the idealist basis on 2n
which the modern understanding of the lyric rests, and so proves that the lyric is itself an
illusion, a creation of readers who want to believe in it. "Like the oracle at Delphi," de Man SECTION 5

writes, Baudelaire's poem "has been made to answer a considerable number and variety of PosT-STRUCTURALIST

questions put to it by various readers .... In all cases, the poem has never failed to answer to READING

:he satisfaction of the questioner." When previous literary critics have asked "Correspon-
dances" to answer their questions about what a lyric is, the poem has given them the an-
swers they have wanted; when de Man asks the poem to tell him that the idea of the lyric is
embedded in a Nietzschean system of interpretation that results in a false lyric ideology, it
also obliges.
De Man's close reading of Baudelaire's poem is very close and owes much to the New
Critical mode of close reading that de Man's teacher Reuben Brower called "slow read-
:ng." The unraveling of the sonnet's illusion of an ideal correspondence between man and
:1ature hinges on de Man's slow reading of a single word, the French word for correspon-
dence or comparison, the little word com me. "When it is said that 'Les parfums, les couleurs
et les sons se repondent ... com me de longs echos,' then the preposition of resemblance,
·comme,' the most frequently counted word in the canon of Baudelaire's poetry, does its
work properly and clearly," writes de Man. But of the final "comme" in the poem, de Man
insists, "Ce comme n'est pas un comme comme les autres." At this point, de Man's close
reading has become so close that he drops out of critical English into Baudelaire's French,
out of commentary into near-repetition. But de Man's point is that the poem's final
preposition is a repetition with a difference, a use of "comme" to mean "such as, for ex-
ample" rather than "like," an enumeration rather than a proposition about resemblance.
Such linguistic scrutiny may seem nitpicky, but it places de Man's reading within both
::-.Jew Critical and structuralist practice (one can easily imagine Jakobson writing para-
graphs about such an "aberrant" use of a preposition in a poem) and so positions his
conclusion as both post-New Critical and explicitly post-structuralist. "Enumerative
repetition disrupts the chain of tropological substitution at the crucial moment when the
poem promises, by way of these very substitutions, to reconcile the pleasures of the mind
with those of the senses and to unite aesthetics with epistemology," de Man concludes.
Both New Critics like Brower and structuralists like Jakobson would say that such recon-
ciliation and unity are exactly what the lyric achieves, either dramatically for the New
Critics or structurally for the structuralists. By claiming that when Baudelaire's poem
disrupts the logic on which those readings depend it also disrupts the illusion on which
the lyric depends, de Man admits how much his own definition of the lyric owes to those
earlier systems of interpretation.
Like Derrida, de Man would like to find an outside or alternative to the history of
poetics, a way to salvage Baudelaire's poem from the versions of lyric reading to which it
has proven so susceptible. He looks for that alternative in one of Baudelaire's prose poems,
"Obsession," written at least five years after "Correspondances," and in which (by way of
another meticulous, slow reading) de Man finds a prosaic and psychologized version of
the earlier poem, so much so that "the resulting couple or pair of texts ... becomes a
model for the uneasy combination of funereal monumentality and paranoid fear that
characterizes the hermeneutics and pedagogy of lyric poetry." In this view, "Obsession"
isn't so much a prose undoing of the supremely lyrical "Correspondances" as it is an expli-
cation of it-and not incidentally, also an explication of the lyric. Since "any text, as text,
compels reading as its understanding," according to de Man, the way in which Baudelaire
(and de Man) make one poem into a reading of another demonstrates that "what we call a
lyric, the instance of represented voice, conveniently spells out the rhetorical and thematic
 272 characteristics that make it the paradigm of a complementary relationship between gram-
mar, trope, and theme." Once we recognize that "'Obsession' leaves 'Correspondances' as
SECTION 5 thoroughly incomprehensible as it always was," we can also recognize that "in the para-
PosT-STRUCTURALIST phernalia of literary terminology, there is no term available to tell us what 'Correspon-
READING dances' might be. All we know is that it is, emphatically, not a lyric. Yet it, and it alone,
contains, implies, produces, generates, permits (or whatever verbal metaphor one wishes
to choose) the entire possibility of the lyric." Like his assertion that "the lyric is not a
genre," de Man's claim that the poem he has spent his essay reading so closely as an iconic
lyric "is, emphatically, not a lyric" is meant to be shocking and counterintuitive. That
shock is intended to wrench us out of the history of poetics that, according to de Man, the
idea of the lyric itself cannot escape. By saying that the poem is not a lyric unless reading
makes it so, de Man returns us to the predicament Derrida figures in the zoomorphic
character of the hedgehog: how can the poem be separated from the history of its inter-
pretation, the history oflyric reading?
Because for de Man that history includes the idealization of the poem as a drama of the
speaking voice (see Brower's "The Speaking Voice" in section 3) and the idealization of
the poem as linguistic exemplar (see Jakobson's "Linguistics and Poetics" in section 4), the
challenge with which de Man leaves us is to abandon those ideals. Derrida's tale of a pa-
thetic little poem-animal waiting to be run over is one funny way to meet such a chal-
lenge, but de Man's way of meeting it is tragic rather than comic. If we could separate "the
materiality of actual history" from "generic terms such as 'lyric,'" which "are always
terms of resistance and nostalgia," de Man writes, then we might glimpse the possibility
of "non-anthropomorphic, non-elegiac, non-celebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is
to say, prosaic, or better, historical modes of language power." Like Derrida, de Man
imagines an ideal resistance to the lyric ideal, but for de Man that fantasy of resistance
takes the form of what he calls "true 'mourning.'" On one hand, as the double quotation
marks indicate, "mourning" refers to the subject of Baudelaire's poem, but in another way
"mourning" refers to the sense ofloss attendant on the failure of the lyric ideal, the loss of
"the desired consciousness of eternity and of temporal harmony as voice and as song."
What we feel when we can no longer feel lyrically may be more lyrical-more expres-
sively, subjectively, passionately "true," in any case, more "historical"-than the romantic
ideal of the lyric ever was. 6
We end this section on the post-structuralist reading of the lyric with Barbara John-
son's reading of de Man's essay. Her "Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law" is in this
sense a post-post-structuralist reading, since it not only follows in the wake of de Man,
but turns to put pressure on de Man's absolute distinction between the ideological struc-
ture of the lyric and non-lyrical "actual history." Lyric and history have more in common
than de Man would lead us to believe, Johnson suggests, as we can see if we look at actual
legal history in relation to de Man's understanding of Baudelaire's contribution to lyric
history. "What are the relations between the laws of genre and the laws of the state?"
Johnson asks, a canny way of proposing that "lyric and law might be seen as two very dif-
ferent ways of instating what a 'person' is." Johnson acknowledges that "there appears to
be the greatest possible discrepancy between a lyric 'person' ... and a legal 'person,'" but
her point is that both depend on anthropomorphism, and thus equally depend on how we
answer the question, "What is a person?" Johnson argues that de Man's complaint about
anthropomorphism in the lyric is that "it is not the name of a pure rhetorical structure,
but the name of a comparison, one of whose terms is treated as a given (as epistemologi-
cally resolved)." In other words, what troubles de Man about anthropomorphism in
Baudelaire is that it pretends to settle the question that the poem can also be understood
to unsettle, the question of how to define the human. "What comes to be at stake, then," 273
in Johnson's reading of de Man, "is lyric poetry as a poetry of the subject." If"Correspon-
dances" does not end by affirming the coincidence of meaning and language, human SECTION 5
presence and its symbols, then for de Man it cannot be a lyric, since presumably a lyric PosT-STRUCTURALIST

must make such affirmations. But must the lyric be defined as such an idealized humanist READING

structure, and must "actual history" be what escapes and resists lyrical intelligibility?
That is the question Johnson poses to de Man, and poses as well to the history of thinking
about the lyric.
It is not an easy question to answer. Johnson points out that de Man's answer seems to
be yes, but that his way of saying yes may also mean no. The subject of the last sentence of
de Man's essay, the sentence that lists the non-lyrical, non-anthropomorphic possibility
of" historical modes of language power," is, Johnson notices, itself "a personification ...
The subjectivizations performed by the lyric upon the unintelligible are here rejected, but
by a personification of mourning": "True 'mourning' is less deluded." Just as de Man reads
the final line of "Correspondances" as undermining the lyric assurances of the previous
lines, Johnson reads the final line of de Man's essay as undermining the post-structuralist
critic's attempt to reverse such lyric assurances. By making the affect of the prose poem an
anti-lyrical agent, a virtual subject who could be more or "less deluded," de Man confuses
the difference between subjective lyric and the history he wants to imagine as an alterna-
tive. If such supposedly non-lyrical "actual history" can only be imagined as personified,
is there really any way of escaping the lyric's anthropocentric logic? As Johnson puts it,
"Has de Man's conclusion really eliminated anthropomorphism and reduced it to the
trope of personification, or is anthropomorphism inescapable in the notion of mourning?
Is this what lyric poetry-so often structured around the relation between loss and
rhetoric-must decide? Or finesse? The least we can say is that de Man has given the last
word in his own text to a personification."
Johnson hints rather than claims that de Man's utopian invocation of "historical
modes of language power" beyond the reach of lyric ideology simplifies the way that lan-
guage actually works in history. In her reading of one rather obscure case in American
legal history, Rowland v. California Men's Colony, Unit II Men's Advisory Council, John-
son demonstrates the way legal discourse (perhaps the most powerful of historical modes
of language power) becomes entangled in just the sort of anthropomorphic and anthro-
pocentric logic on which de Man's version of the lyric depends. A case in which a group of
prisoners try to sue for the right to be given free cigarettes, Rowland v. California Men's
Colony seems an unlikely place to find a historical parallel to Baudelaire's "canonical and
programmatic" sonnet. But in adjudicating the case, the Supreme Court seems to have
encountered the very questions readers of"Correspondances" have encountered, since, as
Johnson puts it, the Court's decision comes down to the relation or distinction between
natural persons (such as individuals) and legal persons (such as associations or councils
or corporations), and "is therefore about what a person is, and how you can tell the differ-
ence between a natural person and an artificial person." As we may have suspected, it is
no easier to distinguish between given and made identities in law than it is in poetry. In
giving the Court's majority opinion, Justice Souter invoked the 1871 "Dictionary Act,"
which states that "unless the context indicates otherwise, the word 'person' includes cor-
porations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock compa-
nies, as well as individuals." This act would seem to grant personhood to groups such as
the Unit II Men's Advisory Council, thereby giving them the right to sue for their ciga-
rettes, but Souter went on to wonder what it means to say that the context may indicate
"otherwise." The words "context" and "indicate" turn out to be hard to pin down, since as
 274 Johnson suggests, "they cannot be glossed with any finality because they name the pro-
cess of glossing itself." In the end, the Court decided that the Men's Advisory Council
SECTION 5 cannot be considered a person too poor to afford his own cigarettes because the context
PosT-STRUCTURALIST does not indicate such a conclusion. Councils cannot be said to be poor in the same sense
READING that people can be poor. Thus, according to Johnson, "to lack is to be human. In a sense,
we have returned to de Man's question about mourning. Is lack human, or just a struc-
ture?" The questions begged by legal discourse and the questions begged by lyric dis-
course turn out to be the same questions.
But with a difference. If both lyric and law raise but fail to answer the question of
whether there is a difference between anthropomorphism and personification, between
the given ness of the essence of the human and the ways in which such essences may be
made up, then surely the consequences of this confusion are not the same for poems and
for Supreme Court decisions on human rights. Yet Johnson is not so sure that even this
difference obtains, since "perhaps the 'fallacious lyrical reading of the unintelligible' was
exactly what legislators count on lyric poetry to provide: the assumption that the human
has been or can be defined so that it can then be presupposed without the question of its
definition's being raised as a question-legal or otherwise. Thus the poets would truly
be, as Shelley claimed, the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world,' not because they
covertly determine policy, but because it is somehow necessary and useful that there be
a powerful, presupposable, unacknowledgment." If lyric assures us that we know and
can understand human experience, that we know and understand what human beings
really think and feel, then lyric may end up being a more influentially" historical form of
language power" than is the apparently more influential legislation that may follow from
such assurance. Thus Johnson turns de Man's utopian ideal of actual history back to-
ward the utopian ideal of the lyric, but in doing so she, like de Man, leaves a modern
rendition of the romantic lyric intact. By invoking Shelley, Johnson also invokes the his-
tory of idealizations of Shelley as the supreme lyric poet, and so ends by granting the
lyric great power indeed. Post-structuralism did not unravel the lyric; instead, post-
structuralist critics tended to make the lyric even more of a modern icon than did their
predecessors in the twentieth century, since by doing so they could demonstrate the
difficulties and hazards, perhaps even the impossibility, of thinking about lyric theory in
any other way.

NOTES

1. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 634-39. De Man does not
the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minne- translate the German, perhaps making a point abou:
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 20-22. the difference and coincidence between meaning
2. Cited by Bloom as Ernst Robert Curtius,Euro- and language.
pean Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. 5. Those theories include Walter Benjamin's, but
William R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, de Man also has in mind Hugo Friedrich's The
1953). Reprinted with a new epilogue by Peter Structure of Modern Poetry (Evanston, IL:
Godman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Northwestern University Press, 1974), in which
Press, 1991). Friedrich argues that Baudelaire invents the
3. Timothy Clark, The Crisis of Inspiration: modern lyric.
Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic 6. On the affective excess that jags in the wake
and Post-Romantic Writing (Manchester: Manches- of post-structuralist thought (and in the wake of
ter University Press, 2001), 261. de Man in particular), see Rei Terada,Feeling in
4· Friedrich Nietzsche, "Truth and Falsity in an Theory: Emotion after the "Death of the Subject"
Ultra moral Sense," in Critical Theory Since Plato, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
ed. Hazard Adams (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt 2001).
 275
FURTHER READING

: :oom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural SECTION 5
of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and PosT-STRUCTURALIST
:.oom, Harold, Paul de Man, jacques Derrida, Proust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. READING
Geoffrey Hartman, and). Hillis Miller. 1979·
Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: --.Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric
Seabury, 1979. of Contemporary Criticism. New York: Oxford
="ruth, Cathy, and Deborah Esch, eds. Critical University Press, 1971.
Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in - - . The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York:
Deconstructive Writing. New Brunswick, Nj: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Rutgers University Press, 1994. Easthope, Antony, and john 0. Thompson.
=:•ase, Cynthia. Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory.
Readings in the Romantic Tradition. Baltimore: Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Edelman, Lee. Homographesis: Essays in Gay
=~ller, jonathan. "Apostrophe." In The Pursuit of Literary and Cultural History. London:
Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, Routledge, 1994.
135-54. London: Routledge, 1981. Hartman, Geoffrey. Criticism in the Wilderness:
--."Deconstruction and the Lyric." In The Study of Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale
Deconstruction Is/in America: A New Sense of University Press, 1980.
rhe Political, 41-51. New York: New York - - . The Fate of Reading. Chicago: University of
Cniversity Press, 1995. p.41-51 Chicago Press, 1975.
--."Reading Lyric." Yale French Studies 69 Hosek, Chaviva, and Patricia Parker, eds. Lyric
1985): 98-106. Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ithaca, NY:
::'err ida, jacques. "The Law of Genre." Translated Cornell University Press, 1985.
t>y Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry 7.1 (Autumn jacobs, Carol. The Dissimulating Harmony.
1980): 55-81. Baltimore: johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
- - . OfGrammatology. Translated by Gayatri Machin, Richard, and Christopher Norris, eds.
Chakavorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry.
Cniversity Press, 1976. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
--.Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Miller,). Hillis. Topographies. Stanford, CA:
Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Stanford University Press, 1995.

The Breaking of Form (1979) 5.1

HAROLD BLOOM

-=-he word meaning goes back to a root that signifies "opinion" or "intention," and is
~:osely related to the word moaning. A poem's meaning is a poem's complaint, its version
)f Keats' Belle Dame, who looked as if she loved, and made sweet moan. Poems instruct
..:s in how they break form to bring about meaning, so as to utter a complaint, a moaning
.:1tended to be all their own. The word form goes back to a root meaning "to gleam" or "to
;parkle," but in a poem it is not form itself that gleams or sparkles. I will try to show that
:~e lustres of poetic meaning come rather from the breaking apart of form, from the shat-
:ering of a visionary gleam.
 276 What is called "form" in poetry is itself a trope, a figurative substitution of the as-it-
were "outside" of a poem for what the poem is supposed to represent or be "about." Ety-
SECTION 5 mologically, "about" means "to be on the outside of" something anyway, and so "about"
PosT-STRUCTURALIST in regard to poems is itself only another trope. Is there some way out of this wilderness of
READING tropes, so that we can recover some sense of either a reader's or writer's other-than-verbal
needs and desires?
All that a poem can be about, or what in a poem is other than trope, is the skill or fac-
ulty of invention or discovery, the heuristic gift. Invention is a matter of"places," of themes,
topics, subjects, or of what Kenneth Burke rephrased as the implicit presence of forms in
subject-matter, and named as "the Individuation of Forms." Burke defined form in litera-
ture as "an arousing and fulfillment of desires." The Burkean formula offered in his early
Counter-Statement is still the best brief description we have:

A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be
gratified by the sequence. (p. 124)

I will extend Burke, in a Burkean way, by investing our gratification not even in the
disruption of sequence, but in our awareness, however precarious, that the sequence of
parts is only another trope for form. Form, in poetry, ceases to be trope only when it be-
comes topos, only when it is revealed as a place of invention. This revelation depends
upon a breaking. Its best analogue is when any of us becomes aware of love just as the
object of love is irreparably lost. I will come back to the erotic analogue, and to the mak-
ing/breaking of form, but only after I explain my own lack of interest in most aspects of
what is called "form in poetry." My aim is not to demystify myself, which would bore
others and cause me despair, but to clarify what I have been trying to say about poetry
and criticism in a series of books published during the last five years. By "clarify" I partly
mean "extend," because I think I have been clear enough for some, and I don't believe that
I ever could be clear enough for others, since for them "clarity" is mainly a trope for
philosophical reductiveness, or for a dreary literal-mindedness that belies any deep con-
cern for poetry or criticism. But I also seem to have had generous readers who believe in
fuller explanations than I have given. A return to origins can benefit any enterprise, and
perhaps an enterprise obsessed with origins does need to keep returning to its initial
recognitions, to its first troubles, and to its hopes for insight into the theory of poetry.

By "theory of poetry" I mean the concept of the nature and function of the poet and of
poetry, in distinction from poetics, which has to do with the technique of poetical compo-
sition. This distinction between the concepts "theory of poetry" and "poetics" is a fruitful
one for knowledge. That de facto the two have contacts and often pass into each other is no
objection. The history of the theory of poetry coincides neither with the history of poetics
nor with the history of literary criticism. The poet's conception of himself ... or the ten-
sion between poetry and science ... are major themes of a history of the theory of poetry,
not of a history of poetics.

I have quoted this paragraph from Curtius' great book, European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages (Excursus VII). My own books from The Anxiety of Influence through
my work on Wallace Stevens are all attempts to develop a theory of poetry in just this
sense. The poet's conception of himself necessarily is his poem's conception of itself, in
my reading, and central to this conception is the matter of the sources of the powers oi
poetry.
The truest sources, again necessarily, are in the powers of poems already written, or
rather, already read. Dryden said of poets that "we have our lineal descents and clans as
well as other families." Families, at least unhappy ones, are not all alike, except perhaps in 277
Freud's sense of "Family Romances." What dominates Freud's notion is the child's
fantasy-making power. What counts in the family romance is not, alas, what the parents 5.1
actually were or did, but the child's fantastic interpretation of its parents. The child pro- HAROLD BLooM

vi des a myth, and this myth is close to poets' myths of the origin of their creativity, be-
cause it involves the fiction of being a changeling. A changeling-fiction is one of the
stances of freedom. The changeling is free because his very existence is a disjunction, and
because the mystery of his origins allows for Gnostic reversals of the natural hierarchy
between parents and children.
Emerson, in his most idealizing temper, said of the poets that they were liberating
gods, that they were free and made others free. I would amend this by saying that poets
make themselves free, by their stances towards earlier poets, and make others free only by
teaching them those stances or positions of freedom.
Freedom, in a poem, must mean freedom of meaning, the freedom to have a meaning of
one's own. Such freedom is wholly illusory unless it is achieved against a prior plenitude of
meaning, which is tradition, and so also against language. Language, in relation to poetry,
can be conceived in two valid ways, as I have learned, slowly and reluctantly. Either one
can believe in a magical theory of all language, as the Kabbalists, many poets, and Walter
Benjamin did, or else one must yield to a thoroughgoing linguistic nihilism, which in its
most refined form is the mode now called Deconstruction. But these two ways turn into
one another at their outward limits. For Deconstruction, irony is not a trope but finally is,
as Paul de Man says, "the systematic undoing ... of understanding." On this view, lan-
guage is not "an instrument in the service of a psychic energy." De Man's serene linguistic
nihilism welcomes the alternative vision:

The possibility now arises that the entire construction of drives, substitutions, repressions,
and representations is the aberrant, metaphorical correlative of the absolute randomness
oflanguage, prior to any figuration or meaning.

Can we prevent this distinguished linguistic nihilism, and the linguistic narcissism
of poets and occultists, from turning into one another? Is there a difference between an
absolute randomness of language and the Kabbalistic magical absolute, in which lan-
guage is totally over-determined? In Coleridge's version of the magical view, founded on
the Johannine Logos, synecdoche or symbol also was no longer a trope, but was the end-
less restitution of performative rhetoric, or the systematic restoration of spiritual persua-
sion and understanding. This remains, though with many refinements, the logocentric
\·iew of such current theorists as Barfield and Ong.
Whether one accepts a theory of language that teaches the dearth of meaning, as in
Derrida and de Man, or that teaches its plenitude, as in Barfield and Ong, does not seem
to me to matter. All I ask is that the theory oflanguage be extreme and uncompromising
enough. Theory of poetry, as I pursue it, is reconcilable with either extreme view of poetic
language, though not with any views in between. Either the new poet fights to win free-
dom from dearth, or from plenitude, but if the antagonist be moderate, then the agon will
not take place, and no fresh sublimity will be won. Only the agon is of the essence. Why?
Is it merely my misprision, to believe that good poems must be combative?
I confess to some surprise that my emphasis upon strong poets and poems should have
given so much offence, particularly to British academic journalists, though truly they do
live within a steadily weakening tradition, and to their American counterparts, who yet
similarly do represent a waning Modernism. The surprise stems from reading historians
as inevitable as Burckhardt, philosophers as influential as Schopenhauer, scholars as
 278 informative as Curtius, and most of all from reading Freud, who is as indescribable as he
is now inescapable. These writers, who are to our age what Longinus was to the Hellenis-
SECTION s tic world, have defined our Sublime for us, and they have located it in the agonistic spirit.
PosT-STRUCTURALIST Emerson preceded all of them in performing the same definition, the same location for
READING America. These literary prophets teach us that the Greeks and the Renaissance were
fiercely competitive in all things intellectual and spiritual, and that if we would emulate
them, we hardly can hope to be free of competitive strivings. But I think these sages teach
a harsher lesson, which they sometimes tell us they have learned from the poets. What is
weak is forgettable and will be forgotten. Only strength is memorable; only the capacity
to wound gives a healing capacity the chance to endure, and so to be heard. Freedom of
meaning is wrested by combat, of meaning against meaning. But this combat consists in
a reading encounter, and in an interpretive moment within that encounter. Poetic warfare
is conducted by a kind of strong reading that I have called misreading, and here again I
enter into an area where I seem to have provoked anxieties.
Perhaps, in common parlance, we need two very different words for what we now call
"reading." There is relaxed reading and alert reading, and the latter, I will suggest, is always
an agon. Reading well is a struggle because fictions and poems can be defined, at their best,
as works that are bound to be misread, that is to say, troped by the reader. I am not saying
that literary works are necessarily good or bad in proportion to their difficulty. Paul Valery
observed that "one only reads well when one reads with some quite personal goal in mind.
It may be to acquire some power. It can be out of hatred for the author." Reading well, for
Valery, is to make one's own figuration of power, to clear imaginative space for one's own
personal goal. Reading well is therefore not necessarily a polite process, and may not meet
the academy's social standards of civility. I have discovered, to my initial surprise, that the
reading of poetry has been as much idealized as the writing of it. Any attempt to de-idealize
the writing of poetry provokes anger, particularly among weak poets, but this anger is mild
compared to the fury of journalists and of many academics when the mystique of a some-
how detached yet still generous, somehow disinterested yet still energetic, reading-process
is called into question. The innocence of reading is a pretty myth, but our time grows very
belated, and such innocence is revealed as only another insipidity.
Doubtless a more adequate social psychology of reading will be developed, but this is
not my concern, any more than I am much affected by the ways in which recent critical
theories have attempted to adumbrate the reader's share. A theosophy of reading, if
one were available, would delight me, but though Barfield has attempted to develop one in
the mode of Rudolph Steiner, such an acute version of epistemological idealism seems to me
remote from the reality of reading. Gnosis and Kabbalah, though heterodox, are at once
traditional and yet also de-idealizing in their accounts of reading and writing, and I con-
tinue to go back to them in order to discover properly drastic models for creative reading
and critical writing.
Gnostic exegesis of Scripture is always a salutary act of textual violence, transgressive
through-and-through. I do not believe that Gnosticism is only an extreme version of the
reading-process, despite its deliberate esotericism and evasiveness. Rather, Gnosticism as
a mode of interpretation helps to make clear why all critical reading aspiring towards
strength must be as transgressive as it is aggressive. It is in Kabbalah, or belated Jewish
Gnosis, that this textual transgression is most apparent, thanks to the superb and invalu-
able labors of Gersh om Scholem. Scholem's researches are a demonstration that our ide-
alisms about texts are poor illusions.
When I observe that there are no texts, but only interpretations, I am not yielding to
extreme subjectivism, nor am I necessarily expounding any particular theory of textual-
ity. When I wrote, once, that a strong reading is the only text, the only lie against time 279
that endures, one enraged reviewer called my assertion a critic's sin against the Holy
Ghost. The holy ghost, in this case, turned out to be Matthew Arnold, greatest of School 5.1
Inspectors. But Emerson made my observation long before me, in many contexts, and HAROLD BLooM

many others had made it before him. Here is one of them, Rabbi Isaac the Blind, thirteenth-
century Proven<;:al Kabbalist, as cited by Scholem:
The form of the written Torah is that of the colors of white fire, and the form of the oral
Torah has colored forms as of black fire. And all these engravings and the not yet unfolded
Torah existed potentially, perceptible neither to a spiritual nor to a sensory eye, until the
will [of God] inspired the idea of activating them by means of primordial wisdom and hid-
den knowledge. Thus at the beginning of all acts there was pre-existentially the not yet
unfolded Torah ...

Rabbi Isaac goes on to insist that "the written Torah can take on corporeal form only
through the power of the oral Torah." As Scholem comments, this means, "strictly speak-
ing, there is no written Torah here on earth." Scholem is speaking of Scripture, of what we
must call Text Itself, and he goes on to a formulation that I would say is true of all lesser
texts, of all poems more belated than the Torah:
Everything that we perceive in the fixed forms of the Torah, written in ink on parchment,
consists, in the last analysis, of interpretations or definitions of what is hidden. There is
only an oral Torah: that is the esoteric meaning of these words, and the written Torah is a
purely mystical concept. ... There is no written Torah, free from the oral element, that can
be known or conceived of by creatures who are not prophets.

What Scholem wryly asserts does not dismay what I would call the poet in the reader
(any reader, at least potentially) but it does dismay or provoke many professional readers,
particularly in the academies. One of my most instructive memories will be always of a
small meeting of distinguished professors, which had gathered to consider the qualifica-
tions of an individual whom they might ask to join their enterprise. Before meditating
upon this person's merits, they spontaneously performed a little ritual of faith. One by
one, in turn, they confessed their belief in the real presence of the literary text. It had an
existence independent of their devotion to it. It had priority over them, would be there af-
ter they were gone, and above all it had a meaning or meanings quite apart from their in-
terpretive activity. The literary text was there. Where? Why, in editions, definitive editions,
upon which responsible commentaries might be written. Responsible commentaries. For
"responsible," substitute what word you will, whatever anxious word might match the so-
cial pieties and professional civilities that inform the spirituality of such occasions.
I only know a text, any text, because I know a reading of it, someone else's reading, my
own reading, a composite reading. I happen to possess a somewhat preternatural verbal
memory, particularly for verse. But I do not know Lycidas when I recite it to myself, in the
sense that I know the Lycidas by the Milton. The Milton, the Stevens, the Shelley, do not
exist. In a recent issue of a scholarly magazine, one exegete of Shelley passionately and
accurately declared his faith that Shelley was a far more gifted imagination than he could
ever be. His humble but worthy destiny, he declared, was to help all of us arrive at the
Shelley by a lifetime of patient textual, historical, and interpretive work. His outrage was
plain in every sentence, and it moved me deeply, even though evidently I was the un-
:Hmed sinner who had compelled him to proclaim his passionate self-effacement.
Alas that words should be only words and not things or feelings, and alas again that it
should be, as Stevens said, a world of words to the end of it. Words, even if we take them
 280 as magic, refer only to other words, to the end of it. Words will not interpret themselves,
and common rules for interpreting words will never exist. Many critics flee to philosophy
SECTION 5 or to linguistics, but the result is that they learn to interpret poems as philosophy or as
PosT-STRUCTURALIST linguistics. Philosophy may flaunt its rigors but its agon with poetry is an ancient one,
READING and never will end. Linguistic explanations doubtless achieve a happy intensity of techni-
cality, but language is not in itself a privileged mode of explanation. Certainly the critic
seeking the Shelley should be reminded that Shelley's poems are language, but the re-
minder will not be an indefinite nourishment to any reader. Philosophers of intertextual-
ity and of rhetoricity usefully warn me that the meanings of an intertextual encounter are
as undecidable and unreadable as any single text is, but I discover pragmatically that such
philosophers at best teach me a kind of double-entry bookkeeping, which as a reader I
have to discount. Every poem becomes as unreadable as every other, and every intertex-
tual confrontation seems as much an abyssing as any other. I subtract the rhetoricity from
both columns, from rhetoric as system of tropes, and from rhetoric as persuasion, and
return to where I started. ]edes Wort ist ein Vorurtei/, Nietzsche says, which I translate as:
"Every word is a clinamen." There is always and only bias, inclination, pre-judgment,
swerve; only and always the verbal agon for freedom, and the agon is carried on not by
truth-telling, but by words lying against time.
Freedom and lying are intimately associated in belated poetry, and the notion that
contains them both might best be named "evasion." Evasion is a process of avoiding, a
way of escaping, but also it is an excuse. Usage has tinged the word with a certain stigma,
but in our poetry what is being evaded ultimately is fate, particularly the necessity of
dying. The study of poetry is (or ought to be) the study of wh'at Stevens called "the intri-
cate evasions of as." Linguistically these evasions constitute trope, but I urge a study of
poetry that depends upon a larger vision of trope than traditional or modern rhetoric af-
fords us. The positions of freedom and the strategies of lying are more than images, more
than figurations, more even than the operations that Freud named "defense." Searching
for a term comprehensive enough to help in the reading of poems, I offered the notion of
"revisionary ratios," and found myself working with six of these, a number not so arbitrary
as it has seemed to some. Rather than enumerate and describe these ratios again, I want to
consider something of the limits that traditional rhetoric has set upon our description of
poems.
Rhetoric has been always unfitted to the study of poetry, though most critics continue
to ignore this incompatibility. Rhetoric rose from the analysis of political and legal ora-
tions, which are absurd paradigms for lyrical poems. Helen Vendler pithily sums up the
continued inadequacy of traditional rhetoric to the description of lyric:

It remains true that the figures of rhetoric, while they may be thought to appear in a more
concentrated form in lyric, seem equally at home in narrative and expository writing.
Nothing in the figures of paradox, or irony, or metaphor, or imagery-or in the generic
conventions of, say, the elegy-specifies a basis in verse.

John Hollander, who is our leading authority upon lyrical form, illuminates tropes by
calling them "turns that occur between the meanings of intention and the significances
of linguistic utterances." I want to expand Hollander's description so as to open up a hid-
den element in all criticism that deals with figuration. Any critic necessarily tropes or
turns the concept of trope in giving a reading of a specific poem. Even our most sophisti-
cated and rigorously theoretical critics are at work on a rhetoric of rhetoric when they
believe themselves merely to be distinguishing between one trope and another. A trope is
troped wherever there is a movement from sign to intentionality, whenever the transfor-
mation from signification to meaning is made by the test of what aids the continuity of 281
critical discourse. The increasingly scandalous instance is in the supposed critical dis-
tinction between metonymy and metaphor, which has become a shibboleth for weak in- 5.1
terpreters. Jakobsonian rhetoric is fashionable, but in my judgment is wholly inapplicable HAROLD BLooM

to lyric poetry. Against Jakobson, I follow Kenneth Burke in seeing that the fundamental
dichotomy in trope is between irony and synecdoche or, as Burke says, between dialectic
and representation. There is precious little dichotomy between metonymy and metaphor
or, as Burke again says, between reduction and perspective. Metonymy and metaphor
alike I would trope as heightened degrees of dialectical irony, with metaphor the more
extended. But synecdoche is not a dialectical trope, since as microcosm it represents a
macrocosm without necessarily playing against it.
In lyric poetry, there is a crucial gap between reduction or metonymy and the part-
for-whole representation of synecdoche. Metonymy is a mode of repetition, working
through displacement, but synecdoche is an initial mode of identification, as its close as-
sociation with the ancient topoi of definition and division would indicate. The topoi as-
sociated with metonymy are adjuncts, characteristics and notation, all of them namings
through supposed cause-and-effect. A metonymy names, but a synecdoche begins a pro-
cess that leads to an un-naming. While metonymy hints at the psychology of compulsion
and obsession, synecdoche hints at the vicissitudes that are disorders of psychic drives.
Regressive behavior expresses itself metonymically, but sado-masochism is synecdochic,
in a very dark sense. I verge upon saying that naming in poetry is a limitation of meaning,
whereas un-naming restitutes meaning, and so adds to representation.
This way of connecting trope and psychic defense, which to me seems an inevitable
aid in the reading of poetry, itself has encountered a good deal of psychic defense in my
more unnamable critics. What is the justification for linking language and the ego, trope
and defense, in relatively fixed patterns? Partly, the rationale would depend upon a dia-
chronic, rather than a synchronic, view of rhetoric, that is, upon an analytic rhetoric that
would observe the changing nature of both linguistic trope and psychic defense as liter-
ary history moved from the Ancient world to the Enlightenment, and then on to Milton
as prophet of Post-Enlightenment poetry. But, in part, the explanation for reading trope
as defense and defense as trope goes back to my earlier observations on criticism as the
rhetoric of rhetoric, and so on each critic's individual troping of the concept of trope. If
rhetoric has its diachronic aspect, then so does criticism as the rhetoric of rhetoric. A
study of Post-Enlightenment criticism from its prophet, Dr. Johnson, on to our contem-
poraries would reveal that its rhetoric was reborn out of Associationist psychology, and
that the crucial terms of that psychology themselves stemmed from the to poi of a rejected
classical rhetoric, ostensibly rejected by the Enlightenment but actually troped rather
than rejected.
This complex phenomenon needs to be studied in detail, and I am attempting such a
study currently in a book on the Sublime and the concept of topos as image-of-voice in
Post-Enlightenment poetry. Here I want only to extract a dilemma of the relation be-
tween style and idea in the perpetual, onward Modernizing march of all post-Miltonic
poetry. From the poets of Sensibility down to our current post-Stevensian contempo-
raries, poetry has suffered what I have termed elsewhere an over-determination of lan-
guage and consequently an under-determination of meaning. As the verbal mechanisms
of crisis have come to dominate lyric poetry, in relatively fixed patterns, a striking effect
has been that the strongest poets have tended to establish their mastery by the paradox of
what I would call an achieved dearth of meaning. Responding to this achieved dearth,
many of the strongest critics have tended to manifest their skill by attributing the dearth
 282 to their own synchronic view of language and so to the vicissitudes of language itself in
producing meaning. A diachronic phenomenon, dependent upon Miltonic and Word-
SECTION 5 sworthian poetic praxis, is thus assigned to a synchronic cause. Deconstructionist criti-
PosT-STRUCTURALIST cism refuses to situate itself in its own historical dilemma, and so by a charming paradox
READING it falls victim to a genealogy to which evidently it must remain blind. Partly, this paradox
is due to the enormous and significant difference between Anglo-American poetic tradi-
tion, and the much weaker French and German poetic traditions. French poetry lacks not
only early giants of the dimension of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, but it also is
devoid of any later figures whose strength could approximate Milton and Wordsworth,
Whitman and Dickinson. There is also the oddity that the nearest French equivalent,
Victor Hugo, remains absurdly unfashionable and neglected by his nation's most ad-
vanced critics. Yet the "achieved dearth of meaning" in French poetry is clearly exempli-
fied more even by Hugo than by Mallarme, just as in English it is accomplished more
powerfully by Wordsworth and Whitman than it is by Eliot and Pound.
If this judgment (however unfashionable) is correct, then it would be sustained by a
demonstration that the revisionary patterns of Modern poetry are set by Wordsworth
and Whitman (or by Hugo, or in German by the later Goethe), and by the further demon-
stration that these fixed or all-but-fixed relations between trope and defense reappear in
Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Valery, in Holderlin and Rilke, in Yeats and Stevens and Hart
Crane. These patterns, which I have mapped as a sequence of revisionary ratios, are not
the invention of belated moderns but of inaugural moderns, the High Romantics, and of
Milton, that mortal god, the Founder from whom Wordsworth and Emerson (as Whit-
man's precursor) derive.
Ratios, as a critical idea, go back to Hellenistic criticism, and, to a crucial clash be-
tween two schools of interpretation, the Aristotelian-influenced school of Alexandria and
the Stoic-influenced school of Pergamon. The school of Alexandria championed the
mode of analogy, while the rival school of Pergamon espoused the mode of anomaly. The
Greek analogy means "equality of ratios," while anomaly means a "disproportion of ra-
tios." Whereas the analogists of Alexandria held that the literary text was a unity and had
a fixed meaning, the anomalists of Pergamon in effect asserted that the literary text was
an interplay of differences and had meanings that rose out of those differences. Our latest
mimic wars of criticism thus repeat battles fought in the second century B.C. between the
followers of Crates of Mallos, Librarian of Pergamon, and the disciples of Aristarchus of
Samothrace, Librarian of Alexandria. Crates, as an Anomalist, was what nowadays Hillis
Miller calls an "uncanny" critic or, as I would say, an "antithetical" critic, a student of the
revisionary ratios that take place between texts. Richard McKeon notes that the method
of Crates led to allegories of reading, rather than to Alexandrian or analogical New Criti-
cism, and I am prepared to call my work an allegory of reading, though very different
from the allegories of reading formulated by Derrida and de Man, legitimate rival de-
scendants of Crates.
The breaking of form to produce meaning, as I conceive it, depends upon the opera-
tion of certain instances of language, revisionary ratios, and on certain topological dis-
placements in language that intervene between ratios, displacements that I have been
calling "crossings."
To account for these ratios, without defending here their name and their number, I
have to return to my earlier themes of the aggression of reading and the transgression of
writing, and to my choice of a psychic rather than a linguistic model in a quest for tropes
that might illuminate acts of reading.
Anna Freud, in her classic study, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, notes that
 ... all the defensive measures of the ego against the id are carried out silently and invisibly. 283
The most that we can ever do is to reconstruct them in retrospect: we can never really wit-
ness them in operation. This statement applies, for instance, to successful repression. The 5.1
ego knows nothing of it; we are aware of it only subsequently, when it becomes apparent HAROLD BLOOM

that something is missing.

As I apply Anna Freud, in a poem the ego is the poetic self and the id is the precursor,
:dealized and frequently composite, hence fantasized, but still traceable to a historical
author or authors. The defensive measures of the poetic self against the fantasized pre-
~ursor can be witnessed in operation only by the study of a difference between ratios, but
:his difference depends upon our awareness not so much of presences as of absences, of
;,·hat is missing in the poem because it had to be excluded. It is in this sense that I would
grant a point made by John Bayley, that I am "fascinated by the sort of poetry that is not
·eally there, and-even better-the kind that knows it never can be." But Bayley errs in
:hinking that this is only one tradition of the poetry of the last three centuries, because
Jearly it is the norm, or the condition of belated, strong poetry. The authentic poem now
achieves its dearth of meaning by strategies of exclusion, or what can be called litanies of
evasion. I will quote a sympathetic British critic, Roger Poole, for a more useful account
0f this problematic element in our poetry:

If a poem is really 'strong' it represents a menace. It menaces the way the reader thinks,
loves, fears and is. Consequently, the reading of strong poetry can only take place under
conditions of mutual self-defense. Just as the poet must not know what he knows, and
must not state what he states, so the reader must not read what he reads. [The] question is
not so much 'What does this poem mean?' as 'What has got left out of this poem to make
of it the particularly expensive torso that it is?'

To adumbrate Poole's observations a touch more fully, I would suggest that we all suf-
fer from an impoverished notion of poetic allusion. No strong poem merely alludes to
another, and what look like overt allusions and even echoes in strong poems are disguises
for darker relationships. A strong authentic allusion to another strong poem can be only
by and in what the later poem does not say, by what it represses. This is another aspect of
a limitation of poetry that defines poetry: a poem can be about experience or emotion or
whatever only by initially encountering another poem, which is to say a poem must
handle experience and emotion as if they already were rival poems. Poetic knowledge is
necessarily a knowledge by tropes, an experience of emotion as trope, and an expression
of knowledge and emotion by a revisionary further troping. Since a poem is necessarily
still further troped in any strong reading, there is a bewildering triple inter-tropicality at
work that makes a mockery of most attempts at reading. I do not agree wholly with de
Man that reading is impossible, but I acknowledge how very difficult it is to read a poem
properly, which is what I have meant by my much-attacked critical trope of"misreading"
or "misprision." With three layers of troping perpetually confronting us, the task of resti-
tuting meaning or of healing a wounded rhetoricity is a daunting one. Yet it can and must
be attempted. The only alternative I can see is the triumph of Romantic irony in purified
form by way of the allegory of reading formulated by Paul de Man. But this most ad-
vanced version of Deconstruction cheerfully accepts the risk warned against by de Man's
truest precursor, Friedrich Schlegel: "The irony of irony is the fact that one becomes
weary of it if one is offered it everywhere and all the time."
To evade such destructive weariness, I return to the poetic equivalent of Freud's
concept of defense. The center of the poetic self, of the speaking subject that Deman ian
 284 Deconstruction dissolves into irony, is narcissistic self-regard. Such poetic self-esteem is
wounded by its realization of belatedness, and the wound or narcissistic scar provokes the
SECTION 5 poetic self into the aggressivity that Freud amazingly chose to call "defense." Even Freud,
PosT-STRUCTURALIST like all the rest of us, idealized the arts, it being Nietzsche's distinction that in this too he
READING was the grand exception, though to some extent he shares this particular distinction with
Kierkegaard. Because of such prevalent idealization, we all of us still resist the supposed
stigma of identifying the strong poet's drive towards immortality with the triadic se-
quence of narcissism, wounded self-regard, and aggression. But change in poetry and criti-
cism as in any human endeavor comes about only through aggression. Unless a strong
poet strongly loves his own poetry, he cannot hope to get it written. When Robinson Jef-
fers writes that he hates his verses, every line, every word, then my response is divided
between a sense that he lies, and a stronger sense that perhaps he tells the truth, and that
is the trouble. Alas that poetic self-love should not in itself be sufficient for strength, but it
is no good lamenting that it should be necessary for poetic strength. Pindar, one of our
earliest instances oflyric strength, should have taught all of us that poetic narcissism is at
the root of any lyric Sublime. The first Olympic ode, still the truest paradigm for Western
lyric, overtly celebrates Hieron of Syracuse, yet the horse and rider more fully and implic-
itly celebrated are Pegasus and Pindar. Lyric celebrates the poetic self, despite every de-
nial. Yet we refuse the lesson, even as Freud partly did. A poet, as much as any man or
woman among us, scarcely feels complimented when described as narcissistic and ag-
gressive. But what can poetry give back, either as successful representation or achieved
pathos, and whether to poet or reader, except for a restitution of narcissism? And since
paranoid thinking can be defined as a complete shield against being influenced, what is it
that saves strong poets from paranoid thinking except for their early susceptibility to
poetic influence, an openness that must in time scar the narcissism of the poet qua poet.
For those who scoff still at the idea of the anxiety of influence, I shall cite the second and
belated Pindar, Holderlin, in a letter he wrote to his precursor, Schiller:

I have sufficient courage and judgment to free myself from other masters and critics and to
pursue my own path with the tranquil spirit necessary for such an endeavor, but in regard
to you, my dependence is insurmountable; and because I know the profound effect a single
word from you can have on me, I sometimes strive to put you out of my mind so as not to
be overcome by anxiety at my work. For I am convinced that such anxiety, such worry is
the death of art, and I understand perfectly well why it is more difficult to give proper ex-
pression to nature when the artist finds himself surrounded by masterpieces than when he
is virtually alone amidst the living world. He finds himself too closely involved with na-
ture, too intimately linked with it, to consider the need for rebelling against its authority
or for submitting to it. But this terrible alternation is almost inevitable when the young
artist is exposed to the mature genius of a master, which is more forceful and comprehen-
sible than nature, and thus more capable of enslaving him. It is not a case of one child
playing with another child-the primitive equilibrium attained between the first artist
and his world no longer holds. The child is now dealing with men with whom he will never
in all probability be familiar enough to forget their superiority. And if he feels this superi-
ority he must become either rebellious or servile. Or must he?

This passage, anguished in its sense of contamination, is cited by Rene Girard as an-
other instance of the violence of thematicism that he names as a progression "from mi-
metic desire to the monstrous double." I would prefer to read it as an exercise in self-
misprision, because in it a very strong poet evasively relies upon a rhetoric of pathos to
portray himself as being weak. The revisionary ratio here employed against Schiller is
what I call kenosis or repetition and discontinuity. Appearing to empty himself of his 285
poetic godhood, Holderlin actually undoes and isolates Schiller, who is made to ebb more
drastically than the ephebe ebbs, and who falls hard where Holderlin falls soft. This keno- 5.1
sis dares the profoundest evasion of naming as the death of art what is the life of Holder- HAROLD BLooM

lin's art, the ambivalent and agonistic clearing-away of Schiller's poetry in order to open
up a poetic space for Holderlin's own achievement. Freud, in his final phase, taught us
what we may call "the priority of anxiety"-that is, the dominance of the pleasure prin-
ciple by tendencies more primitive than it, and independent of it. Holderlin teaches us the
same, even as he denies his own teaching. Freud belatedly discovered that certain dreams
in traumatic neuroses come out of "a time before the purpose of dreams was the fulfill-
ment of wishes" and so are attempts "to master the stimulus retrospectively by developing
the anxiety." Holderlin, in his greatest odes, earlier discovered that poetic thoughts did not
sublimate desires, but were endeavors to master a quasi-divine reality by developing the
anxiety that came from the failure to realize poetic godhood. As a poet, Holderlin knew
what as a man he denies in his letter to Schiller, which is that the anxiety of influence is a
figuration for Sublime poetry itself.
Defense therefore is the natural language of Holderlin's poetic imagination and of
every Post-Enlightenment imagination that can aspire convincingly to something like
Holderlin's Sublime strength. But in language itself defense is compelled to be manifested
as trope. I have argued elsewhere for certain paradigmatic links between specific tropes
and specific defenses, at least since Milton's day, and I will not repeat such argument here.
But I have never elucidated the relation of trope to my revisionary ratios, and that will be
my concern in the remainder of the theoretical portion of this essay, after which I will
conclude by speculating upon the role of the ratios in the poetic breaking of poetic form.
An excursus in practical criticism will follow, so as to apply my sequence of ratios to the
interpretation ofJohn Ashbery's recent long poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
It is certainly very difficult to chart anomalies, particularly within a poem yet in refer-
ence to the impingement of another poem. Revisionary ratios are thus at once intra-poetic
and inter- poetic, which is a necessary doubling since the ratios are meant to map an in-
ternalizing of tradition. Tradition is internalized only when a total stance toward precur-
sors is taken up by a new strong poet. Such a stance is a mode of deliberateness, but it can
operate at many levels of consciousness, and with many shades between negation and
avowal. As John Hollander observed, ratios are "at once text, poem, image and model."
As text, a ratio names intertextual differences; as poem it characterizes a total relation-
ship between two poets, earlier and later. As model, a ratio functions the way a paradigm
works in the problem-solving of normal science. It is as image that a ratio is most crucial,
for the revisionary ratios are, to cite Hollander again, "the varied positions of freedom" or
"true position" for a poet.
Freud's patterns of psychic images are the defenses, a tropological system masking
itself as a group of operations directed against change, but actually so contaminated by
the drives it would deflect as to become a compulsive and unconscious process like the
drives. But eventually Freud was to assert that "the theory of the drives is so to say our
mythology. Drives are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness." To this au-
dacity of the Founder I would add that defenses are no less mythological. Like tropes, de-
fenses are turning-operations, and in language tropes and defenses crowd together in the
entity rather obscurely called poetic images. Images are ratios between what is uttered and
what, somehow, is intended, and as Kenneth Burke remarks, you cannot discuss images
for very long without sliding into whole textures of relationships. Cannot those relation-
ships be charted? If it is extravagant to create a new rhetoric, this extravagance, as Joseph
 286 Riddel says, "simply repeats the wandering or indirect movement of all trope." But trope,
or the play of substitution, is purely a temporal process. Ratios of revision between earlier
SECTION 5 and later poets and poems are as much spatial as temporal, though the space be imagina-
PosT-STRUCTURALIST tive or visionary. Rhetorical criticism, even of the advanced deconstructive kind, treats a
READING poem merely as a formal and linguistic structure. But strong poems manifest the will to
utter permanent truths of desire, and to utter these within a tradition of utterance. The
intention to prophesy is necessarily a dynamic of space as well as time, particularly when
the prophecy insists upon finding its authority within a tradition of what has been proph-
esied. As soon as we speak of what is within a previous utterance, our discourse is in-
volved in thematics, in topology or literary place. Themes are things placed into stance,
stance is the attitude or position of the poet in the poem, and placing is a dynamic of de-
sire seeking either its apotheosis or its entropic self-destruction.
A power of evasion may be the belated strong poet's most crucial gift, a psychic and
linguistic cunning that energizes what most of us have over-idealized as the imagina-
tion. Self-preservation is the labor of the poem's litanies of evasion, of its dance-steps
beyond the pleasure principle. Where a defensive struggle is carried on, there must be
some self-crippling, some wounding of energies, even in the strongest poets. But the
uncanny or Sublime energies of poetic evasion, operating through the graduated anom-
alies that are ratios of revision, constitute the value-creating power of the anxiety of in-
fluence. Ann Wordsworth summarizes this eloquently, when she speaks of "this inge-
nious ravelling, a process as determinant perhaps as dream-work" which is "the creative
mind's capacity to know through the precursor, to renew through misprision, and to
expand into the full range of human experience." Where my formulation and use of re-
visionary ratios have been most attacked is in their sequence, and in the recurrence of
that sequence in so many poems of the last two hundred years. I have meant that we are
to read through ratios and not into them, so that they cannot be regarded as reductive
entities, but still their frequency causes disquiet. So it should, but hardly because revi-
sionary ratios are my own paranoid code, as some journalists have suggested. And yet a
few closing words on paranoid codes may be in place just here and now in this fictional
time of Borges and Pynchon.
Commenting on The Crying of Lot 49, the book's best critic, Frank Kermode alas,
observes that "a great deviation is called a sect if shared, paranoia if not." Kermode charm-
ingly goes on to recall that "a man once undertook to demonstrate infallibly to me that
Wuthering Heights was an interlinear gloss on Genesis. How could this be disproved?
He had hit on a code, and legitimated all the signs." Kermode's point is that this is the
danger that both Pynchon's Oedipa and the novel's reader confront. Warning us, Ker-
mode asks us to remember that "deception is the discovery of the novel, not of its crit-
ics." If Kermode is correct in this, then I would call Pynchon, in just that respect, too
much of a moralist and too little of a strong poet. If evasion is the discovery of the post-
Miltonic poem, it is also the discovery of the poem's critics. Every belated poem that
matters ends with either the narrative gesture, postponing the future, by projecting it,
or else the prophetic gesture, hastening the future, by introjecting it. These defensive
operations can be regarded as either the work of negation, intellectually freeing us from
some of the consequences of repression, or the labor of paranoia, reducing reality to a
code. I would hope to have done part of the work of negation for some readers and lov-
ers of poetry besides myself. There is no reading worthy of being communicated to
another unless it deviates to break form, twists the lines to form a shelter, and so makes
a meaning through that shattering of belated vessels. That shattering is rhetorical, yes,
but more than language is thus wounded or blinded. The poet of our moment and of 287
our climate, our Whitman and our Stevens, says it best for me, and so I end with the elo-
quence ofJohn Ashbery: 5.1
HAROLD BLOOM
The song makes no mention of directions.
At most it twists the longitude lines overhead
Like twigs to form a crude shelter. (The ship
Hasn't arrived, it was only a dream. It's somewhere near
Cape Horn, despite all the efforts of Boreas to puff out
Those drooping sails.) The idea of great distance
Is permitted, even implicit in the slow dripping
Of a lute. How to get out?
This giant will never let us out unless we blind him.

Che cos'e la poesia? (r9ss; trans. 1991) 5.2

JACQUES DERRIDA Translated by Peggy Kamuf 1

In order to respond to such a question-in two words, right?-you are asked to know how
to renounce knowledge. And to know it well, without ever forgetting it: demobilize cul-
ture, but never forget in your learned ignorance what you sacrifice on the road, in cross-
ing the road.
Who dares to ask me that? Even though it remains inapparent, since disappearing is
its law, the answer sees itself (as) dictated (dictation). I am a dictation, pronounces poetry,
learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and keep me, look out for me, look at me, dic-
tated dictation, right before your eyes: soundtrack, wake, trail of light, photograph of the
feast in mourning.
It sees itself, the response, dictated to be poetic, by being poetic. And for that reason,
it is obliged to address itself to someone, singularly to you but as if to the being lost in
anonymity, between city and nature, an imparted secret, at once public and private, abso-
lutely one and the other, absolved from within and from without, neither one nor the
other, the animal thrown onto the road, absolute, solitary, rolled up in a ball, next to (it)
self And for that very reason, it may get itself run over, just so, the herisson, istrice 2 in Ital-
ian, in English, hedgehog.
And if you respond otherwise depending on each case, taking into account the space
and time which you are given with this demand (already you are speaking Italian), 3 by the
demand itself, according to this economy but also in the imminence of some traversal out-
side yourself, away from home, venturing toward the language of the other in view of an
impossible or denied translation, necessary but desired like a death-what would all of this,
the very thing in which you have just begun to turn deliriously, have to do, at that point,
with poetry? Or rather, with the poetic, since you intend to speak about an experience,
 288 another word for voyage, here the aleatory rambling of a trek, the strophe 4 that turns but
never leads back to discourse, or back home, at least is never reduced to poetry-written,
SECTION 5 spoken, even sung.
PosT-STRUCTURALIST Here then, right away, in two words, so as not to forget:
READING
1. The economy of memory: a poem must be brief, elliptical by vocation, whatever
may be its objective or apparent expanse. Learned unconscious of Verdichtung
and of the retreat.
2. The heart. Not the heart in the middle of sentences that circulate risk-free
through the interchanges and let themselves be translated into any and all lan-
guages. Not simply the heart archived by cardiography, the object of sciences or
technologies, of philosophies and bio-ethico-juridical discourses. Perhaps not
the heart of the Scriptures or of Pascal, nor even, this is less certain, the one
that Heidegger prefers to them. No, a story of "heart" poetically enveloped in
the idiom "apprendre par coeur," whether in my language or another, the En-
glish language [to learn by heart], or still another, the Arab language (hafiza a'n
zahri kalb)-a single trek with several tracks. 5

Two in one: the second axiom is rolled up in the first. The poetic, let us say it, would
be that which you desire to learn, but from and of the other, thanks to the other and under
dictation, by heart; imparare a memoria. Isn't that already it, the poem, once a token is
given, the advent6 of an event, at the moment in which the traversing of the road named
translation remains as improbable as an accident, one which is all the same intensely
dreamed of, required there where what it promises always leaves something to be desired?
A grateful recognition goes out toward that very thing and precedes cognition here: your
benediction before knowledge.
A fable that you could recount as the gift of the poem, it is an emblematic story: some-
one writes you, to you, of you, on you. No, rather a mark addressed to you, left and con-
fided with you, is accompanied by an injunction, in truth it is instituted in this very order
which, in its turn, constitutes you, assigning your origin or giving rise to you: destroy me,
or rather render my support invisible to the outside, in the world (this is already the trait
of all dissociations, the history of transcendences), in any case do what must be done so
that the provenance of the mark remains from now on unlocatable or unrecognizable.
Promise it: let it be disfigured, transfigured or rendered indeterminate in its port-and in
this word you will hear the shore of the departure as well as the referent toward which a
translation is portered. Eat, drink, swallow my letter, carry it, transport it in you, like the
law of a writing become your body: writing in (it)self. The ruse of the injunction may first
of all let itself be inspired by the simple possibility of death, by the risk that a vehicle poses
to every finite being. You hear the catastrophe coming. From that moment on imprinted
directly on the trait, come from the heart, the mortal's desire awakens in you the move-
ment (which is contradictory, you follow me, a double restraint, an aporetic constraint) to
guard from oblivion this thing which in the same stroke exposes itself to death and pro-
tects itself-in a word, the address, the retreat of the herisson, like an animal on the auto-
route rolled up in a ball. One would like to take it in one's hands, undertake to learn it and
understand it, to keep it for oneself, near oneself.
You love-keep that in its singular form/ we could say in the irreplaceable literality of
the vocable if we were talking about poetry and not only about the poetic in general. But
our poem does not hold still within names, nor even within words. It is first of all
thrown out on the roads and in the fields, thing beyond languages, even if it sometimes
happens that it recalls itself in language, when it gathers itself up, rolled up in a ball on
itself, it is more threatened than ever in its retreat: it thinks it is defending itself, and it 289
loses itself.
Literally: you would like to retain by heart an absolutely unique form, an event whose 5.2
intangible singularity no longer separates the ideality, the ideal meaning as one says, jACQUES DERRIDA

from the body of the letter. In the desire of this absolute inseparation, the absolute nonab-
solute, you breathe the origin of the poetic. Whence the infinite resistance to the transfer
of the letter which the animal, in its name, nevertheless calls out for. That is the distress
of the herisson. What does the distress, stress itself, want? Stricto sensu, to put on guard.
Whence the prophecy: translate me, watch, keep me yet a while, get going, save yourself,
let's get off the autoroute.
Thus the dream of learning by heart arises in you. Of letting your heart be traversed
by the dictated dictation. In a single trait-and that's the impossible, that's the poematic
experience. You did not yet know the heart, you learn it thus. From this experience and
from this expression. I call a poem that very thing that teaches the heart, invents the
heart, that which, finally, the word heart seems to mean and which, in my language, I
cannot easily discern from the word itself. Heart, in the poem "learn by heart" (to be
learned by heart), no longer names only pure interiority, independent spontaneity, the
freedom to affect oneself actively by reproducing the beloved trace. The memory of the
"by heart" is confided like a prayer-that's safer-to a certain exteriority of the automaton,
to the laws of mnemotechnics, to that liturgy that mimes mechanics on the surface, to the
automobile that surprises your passion and bears down on you as if from an outside: aus-
wendig, "by heart" in German. 8
So: your heart beats, gives the downbeat, the birth of rhythm, beyond oppositions, be-
yond outside and inside, conscious representation and the abandoned archive. A heart
down there, between paths and autostradas, outside of your presence, humble, close to the
earth, low down. Reiterate(s) in a murmur: never repeat ... In a single cipher, the poem (the
learning by heart, learn it by heart) seals together the meaning and the letter, like a rhythm
spacing out time.
In order to respond in two words: ellipsis, for example, or election, heart, herisson, or
istrice, you will have had to disable memory, disarm culture, know how to forget knowl-
edge, set fire to the library of poetics. The unicity of the poem depends on this condition.
You must celebrate, you have to commemorate amnesia, savagery, even the stupidity9 of
the "by heart": the herisson. It blinds itself. Rolled up in a ball, prickly with spines, vul-
nerable and dangerous, calculating and ill-adapted (because it makes itself into a ball,
sensing the danger on the autoroute, it exposes itself to an accident). No poem without
accident, no poem that does not open itself like a wound, but no poem that is not also just
as wounding. You will call poem a silent incantation, the aphonic wound that, of you,
from you, I want to learn by heart. It thus takes place, essentially, without one's having to
do it or make it: it lets itself be done, without activity, without work, in the most sober
pathos, a stranger to all production, especially to creation. The poem falls to me, benedic-
tion, coming of (or from) the other. Rhythm but dissymmetry. There is never anything
but some poem, before any poiesis. When, instead of "poetry," we said "poetic," we ought
to have specified: "poematic." Most of all do not let the herisson be led back into the circus
or the menagerie of poiesis: nothing to be done (poiein), neither "pure poetry," nor pure
rhetoric, nor reine Sprache, nor "setting-forth-of-truth-in-the-work." 10 Just this contami-
nation, and this crossroads, this accident here. This turn, the turning round of this catas-
trophe. The gift of the poem cites nothing, it has no title, its histrionics are over, it comes
along without your expecting it, cutting short the breath, cutting all ties with discursive
and especially literary poetry. In the very ashes of this genealogy. Not the phoenix, not
 290 the eagle, but the herisson, very lowly, low down, close to the earth. Neither sublime, nor
incorporeal, angelic, perhaps, and for a time.
SECTION 5 You will call poem from now on a certain passion of the singular mark, the signature
PosT-STRUCTURALIST that repeats its dispersion, each time beyond the logos, ahuman, barely domestic, not re-
READI Nc appropriable into the family of the subject: a converted animal, rolled up in a ball, turned
toward the other and toward itself, in sum, a thing-modest, discreet, close to the earth,
the humility that you surname, thus transporting yourself in the name beyond a name, a
catachrestic herisson, its arrows held at ready, when this ageless blind thing hears but
does not see death coming.
The poem can roll itself up in a ball, but it is still in order to turn its pointed signs
toward the outside. To be sure, it can reflect language or speak poetry, but it never relates
back to itself, it never moves by itself like those machines, bringers of death. Its event al-
ways interrupts or derails absolute knowledge, autotelic being in proximity to itself. This
"demon of the heart" never gathers itself together, rather it loses itself and gets off the
track (delirium or mania), it exposes itself to chance, it would rather let itself be torn to
pieces by what bears down upon it.
Without a subject: poem, perhaps there is some, and perhaps it leaves itself, but I
never write any. A poem, I never sign(s) it. The other sign(s}. The I is only at the coming
of this desire: to learn by heart. Stretched, tendered forth to the point of subsuming its
own support, thus without external support, without substance, without subject, abso-
lute of writing in (it)self, the "by heart" lets itself be elected beyond the body, sex, mouth,
and eyes; it erases the borders, slips through the hands, you can barely hear it, but it
teaches us the heart. Filiation, token of election confided as legacy, it can attach itself to
any word at all, to the thing, living or not, to the name of herisson, for example, between
life and death, at nightfall or at daybreak, distracted apocalypse, proper and common,
public and secret.
-But the poem you are talking about, you are getting off the track, it has never been
named thus, or so arbitrarily.
-You just said it. Which had to be demonstrated. Recall the question: "What is ... ?"
(ti est£, was ist . .. , istoria, episteme, philosophia). "What is ... ?" laments the disappear-
ance of the poem-another catastrophe. By announcing that which is just as it is, a ques-
tion salutes the birth of prose.

NOTES

1. Translator's Notes: The Italian poetry journal risk of this loss in crossing over from one language to
Poesia invited Derrida to write something for the another, or already in the transfer into any language
rubric with which it opens every issue under the title at all, causes the herisson to roll itself into a ball in
"Che cos' e Ia poesia?" (What is poetry? or more the middle of the road and bristle its spines: herisser
literally, What thing is poetry?). Derrida responded means to bristle or to spike, and therefore it may be
with this brief text that was then published beside its said of a text that it is spiked with difficulties or even
Italian translation. As always, Derrida works to traps (e.g., "de nombreux pieges herissent le texte").
abolish the distance between what he is writing If indeed the poetic bristles with difficulty, this very
about (poetry, the poem, the poetic, or as he will mechanism of turning in on itself for protection
finally call it: the poematic) and what his writing from the rush of traffic is also what exposes it to
is doing. Reference without referent, this poem being rubbed out, obliterated. Thus, the poem's
defines or describes only itself even as it points appeal to the heart and to that other mechanism for
beyond itself to the poetic in general. It is, writes remembering which is called, in many languages,
Derrida, a herisson, in Italian istrice, a name which learning by heart. To increase the herisson's chances
loses all its rich resonance as soon as it is translated of getting across the road, we have posted a
into English: hedgehog, a European cousin of the number of signs here the length of the distance to be
porcupine that has similar habits of self-defense. The traversed. These guideposts, in lieu of notes, are set
to one side so they will not get underfoot of the 6. La venue, also "she who has come." 291
creature's movements. 7· Somewhere in "Envois" Derrida wonders how
2. Throughout the text, the sir-sound is stressed. one can say"! love you" in English, which does not 5.2
One may hear in it the distress of the beast caught distinguish between "you" singular and "you"
jACQUES DERRIDA
in the strictures of this translation. plural.
3· Because in Italian, domanda means question. 8. But also "outward" or "outside."
4. Stanza; from the Greek: turn. 9. Betise from bete, beast or animal.
5. Voies, for which a homonym would be voix, 10. See Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of

,·oices. Art.

Anthropomorphism and 5.3

Trope in the Lyric (r984)
PAUL DE MAN

The gesture that links epistemology with rhetoric in general, and not only with the mi-
metic tropes of representation, recurs in many philosophical and poetic texts of the nine-
teenth century, from Keats's "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" to Nietzsche's perhaps better
known than understood definition of truth as tropological displacement: "Was ist also
Wahrheit? Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern, Metonymien, Anthropomorphis-
men ... " 1 Even when thus translated before it has been allowed to run one third of its
course, Nietzsche's sentence considerably complicates the assimilation of truth to trope
that it proclaims. Later in the essay, the homology between concept and figure as sym-
metrical structures and aberrant repressions of differences is dramatized in the specular
destinies of the artist and the scientist-philosopher. Like the Third Critique, this late
Kantian text demonstrates, albeit in the mode of parody, the continuity of aesthetic with
rational judgment that is the main tenet and the major crux of all critical philosophies
and "Romantic" literatures. The considerable difference in tone between Nietzsche and
Kant cannot conceal the congruity of the two projects, their common stake in the recov-
ery of controlled discourse on the far side of even the sharpest denials of intuitive sense-
certainties. What interests us primarily in the poetic and philosophical versions of this
transaction, in this give-and-take between reason and imagination, is not, at this point,
the critical schemes that deny certainty considered in themselves, but their disruption by
patterns that cannot be reassimilated to these schemes, but that are nevertheless, if not
produced, then at least brought into focus by the distortions the disruption inflicts upon
them.
Thus, in the Nietzsche sentence, the recovery of knowledge by ways of its devaloriza-
tion in the deviance of the tropes is challenged, even at this moment of triumph for a
critical reason which dares to ask and to reply to the question: what is truth? First of all,
the listing of particular tropes is odd, all the more so since it is technically more precise
than is often the case in such arguments: only under the pen of a classical philologist such
 292 as Nietzsche is one likely to find combined, in 1872, what Gerard Genette has since wittily
referred to as the two "chiens de faience" of contemporary rhetoric-metaphor and me-
SECTION 5 tonymy. But the third term in the enumeration, anthropomorphism, is no longer a philo-
PosT-STRUCTURALIST logical and neutral term, neither does it complement the two former ones: anthropomor-
READJNG phisms can contain a metaphorical as well as a metonymic moment-as in an Ovidian
metamorphosis in which one can start out from the contiguity of the flower's name to
that of the mythological figure in the story, or from the resemblance between a natural
scene and a state of soul.
The term "anthropomorphism" therefore adds little to the two previous ones in the
enumeration, nor does it constitute a synthesis between them, since neither metaphor nor
metonymy have to be necessarily anthropomorphic. Perhaps Nietzsche, in the Voltairean
conte philosophique On Truth and Lie is just being casual in his terminology-but then,
opportunities to encounter technical tropological terms are so sparse in literary and philo-
sophical writings that one can be excused for making the most of it when they occur. The
definition of truth as a collection ("army" being, aside from other connotations, at any rate
a collective term) of tropes is a purely structural definition, devoid of any normative em-
phasis; it implies that truth is relational, that it is an articulation of a subject (for example
"truth") and a predicate (for example "an army of tropes") allowing for an answer to a
definitional question (such as "what is truth?") that is not purely tautological. At this
point, to say that truth is a trope is to say that truth is the possibility of stating a proposi-
tion; to say that truth is a collection of varied tropes is to say that it is the possibility of
stating several propositions about a single subject, of relating several predicates to a sub-
ject according to principles of articulation that are not necessarily identical: truth is the
possibility of definition by means of infinitely varied sets of propositions. This assertion
is purely descriptive of an unchallenged grammatical possibility and, as such, it has no
critical thrust, nor does it claim to have one: there is nothing inherently disruptive in the
assertion that truth is a trope.
But "anthropomorphism" is not just a trope but an identification on the level of sub-
stance. It takes one entity for another and thus implies the constitution of specific entities
prior to their confusion, the taking of something for something else that can then be as-
sumed to be given. Anthropomorphism freezes the infinite chain of tropological trans-
formations and propositions into one single assertion or essence which, as such, excludes
all others. It is no longer a proposition but a proper name, as when the metamorphosis in
Ovid's stories culminates and halts in the singleness of a proper name, Narcissus or Daphne
or whatever. Far from being the same, tropes such as metaphor (or metonymy) and an-
thropomorphisms are mutually exclusive. The apparent enumeration is in fact a foreclo-
sure which acquires, by the same token, considerable critical power.
Truth is now defined by two incompatible assertions: either truth is a set of proposi-
tions or truth is a proper name. Yet, on the other hand, it is clear that the tendency to
move from tropes to systems of interpretations such as anthropomorphisms is built into
the very notion of trope. One reads Nietzsche's sentence without any sense of disruption,
for although a trope is in no way the same as an anthropomorphism, it is nevertheless the
case that an anthropomorphism is structured like a trope: it is easy enough to cross the
barrier that leads from trope to name but impossible, once this barrier has been crossed,
to return from it to the starting-point in "truth." Truth is a trope; a trope generates a
norm or value; this value (or ideology) is no longer true. It is true that tropes are the pro-
ducers of ideologies that are no longer true.
Hence the "army" metaphor. Truth, says Nietzsche, is a mobile army of tropes. Mobil-
ity is coextensive with any trope, but the connotations introduced by "army" are not so
obvious, for to say that truth is an army (of tropes) is again to say something odd and
possibly misleading. It can certainly not imply, in On Truth and Lie that truth is a kind of 293
commander who enlists tropes in the battle against error. No such dichotomy exists in
any critical philosophy, let alone Nietzsche's, in which truth is always at the very least dia- 5.3
lectical, the negative knowledge of error. Whatever truth may be fighting, it is not error PAuL oe MAN
but stupidity, the belief that one is right when one is in fact in the wrong. To assert, as we
just did, that the assimilation of truth to tropes is not a disruption of epistemology, is not
to assert that tropes are therefore true or on the side, so to speak, of truth. Tropes are
neither true nor false and are both at once. To call them an army is however to imply that
their effect and their effectiveness is not a matter of judgment but of power. What charac-
terizes a good army, as distinct for instance from a good cause, is that its success has little
to do with immanent justice and a great deal with the proper economic use of its power.
One willingly admits that truth has power, including the power to occur, but to say that
its power is like that of an army and to say this within the definitional context of the ques-
tion: what is therefore truth? is truly disruptive. It not only asserts that truth (which was
already complicated by having to be a proposition as well as a proper name) is also power,
but a power that exists independently of epistemological determinations, although these
determinations are far from being nonexistent: calling truth an army of tropes reaffirms
its epistemological as well as its strategic power. How the two modes of power could exist
side by side certainly baffles the mind, if not the grammar of Nietzsche's tale. The sen-
tence that asserts the complicity of epistemology and rhetoric, of truth and trope, also
turns this alliance into a battle made all the more dubious by the fact that the adversaries
may not even have the opportunity ever to encounter each other. Less schematically com-
pressed, more elaborated and dramatized instances of similar disjunctions can be found
in the texts of lyrical poets, such as, for example, Baudelaire.

The canonical and programmatic sonnet "Correspondances" 2 contains not a single sen-
tence that is not simply declarative. Not a single negation, interrogation, or exclamation,
not a single verb that is not in the present indicative, nothing but straightforward affir-
mation: "!a Nature est un temple ... II est des parfums frais com me des chairs d'enfants."
The least assertive word in the text is the innocuous "parfois" in line 2, hardly a dra-
matic temporal break. Nor is there (a rare case in Les Fleurs du mal) any pronominal agi-
tation: no je-tu apostrophes or dialogues, only the most objective descriptions of third
persons. The only personal pronoun to appear is the impersonal "il" of "il est (des
parfums) ..."
The choice of"Correspondances" to explicate the quandaries of language as truth, as
name, and as power may therefore appear paradoxical and forced. The ironies and the
narrative frame of On Truth and Lie make it difficult to take the apparent good cheer of its
tone at face value, but the serenity of "Correspondances" reaches deep enough to elimi-
nate any disturbance of the syntactical surface. This serenity is prevalent enough to make
even the question superfluous. Nietzsche still has to dramatize the summation of his
story in an eye-catching paragraph that begins with the question of questions: Was ist
also Wahrheit? But Baudelaire's text is all assurance and all answer. One has to make an
effort to perceive the opening line as an answer to an implicit question, "La Nature est un
temple ..." as the answer to "Qu'est-ce que !a nature?" The title is not "La Nature," which
would signal a need for definition; in "Correspondances," among many other connota-
tions, one hears "response," the dialogical exchange that takes place in mutual proximity
to a shared entity called nature. The response to the sonnet, among its numerous readers
and commentators, has been equally responsive. Like the oracle of Delphi, it has been
made to answer a considerable number and variety of questions put to it by various read-
ers. Some of these questions are urgent (such as: how can one be innocent and corrupt at
 294 the same time?), some more casually historical (such as: when can modern French lyric
poetry, from Baudelaire to surrealism and beyond, be said to begin?). In all cases, the
SECTION 5 poem has never failed to answer to the satisfaction of its questioner.
PosT-STRUCTURALIST The serenity of the diction celebrates the powers of tropes or "symboles" that can re-
READI Nc duce any conceivable difference to a set of polarities and combine them in an endless play
of substitution and amalgamation, extending from the level of signification to that of the
signifier. Here, as in Nietzsche's text, the telos of the substitutions is the unified system
"esprit/sens" (I. 14), the seamless articulation, by ways of language, of sensory and aes-
thetic experience with the intellectual assurance of affirmation. Both echo each other in
the controlled compression of a brief and highly formalized sonnet which can combine
the enigmatic depth of doctrine-sending commentators astray in search of esoteric
authority-with the utmost banality of a phrase such as "verts comme Ies prairies."
On the thematic level, the success of the project can be measured by the unquestioned
acceptance of a paradox such as "Vaste comme Ia nuit et comme Ia clarte," in which a con-
junctive et can dare to substitute for what should be the ou of an either/or structure. For
the vastness of the night is one of confusion in which distinctions disappear, Hegel's
night in which A =A because no such thing as A can be discerned, and in which infinity
is homogeneity. Whereas the vastness of light is like the capacity of the mind to make
endless analytical distinctions, or the power of calculus to integrate by ways of infinitesi-
mal differentiation. The juxtaposition of these incompatible meanings is condensed in
the semantic ambiguity of "se confondent," which can designate the bad infinity of con-
fusion as well as the fusion of opposites into synthetic judgments. That "echoes," which
are originally the disjunction of a single sensory unit or word by the alien obstacle of a
reflection, themselves re-fuse into a single sound ("Comme de longs echos qui de loin se
confondent") again acts out the dialectic of identity and difference, of sensory diffuseness
and intellectual precision.
The process is self-consciously verbal or mediated by language, as is clear from the
couple "se confondent I se repondent," which dramatizes events of discourse and in which,
as was already pointed out, "se repondent" should be read as "se correspondent" rather
than as a pattern of question and answer. As in "confuses paroles" and "symboles" in the
opening lines, the stress on language as the stage of disjunction is unmistakable. Lan-
guage can be the chain of metaphors in a synethesia, as well as the oxymoronic polysemy
of a single word, such as "se confondent" (or "transports" in I. 14) or even, on the level of
the signifier, the play of the syllable or the letter. For the title, "Correspondances," is like
the anagrammatic condensation of the text's entire program: "corps" and "esprit" brought
together and harmonized by the anee of assonance that pervades the concluding tercets:
from ayant, amore, chan tent to expansion, sens, transport, finally redoubled and reechoed
in enc-ens/sens.
The assertion, or representation, of verbality in "se repondent" (or in "Laissent parfois
sortir de confuses paroles") also coincides, as in Nietzsche's text, with the passage from
tropes-here the substitution of one sense experience by another-to anthropomor-
phisms. Or so, at least, it seems to a perhaps overhasty reading that would at once oppose
"nature" to "homme" as in a polarity of art ("temple") and nature, and endow natural
forests and trees with eyes ("regards") and voices. The tradition of interpretation for this
poem, which stresses the importance of Chateaubriand and of Gerard de Nerval as
sources, almost unanimously moves in that direction.
The opening lines allow but certainly do not impose such a reading. "La Nature est un
temple" is enigmatic enough to constitute the burden of any attempt at understanding
and cannot simply be reduced to a pattern of binary substitution, but what follows is
hardly less obscure. "Vivants piliers," as we first meet it, certainly suggests the erect shape 295
of human bodies naturally enough endowed with speech, a scene from the paintings of
Paul Delvaux rather than from the poems of Victor Hugo. ''L'homme," in line 3, then 5.3
becomes a simple apposition to "vivants piliers." The notion of nature as a wood and, PAuL oe MAN
consequently, of "piliers" as anthropomorphic columns and trees, is suggested only by
"desforets de symboles" in which, especially in combination with "symboles," a natural
and descriptive reading of "fon~t" is by no means compelling. Nor is nature, in Baude-
laire, necessarily a sylvan world. We cannot be certain whether we have ever left the
world of humans and whether it is therefore relevant or necessary to speak of anthropo-
morphism at all in order to account for the figuration of the text. "Des fon~ts," a plural of
what is already, in the singular, a collective plural (fon~t) can be read as equivalent to
"une foule de symboles," a figure of amplification that designates a large number, the
crowd of humanity in which it is well known that Baudelaire took a constant poetic, rather
than humanitarian, interest.
Perhaps we are not in the country at all but have never left the city, the "rue assourdis-
sante" of the poem entitled "A une passante," for example. "Symboles" in "des fon~ts de
symboles" could then designate the verbal, the rhetorical dimension within which we
constantly dwell and which we therefore meet as passively as we meet the glance of the
other in the street. That the possibility of this reading seems far-fetched and, in my expe-
rience, never fails to elicit resistance, or that the forest/temple cliche should have forced
itself so emphatically upon the attention of the commentators is one of the cruxes of
"Correspondances."
It has been enough of a crux for Baudelaire himself to have generated at least one
other text, the poem "Obsession," to which we will have to turn later. For the possibility of
anthropomorphic (mis)reading is part of the text and part of what is at stake in it. An-
thropomorphism seems to be the illusionary resuscitation of the natural breath of lan-
guage, frozen into stone by the semantic power of the trope. It is a figural affirmation that
claims to overcome the deadly negative power invested in the figure. In Baudelaire's, as in
0lietzsche's text, the icon of this central trope is that of the architectural construct, temple,
beehive, or columbarium.
This verbal building, which has to celebrate at the same time funeral and rebirth, is
built by the infinite multiplication of numbers raising each other to ever higher arithme-
tic power. The property which privileges "parfums" as the sensory analogon for the joint
powers of mind and body (II. 9-14) is its ability to grow from the infinitely small to end-
less expansion, "ce grain d'encens qui remplit une eglise"-a quotation from Les Fleurs du
mal that made it into Littre. The religious connotation of"temple" and "encens" suggests,
as in the immediately anterior poem in the volume, "Elevation," a transcendental circula-
tion, as ascent or descent, between the spirit and the senses, a borderline between two
distinct realms that can be crossed.
Yet this movement is not unambiguously sustained by all the articulations of the text.
Thus in the line "L'homme y passe atravers des fon~ts de symboles," "passer atravers" can
have two very different spatial meanings. It can be read as "traverser Ia fon~t"; one can
cross the woods, as Narcissus goes through the looking-glass, or as the acrobat, in Ban-
ville's poem that echoes in Mallarme's "Le Pitre chatie," goes through the roof of the cir-
cus tent, or as Vergil, for that matter, takes Dante beyond the woods in which he lost his
way. But "passer atravers" can also mean to remain enclosed in the wood, to wander and
err around in it as the speaker of"A une passante" wanders around in the crowd. The lat-
ter reading in fact suits the represented scene better than the former, although it is incom-
patible with the transcendental claims usually made for the sonnet. The transcendence of
 296 substitutive, analogical tropes linked by the recurrent "comme," a transcendence which
occurs in the declarative assurance of the first quatrain, states the totalizing power of
SECTION 5 metaphor as it moves from analogy to identity, from simile to symbol and to a higher or-
PosT-STRUCTURALIST der of truth. Ambivalences such as those noted in "passer a travers," as well as the thea-
READING retical ambivalence of anthropomorphism in relation to tropes, complicate this expecta-
tion perhaps more forcefully than its outright negation. The complication is forceful
enough to contaminate the key word that carries out the substitutions which constitute
the main structure of the text: the word "comme."
When it is said that "Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent ... comme de
longs echos," then the preposition of resemblance, "com me," the most frequently counted
word in the canon of Baudelaire's poetry, does its work properly and clearly, without up-
setting the balance between difference and identity that it is assigned to maintain. It
achieves a figure of speech, for it is not actually the case that an answer is an echo; no echo
has ever answered a question except by a" delusion" of the signifier-3-but it is certainly the
case that an echo sounds like an answer, and that this similarity is endlessly suggestive.
And the catachresis "se repondent" to designate the association between the various senses
duly raises the process to the desired higher power. "Des parfums ... I Doux com me les
hautbois, verts comme les prairies" is already somewhat more complex, for although it is
possible in referential and semantic terms to think of oboes and of certain scents as pri-
marily "soft," it makes less sense to think of scents as green; "green scents" have less com-
pelling connotations than "green thoughts" or "green shades." The relaying "comme"
travels by ways of "hautbois," solidly tied to "parfums" by ways of "doux" and altogether
compatible with "vert," through the pastoral association of the reedy sound still reinforced
by the "(haut)bois, verts" that would be lost in English or German translation. The green-
ness of the fields can be guided back from color to scent with any "unsweet" connotation
carefully filtered out.
All this is playing at metaphor according to the rules of the game. But the same is not
true of the final "comme" in the poem: "II est des parfums frais com me ... I Doux
comme ... I -Et d'autres ... I Ayant !'expansion des choses infiniesl Comme l'ambre, le
muse, le benjoin et l'encens." Ce comme n'est pas un comme comme les autres. It does not
cross from one sense experience to another, as "frais" crosses from scent to touch or
"doux" from scent to sound, nor does it cross from the common sensorium back to the
single sense of hearing (as in "Les parfums, les couleurs et lessons se repondent" "Comme
de longs echos ... ") or from the sensory to the intellectual realm, as in the double regis-
ter of "se confondent." In each of these cases, the "com me" is what avoids tautology by
linking the subject to a predicate that is not the same: scents are said to be like oboes, or
like fields, or like echoes. But here "comme" relates to the subject "parfums" in two differ-
ent ways or, rather, it has two distinct subjects. If "comme" is related to "!'expansion des
choses infinies," which is grammatically as well as tonally possible, then it still functions,
like the other "commes," as a comparative simile: a common property ("!'expansion")
links the finite senses to an experience of infinity. But "comme" also relates to "parfums":
"II est des parfums frais ... I -Et d'autres ... I Comme l'ambre, le muse, le benjoin et
l'encens"; the somewhat enigmatic hyphen can be said to mark that hesitation (as well as
rule it out). "Comme" then means as much as "such as, for example" and enumerates
scents which contrast with "chairs d'enfants" as innocence contrasts with experience or
nature with artifice. This working out by exemplification is quite different from the ana-
logical function assigned to the other uses of "comme."
Considered from the perspective of the "thesis" or of the symbolist ideology of the
text, such a use of "comme" is aberrant. For although the burden of totalizing expansion
seems to be attributed to these particular scents rather than the others, the logic of 297
"comme" restricts the semantic field of "parfums" and confines it to a tautology: "II est
des parfums ... I Com me (des parfums)." Instead of analogy, we have enumeration, and 5.3
an enumeration which never moves beyond the confines of a set of particulars: "foret" PAuL oE MAN

synthesizes but does not enumerate a set of trees, but "ambre," "muse," "benjoin," and
"encens," whatever differences or gradations one wishes to establish between them, are
refrained by "comme" ever to lead beyond themselves; the enumeration could be contin-
ued at will without ceasing to be a repetition, without ceasing to be an obsession rather
than a metamorphosis, let alone a rebirth. One wonders if the evil connotations of these
corrupt scents do not stem from the syntax rather than from the Turkish bath or black
mass atmosphere one would otherwise have to conjure up. For what could be more per-
verse or corruptive for a metaphor aspiring to transcendental totality than remaining
stuck in an enumeration that never goes anywhere? If number can only be conquered by
another number, if identity becomes enumeration, then there is no conquest at all, since
the stated purpose of the passage to infinity was, like in Pascal, to restore the one, to es-
cape the tyranny of number by dint of infinite multiplication. Enumerative repetition
disrupts the chain of tropological substitution at the crucial moment when the poem
promises, by way of these very substitutions, to reconcile the pleasures of the mind with
those of the senses and to unite aesthetics with epistemology. That the very word on
which these substitutions depend would just then lose its syntactical and semantic uni-
vocity is too striking a coincidence not to be, like pure chance, beyond the control of au-
thor and reader.
It allows, at any rate, for a sobering literalization of the word "transport" in the final
line "Qui chantent les transports de !'esprit et des sens." "Transport" here means, of
course, to be carried away beyond thought and sensation in a common transcendental
realm; it evokes loss of control and ecstatic unreason. But all attentive readers of Baude-
laire have always felt that this claim at self-loss is not easily compatible with a colder, ana-
lytic self-consciousness that moves in a very different direction. In the words of our text,
"les transports de !'esprit" and "Les transports des sens" are not at all the same "transports."
We have learned to recognize, of late, in "transports" the spatial displacement implied by
the verbal ending of metaphorein. One is reminded that, in the French-speaking cities of
our century, "correspondance" meant, on the trolley-cars, the equivalence of what is called
in English a "transfer"-the privilege, automatically granted on the Paris Metro, of con-
necting from one line to another without having to buy a new ticket.
The prosaic transposition of ecstasy to the economic codes of public transportation is
entirely in the spirit of Baudelaire and not by itself disruptive with regard to the claim for
transcendental unity. For the transfer indeed merges two different displacements into
one single system of motion and circulation, with corresponding economic and meta-
physical profits. The problem is not so much centered on phorein as on meta (trans ... ),
for does "beyond" here mean a movement beyond some particular place or does it mean
a state that is beyond movement entirely? And how can "beyond," which posits and
names movement, ever take us away from what it posits? The question haunts the text in
all its ambiguities, be it "passer atravers" or the discrepancy between the "com me" of ho-
mogeneity and the "comme" of enumeration. The apparent rest and tranquility of "Cor-
respondances" within the corpus of Les Fleurs du mal lies indeed beyond tension and be-
yond motion. If Nature is truly a temple, it is not a means of transportation or a railroad
station, Victorian architects who loved to build railroad stations in the shape of cathe-
drals notwithstanding. Nature in this poem is not a road toward a temple, a sequence of
motions that take us there. Its travels, whatever they are, lie far behind us; there is no
 298 striving here, no questing for an absence or a presence. And if man (l'homme) is at home
among "regards familiers" within that Nature, then his language of tropes and analogies
SECTION 5 is of little use to them. In this realm, transfer tickets are of no avail. Within the confines
PosT-STRUCTURALIST of a system of transportation-or of language as a system of communication-one can
READING transfer from one vehicle to another, but one cannot transfer from being like a vehicle to
being like a temple, or a ground.
The epistemological, aesthetic, and poetic language of transports or of tropes, which
is the theme though not singly the rhetoric of this poem, can never say nor, for that mat-
ter, sing or understand the opening statement: "Ia Nature est un temple." But the poem
offers no explicit alternative to this language which, like the perfumes enumerated by
"comme," remains condemned to the repetition of its superfluity. Few poems in Les
Fleurs du mal state this in a manner that is both so obvious yet, by necessity, so oblique.
The poem most remote from stating it is also the one closest to "Correspondances," its
"echo" as it were, with which it is indeed very easy to confuse it. Little clarity can be
gained from "Correspondances" except for the knowledge that disavows its deeper affin-
ity with "Obsession."

Written presumably in February 186o, at least five years after "Correspondances" (of
which the date is uncertain but anterior to 1855), "Obsession" (O.C., 1:73) alludes to many
poems in Les Fleurs du mal, such as ''!'Homme et Ia mer" (1852) and "De profundis cla-
mavi" (1851). But it more than alludes to "Correspondances"; it can be called a reading of
the earlier text, with all the complications that are inherent in this term. The relationship
between the two poems can indeed be seen as the construction and the undoing of the
mirrorlike, specular structure that is always involved in a reading. On both the thematic
and the rhetorical level, the reverted symmetries between the two texts establish their
correspondence along a positive/negative axis. Here again, our problem is centered on the
possibility of reinscribing into the system elements, in either text, that do not belong to
this pattern. The same question can be asked in historical or in generic terms but, in so
doing, the significance of this terminology risks being unsettled.
One can, for instance, state the obvious difference in theme and in diction between
the two poems in terms derived from the canonical history of French nineteenth-century
lyric poetry. With its portal of Greek columns, its carefully balanced symmetries, and its
decorous absence of any displayed emotion, "Correspondances" has all the characteris-
tics of a Parnassian poem, closer to Heredia than to Hugo. The "romantic" exaltation of
"Obsession" 's apostrophes and exclamations, on the other hand, is self-evident. If nature
is a "transport" in "Obsession," it is a temple in "Correspondances." However, by putting
the two texts side by side in this manner, their complementarity is equally manifest.
What is lost in personal expressiveness from the first poem is gained in the symbolic
"depth" that has prompted comparisons of "Correspondances" with the poetry of that
other neo-classicist, Gerard de Nerval, or supported the claim of its being the forerunner
of symbolism. Such a historicizing pattern, a commonplace of aesthetic theory, is a func-
tion of the aesthetic ideologization of linguistic structures rather than an empirical his-
torical event. The dialectical interaction of "classical" with "romantic" conceptions, as
summarized in the contrastive symmetries between these two sonnets, ultimately reveals
the symbolic character of poetic language, the linguistic structure in which it is rooted.
"Symbolist" art is considered archaic when it is supposed to be spontaneous, modern
when it is self-conscious, and this terminology has a certain crude wisdom about it that is
anything but historical, however, in its content. Such a combination of linguistic with
pseudo-historical terms, of "symbolic" with "classic" (or parnassien) or with "romantic"
(or symboliste), a combination familiar at least since Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, is a 299
necessary feature of systems that combine tropes with aesthetic and epistemological
norms. In this perspective, the relationship between the neo-classical "Correspondances" 5.3
and the post-romantic "Obsession" is itself structured like a symbol: the two sonnets com- PAuL DE MAN

plement each other like the two halves of a symbolon. Historicizing them into a diachrony
or into a valorized qualitative hierarchy is more convenient than it is legitimate. The termi-
nology of traditional literary history, as a succession of periods or literary movements, re-
mains useful only if the terms are seen for what they are: rather crude metaphors for figural
patterns rather than historical events or acts.
Stated in generic rather than historical terms, the relationship between "Correspon-
dances" and "Obsession" touches upon the uncertain status of the lyric as a term for poetic
discourse in general. The lyric's claim of being song is made explicitly in "Correspondances"
("qui chantent les transports ... "),whereas "Obsession" howls, laughs, and speaks but does
not pretend to sing. Yet the je-tu structure of the syntax makes it much closer to the repre-
sentation of a vocal utterance than the engraved, marmorean gnomic wisdom of "Corre-
spondances." The reading however disclosed a discrepancy that affects the verb "chanter" in
the concluding line: the suggestive identification of"parfum" with song, based on common
resonance and expansion, is possible only within a system of relays and transfers that, in the
syntax if not in the stated meaning of the poem, becomes threatened by the stutter, the pir!-
tinement of aimless enumeration. This eventuality, inherent in the structure of the tropes
on which the claim to lyricism depends, conflicts with the monumental stability of a com-
pleted entity that exists independently of its principle of constitution and destruction. Song
is not compatible with aphasia and a stuttering Amphion is an absurd figure indeed. No
lyric can be read lyrically nor can the object of a lyrical reading be itself a lyric-which im-
plies least of all that it is epical or dramatic. Baudelaire's own lyrical reading of"Correspon-
dances," however, produced at least a text, the sonnet entitled "Obsession."
The opening of"Obsession" reads the first quatrain of"Correspondances" as if it were
indeed a sylvan scene. It naturalizes the surreal speech oflive columns into the frighten-
ing, but natural, roar of the wind among the trees:

Grands bois, vous m'effrayez comme des cathedrales;

Vous hurlez comme l'orgue;

The benefits of naturalization-as we can call the reversal of anthropomorphism-are at

once apparent. None of the uncertainties that obscure the opening lines of "Correspon-
dances" are maintained. No "comme" could be more orthodox than the two "commes" in
these two lines. The analogism is so perfect that the implied anthropomorphism becomes
fully motivated.
In this case, the unifying element is the wind as it is heard in whistling keyholes,
roaring trees, and wind instruments such as church organs. Neither is there any need to
invoke hallucination to account for the fear inspired by stormy forests and huge cathe-
drals: both are versions of the same dizziness of vast spaces. The adjustment of the ele-
ments involved (wood, wind, fear, cathedral, and organ) is perfectly self-enclosed, since
all the pieces in the structure fit each other: wood and cathedral share a common shape,
but wood also fits organ by way of the noise of the roaring wind; organ and cathedral,
moreover, are linked by metonymy, etc. Everything can be substituted for everything else
without distorting the most natural experience. Except, of course, for the "vous" of ad-
dress in the apostrophe "Grands bois," which is, of course, absurd from a representational
point of view; we are all frightened by windy woods but do not generally make a spectacle
of ourselves talking to trees.
 300 Yet the power of the analogy, much more immediately compelling than that of synes-
thesia in "Correspondances," naturalizes even this most conventional trope of lyric ad-
SECTION 5 dress: when it is said, in line 4, that the terror of the wind corresponds to the subjective
PosT-STRUCTURALIST fear of death
READING
et dans nos coeurs maud its,

Repondent les echos de VOS De profundis,

then the analogy between outer event and inner feeling is again so close that the figural
distance between noise (wind) and speech or even music almost vanishes, all the more so
since wind as well as death are designated by associated sounds: the howling of the wind
and the penitential prayer, aural metonymy for death. As a result, the final attribution of
speech to the woods (vas De profundis) appears so natural that it takes an effort to notice
that anthropomorphism is involved. The claim to verbality in the equivalent line from
"Correspondances," "Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se n!pondent" seems fantastic
by comparison. The omnipresent metaphor of interiorization, of which this is a striking
example, here travels initially by ways of the ear alone.
The gain in pathos is such as to make the depth of De profundis the explicit theme
of the poem. Instead of being the infinite expanse, the openness of "Vaste comme !a
nuit et comme !a clarte," depth is now the enclosed space that, like the sound chamber
of a violin, produces the inner vibration of emotion. We retrieve what was conspicu-
ously absent from "Correspondances," the recurrent image of the subject's presence to
itself as a spatial enclosure, room, tomb, or crypt in which the voice echoes as in a cave.
The image draws its verisimilitude from its own "mise en abyme" in the shape of the
body as the container of the voice (or soul, heart, breath, consciousness, spirit, etc.) that
it exhales. At the cost of much represented agony ("Chambres d' eternel deuil ou vi brent
de vieux ra.les"), "Obsession" asserts its right to say 'T' with full authority. The canon of
romantic and post-romantic lyric poetry offers innumerable versions and variations of
this inside/outside pattern of exchange that founds the metaphor of the lyrical voice
as subject. In a parallel movement, reading interiorizes the meaning of the text by its
understanding. The union of aesthetic with epistemological properties is carried out by
the mediation of the metaphor of the self as consciousness of itself, which implies its
negation.
The specular symmetry of the two texts is such that any instance one wishes to select
at once involves the entire system with flawless consistency. The hellenic "temple" of
"Correspondances," for example, becomes the Christian "cathedrale" of"Obsession," just
as the denominative, impersonal third person discourse of the earlier poem becomes the
first person discourse of the later one. The law of this figural and chiastic transformation
is negation. "Obsession" self-consciously denies and rejects the sensory wealth of "Cor-
respondances." The landscape of denial from "De profundis clamavi":

C'est un pays plus nu que Ia terre polaire;

-Ni betes, ni ruisseaux, ni verdure, ni bois!

reappears as the desire of "Obsession":

Car je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu!

in sharp denial of

Doux com me les hautbois, verts com me les prairies

from "Correspondances." Similar negations pervade the texts, be it in terms of affects, 301
moods, or grammar.
The negation, however, is indeed a figure of chiasmus, for the positive and negative 5.3
valorizations can be distributed on both sides. We read "Obsession" thematically as an PAuL oE MAN

interiorization of "Correspondances," and as a negation of the positivity of an outside

reality. But it is just as plausible to consider "Obsession" as the making manifest, as the
exteriorization of the subject that remains hidden in "Correspondances." Naturalization,
which appears to be a movement from inside to outside, allows for affective verisimilitude
which moves in the opposite direction. In terms of figuration also, it can be said that
··correspondances" is the negation of "Obsession": the figural stability of "Obsession" is
denied in "Correspondances." Such patterns constantly recur in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century lyric poetry and create a great deal of critical confusion, symptomatic of further-
reaching complexities.
The recuperative power of the subject metaphor in "Obsession" becomes particularly
evident, in all its implications, in the tercets. As soon as the sounds of words are allowed,
as in the opening stanza, to enter into analogical combinations with the sounds of nature,
they necessarily turn into the light imagery of representation and of knowledge. If the
sounds of nature are akin to those of speech, then nature also speaks by ways of light, the
light of the senses as well as of the mind. The philosophical p_hantasm that has concerned
us throughout this reading, the reconciliation of knowledge with phenomenal, aesthetic
experience, is summarized in the figure of speaking light which, as is to be expected in
the dialectical mode of negation, is both denied and asserted:
Comme tu me plairais, 6 nuit! sans ces etoiles
Dont Ia lumiere parte un langage connu!

Light implies space which, in turn, implies the possibility of spatial differentiation, the
play of distance and proximity that organizes perception as the foreground-background
juxtaposition that links it to the aesthetics of painting. Whether the light emanates from
outside us before it is interiorized by the eye, as is the case here in the perception of a star,
or whether the light emanates from inside and projects the entity, as in hallucination or in
certain dreams, makes little difference in this context. The metamorphic crossing be-
tween perception and hallucination

Mais les tenebres sont elles-rnemes des toiles

Oil vi vent, jaillissant de rnon oeil par rnilliers,
Des etres disparus aux regards farniliers

occurs by means of the paraphernalia of painting, which is also that of recollection and of
re-cognition, as the recovery, to the senses, of what seemed to be forever beyond experi-
ence. In an earlier outline, Baudelaire had written

Mais les tenebres sont elles-rnemes des toiles

Oil [peint] ... (presumably for "se peignent"; O.C., 1:981)

"Peint" confirms the reading of "toiles" as the device by means of which painters or dra-
matists project the space or the stage of representation, by enframing the interiorized
expanse of the skies. The possibility of representation asserts itself at its most efficacious
at the moment when the sensory plenitude of "Correspondances" is most forcefully de-
nied. The lyric depends entirely for its existence on the denial of phenomenality as the
surest means to recover what it denies. This motion is not dependent, in its failure or in
its illusion of success, on the good or the bad faith of the subject it constitutes.
 302 The same intelligibility enlightens the text when the enigma of consciousness as eter-
nal mourning ("Chambres d' eternel deuil ou vibrent de vieux nlles") is understood as the
SEen oN 5 hallucinatory obsession of recollection, certainly easier to comprehend by shared experi-
PosT-STRUCTURALIST ence than by esoteric correspondences. "Obsession" translates "Correspondances" into
READING intelligibility, the least one can hope for in a successful reading. The resulting couple or
pair of texts indeed becomes a model for the uneasy combination of funereal monumen-
tality with paranoid fear that characterizes the hermeneutics and the pedagogy of lyric
poetry.
Yet, this very title, "Obsession," also suggests a movement that may threaten the far-
reaching symmetry between the two texts. For the temporal pattern of obsessive thought
is directly reminiscent of the tautological, enumerative stutter we encountered in the
double semantic function of "comme," which disrupted the totalizing claim of metaphor
in "Correspondances." It suggests a psychological and therefore intelligible equivalent of
what there appeared as a purely grammatical distinction, for there is no compelling the-
matic suggestion, in "comme l'ambre, le muse, le benjoin et l'encens," that allows one to
think of this list as compulsively haunting. The title "Obsession," or the last line of the
poem, which names the ghostly memory of mourned absences, does therefore not corre-
spond to the tension, deemed essential, between the expansiveness of"des choses infinies"
and the restrictive catalogue of certain kinds of scents introduced by "comme." Yet, if the
symmetry between the two texts is to be truly recuperative, it is essential that the disar-
ticulation that threatens the first text should find its counterpart in the second: mere natu-
ralization of a grammatical structure, which is how the relationship between enumeration
and obsession can be understood, will not suffice, since it is precisely the tension between
an experienced and a purely linguistic disruption that is at issue. There ought to be a place,
in "Obsession," where a similar contrast between infinite totalization and endless repeti-
tion of the same could be pointed out. No such place exists. At the precise point where one
would expect it, at the moment when obsession is stressed in terms of number, "Obses-
sion" resorts to synthesis by losing itself in the vagueness of the infinite

Ou vi vent, jaillissant demon oeil par milliers,

Des etres disparus aux regards familiars.

There could be no more decisive contrast, in Les Fleurs du mal, than between the reassur-
ing indeterminacy of these infinite thousands-as one had, in "Correspondances," "des
forets"-and the numerical precision with which, in "Les sept vieillards" (O.C., 1:87-88), it
is the passage from one altogether finite to another altogether finite number that pro-
duces genuine terror:

Aurais·je, sans mourir, contemple le huitieme,

Sosie inexorable, ironique et fatal,
Degoutant Phenix, fils et pere de lui-meme?
-Mais je tournai le dos au cortege infernal.

Exaspere com me un ivrogne qui voit double,

je rentrai, je fermai rna porte, epouvante,
Malade et morfondu, 'esprit fievreux et trouble,
Blesse par le mystere et par l'absurdite!

Unlike "Obsession," "Les sept vieillards" can however in no respect be called a reading of
"Correspondances," to which it in no way corresponds.
 The conclusion is written into the argument which is itself written into the reading, a 303
process of translation or "transport" that incessantly circulates between the two texts.
There always are at least two texts, regardless of whether they are actually written out or 5.3
not; the relationship between the two sonnets, obligingly provided by Baudelaire for the PAUL DE MAN
benefit, no doubt, of future teachers invited to speak on the nature of the lyric, is an in-
herent characteristic of any text. Any text, as text, compels reading as its understanding.
What we call the lyric, the instance of represented voice, conveniently spells out the rhetori-
cal and thematic characteristics that make it the paradigm of a complementary relationship
between grammar, trope, and theme. The set of characteristics includes the various struc-
tures and moments we encountered along the way: specular symmetry along an axis of as-
sertion and negation (to which correspond the generic mirror-images of the ode, as celebra-
tion, and the elegy, as mourning), the grammatical transformation of the declarative into
the vocative modes of question, exclamation, address, hypothesis, etc., the tropological
transformation of analogy into apostrophe or the equivalent, more general transformation
which, with Nietzsche's assistance, we took as our point of departure: the transformation of
trope into anthropomorphism. The lyric is not a genre, but one name among several to
designate the defensive motion of understanding, the possibility of a future hermeneutics.
From this point of view, there is no significant difference between one generic term and
another: all have the same apparently intentional and temporal function.
We all perfectly and quickly understand "Obsession," and better still the motion that
takes us from the earlier to the later text. But no symmetrical reversal of this lyrical
reading-motion is conceivable; if Baudelaire, as is eminently possible, were to have writ-
ten, in empirical time, "Correspondances" after "Obsession," this would change nothing.
"Obsession" derives from "Correspondances" but the reverse is not the case. Neither does
it account for it as its origin or cause. "Correspondances" implies and explains "Obses-
sion" but "Obsession" leaves "Correspondances" as thoroughly incomprehensible as it
always was. In the paraphernalia of literary terminology, there is no term available to tell
us what "Correspondances" might be. All we know is that it is, emphatically, not a lyric.
Yet it, and it alone, contains, implies, produces, generates, permits (or whatever aberrant
verbal metaphor one wishes to choose) the entire possibility of the lyric. Whenever we
encounter a text such as "Obsession" -that is, whenever we read-there always is an
infra-text, a hypogram like "Correspondances" underneath. Stating this relationship, as
we just did, in phenomenal, spatial terms or in phenomenal, temporal terms-"Obsession,"
a text of recollection and elegiac mourning, adds remembrance to the flat surface of time
in "Correspondances" -produces at once a hermeneutic, fallacious lyrical reading of the
unintelligible. The power that takes one from one text to the other is not just a power of
displacement, be it understood as recollection or interiorization or any other "transport,"
but the sheer blind violence that Nietzsche, concerned with the same enigma, domesti-
cated by calling it, metaphorically, an army of tropes.
Generic terms such as "lyric" (or its various sub-species, "ode," "idyll," or "elegy") as
well as pseudo-historical period terms such as "romanticism" or "classicism" are always
terms of resistance and nostalgia, at the furthest remove from the materiality of actual
history. If mourning is called a "chambre d' eternel deuil ou vibrent de vieux rfiles," then
this pathos of terror states in fact the desired consciousness of eternity and of temporal
harmony as voice and as song. True "mourning" is less deluded. The most it can do is to
allow for non-comprehension and enumerate non-anthropomorphic, non-elegiac, non-
celebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say, prosaic, or, better, historical modes of
language power.
 304
NOTES
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Ober Wahrheit and Luge citations will be made from this edition,
im aussermoralischen Sinn," Werke, Karl identified as O.C.
Schlechta, ed. (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1966), 3:314. 3. See Ovid's version of the Narcissus story,
2. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, Metamorphoses, III, 341ff.
Pleiade ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 1.11. Further

5.4 Anthropomorphism in
Lyric and Law (1998)
BARBARA JoHNSON

Anthropomorphism. n. Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to

inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.
American Heritage Dictionary

Through a singular ambiguity, through a kind of transposition or intellectual quid pro

quo, you will feel yourself evaporating, and you will attribute to your ... tobacco, the
strange ability to smoke you.
Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises

Recent discussions of the relations between law and literature have tended to focus on
prose-novels, short stories, autobiographies, even plays-rather than on lyric poetry. 1
Literature has been seen as a locus of plots and situations that parallel legal cases or prob-
lems, either to shed light on complexities not always acknowledged by the ordinary prac-
tice oflegal discourse, or to shed light on cultural crises and debates that historically un-
derlie and inform literary texts. But, in a sense, this focus on prose is surprising, since
lyric poetry has at least historically been the more law-abiding or rule-bound of the
genres. Indeed, the sonnet form has been compared to a prison (Wordsworth), 2 or at least
to a bound woman (Keats), 3 and Baudelaire's portraits of lyric depression (Spleen) 4 are
often written as if from behind bars. What are the relations between the laws of genre and
the laws of the state?5 The present essay might be seen as asking this question through the
juxtaposition, as it happens, between two sonnets and a prisoners' association.
More profoundly, though, lyric and law might be seen as two very different ways of
instating what a "person" is. There appears to be the greatest possible discrepancy be-
tween a lyric "person" (emotive, subjective, individual) and a legal "person" (rational,
rights-bearing, institutional). In this essay I will be trying to show, through the question
of anthropomorphism, how these two "persons" can illuminate each other.
My argument develops out of the juxtaposition of two texts: Paul de Man's essay "An-
thropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric," 6 in which I try to understand why for de Man
the question of anthropomorphism is at the heart of the lyric, and the text of a Supreme 305
Court opinion from 1993, Rowland v. California Men's Colony, Unit II Men's Advisory Coun-
ciU This case has not become a household name like Roe v. Wade or Brown v. Board of Edu- 5.4
cation, and probably with good reason. What is at stake in it appears trivial-at bottom, it BARBARA joHNSON

is about an association of prisoners suing for the right to have free cigarette privileges
restored. But the Supreme Court's task is not to decide whether the prisoners have the
right to smoke (an increasingly contested right, in fact, in the United States). The case has
come before the court to resolve the question of whether the prisoners' council can be
counted as a juridical "person" under the law. What is at stake, then, in both the legal and
the lyric texts is the question, What is a person?

1.

I will begin by discussing the article by Paul de Man, which is one of the most difficult,
even outrageous, of his essays. Both hyperbolic and elliptical, it makes a number of very
strong claims about literary history, lyric pedagogy, and the materiality of "historical
modes oflanguage power" (262). Toward the end of his text, de Man somewhat unexpect-
edly reveals that the essay originated in an invitation to speak on the nature of lyric. But
it begins with some general remarks about the relation between epistemology and rheto-
ric (which can stand as a common contemporary way of framing the relations between
law and literature). The transition between the question of the lyric and the question of
epistemology and rhetoric is made through the Keatsian chiasmus, "Beauty is truth, truth
beauty,"8 which de Man quotes on his way to Nietzsche's short and "better known than
understood" (239) essay "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense."9 "What is truth?"
Nietzsche asks in that essay's most oft-quoted moment: "a mobile army of metaphors, me-
tonymies, and anthropomorphisms." Thus it would seem that Nietzsche has answered,
"Truth is trope, trope truth" or "epistemology is rhetoric, rhetoric epistemology." But de
Man wants to show in what ways Nietzsche is not saying simply this. First, the list of tropes
is, he says, "odd." Although metaphor and metonymy are the names of tropes that designate
a pure structure of relation (metaphor is a relation of similarity between two entities; me-
tonymy is a relation of contiguity), de Man claims that anthropomorphism, while struc-
tured similarly, is not a trope. It is not the name of a pure rhetorical structure, but the name
of a comparison one of whose terms is treated as a given (as epistemologically resolved). To
use an anthropomorphism is to treat as known what the properties of the human are.
"Anthropomorphism" is not just a trope but an identification on the level of substance. It
takes one entity for another and thus implies the constitution of specific entities prior
to their confusion, the taking of something for something else that can then be assumed to
be given. Anthropomorphism freezes the infinite chain of tropological transformations
and propositions into one single assertion or essence which, as such, excludes all others. It
is no longer a proposition but a proper name. (241)

Why does he call this a proper name? Shouldn't the essence that is taken as given be a
concept? If"man" is what is assumed as a given, why call it a proper name? (This question
is particularly vexed when the theorist's proper name is "de Man.") The answer, I think,
is that "man" as concept would imply the possibility of a proposition. "Man" would be
subject to definition, and thus transformation or trope. But proper names are not subjects
of definition: they are what they are. If"man" is taken as a given, then, it can only be be-
cause it is out of the loop of qualification. It is presupposed, not defined.
Yet the examples of proper names de Man gives are surprising: Narcissus and Daphne.
Nietzsche's triumvirate of metaphor, metonymy, and anthropomorphism then functions
 306 like the plot of an Ovid ian metamorphosis: from a mythological world in which man and
nature appear to be in metaphorical and metonymic harmony, there occurs a crisis
SECTION 5 wherein, by a process of seamless transformation, a break nevertheless occurs in the sys-
PosT-STRUCTURALIST tern of correspondences, leaving a residue that escapes and remains: the proper name. De
READING Man's discussion of Baudelaire's sonnets will in fact be haunted by Ovidian presences:
Echo is lurking behind every mention of Narcissus, while one of the recurring cruxes is
whether there is a human substance in a tree. It is perhaps not an accident that the figures
that occupy the margins of de Man's discussion are female. If de Man's enduring question
is whether linguistic structures and epistemological claims can be presumed to be com-
patible, the question of gender cannot be located exclusively either in language (where the
gender of pronouns, and often of nouns, is inherent in each language) or in the world. By
extension, the present discussion of the nature of "man" cannot fail to be haunted by the
question of gender.
The term anthropomorphism in Nietzsche's list thus indicates that a given is being
forced into what otherwise would function as a pure structure of relation. In addition,
Nietzsche calls truth an army of tropes, thus introducing more explicitly the notion of
power, force, or violence. This is not a notion that can fit into the oppositions between
epistemology and rhetoric, but rather disrupts the system. In the text of the Supreme
Court decision that I will discuss in a moment, such a disruption is introduced when the
opposition on which the case is based, the opposition between natural person and artifi-
cial entity, opens out onto the question of policy. There, too, it is a question of truth and
power, of the separation of the constative-what does the law say? from the performative-
what does it do?

The bulk of de Man's essay is devoted to a reading of two sonnets by Baudelaire: "Corre-
spondances" and "Obsession," which I here reproduce. 10

CORRESPONDANCES

La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs echos qui de loin se confondent

Dans une tenebreuse et profonde unite,
Vaste com me Ia nuit et comme Ia clarte,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent.

II est des parfums frais com me des chairs d'enfants,

Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
-Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant !'expansion des choses infinies,

Comme l'ambre, le muse, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de !'esprit et des sens.

[Nature is a temple, where the living pillars

Sometimes utter indistinguishable words;
Man passes through these forests of symbols
Which regard him with familiar looks.
 Like long echoes that blend in the distance 307
Into a unity obscure and profound,
Vast as the night and as the light, 5.4
The perfumes, colors, and sounds correspond. BARBARA jOHNSON

There are some perfumes fresh as a baby's skin,

Mellow as oboes, verdant as prairies,
-And others, corrupt, rich, and triumphant,

With all the expansiveness of infinite things,

Like ambergris, musk, benjamin, incense,
That sing the transports of spirit and sense.]

OBSESSION

Grands bois, vous m'effrayez com me des cathedrales;

Vous hurlez comme l'orgue; et dans nos coeurs maudits,
Chambres d'eternel deuil ou vibrent de vieux rales,
Repondent les echos de vos De profundis.

Jete hais, Ocean! tes bonds et tes tumultes,

Mon esprit les retrouve en lui; ce rire amer
De l'homme vaincu, plein de sanglots et d'insultes,
Je l'entends dans le rire enorme de la mer.

Comme tu me plairais, 6 nuit! sans ces etoiles

Dont la lumiere parle un langage connu!
Car je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu!

Mais les tenebres sont elles-memes des toiles

Ou vivent, jaillissant demon oeil par milliers,
Des etres disparus aux regards familiers.

[You terrify me, forests, like cathedrals;

You roar like organs; and in our cursed hearts,
Chambers of mourning that quiver with our dying,
Your De profundis echoes in response.

How I hate you, Ocean! your tumultuous tide

Is flowing in my spirit; this bitter laughter
Of vanquished man, strangled with sobs and insults,
I hear it in the heaving laughter of the sea.

0 night, how I would love you without stars,

Whose light can only speak the words I know!
For I seek the void, and the black, and the bare!

But the shadows are themselves a screen

That gathers from my eyes the ones I've lost,
A thousand living things with their familiar looks.]

Both poems end up raising "man" as a question-"Correspondances" looks upon "man"

as if from a great distance, as if from the outside; "Obsession" says "I," but then identifies
with "vanquished man" whose laugh is echoed in the sea.
 308 "Correspondances" is probably the most canonical of Baudelaire's poems in that it
has justified the largest number of general statements about Baudelaire's place in literary
SEcnoN 5 history. The possibility ofliterary history ends up, in some ways, being the real topic of de
PosT-STRUCTURALIST Man's essay. De Man will claim that the use of this sonnet to anchor the history of "the
READING symbolist movement" is based on a reading that ignores a crucial element in the poem, an
element that, if taken seriously, will not allow for the edifice of literary history to be built
upon it.
"Correspondances" sets up a series of analogies between nature, man, symbols, and
metaphysical unity, and among manifestations of the different physical senses, all
through the word "comme" ("like"). A traditional reading of the poem would say that the
lateral analogies among the senses (perfumes fresh as a baby's skin, mellow as oboes,
green as prairies) are signs that there exists an analogy between man and nature, and
man and the spiritual realm.
De Man focuses on this analogy-making word, "com me," and notes an anomaly in the
final instance. Whereas the first uses of"comme" in the poem equate different things into
likeness, the last one just introduces a list of examples-there are perfumes that are rich
and corrupt, like musk, ambergris, and frankincense. This is thus a tautology-there are
perfumes like ... perfumes. De Man calls this a stutter. He writes, "Comme then means
as much as 'such as, for example'" (249). "Ce Com me n'est pas un com me comme les au-
tres" (249), writes de Man in a sudden access of French. His sentence performs the stutter
he attributes to the enumeration of the perfumes. Listing examples would seem to be
quite different from proposing analogies. If the burden of the analogies in "Correspon-
dances" is to convince us that the metaphorical similarities among the senses point to a
higher spiritual unity, then sheer enumeration would disrupt that claim.
There is another, more debatable, suggestion in de Man's reading that attempts to
disrupt the anthropomorphism of the forest of symbols. De Man suggests that the trees
are a mere metaphor for a city crowd in the first stanza. If the living pillars with their fa-
miliar glances are metaphorically a city crowd, then the anthropomorphism of nature is
lost. Man is surrounded by tree-like men, not man-like trees. It is not "man" whose at-
tributes are taken on by all of nature, but merely a crowd of men being compared to trees
and pillars. De Man notes that everyone resists this reading-as do I-but the intensity
with which it is rejected does make visible the seduction of the system that puts nature,
god, and man into a perfect unity through the symbol, which is what has made the poem
so important for literary history. Similarly, if the last "comme" is sheer enumeration
rather than similarity, the transports in the last line of the poem would not get us into a
transcendent realm, but would be like getting stuck on the French transportation system
(which, as de Man points out, uses the word "correspondance" for changes of station
within the system). All these tropes would not carry us away into the spiritual realm, but
would be an infinite series of substitutions. The echoes would remain echoes and not
merge into a profound unity.
If"Correspondances" is said to place man in the center of a universe that reflects him
in harmony with all of nature, the poem "Obsession" places all of nature and the universe
inside the psychology of man. Even the senses are projections. "Obsession" is the reading
of"Correspondances" as hallucination. While "Correspondances" is entirely declarative,
"Obsession" is almost entirely vocative. (Interestingly, de Man does not comment on
another anomaly in the meaning of the word "comme"-the "comme" in "Obsession"
that means "How!"-which is surprising, since it enacts precisely what he calls "the tro-
pological transformation of analogy into apostrophe" [261].) Nature is addressed as a
structure haunted by the subject's obsessions. Everywhere he looks, his own thoughts
look back. For psychoanalytically inclined readers, and indeed for de Man himself in an 309
earlier essay, 11 "Obsession" demystifies "Correspondances." There is no profound unity
in the world, but only, as Lacan would say, paranoid knowledgeY But de Man sees the 5.4
psychological gloss as another mystification, another anthropomorphism-the very an- BARBARA joHNSON

thropomorphic mystification that it is the duty of lyric, and of lyric pedagogy, to pro-
mote. "The lyric is not a genre, but one name among several to designate the defensive
motion of understanding" (261). De Man concludes provocatively: "The resulting couple
or pair of texts indeed becomes a model for the uneasy combination of funereal monu-
mentality with paranoid fear that characterizes the hermeneutics and the pedagogy of
lyric poetry" (259). What comes to be at stake, then, is lyric poetry itself as a poetry of the
subject. By juxtaposing lyric and law in this essay, I am implicitly asking whether there
is a relation between the "first person" (the grammatical "I") and the "constitutional per-
son" (the subject of rights).
"Only a subject can understand a meaning," claims Lacan. "Conversely, every phe-
nomenon of meaning implies a subject." 13 What de Man seems to be arguing for here is
the existence of a residue oflanguage or rhetoric that exists neither inside nor outside the
"phenomenon of meaning." Does lyric poetry try to give a psychological gloss to disrup-
tions that are purely grammatical? Are the periodizations in literary history such as Par-
nassian and Romantic merely names for rhetorical structures that are not historical? For
de Man, "Obsession" loses the radical disruption of "Correspondances" by making enu-
meration into a symptom, which is more reassuring than endless repetition. It is as
though de Man were saying that "Obsession," despite or rather because it is so psycho-
logically bleak, falls back within the pleasure principle-that is, the psychological, the
human-whereas "Correspondances," which seems so sunny, contains a disruption that
goes beyond the pleasure principle. When de Man says that we can get "Obsession" from
"Correspondances" but not the other way around, this is a way of repeating Freud's expe-
rience of the disruption of the pleasure principle in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a study
in which Freud grappled with the very limits of psychoanalysis. Freud noticed that there
were experiences or facts that seemed to contradict his notion of the primacy of the plea-
sure principle in human life (negative pleasures, the repetition compulsion, the death in-
stinct). As Derrida has shown, Freud kept bringing the beyond back within explainabil-
ity, and the beyond of Freud's theory kept popping up elsewhere. 14 He could, in effect, get
the pleasure principle to explain its beyond, but not anticipate it. The beyond of the plea-
sure principle could only exist as a disruption.
De Man makes the surprising claim that "Correspondances" is not a lyric, but con-
tains the entire possibility oflyric: "'Obsession,' a text of recollection and elegiac mourn-
ing, adds remembrance to the flat surface of time in 'Correspondances'-produces at once
a hermeneutic, fallacious, lyrical reading of the unintelligible" (262). The act of making
intelligible, whether in the lyric or in the terminology of literary history, is for de Man at
the end of the essay always an act of"resistance and nostalgia, at the furthest remove from
the materiality of actual history." This would mean that "actual history" is what escapes
and resists intelligibility. Here is how de Man ends the essay:

If mourning is called a "chambre d'eternel deuil ou vibrent de vieux nlles," then this
pathos of terror states in fact the desired consciousness of eternity and of temporal har-
mony as voice and as song. True "mourning" is less deluded. The most it can do is to allow
for non-comprehension and enumerate non-anthropomorphic, non-elegiac, non-
celebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say, prosaic, or, better, historical modes of
language power. (262)
 310 Earlier in the essay, de Man had said of Nietzsche's general analysis of truth that "truth is
always at the very least dialectical, the negative knowledge of error" (242). In another es-
SECTION 5 say, de Man speaks of "literature as the place where this negative knowledge about the
PosT-STRUCTURALIST reliability of linguistic utterance is made available."IS Negativity, then, is not an assertion
READING of the negative, but a nonpositivity within the possibility of assertion. This final sentence
is clearly a version of stating negative knowledge. But it is also a personification. "True
'mourning'" is said to be "less deluded." Stressing the word it as the agent, he writes, "the
most it can do is to allow for non-comprehension." "True mourning" becomes the subject
of this negative knowledge. The subjectivizations performed by lyric upon the unintelli-
gible are here rejected, but by a personification of mourning. Is mourning-or rather,
"true 'mourning'"-human or inhuman? Or is it what makes it impossible to close the
gap between "man" and rhetoric? In other words, does this type of personification pre-
suppose knowledge of human essence, or does it merely confer a kind of rhetorical
agency? Is it anthropomorphic? Is there a difference between personification and anthro-
pomorphism? Is the text stating its knowledge as if it were a human, or is it just perform-
ing the inescapability of the structures it is casting off? Has de Man's conclusion really
eliminated anthropomorphism and reduced it to the trope of personification, or is an-
thropomorphism inescapable in the notion of mourning? Is this what lyric poetry-so
often structured around the relation between loss and rhetoric-must decide? Or fi-
nesse? The least we can say is that de Man has given the last word in his own text to a
personification.

2.

That which henceforth is to be "truth" is now fixed; that is to say, a uniformly valid and
binding designation of things is invented and the legislature oflanguage also gives the first
laws of truth: since here, for the first time, originates the contrast between truth and fal-
sity. The liar uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make the unreal appear as
real, e.g., he says,"! am rich," whereas the right designation of his state would be "poor."
Nietzsche, "Truth and Falsity in an Ultra moral Sense"

The case of Rowland v. California Men's Colony, Unit II Men's Advisory Council is based
on a provision in the United States legal code permitting a "person" to appear in court in
forma pauperis. The relevant legislation reads in part:

Any court of the United States may authorize the commencement, prosecution or defense
of any suit, action, or proceeding, civil or criminal, or appeal therein, without prepayment
of fees and costs or security therefor, by a person who makes affidavit that he is unable to
pay such costs or give security therefor. 16

In other words, a "person" may go to court without prepayment of fees if the "person" can
demonstrate indigence. The question to be decided by the court is whether this provision
applies to artificial persons such as corporations or councils, or whether it is meant to ap-
ply only to individuals. In the case that led to Rowland v. California Men's Colony, Unit II
Men's Advisory Council, a council of prisoners in California has tried to bring suit against
the correctional officers of the prison for the restoration of the practice of providing free
cigarettes for indigent prisoners, which was discontinued. They try to sue in forma pau-
peris on the grounds that the warden forbids the council to hold funds of its own. The
court finds that they have not sufficiently proven indigence. They are allowed to appeal in
forma pauperis in order to enable the court to decide whether the council, as an artificial
legal person, is entitled to sue in forma pauperis. The appeals court decides that they are
so entitled, but this conflicts with another court ruling in another case. The Supreme 311
Court therefore gets to decide whether the provisions for proceeding in forma pauperis
should apply only to natural persons, or also to legal persons such as associations and 5.4
councils. The case is therefore about what a person is, and how you can tell the difference BARBARA joHNSON

between a natural person and an artificial person.

Justice Souter's majority opinion begins with something that in many ways resembles
de Man's stutter of infinite enumeration. In order to find out what the legal meaning of
"person" is, Souter turns to what is called the "Dictionary Act." The Dictionary Act gives
instructions about how to read acts of Congress. It states:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates other-
wise, the word "person" includes corporations, companies, associations, firms, partner-
ships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals. (1 United States Code 1)

Thus, the word person does include artificial entities unless the context indicates other-
wise. Now the court asks, but what does "context" mean? It turns to Webster's New Inter-
national Dictionary, where it notes that it means "the part or parts of a discourse preced-
ing or following a 'text' or passage or a word, or so intimately associated with it as to
throw light on its meaning." The context, then, is the surrounding words of the act. Of
course, Webster's does offer a second meaning for the word context, "associated sur-
roundings, whether material or mental"-a reference not to the surrounding text but to
the broader reality or intentionality-but Souter dismisses this by saying, "we doubt that
the broader sense applies here." Why? Because "if Congress had meant to point further
afield, as to legislative history, for example, it would have been natural to use a more spa-
cious phrase, like 'evidence of congressional intent,' in place of 'context.'"
The word natural, which is precisely at issue here, since we are trying to find out
whether the statute applies only to natural persons, is here applied precisely to an artifi-
cial person, Congress, which is personified as having natural intentionality. "If Congress
had meant ..." The Court's decision repeatedly relies on this type of personification: it is
as though Souter has to treat Congress as an entity with intentions, even natural inten-
tions, in order to say that Congress could not have meant to include artificial entities in
its ruling. There is a personification of an artificial entity, Congress, embedded in the
very project of interpreting how far the law will allow for artificial entities to be consid-
ered persons.
Turning to the Dictionary Act for person and to Webster's dictionary for context,
Souter also notes that he has to define indicates. The difficulty of doing so pushes him
into a volley of rhetorical flourishes: "A contrary 'indication' may raise a specter short of
inanity, and with something less than syllogistic force." "Indicates,'' it seems, means more
than nonsense but less than logical necessity. In other words, the task of reading becomes
an infinite regress of glossing terms that are themselves supposed to be determinants of
meaning. De Man's linguistic stutter returns here as the repeated effort to throw language
outside itself. We could read a text, this implies, if only we were sure of the meaning of the
words context and indicate. But those are precisely the words that raise the question of
meaning in its most general form-they cannot be glossed with any finality because they
name the process of glossing itself.
Souter's text, in fact, is most anthropomorphic at those points where the infinite re-
gress oflanguage is most threatening. Congress is endowed with "natural" intentionality in
order to sweep away the abyss of reference. Souter's dismissal of the prisoners' association as
an "amorphous legal creature" is the counterpart to the need to reinforce the anthropomor-
phizability of the artificial legal creature, Congress. 17
 312 Souter's opinion proceeds to detail the ways in which he thinks the in forma pauperis
ruling should only apply to natural persons. If an affidavit alleging poverty is required for
SECTION 5 a person to proceed in forma pauperis, then can an artificial entity plead poverty? Souter
PosT-STRUCTURALIST again turns to Webster's dictionary to find that poverty is a human condition, to be
READING "wanting in material riches or goods; lacking in the comforts of life; needy." Souter also
refers to a previous ruling, which holds that poverty involves being unable to provide for
the "necessities of life." It is as though only natural persons can have "life," and that life is
defined as the capacity to lack necessities and comforts. "Artificial entities may be insol-
vent," writes Souter, "but they are not well spoken of as 'poor.'" An artificial entity cannot
lack the necessities and comforts of life. Only life can lack. The experience oflack differ-
entiates natural persons from artificial persons. To lack is to be human. In a sense, we
have returned to de Man's question about mourning. Is lack human, or just a structure?
Whatever the case, the Court holds that associations cannot be considered persons for
the purpose of the in forma pauperis procedure.
The majority was only five to four, however. In a dissenting opinion, written by Clar-
ence Thomas, it is argued that there is no reason to restrict the broad definition of "per-
son" to natural persons in this case. Thomas quotes the Court's view of "poverty" as an
exclusively "human condition," and comments:

I am not so sure. "Poverty" may well be a human condition in its "primary sense," but I
doubt that using the word in connection with an artificial entity departs in any significant
way from settled principles of English usage .... Congress itself has used the word "poor"
to describe entities other than natural persons, referring in at least two provisions of the
United States Code to the world's "Poorest countries"-a term that is used as a synonym
for the least developed of the so-called" developing" countries.

Souter has glossed the word poor as though speakers of English could only use it literally.
Thomas responds by including the figurative use of poor as included within normal us-
age. The boundaries between natural persons and artificial persons cannot be deter-
mined by usage, because those boundaries have always already been blurred. In treating
Congress as an entity with natural intentions, indeed, Souter has already shown how
"natural" the artificial can be.
At another point, Thomas takes issue with Souter's discussion of a case in which an
association or corporation is considered a person despite strong contextual indicators to
the contrary. In the case of Wilson v. Omaha Indian Tribe, 442 U.S. 653, 666 (1979), it was
decided that "white person" could include corporations because the "larger context" and
"purpose" of the law was to protect Indians against non-Indian squatters, and would be
frustrated if a "white person" could simply incorporate in order to escape the provision of
the law. Souter admits that "because a wholly legal creature has no color, and belongs to no
race, the use of the adjective 'white' to describe a 'person' is one of the strongest contextual
indicators imaginable that 'person' covers only individuals." Justice Thomas argues that
if the Court "was correct in holding that the statutory term 'white person' includes a cor-
poration (because the 'context' does not 'indicate otherwise')-the conclusion that an
association is a 'person' for in forma pauperis purposes is inescapable." Perhaps another
inescapable conclusion is that despite its apparent reference to the physical body, the
phrase "white person" is the name, not of a natural, but of a corporate person.
Justice Thomas refutes the reasons Souter has given for finding that artificial entities
are excluded from the in forma pauperis provision, noting that there may be sound policy
reasons for wanting to exclude them, but that the law as written cannot be construed to
have done so. The Court's job, he writes, is not to make policy but to interpret a statute.
"Congress has created a rule of statutory construction (an association is a 'person') and 313
an exception to that rule (an association is not a 'person' if the 'context indicates other-
wise'), but the Court has permitted the exception to devour the rule [a nice personifica- 5.4
tion]" (treating the rule as if artificial entities were excluded rather than included unless BARBARA joHNSON

the context indicates otherwise). "Whatever 'unless the context indicates otherwise'
means," writes Thomas, "it cannot mean 'unless there are sound policy reasons for con-
cluding otherwise.'"
Permitting artificial entities to proceed in forma pauperis may be unwise, and it may
be an inefficient use of the government's limited resources, but I see nothing in the text of
the in forma pauperis statute indicating that Congress has chosen to exclude such entities
from the benefits of that law.
Thus, Thomas's two conservative instincts are at war with each other: he would like
the government not to spend its money, but he would also like to stick to the letter of
the law.
The question of what counts as a juridical person has, in fact, been modified over
time in the legal code. It was in 1871 (significantly, perhaps, at the beginning of the end of
post-Civil War Reconstruction) that the so-called Dictionary Act was first passed by
Congress, in which the word Person "may extend and be applied to bodies politic and
corporate." More recently, the question of fetal personhood has been debated, not only in
the Roe v. Wade decision, where it was decided that a fetus was not a legal person, but also
in Weaks v. Mounter, 88 Nev. n8, where it was decided that a fetus was a person who could
sue for intrauterine injuries, but only after birth. Recently, the question of granting pat-
ents for forms oflife such as oil-slick-eating bacteria or genetically altered mice has raised
the question of whether a hybrid between humans and close animal relatives can be pat-
ented. And also, of course, the question of the ethics and legality of cloning humans has
been raised. The law has reached another crisis about the definition of "person." In an
article on constitutional personhood, Michael Rivard writes:

Current law allows patents for genetically engineered animals but not for human beings.
Humans are not patentable subject matter because patents are property rights, and the
Thirteenth Amendment forbids any grant of property rights in a human being. Neverthe-
less, this exclusion for humans will prove impossible to maintain: within ten to thirty
years, or perhaps sooner, advances in genetic engineering technology should allow scien-
tists to intermingle the genetic material ofhumans and animals to produce human-animal
hybrids .... It may soon be possible to patent-and to enslave-human-animal hybrids
who think and feel like humans, but who lack constitutional protection under the Thir-
teenth Amendment. 18

The Thirteenth Amendment is the amendment that abolishes slavery. The constitutional
protection against slavery operates as a constraint on the patent office, but it does so in a
paradoxical way. The fear of reinstituting something like slavery, or property in humans,
is a reaction to, but also a sign of, what must be an ongoing research goal to come as close
as possible to creating the ownable, enslavable human. 19
Constitutional personhood has in fact often been defined in proximity to slavery. The
contradiction between equal rights and chattel slavery led from the beginning to verbal
gymnastics, even in the drafting of the Constitution itself. By not using the word slavery
in the Constitution, and by revising the text of the original fugitive slave clause to refer to
the legality of slavery only on the level of the states rather than of the federal government,
the framers built a double intentionality into the very foundation of their law. Douglas
Fehrenbacher, studying the egregious understanding of original intent later employed by
 314 the Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, writes of the Constitution: "It is as
though the framers were half-consciously trying to frame two constitutions, one for their
SECTION 5 own time and the other for the ages, with slavery viewed bifocally-that is, plainly visible
PosT-STRUCTURALIST at their feet, but disappearing when they lifted their eyes." 20 A written text of law can thus
READING contain a double intention, the trace of a compromise between differing opinions. No
wonder interpreting the law's intention is so complicated. That intention can always al-
ready be multiple. The distinction Justice Thomas made between interpreting the law and
making policy cannot hold if the law's ambiguity allows for the possibility that the policy
it governs will change.

3·
The "inhuman" is not some kind of mystery, or some kind of secret; the inhuman is: lin-
guistic structures, the play of linguistic tensions, linguistic events that occur, possibilities
which are inherent in language-independently of any intent or any drive or any wish or
any desire we might have .... If one speaks of the inhuman, the fundamental non-human
character of language, one also speaks of the fundamental non-definition of the human as
such.
Paul de Man, "Benjamin's 'The Task of the Translator'"

Only smoking distinguishes humans from the rest of the animals.

Anonymous (quoted in Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime)

The case of Rowland v. California Men's Colony, Unit II Men's Advisory Council was os-
tensibly about whether a council of inmates could sue prison officials in forma pauperis to
get their cigarettes back. The details of the case seemed irrelevant to the question of whether
an artificial person has the right to sue in forma pauperis. Yet perhaps some of those details
deserve note. Is it relevant that the suit to decide this question is brought by a council of
inmates? The phenomenon of the inmate civil suit has grown to the point where the case
law may very well be transformed by it. In a 1995 study of inmate suits in California, it
was reported that "For the last fourteen years at least, the federal courts have faced a
growing caseload and workload challenge posed by inmate cases .... By 1992, these fil-
ings numbered nearly 30,ooo, and constituted 13% of the courts' total civil case filings
nationwide." 21 The majority of these suits are filed in forma pauperis. 22 The Supreme
Court's decision may well have been affected by what Clarence Thomas calls "policy
decisions."
If prisoners are affecting the nature of civil proceedings, they are also, at least figura-
tively, affecting theoretical discussions about the nature of rational choice and the evolu-
tion of cooperation. The celebrated "Prisoner's Dilemma" has been central to questions of
self-interest and social goods since it was introduced by Albert Tucker in 1950. Max Black
has even entitled his discussion of the issues raised "The 'Prisoner's Dilemma' and the
Limits of Rationality." 23 Why is it that the theoretical study of rational choice has re-
course to "man" conceived as a prisoner? Does this have anything to do with the poets'
tendency to see the sonnet form as a prison?
And is it by chance that Rowland v. California Men's Colony, Unit II Men's Advisory
Council is about cigarettes? On the one hand, it seems paradoxical that the council has to
demonstrate its indigence in order to pursue its suit against the prison directors for de-
priving the prisoners of access to cigarettes, which in prisons function as a form of cur-
rency. On the other hand, it seems fitting that the personhood of the association is the
counterpart to the humanity of the inmates, which, as common wisdom (quoted above,
second epigraph) would have it, is demonstrated by the act of smoking. The prisoners 315
would thus, in a very attenuated way, be suing for their humanity. As Richard Klein has
wittily shown, smoking serves no function other than to enact a structure of desire-of 5.4
human desire for self-transcendence, for repetition, for bodily experience corresponding BARBARA joHNSON

to something other than the "necessities of life" required for existence alone: in short,
desire for the sublime. 24 Far from being what defines natural personhood, then, need for
the "necessities of life" alone is precisely what cannot define the human.
In the article cited earlier, Rivard declares that "corporations would be presumed con-
stitutional nonpersons," especially for liberty-related rights, unless the corporation could
rebut its nonperson status by showing specific natural persons "who would be affected if
the corporation were denied these rights." 25 This is the opposite of the Dictionary Act,
which considers a corporation a person "unless the context indicates otherwise." Rivard's
article is arguing for the rights of new biological species who can pass the "self-awareness
test" (which, in a surpisingly Lacanian move derived from Michael Dennett, he defines as
wanting to be different from what one is), and he claims that corporations, by their na-
ture, do not pass this test.
But the question of the nature of corporations as persons has never been a simple one,
as Rivard admits. In an article titled "The Personification of the Business Corporation in
American Law" (University of Chicago Law Review 54 [fall1987]: 1441), Gregory A. Marks
outlines in detail the history of corporate personhood. The relation between corporations
and the natural persons who compose them has grown more complicated over time, but
in most discussions of the matter, it is the "natural" person that functions as the known
quantity, and the "artificial" who is either just an "aggregate" of natural persons, or a fic-
tion created by the state, or a mere metaphor, or actually resembles (is like, to return to
the Baudelairean word) a natural person in that it has a "will" of its own. Such a corporate
will is a form of agency separate from that of the natural corporators, who exist behind
the "veil" of the corporation. Much of Marks's article concerns the exact rhetorical va-
lence of this personification:

American law has always recognized that people's activities could be formally organized
and that the resulting organizations could be dealt with as units. Personification, however,
is important because it became far more than a quaint device making it possible for the law
to deal with organized business entities. In American legal and economic history, personi-
fication has been vital because it (r) implies a single and unitary source of control over the
collective property of the corporation's members, (2) defines, encourages, and legitimates
the corporation as an autonomous, creative, self-directed economic being, and (3) cap-
tures rights, ultimately even constitutional rights, for corporations thereby giving corpo-
rate property unprecedented protection from the state. (1443)

Marks takes seriously the role oflanguage in the evolving history of the corporation. Phi-
losophers and legislators have gone to great lengths to minimize the rhetorical damage, to
eliminate personification as far as possible, but he asserts that it is not just a figure of
speech to speak of a corporation's "mind," or even its "life." "Practical experience, not just
anthropomorphism, fixed the corporate mind in the management hierarchy" (1475). The
corporation resembled a human being in its capacity to "take resolves in the midst of
conflicting motives," to "will change." Yet the analogy is not perfect. The corporation, for
example, unlike its corporators, is potentially immortal. The effect of personification ap-
pears to derive its rhetorical force from the ways in which the corporation resembles a
natural person, yet the corporation's immortality in no way diminishes its personifica-
tion. When Marks says that it is "not just anthropomorphism" that underpins the agency
 316 of the corporation, he still implies that we can know what anthropomorphism is. But his
final sentence stands this presupposition on its head. Far from claiming that a corpora-
SECTION 5 tion's characteristics are derived from a knowable human essence, Marks suggests that
PosT-STRUCTURALIST what have been claimed to be the essential characteristics of man (especially "economic
READING man") have in fact been borrowed from the nature of the corporation:

Personification with its roots in historic theological disputes and modern business neces-
sity, had proved to be a potent symbol to legitimate the autonomous business corporation
and its management. Private property rights had been transferred to associations, associa-
tions had themselves become politically legitimate, and the combination had helped foster
modern political economy. The corporation, once the derivative tool of the state, had be-
come its rival, and the successes of the autonomous corporate management turned the
basis for belief in an individualist conception of property on its head. The protests of
modern legists notwithstanding, the business corporation had become the quintessential
economic man. (1482-83)

Theories of rationality, naturalness, and the "good," presumed to be grounded in the na-
ture of"man," may in reality be taking their notions of human essence not from "natural
man" but from business corporations.
Ambivalence about personification, especially the personification of abstractions, has
in fact permeated not only legal but also literary history. Nervousness about the agency of
the personified corporation echoes the nervousness Enlightenment writers felt about the
personifications dreamed up by the poets. As Steven Knapp puts it in his hook Personifi-
cation and the Sublime:

Allegorical personification-the endowing of metaphors with the agency ofliteral persons-

was only the most obvious and extravagant instance of what Enlightenment writers per-
ceived, with a mixture of admiration and uneasiness, as the unique ability of poetic genius
to give the force of literal reality to figurative "inventions." More important than the in-
congruous presence of such agents was their contagious effect on the ostensibly literal
agents with which they interacted. 26

The uncanniness of the personification, then, was derived from its way of putting in
question what the "natural" or the "literal" might be.
We have finally come back to the question of whether there is a difference between
anthropomorphism and personification, which arose at the end of the discussion of the
essay by Paul de Man. It can now be seen that everything hangs on this question. Not only
does anthropomorphism depend on the given ness of the essence of the human and per-
sonification does not, but the mingling of personifications on the same footing as "real"
agents threatens to make the lack of certainty about what humanness is come to con-
sciousness. Perhaps the loss of unconsciousness about the lack of humanness is what de
Man was calling "true 'mourning.'" Perhaps the "fallacious lyrical reading of the unintel-
ligible" was exactly what legislators count on lyric poetry to provide: the assumption that
the human has been or can be defined so that it can then be presupposed without the
question of its definition's being raised as a question-legal or otherwise. Thus the poets
would truly be, as Shelley claimed, the "unacknowledged legislators of the world," not
because they covertly determine policy, but because it is somehow necessary and useful
that there be a powerful, presupposable, unacknowledgment. But the very rhetorical
sleight of hand that would instate such an unacknowledgment is indistinguishable from
the rhetorical structure that would empty it. Lyric and law are two of the most powerful
discourses that exist along the fault line of this question.
 317
NOTES

1. I am thinking of Richard Posner's Law and 9- Friedrich Nietzsche, "Truth and Falsity in an 5.4
Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Ultramoral Sense," in Critical Theory since Plato, BARBARA jOHNSON
1988), Richard Weisberg's The Failure of the Word ed. Hazard Adams (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), and Jovanovich, 1992), 634-39. If the Keats poem stands
Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions (Chicago: as the claim that aesthetic and epistemological
University of Chicago Press, 2000). But for a legal structures are compatible, Nietzsche's text, for de
approach that does address poetry, see the Man, stands as a parody of that claim.
interesting discussion of Wallace Stevens by 10. The translations are mine, for the purpose of
Thomas Grey and Margaret Jane Radin in the Yale bringing out those aspects of the poems that are
Journal of Law & The Humanities 2:2 (summer relevant to my discussion.
1990), as well as the more extended treatment of 11. "Allegory and Irony in Baudelaire," in
Wallace Stevens in Thomas Grey, The Wallace Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism
Stevens Case: Law and the Practice of Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). This essay is part of the Gauss Seminar given by de
2. William Wordsworth's sonnet, "Nuns Fret Man in 1967.
Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room," contains 12. Jacques Lacan, "Aggressivity in Psychoanaly-
the lines, "In truth the prison, into which we sis," in £crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan
doom I Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 17: "What l have
me, I In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be called paranoic knowledge is shown, therefore, to
bound I Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground" correspond in its more or less archaic forms to
(Selected Poetry and Prose of Wordsworth [New certain critical moments that mark the history of
York: Signet, 1970], 169). man's mental genesis, each representing a stage in
3- John Keats's sonnet on the sonnet begins, "If objectifying identification."
by dull rhymes our English must be chained, I And, 13. Ibid., 9-
like Andromeda, the sonnet sweet I Fettered ..." 14- Jacques Derrida, "Freud's Legacy," in The
(The Selected Poetry of Keats [New York: Signet, Postcard, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
1966], 264)- Chicago Press, 1987).
4- One of several poems by Baudelaire titled 15. De Man, "The Resistance to Theory," 10.
Spleen describes a mood produced by or analo- 16. United States Code (1994 edition), vol. 15, 438.
gized to a rainy day: "Quand Ia pluie etalant ses 17- In a response to the present paper given at the
immenses trainees I D'une vaste prison imite les Yale Law School, Shoshana Felman made the
barreaux ..." (Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, brilliant suggestion that Souter would have wanted
vol. 1 [Paris: Pleiade, 1975], 75). to rewrite Baudelaire's "Correspondances" as: "Le
5- For a suggestive discussion of what it means Congres est un temple ou de vivants pilliers
for a text to obey the law of genre, see Jacques laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles ..."The
Derrida, "The Law of Genre," in Acts of Literature, neoclassical, Parnassian architecture of official
ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992). Washington, D.C., and the common metaphorical
6. Paul de Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope expression "pillars of the community," add
in the Lyric," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New piquancy to this suggestion.
York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Page 18. Michael D. Rivard, "Toward a General
numbers in parentheses refer to this essay. Theory of Constitutional Personhood: A Theory of
7· United States Law Week 61:25 (January 12, Constitutional Personhood for Transgenic
1993). Page numbers in parentheses refer to this Humanoid Species," UCLA Law Review 39: 5 (June
text. 1992): 1428-29.
8. This allusion to Keats's "Ode on a Grecian 19. See A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and
Urn" stands in for the premise of the compatibility Barbara Kopytoff, "Property First, Humanity
of literary aesthetics with linguistic structures, and Second: The Recognition of the Slave's Human
oflinguistic structures with perceptual or intuitive Nature in Virginia Civil Law," Ohio State Law
knowledge, that de Man is often at pains to contest. Journal50:3 (June 1989): "The humanity of the
See his remarks on the pedagogical model of the slave, requiring that he be treated with the care
trivium in the titular essay of The Resistance to due other humans and not like other forms of
Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota property, became part of the owner's property
Press, 1986). rights" (520).
 318 20. Douglas E. Fehrenbacher, Slavery, Law, and 23. Max Black, Perplexities (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Pers- University Press, 1990). See also Robert Axelrod,
SECTION 5 pective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 15. The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic
21. Kim Mueller, "Inmates' Civil Rights Cases Books, 1984).
PosT-STRUCTURALIST
and the Federal Courts: Insights Derived from a 24. Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime
READING
Field Research Project in the Eastern District of (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).
California," Creighton Law Review 1228 (June Klein notes, incidentally, that Baudelaire is one of
· 1995): 1258-59. In the Eastern District of California, the first French writers to use the word cigarette in
inmates' civil rights actions constituted nearly 30 print (in his "Salons de 1848," 8).
percent of the case filings. (California Men's 25. Rivard, "Toward a General Theory of
Colony is not in the Eastern District; it is in San Constitutional Personhood," 1501-2.
Luis Obispo.) 26. Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime
22. Ibid., 1276 and 1281. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 2.
SECTION 6

FranldUrt School
and After

The term "Frankfurt School" arose informally to describe Marxist thinkers associated
with the School of Social Research in Frankfurt (founded in 1923). In this section, we are
concerned with only two figures that could be described as Frankfurt School thinkers, if
only because that is where their conversation with one another began. Walter Benjamin
and Theodor Adorno wrote essays about the lyric that have proven enormously influen-
tial for many critics trying to think their way out of or around the Anglo-American New
Critical tradition. However, these essays remain difficult to assimilate to modern critical
ideas of what a lyric is or was. This is because in Germany the lyric remained closely tied
to the idea of the folk song (in the wake of Herder and Heine) and to Hegel's idealization
of subjective lyric as the highest form of aesthetic representation. The difference between
the lyric as popular expression and the lyric as the most elevated type of individual ex-
pression formed the dialectic from which Benjamin's and Adorno's ideas about the lyric
emerged.
Neither I. A. Richards's Practical Criticism nor American New Criticism influenced
Benjamin or Adorno. That is why their ideas have proven so attractive as alternatives to
the Anglophone tradition but also why they have been difficult to integrate into the lyric
models assumed by twentieth-century Anglo-American lyric theory. While many lyric
theorists have been drawn to Frankfurt School approaches (especially in the last thirty
years, when Frankfurt School theory has seemed to offer an alternative to a waning post-
structuralism), there has also been much confusion between the definitions of the lyric
held by these different intellectual traditions. Too often, Adorno's "Lyric and Society" in
particular has been taken up as a touchstone for a normative view of the lyric neither
Benjamin nor Adorno would have recognized. For them, what was at stake in writing
about the lyric was the relation between aesthetic expression and social decadence in high
capitalism. Their debate over lyric was really a debate over social theory-or, to put this
differently, lyric theory was for these thinkers always already and primarily social theory.
As Robert Kaufman has written, "the Frankfurters demonstrated their conviction that
art could act decisively on structural, socioeconomic dynamics and might indeed be the
means through which certain aspects of sociohistorical development could become ap-
prehensible in the first place.'' 1 As we have seen, one could certainly make the argument
 320 that for the Practical and New Critics, as well as the Structuralists and Post-Structuralists,
theories of the lyric were also always theories of sociality, but in Frankfurt School thought
SECTION 6 the social theory implicit in all modern theories of the lyric became the explicit focus.
FRANKFURT ScHooL Although the selections from Benjamin and Adorno included here were written over
AND AFTER twenty years apart, Adorno's essay (originally a radio address in Berlin in 1957) can be
read as a belated response to Benjamin's series of essays on Baudelaire (essays that pro-
foundly influenced both de Man's and Johnson's work on Baudelaire represented in sec-
tion s). Benjamin's work on Baudelaire was part of an unfinished, lifelong study he called
the Passagenwerk or Arcades Project, a collection of writings about life in Paris in the
nineteenth century. In their extensive correspondence before Benjamin's death in 1940,
Adorno told Benjamin "in as simple and Hegelian manner as possible" that his "dialectic
lacks one thing: mediation. Throughout your text there is a tendency to relate the prag-
matic contents of Baudelaire's work directly to adjacent features in the social history of
his time, preferably economic features." 2 Adorno zeroed in on Benjamin's argument that
"Baudelaire's wine poems have been motivated by the wine duty and the town gates," a
determination that "imputes to phenomena precisely that kind of spontaneity, palpability
and density which they have lost in capitalism. In this sort of immediate ... materialism,
there is a profoundly romantic element" (AP 129). Adorno's criticism was somewhat un-
fair, since Benjamin argued that he reserved the theoretical part of the project for another
section, but it also shifted the "profoundly romantic element" of Benjamin's thought to a
view of capitalism rather than to a view of the lyric. Benjamin's work on Baudelaire's lyrics
is actually about the failure of romanticism, about the alienated situation of the romantic
lyric in capitalism, but when he wrote that "Baudelaire envisaged readers to whom the
reading oflyric poetry would present difficulties," it was the shift in the structure of these
readers' experience in an increasingly alienated and fractured sociality that was his focus.
Although he goes on to argue that Baudelaire's response to this new social predicament
was to make his poems reflect his readers' alienation, his argument is not that the lyric
itself changed in response to these conditions but that Baudelaire wrote lyrics that could
address such conditions. For both Benjamin and Adorno, the lyric is pretty much what
Hegel thought it was a century earlier: the subjective expression of the individual that
represents at its best the ideal aesthetic form of the zeitgeist, the beacon of social progress.
Underneath that Hegelian idealism lurked Herder's championing of poetry's role as the
expression of folk culture. Whether the lyric can continue to fulfill either its ideal or its
popular function in the era of high capitalism is the problem both Benjamin and Adorno
take as their theme.
For Benjamin, that problem was actually Baudelaire's theme in the middle of the nine-
teenth century. According to Benjamin, "the conditions for the reception of lyric poetry
had already become extremely unfavorable" by the middle of the nineteenth century. The
pose of an early-nineteenth-century poet like Lamartine as the "minstrel" of the people
was no longer possible by Baudelaire's time; instead, Benjamin writes, by the middle of
the century the poet had become "representative of a genre." This narrowing of the lyric
from vehicle of communal expression to specialized genre meant that by the time of
Baudelaire the lyric was met with "a greater coolness of the public" than it had been in
previous eras. Benjamin locates Baudelaire's genius in recognizing the failure of lyric
poetry to "accord with the experience of its readers" and deciding to write poems that did
address that experience-the anti-lyrical lyrics of Les Fleurs du mal. Ironically, Baude-
laire's responses to the failure of the lyric resulted in a best-selling book oflyrics.
The book succeeded so wildly, Benjamin argues, because Baudelaire discovered how
and why "lyric poetry could be grounded in experience for which exposure to shock has
become the norm." In order to describe that experience, Benjamin turned to Bergson, 321
Proust, and Freud as theorists of modern subjectivity, as thinkers about the new normal.
But Benjamin insisted that what had become the norm in modern life-essentially, the SECTION 6
reaction formations of variously traumatized individuals-did not become the norm for FRANKFURT ScHooL

the lyric. The "hidden figure" of the crowd that Benjamin finds in Baudelaire's poetry as AND AFTER

a whole is one way of understanding how those traumatized individuals become a social
condition, but Benjamin's essay ends by documenting the many ways in which this social
condition was at odds with the conditions of the lyric itself. How does the lyric change as
a genre in response to the alienation of modern experience? According to Benjamin, this
is a pressing question for Baudelaire, since "his work cannot be categorized merely as
historical, like anyone else's, but it intends to be so and understood itself as such." While
"it cannot be denied" that some of Baudelaire's motifs "render the possibility of lyric po-
etry problematic," that does not mean that the genre disintegrates in Baudelaire's hands.
Instead, it becomes ironic; since the idea of "the lyric poet with his halo is antiquated,"
Baudelaire presents that idea ironically, but that irony does not necessarily change the
idea of lyric itself-on the contrary, it may make that idea seem more romantic, more
nostalgic, by contrast. The law of Baudelaire's poetry may be the law of"immediate shock
experience," but that law reflects the modern disintegration of experience rather than the
modern disintegration of the lyric, which Baudelaire's irony actually ends by throwing
into stark relief as a vanishing ideal.
Adorno's "Lyric Poetry and Society," composed seventeen years after Benjamin's
death, is in part a response to the lyric's precarious predicament in Benjamin's work on
Baudelaire. Adorno initially agrees with Benjamin in his definition of what a lyric is or
should be, or at least he seems to: "the universality of the lyric's substance ... is social in
nature." Yet as we may have expected from his complaint that Benjamin's reading of Baude-
laire depended on an "immediate materialism" lacking dialectical mediation, Adorno's
version of what makes the lyric representative of a universal social condition differs
markedly from his friend's model. If, for Benjamin, Baudelaire's work was representative
in marking the difference between the lyric ideal and the actual, decadent experience of
modern individuals, for Adorno the modern lyric is most fully realized not in that ironic
disparity but in the absolute congruity between the alienated, difficult modern poem
and alienated, difficult modern sociality. But "congruity" is not quite the right word for
the relationship between lyric and society in Adorno's essay, "since it is precisely what is
not social in the lyric poem that is now to become its social aspect." Adorno invokes
Gustave Don~'s caricatured deputy of the ancien regime (who exclaims, "And to whom,
gentlemen, do we owe the revolution of 1789 if not to Louis XVI!") in order to character-
ize the negative dialectic between lyric poetry and society: "in my view," Adorno ex-
plains, "you could say, society plays the role of the executed king and the lyric the role of
his opponents." 3 This is to say, Adorno continues, that Benjamin may have been quite
right about the disintegration and alienation of modern social life but that he was wrong
about the lyric's response to modernity's fractured state. For Adorno, the lyric is not
something set above or apart from modernity, an ironic distillation of the mismatch
between the ideal and the real, but has become instead modernity's vehicle, an objective
force that impels "a constricted and constricting social condition to transcend itself and
become worthy of human beings." It is not divorced from but is instead restored to its
Hegelian destiny by means of the very conditions that would seem to make such a uto-
pian horizon harder to see.
The means by which such a surprising conversion becomes possible is the medium
of language. In this sense Adorno's approach has something in common with the
 322 structuralists, since for Adorno, as for Jakobson, the way language structures the lyric
becomes a paradigmatic instance of the way language structures the social world. What
SECTION 6 language mediates in both views is the experience of the individual, so much so that "in
FRANKFURT ScHoOL the lyric poem the subject, through its identification with language, negates both its op-
AND AFTER position to society as something merely monadological and its mere functioning within
a wholly socialized society [vergesellschaftete Gesellschaft]." Since poems are made of
language and societies are made of language, the individual's relation to poems and to
the social world is really the same relation. The trick to this logic when it comes to a
definition of the lyric is that the modern lyric's linguistic mediation of experience is
dialectical: the ideal of a common language for common experience only becomes
available in and through the alienated language of isolated individual experience.
Thus, for Adorno, the more "atomistic" and individualized the society, the more iso-
lated and apparently divorced from sociality lyric language becomes. Alienation is what
the modern individual and the modern lyric have in common, since the expression of the
loss of common experience becomes the expression of common experience: "The work's
distance from mere existence becomes the measure of what is false and bad in the latter.
In its protest the poem expresses the dream of a world in which things would be differ-
ent." That dream, Hegel's lyric ideal, can be glimpsed where one would least expect to
find it: in the estranged language of the most difficult, most "purified" modern poetry, in
poetry that seems aristocratic rather than popular, radically isolated rather than com-
mon. Adorno finds his premier example of such poetry not in Baudelaire but in the work
of Stefan George, a poet so difficult that he seems to hear "his own language as if it were a
foreign tongue." In departing from Benjamin's example of the first modern and last best-
selling lyric poet in France, choosing instead the obscure "cult" German post-Symbolist
George, Adorno was also departing from Benjamin's way of reading the lyric. For Adorno,
high modernist style mediates the alienation that Baudelaire's poems expressed only the-
matically. It is not George's subjects but instead the estrangement of George's language
that Adorno wants to frame as the ideal medium of what has become the bourgeois indi-
vidual's common experience, since "this very lyric speech becomes the voice of human
beings between whom the barriers have fallen." In the lyric expression of solitude and
isolation our common experience of the consequences of capitalism may be heard.
Understood in this way, Adorno's version of the modern lyric is even more romanti-
cized than the view he accused Benjamin of holding dear-and both heady combinations
of a dystopian view of social history and a utopian view of lyric possibility have proven
dear in turn to a long line of thinkers about modern poetics. Fredric Jameson, perhaps
the most influential American post-Frankfurt School thinker (though a critic more often
devoted to thinking about prose than poetry) inherits what he calls "this privileged the-
ory of poetic value" and in many ways sustains it. In his essay on Baudelaire included
here, Jameson returns to Benjamin-a return all the more remarkable for its lack of any
mention of Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire or of Adorno's reading of Benjamin. Instead
of invoking Benjamin by name or explicitly referring to the conversation between Benja-
min and Adorno, Jameson follows in the double wake of Benjamin's reading of Baude-
laire as the poet of high capitalism and of Adorno's reading of the ideal poetry of high
modernism by producing his own version of Baudelaire as inaugural poet of high mod-
ernism beside a new "Baudelaire of post-modernism, of our own immediate age, of con-
sumer society, the Baudelaire of the society of the spectacle or the image." Jameson thus
brings Frankfurt School lyric theory into contact with a social world neither Benjamin
nor Adorno saw coming.
 Jameson's first Baudelaire is a lyric poet via both Benjamin's materialist and Adorno's 323
linguistic models of the lyric: Jameson traces the disappearance or eclipse of "what we
now call the 'referent'" in Baudelaire's poetry through "the inner contradiction in the raw SEcnoN 6
material of Baudelaire's text between precapitalist society and the new industrial me- FRANKFURT ScHooL

tropolis of nascent capital." Jameson combines Benjamin's materialism with Adorno's AND AFTER

aestheticism by turning to another theorist of poetics of the 1930s. He rewrites Hei-

degger's phenomenological staging of a "rift" between World and Earth (included and
discussed in section 7) "in terms of the dimensions of History and the social project on
the one hand, and and of Nature or matter on the other." The effect of this rewriting is not
only to further obscure Jameson's debts to Frankfurt School thinkers but to shift Hei-
degger's philosophical discourse of ontology toward a Marxist discourse of dialectical
materialism. By effecting that shift, Jameson grounds the disappearance of the referent in
Baudelaire's poems in a very Benjaminian sense of an historical shift in experience. Ac-
cording to Jameson, "on or around 1857'' the language for physical sensation changed so
radically that one could say that "before Baudelaire and Flaubert there are no physical
sensations in literature." While he admits that this is "an outrageous (or at least, as they
say, unverifiable) generalization," he suggests it in just the way that Benjamin suggests
that in the middle of the nineteenth century there was an historical transformation of
"experience for which exposure to shock has become the norm." Both Jameson and Ben-
jamin read Baudelaire's poetry as the registration of this shift in experience. In Jameson,
the Heideggerian rift between history and nature that is the product of the post-capitalist
transformation of experience eventuates in what he calls "the whole drama of modern-
ism ... in the way in which its own peculiar life and logic depend on the reduction of
reference to an absolute minimum and the elaboration, in the former place of reference,
of complex symbolic and often mythical frameworks and scaffolding." Thus Jameson's
first Baudelaire, the Baudelaire who is the inaugural poet of high modernism, emerges
from Benjamin's Baudelaire, the Baudelaire who is the laureate of decadent or trauma-
tized modern sensation. And like Benjamin, Jameson makes these large claims for Baude-
laire's importance in the history of lived experience without turning to how or why this
shift might also change the genre mediating that experience.
Indeed, the closest that Jameson comes to considering Baudelaire's poems as lyrics is
when he turns to what he calls "the post-modern elements in Baudelaire." The anachro-
nism is part of Jameson's point. What he wants to emphasize in his second Baudelaire is
this iconic modern lyric poet's relevance to aesthetic categories not yet available earlier
in the twentieth century, his relevance to "our own immediate age, [to] consumer society,
the Baudelaire of the society of the spectacle or the image." While the high modernist
Baudelaire may have been, in Heidegger's phrase, the poet for whom "Language is the
house of being," for Jameson's post-modernist Baudelaire, "Language is only the apart-
ment of being." This shrinking of the consolation language can give in the post-capitalist
urban landscape is also a diminution of Adorno's ingenious solution to the lyric's regis-
tration of the alienation of modern experience. If, for Adorno, lyric language can become
the common expression of individuals "between whom the barriers have fallen" precisely
because the difficult modern lyric represents social alienation in its own alienated form,
for Jameson the post modern studio apartment of lyric language is too small for such ac-
commodations. The best it can do is to provide a screen for "spectacles which would seem
symbolically to crush human life and to dramatize everything which reduces the indi-
vidual human being and the individual subject to powerlessness and nothingness." Just as
Jameson takes a step beyond Benjamin in proposing that Baudelaire's poetry measures
 324 such a radical shift in historical experience that physical sensation can be represented
there for the first time, he takes a step beyond Adorno in proposing that poetry might
SECTION 6 represent the alienation of contemporary experience by no longer representing anything at
FRANKFURT ScHooL all, by becoming instead part of"the whole world of the production and reproduction of the
AND AFTER image and of the simulacrum, and of which the smeared light and multiretlective glass of
the most elegant post-contemporary films or buildings is an adequate analagon." Searching
for a language for representation after the death of representation, Jameson also searches for
a language for Frankfurt School theory after the death of its founders, and for a sense of the
lyric that could compete with movies, computer screens, and videos as a medium for expe-
rience after the death of experience.
Yet even in Jameson's extreme version, Frankfurt School theory cannot, by definition,
give up on an admittedly utopian horizon in which the lyric could restore experience to
the shocked or alienated or bedazzled or evacuated subject. In this line of thinking, there
is always the hope that we could recover from the ravages of late capitalism-and often it
is lyric poetry that may have the capacity to save us, if only by so articulately tallying our
losses. The romantic-and especially Hegelian-elevation oflyric to the ideal genre of in-
dividual expression must remain residual in Frankfurt School theory, if only, as in Jame-
son, as the background against which that theory reacts. In his essay, Drew Milne re-
sponds directly to the dependence of Frankfurt School theory on the Hegelian expressive
lyric ideal. Though Milne begins by citing Adorno's claim that "the lyric work is always
the subjective expression of a social antagonism," he quickly turns to ask, "What oflyric's
constitutive inhumanity, its relation to non-human nature?" This is a question that chal-
lenges Jameson's post-Benjaminian drive to seek in lyric the representation of modern
and even contemporary social experience and that threatens to reverse Adorno's famous
definition oflyric at the same time. What iflyric is not individual expression-at least not
individual human expression? Can expression be inhuman? While Adorno suggests that
the lyric poet submits to the "objectivity of language," Milne's question suggests that
lyric language may not just be reified or objectified but may be outside the poet's
grasp. Against the grain of Adorno's apprehension of the lyric as thoroughly modern,
Milne suggests that "the limits of lyric humanism remain closer" to ancient concep-
tions of lyric as "the speculative experience of nature." Milne's qualification of Adorno
brackets the modern association between lyric and subjective expression, yet Milne
wants to retain a Frankfurt School emphasis on lyric as representation of historical
experience. How can an ancient conception of "speculative experience" apply to mod-
ern experience and to the modern lyric? And how can expression not have a human
subject?
Milne's answer is very much in the spirit of Adorno, as he changes the key of repre-
sentation from the metaphor of human speech to "the lyric poetry of the page." Ironically,
then, modern poetry can approach an archaic premodern sense of experience (the utopian
horizon of classic Frankfurt School thought) by being printed rather than sung, since "as
writing, lyric is freed from the clumsiness of speech, and in this freedom it is possible to
imagine the voices of nature beyond the human." As Milne's alternative to lyric human-
ism retains an emphasis on lyric as the vehicle of experience, so his alternative to the figu-
ration of lyric as speech retains an emphasis on voice, though "the voices of nature" are
not human voices in which we drown. Instead, "the voices of nature" surface in modern
poetry as symptoms of "the difficulty of overcoming the thematics of romanticism,"
symptoms often figured in and after romanticism as birdsong, though a birdsong com-
mitted to the page on which the poem is printed. As Milne points out, even Hegel's ro-
manticism was embarrassed by the artifice of song as a metaphor for lyric. In Keats,
Hegel, Shelley, and Kant, Milne traces "an unreconciled affinity between birds and 325
humans .... This affinity allows the lyric poet to explore both the limits of humanism in
our conceptions of song and the limits to disenchantment in the human domination of SECTION 6
nature." This reading of the thematics of birdsong in the transition from romantic to FRANKFURT ScHooL

modern poetics attempts to solve the problem that Benjamin, Adorno, and Jameson AND AFTER

confronted in different ways: the problem of how to reconcile an ideal ambition for
lyric expression with the real constraints on such expression set by contemporary so-
cial conditions. The commodification of nature, of the not-human, might be addressed
in this formulation by an expression "of alienation from anthropomorphic identifica-
tion with nature." Such expressions always threaten to disappear or to become inaudi-
ble behind human voices, but Milne traces a line of contemporary poets who draw on
the romantic obsession with birdsong at the edges of humanism to figure a natural ex-
pression that would not be our own, that would be legible only in an intricate intertex-
tual slide.
Milne's lyrical meditation on "the limits of lyric humanism" remains very much un-
der the influence of Adorno's project, just as Jameson's meditation on the postmodern
Baudelaire remains very much under the influence of Benjamin's project. Milne's varia-
tion on Adorno's theme is to retain a sense of the lyric as the expression of social alien-
ation but to change the subject of that expression. The trick is to imagine birdsong as "the
language of winged words" rather than as the language of the poet. Such an exchange
must always be a bit of a sleight of hand, since of course birds don't write lyric poems.
Then again, we don't actually hear birds when we read poems; the phenomenology of
poems as song is wholly imagined, an unheard music. Stathis Gourgouris cuts through
this metaphorical double bind by thinking through Adorno's theory of lyric subjectivity
not against the backdrop of printed poetic birdsong but in the context of musical re-
sponse. Specifically, Gourgouris follows Adorno in thinking through "the societal pa-
rameters of lyric poetry" but rather than finding those parameters in the limits of lyric
humanism, as Milne does, he considers "both the significance of lyric poetry in modern
society and the song form in strictly musical terms." To think in "strictly musical terms"
for Gourgouris is to follow Adorno in thinking of music and lyric in strictly social terms.
Gourgouris gives a very close reading of"On Lyric Poetry and Society" in order to under-
stand how Adorno manages to confirm "the transcendental substance oflyrical subjectiv-
ity by abolishing its metaphysical framework, a gesture that, on first sight at least, appears
impossible by mere logic." While Jameson basically upholds the Hegelian metaphysical
scaffolding of Frankfurt School lyric theory (even while combining it with a dash of Hei-
degger) and Milne hazards a preceding, premodern speculative logic of lyric inhumanism,
Gourgouris understands Adorno to have already revised Hegel's idealist humanism in the
name of the social lyric "as a form of address."
According to Gourgouris, "Adorno nullifies from the start any indication that the
social element in the lyric might be deduced from the social content of the poem or the
social interests of the poet." As we have seen, Adorno is usually read as endorsing aes-
thetic autonomy as the means of social resistance-that is, the alienated and self-sufficient
modern poem becomes an expressive analogue for the alienated and self-enclosed mod-
ern individual. But Gourgouris revises this reading to suggest that "the autonomy of the
lyric may be aesthetic in the sense that it pertains to the making of an art-form but as a
gesture of poiesis, it bears indeed the gestures of social autonomy-by which I mean, the
position in society, within a social imaginary, that enables us to reconceptualize, rear-
range, reimagine the very framework of the social reality we inherit." For Gourgouris, the
utopian horizon of Adorno's theory of the lyric is not the perfected linguistic form of the
 326 poem itself but, as Adorno, writes, "the dream of a world in which things would be
different."
SECTION 6 Can lyric poetry really change the world? Gourgouris admits that even Adorno backs
FRANKFURT ScHooL away from this question, resorting to the "rather romantic claim that [a] double
AND AFTER alienation-the alienation of alienation, we would say dialectically-restores the lyric 'I'
from its formative dehumanization." Against that view, Gourgouris prefers to think that
"the emancipatory force of the lyric" is a matter of"a genuine autonomous social imagi-
nation." His ambitions for the lyric are thus even more utopian than Adorno's-or they
would be, if his example of"a genuine autonomous social imagination" were not so com-
pelling as a qualified historical accomplishment. In the instance of the composer Hanns
Eisler's Hollywooder Liederbuch, a song cycle Eisler produced with Bertolt Brecht while
both were in exile in Los Angeles in the early 1940s, Gourgouris finds a counter-example
to Adorno's difficult early-twentieth-century high modern poetry of the page. The alien-
ation of Adorno's lyric subject became an historical reality for Eisler and Brecht after
their escapes from Nazi Germany. As Brecht wrote while in Los Angeles, "to work lyri-
cally here, even if relating to the present ... is as if working in gold filigree. There's some-
thing whimsical, eccentric, blinkered about it." Living the alienation of exile and working
through it, inhabiting the reality of a reified alienation, Eisler and Brecht fashioned a lyri-
cism "at the bare limit, stripping the requisite sentimentalism one associates convention-
ally with lyric expression." They realized in history what Adorno and Brecht's dear friend
Benjamin posited in theory, and according to Gourgouris, they went further: not only did
they make lyrics in exile that expressed both their own and the modern lyric's distance
from earlier sentimental community investments, but they used their exile in Hollywood
to dream of "an as yet imaginary community nurtured from within the experience of
exile to be constituted as its own overcoming." They were able to do this by working in
both words and music, by lifting the lyric off the page and thus out of its potentially stul-
tifying associations, translating it into the potential for what Gourgouris calls "transgres-
sive listening." In the Hollywooder Liederbuch, of all places, Gourgouris finds a dialectical
alternative to Benjamin's sense of the lyric as ironic modern anachronism; he finds a po-
tential realization of Adorno's fantasy of the lyric as the speech of men between whom the
barriers have fallen. According to this way of thinking, as history would have it, in the early
1940s in Hollywood, the speech of all men became the music of a few men who had been
driven out of the country that gave birth to the Frankfurt School. That music was never
produced during the composer's lifetime, remaining literally unheard music that could
only dream of a world-an undiscovered country-where music could make dreams come
true. Like all post-Frankfurt School lyric theory, Gourgouris's essay grounds itself in the
belief that the lyric helps to bring about a world in which things could be different by imag-
ining that such a world may come into being under the very circumstances that make it
impossible.

NOTES

1. Robert Kaufman, "Frankfurt School," in The and Benjamin over the uses and abuses of the
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th lyric, see Giorgio Agamben, "The Prince and the
ed., ed. Roland Greene eta!. (Princeton, N): Frog: The Question of Method in Adorno and
Princeton University Press, 2012), 518. Benjamin," in Infancy and History: The Destruc-
2. Aesthetics and Politics: Ernst Bloch, Georg tion of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London:
Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Verso, 1993).
Adorno, trans. and ed. Ronald Taylor (London: 3. For an extensive reading of Adorno's version of
NLB, 1977), 128. Henceforth AP. For an extended the social lyric, see Kaufman (2004); on Frankfurt
analysis of the correspondence between Adorno School poetics, see also Kaufman (2001 and 2006).
 327
FURTHER READING

Adorno, Theodor. Notes to Literature. Volumes jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. Princeton, SECTION 6
1-2. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson. N): Princeton University Press, 1971. FRANKFURT SCHOOL
Edited by Ralph Tiedimann. New York: Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. AND AFTER
Columbia University Press, 1991. London: Polity Press, 1998.
Adorno, Theodor, and Walter Benjamin. The jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History
Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940. Translated of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social
by Nicholas Walter. Edited by Henri Lonitz. Research, 1923-1950. Berkeley: University of
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, California Press, 1973.
2001. Kaufman, Robert. "Adorno's Social Lyric and
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Volumes 1-4. Literary Criticism Today." In The Cambridge
Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael jennings. Companion to Adorno, edited by Tom Huhn.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
2004-2006. --."Lyric's Expression: Musicality, Conceptu-
Brenk man, john. Culture and Domination. Ithaca, ality, Critical Agency." Cultural Critique 6o
NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. (Winter 2006): 197-216.
Buck- Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: - - . "Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats,
Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Avant-Garde." Critical Inquiry 27:2 (Winter
- - . Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. 2001): 354-84.
Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Melin, Charlotte. Poetic Maneuvers: Hans Magnus
Institute. New York: Free Press, 1977. Enzensberger and the Lyric Genre. Avant-garde
Damon, Maria, and Ira Livingston, eds. Poetry and & Modernism Studies. Evanston, IL: Northwest-
Cultural Studies: A Reader. Urbana: University ern University Press, 2003.
of Illinois Press, 2009. Tiffany, Daniel. Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife,
Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin: Or, Towards a Substance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
Revolutionary Criticism. New York: Verso, 2009. 2009.
Hansen, Miriam. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried - - . Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern
Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Lyric. Berkeley: University of California Press,
Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
2011.

On Some Motifs in Baudelaire 6.1

(1939; trans. 1969)

WALTER BENJAMIN Translated by Harry Zohn 1

I
Baudelaire envisaged readers to whom the reading of lyric poetry would present difficul-
ties. The introductory poem of Les Fleurs du mal is addressed to these readers. Willpower
and the ability to concentrate are not their strong points. What they prefer is sensual
pleasure; they are familiar with the "spleen" which kills interest and receptiveness. It is
strange to come across a lyric poet who addresses himself to such readers-the least re-
warding type of audience. There is of course a ready explanation for this. Baudelaire
 328 wanted to be understood; he dedicates his book to those who are like him. The poem
addressed to the reader ends with the salutation: "Hypocrite lecteur,-mon semblable,-
SECTION 6 mon frere!" 2 It might be more fruitful to put it another way and say: Baudelaire wrote a
FRANKFURT ScHooL book which from the very beginning had little prospect of becoming an immediate
AND AFTER popular success. The kind of reader he envisaged is described in the introductory
poem, and this turned out to have been a far-sighted judgment. He would eventually
find the reader his work was intended for. This situation-the fact, in other words, that
the conditions for the reception of lyric poetry have become increasingly unfavorable-
is borne out by three particular factors, among others. First of all, the lyric poet has
ceased to represent the poet per se. He is no longer a "minstrel," as Lamartine still was;
he has become the representative of a genre. (Verlaine is a concrete example of this
specialization; Rimbaud must already be regarded as an esoteric figure, a poet who, ex
officio, kept a distance between his public and his work.) Second, there has been no suc-
cess on a mass scale in lyric poetry since Baudelaire. (The lyric poetry of Victor Hugo
was still capable of evoking powerful reverberations when it first appeared. In Ger-
many, Heine's Buch der Lieder marks a watershed.) The third factor follows from this-
namely, the greater coolness of the public, even toward the lyric poetry that has been
handed down as part of its own cultural heritage. The period in question dates back
roughly to the mid-nineteenth century. Throughout this span, the fame of Les Fleurs
du mal has steadily increased. This book, which the author expected would be read by
the least indulgent of readers and which was it first read by only a few indulgent ones, has,
over the decades, acquired the stature of a classic and become one of the most widely
printed ones as well.
If conditions for a positive reception of lyric poetry have become less favorable, it is
reasonable to assume that only in rare instances does lyric poetry accord with the experi-
ence of its readers. This may be due to a change in the structure of their experience. Even
though one may approve of this development, one may find it difficult to specify the
nature of the change. Turning to philosophy for an answer, one encounters a strange situ-
ation. Since the end of the nineteenth century, philosophy has made a series of attempts
to grasp "true" experience, as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standard-
ized, denatured life of the civilized masses. These efforts are usually classified under the
rubric of "vitalism." Their point of departure, understandably enough, has not been the
individual's life in society. Instead they have invoked poetry, or preferably nature-most
recently, the age of myths. Dilthey's book Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung represents one of
the earliest of these efforts, which culminate with Klages and Jung, who made common
cause with fascism. Towering above this literature is Bergson's early monumental work,
Matiere et memoire. To a greater extent than the other writings in this field, it preserves
links with empirical research. It is oriented toward biology. As the title suggests, it re-
gards the structure of memory [Gedachtnis] as decisive for the philosophical structure of
experience [Erfahrung]. Experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence
as well as private life. It is the product less of facts firmly anchored in memory [Erinner-
ung] than of accumulated and frequently unconscious data that flow together in memory
[Gedachtnis]. Of course, the historical determination of memory is not at all Bergson's
intention. On the contrary, he rejects any historical determination of memory. He thus
manages to stay clear of that experience from which his own philosophy evolved, or,
rather, in reaction to which it arose. It was the alienating, blinding experience of the age
of large-scale industrialism. In shutting out this experience, the eye perceives a comple-
mentary experience-in the form of its spontaneous afterimage, as it were. Bergson's
philosophy represents an attempt to specify this afterimage and fix it as a permanent re-
cord. His philosophy thus indirectly furnishes a clue to the experience which presented 329
itself undistorted to Baudelaire's eyes, in the figure of his reader.
6.1
II WALTER BENJAMIN

The reader of Matiere et memoire, with its particular definition of the nature of experi-
ence in duree, is bound to conclude that only a poet can be the adequate subject of such an
experience. And it was indeed a poet who put Bergson's theory of experience to the test.
Proust's work A Ia Recherche du temps perdu may be regarded as an attempt to produce
experience, as Bergson imagines it, in a synthetic way under today's social conditions, for
there is less and less hope that it will come into being in a natural way. Proust, inciden-
tally, does not evade the question in his work. He even introduces a new factor, one that
involves an immanent critique of Bergson. Bergson emphasized the antagonism between
the vita activa and the specific vita contemplativa which arises from memory. But he leads
us to believe that turning to the contemplative realization of the stream of life is a matter
of free choice. From the start, Proust indicates his divergent view in his choice of terms.
In his work the memoire pure of Bergson's theory becomes a memoire involontaire. Proust
immediately confronts this involuntary memory with a voluntary memory, one that is in
the service of the intellect. The first pages of his great novel are devoted to making this
relationship clear. In the reflection which introduces the term, Proust tells us that for
many years he had a very indistinct memory of the town of Combray, where he had spent
part of his childhood. One afternoon, the taste of a kind of pastry called a madeleine
(which he later mentions often) transported him back to the past, whereas before then he
had been limited to the promptings of a memory which obeyed the call of conscious at-
tention. This he calls memoire volontaire. Its signal characteristic is that the information it
gives about the past retains no trace of that past. "It is the same with our own past. In vain
we try to conjure it up again; the efforts of our intellect are futile." In sum, Proust says that
the past is situated "somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect and its field of opera-
tions, in some material object ... , though we have no idea which one it is. And whether we
come upon this object before we die, or whether we never encounter it, depends entirely on
chance."
According to Proust, it is a matter of chance whether an individual forms an image of
himself, whether he can take hold of his experience. But there is nothing inevitable about
the dependence on chance in this matter. A person's inner concerns are not by nature of
an inescapably private character. They attain this character only after the likelihood de-
creases that one's external concerns will be assimilated to one's experience. Newspapers
constitute one of many indications of such a decrease. If it were the intention of the press
to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experience, it
would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is achieved: to
isolate events from the realm in which they could affect the experience of the reader. The
principles of journalistic information (newness, brevity, clarity, and, above all, lack of con-
nection between the individual news items) contribute as much to this as the layout of the
pages and the style of writing. (Karl Kraus never tired of demonstrating the extent to
which the linguistic habitus of newspapers paralyzes the imagination of their readers.)
Another reason for the isolation of information from experience is that the former does
not enter "tradition." Newspapers appear in large editions. Few readers can boast of hav-
ing any information that another reader may need from them. Historically, the various
modes of communication have competed with one another. The replacement of the older
relation by information, and of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy
of experience. In turn, there is a contrast between all these forms and the story, which is
 330 one of the oldest forms of communication. A story does not aim to convey an event per se,
which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds the event in the life of the story-
SECTION 6 teller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thus bears the trace of the
FRANKFURT ScHooL storyteller, much the way an earthen vessel bears the trace of the potter's hand.
AND AFTER Proust's eight-volume novel gives some idea of the effort it took to restore the figure of
the storyteller to the current generation. Proust undertook this task with magnificent
consistency. From the outset, this involved him in a fundamental problem: reporting on
his own childhood. In saying that it was a matter of chance whether the problem could be
solved at all, he took the measure of its difficulty. In connection with these reflections, he
coined the phrase memoire involontaire. This concept bears the traces of the situation
that engendered it; it is part of the inventory of the individual who is isolated in various
ways. Where there is experience [Erfahrung] in the strict sense of the word, certain con-
tents of the individual past combine in the memory [Gediichtnis] with material from the
collective past. Rituals, with their ceremonies and their festivals (probably nowhere re-
called in Proust's work), kept producing the amalgamation of these two elements of
memory over and over again. They triggered recollection at certain times and remained
available to memory throughout people's lives. In this way, voluntary and involuntary
recollection cease to be mutually exclusive.

III
In seeking a more substantial definition of what appears in Proust's memoire de
/'intelligence as a by-product of Bergson's theory, we would do well to go back to Freud. In
1921 Freud published his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which hypothesizes a cor-

relation between memory (in the sense of memoire involontaire) and consciousness. The
following remarks, though based on that essay, are not intended to confirm it; we shall
have to content ourselves with testing the fruitfulness of Freud's hypothesis in situations
far removed from the ones he had in mind when he wrote. Such situations are more likely
to have been familiar to Freud's pupils. Some of Reik's writings on his own theory of
memory are in line with Proust's distinction between involuntary and voluntary recollec-
tion. "The function of memory [Gediichtnis]," Reik writes, "is to protect our impressions;
reminiscence [Erinnerung] aims at their dissolution. Memory is essentially conservative;
reminiscence, destructive." Freud's fundamental thought, on which these remarks are
based, is the assumption that "emerging consciousness takes the place of a memory trace."3
Therefore, "it would be the special characteristic of consciousness that, unlike what hap-
pens in all other systems of the psyche, the excitatory process does not leave behind a per-
manent change in its elements, but expires, as it were, in the phenomenon of becoming
conscious." The basic formula of this hypothesis is that "becoming conscious and leaving
behind a memory trace are incompatible processes within one and the same system."
Rather, vestiges of memory are "often most powerful and most enduring when the inci-
dent which left them behind was one that never entered consciousness." Put in Proustian
terms, this means that only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously;
what has not happened to the subject as an isolated experience [Erlebnis], can become a
component of memoire involontaire. According to Freud, the attribution of "permanent
traces as the basis of memory" to processes of stimulation is reserved for "other systems,"
which must be thought of as different from consciousness. In Freud's view, consciousness
as such receives no memory traces whatever, but has another important function: protec-
tion against stimuli. "For a living organism, protection against stimuli is almost more
important than the reception of stimuli. The protective shield is equipped with its own
store of energy and must above all strive to preserve the special forms of conversion of 331
energy operating in it against the effects of the excessive energies at work in the external
world-effects that tend toward an equalization of potential and hence toward destruc- 6.1
tion." The threat posed by these energies is the threat of shocks. The more readily con- WALTER BENJAMIN

sciousness registers these shocks, the less likely they are to have a traumatic effect. Psy-
choanalytic theory strives to understand the nature of these traumatic shocks "in terms
of how they break through the shield that protects against stimuli." According to this
theory, fright gains "significance" in proportion to the "absence of any preparedness for
anxiety."
Freud's investigation was occasioned by the sort of dream that may afflict accident
survivors-those who develop neuroses which cause them to relive the catastrophe in
which they were involved. Dreams of this kind, according to Freud, "endeavor to master
the stimulus retroactively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the
traumatic neurosis." Valery seems to have had something similar in mind. The coinci-
dence is worth noting, for Valery was among those interested in the special functioning
of psychic mechanisms under present-day conditions. (Moreover, Valery was able to
reconcile this interest with his poetic production, which remained exclusively lyric. He
thus emerges as the only author who goes back directly to Baudelaire.) "The impressions
and sense perceptions of humans," Valery writes, "actually belong in the category of
surprises; they are evidence of an insufficiency in humans ... Recollection is ... an ele-
mental phenomenon which aims at giving us the time for organizing 'the reception of
stimuli' which we initially lacked." 4 The reception of shocks is facilitated by training in
coping with stimuli; if need be, dreams as well as recollection may be enlisted. As a rule,
however-so Freud assumes-this training devolves upon the wakeful consciousness,
located in a part of the cortex which is "so frayed by the effect of the stimulus" that it
offers the most favorable situation for the reception of stimuli. That the shock is thus
cushioned, parried by consciousness, would lend the incident that occasions it the char-
acter of an isolated experience [Erlebnis], in the strict sense. If it were incorporated di-
rectly in the register of conscious memory, it would sterilize this incident for poetic ex-
perience [Erfahrung].
One wonders how lyric poetry can be grounded in experience [einer Erfahrung] for
which exposure to shock [Chockerlebnis] has become the norm. One would expect such
poetry to have a large measure of consciousness; it would suggest that a plan was at work
in its composition. This is indeed true of Baudelaire's poetry; it establishes a connection
between him and Poe, among his predecessors, and with Valery, among his successors.
Proust's and Valery's reflections on Baudelaire complement each other providentially.
Proust wrote an essay on Baudelaire which is actually surpassed in significance by cer-
tain reflections in his novels. In his "Situation de Baudelaire," Valery supplies the classic
introduction to Les Fleurs du mal. "Baudelaire's problem," he writes, "must have posed
itself in these terms: 'How to be a great poet, but neither a Lamartine nor a Hugo nor a
Musset.' I do not say that this ambition was consciously formulated, but it must have
been latent in Baudelaire's mind; it even constituted the essential Baudelaire. It was his
raison d'etat." There is something odd about referring to "reason of state" in the case of
a poet. There is something remarkable about it: the emancipation from isolated experi-
ences [Erlebnisse]. Baudelaire's poetic production is assigned a mission. Blank spaces
hovered before him, and into these he inserted his poems. His work cannot be catego-
rized merely as historical, like anyone else's, but it intended to be so and understood it-
self as such.
 332
IV
SECTION 6 The greater the shock factor in particular impressions, the more vigilant consciousness
FRANKFURT ScHOOL has to be in screening stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less these impressions
AND AFTER enter long experience [Erfahrung] and the more they correspond to the concept of iso-
lated experience [Erlebnis]. Perhaps the special achievement of shock defense is the way
it assigns an incident a precise point in time in consciousness, at the cost of the integ-
rity of the incident's contents. This would be a peak achievement of the intellect; it
would turn the incident into an isolated experience. Without reflection, there would
be nothing but the sudden start, occasionally pleasant but usually distasteful, which,
according to Freud, confirms the failure of the shock defense. Baudelaire has por-
trayed this process in a harsh image. He speaks of a duel in which the artist, just be-
fore being beaten, screams in fright. This duel is the creative process itself. Thus,
Baudelaire placed shock experience [Chockerfahrung] at the very center of his art. This
self-portrait, which is corroborated by evidence from several contemporaries, is of
great significance. Since Baudelaire was himself vulnerable to being frightened, it was
not unusual for him to evoke fright. Valles tells us about his eccentric grimaces; on the
basis of a portrait by Nargeot, Pontmartin establishes Baudelaire's alarming appear-
ance; Claude! stresses the cutting quality he could give to his utterances; Gautier speaks
of the italicizing Baudelaire indulged in when reciting poetry; Nadar describes his
jerky gait.
Psychiatry is familiar with traumatophile types. Baudelaire made it his business to
parry the shocks, no matter what their source, with his spiritual and physical self. This
shock defense is rendered in the image of combat. Baudelaire describes his friend Con-
stantin Guys, whom he visits when Paris is asleep: "How he stands there, bent over his
table, scrutinizing the sheet of paper just as intently as he does the objects around him by
day; how he stabs away with his pencil, his pen, his brush; how he spurts water from his
glass to the ceiling and tries his pen on his shirt; how he pursues his work swiftly and in-
tensely, as though he were afraid his images might escape him. Thus, he is combative
even when alone, parrying his own blows." In the opening stanza of "Le Solei!," Baude-
laire portrays himself engaged in just such fantastic combat; this is probably the only
passage in Les Fleurs du mal that shows the poet at work.
Le long du vieux faubourg, ou pendent aux masures
Les persiennes, abri des secretes luxures,
Quand le solei! cruel frappe a traits redoubles
Sur !a ville et les champs, sur les toits et les bles,
Je vais m'exercer seul a rna fantasque escrime,
Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de !a rime,
Trebuchant sur les mots com me sur les paves,
Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps reves.

[Through decrepit neighborhoods on the outskirts of town, where

Slatted shutters hang at the windows of hovels that shelter secret lusts;
At a time when the cruel sun beats down with redoubled force
On city and countryside, on rooftops and cornfields,
I go out alone to practice my fantastical fencing,
Scenting chances for rhyme on every street corner,
Stumbling over words as though they were cobblestones,
Sometimes knocking up against verses dreamed long ago.]
 336 In a widow's veil, mysteriously and mutely borne along by the crowd, an unknown
woman crosses the poet's field of vision. What this sonnet conveys is simply this: far from
SECTION 6 experiencing the crowd as an opposing, antagonistic element, the city dweller discovers
FRANKFURT ScHOOL in the crowd what fascinates him. The delight of the urban poet is love-not at first sight,
AND AFTER but at last sight. It is an eternal farewell, which coincides in the poem with the moment of
enchantment. Thus, the sonnet deploys the figure of shock, indeed of catastrophe. But the
nature of the poet's emotions has been affected as well. What makes his body contract in
a tremor-"crispe comme un extravagant," Baudelaire says-is not the rapture of a man
whose every fiber is suffused with eros; rather, it is like the sexual shock that can beset a
lonely man. The fact that "these verses could have been written only in a big city," as
Thibaudet put it, is not very meaningfulY They reveal the stigmata which life in a me-
tropolis inflicts upon love. Proust read the sonnet in this light, and that is why he gave to
his own echo of the woman in mourning (which appeared to him one day in the form of
Albertine) the evocative epithet "La Parisienne." "When Albertine came into my room
again, she wore a black satin dress. It made her look pale. She resembled the kind of fiery
yet pale Parisian woman who is not used to fresh air and has been affected by living
among the masses, possibly in an atmosphere of vice-the kind you can recognize by her
gaze, which seems unsteady if there is no rouge on her cheeks." 13 This is the gaze-
evident even as late as Proust-of the object of a love which only a city dweller experi-
ences, which Baudelaire captured for poetry, and which one might not infrequently
characterize as being spared, rather than denied, fulfillment. 14

[ ... ]

XII
Les Fleurs du mal was the last lyric work that had a broad European reception; no later writ-
ings penetrated beyond a more or less limited linguistic area. Added to this is the fact that
Baudelaire expended his productive capacity almost entirely on this one volume. And finally,
it cannot be denied that some of his motifs-those which the present study has discussed-
render the possibility oflyric poetry problematic. These three facts define Baudelaire histori-
cally. They show that he held steadfastly to his cause and focused single-mindedly on his
mission. He went so far as to proclaim as his goal "the creation of a cliche [poncif]." 15 He saw
in this the condition for any future lyric poetry, and had a low opinion of those poets who
were not equal to the task. "Do you drink beef tea made of ambrosia? Do you eat cutlets from
Paros? How much can you get for a lyre, at the pawnshop?" 16 To Baudelaire, the lyric poet
with his halo is antiquated. In a prose piece entitled "Perte d'aureole" [Loss of a Halo], which
came to light at a late date, Baudelaire presents such a poet as a supernumerary. When
Baudelaire's literary remains were first examined, this piece was rejected as "unsuitable for
publication"; to this day, it has been neglected by Baudelaire scholars.

"What do I see, my dear fellow? You-here? I find you in a place of ill repute-a man who
sips quintessences, who consumes ambrosia? Really! I couldn't be more surprised!"
"You know, my dear fellow, how afraid I am of horses and carriages. A short while ago I
was hurrying across the boulevard, and amid that churning chaos in which death comes
galloping at you from all sides at once I must have made an awkward movement, for the halo
slipped off my head and fell into the mire of the macadam. I didn't have the courage to pick it
up, and decided that it hurts less to lose one's insignia than to have one's bones broken.
Furthermore, I said to myself, every cloud has a silver lining. Now I can go about incognito, do
bad things, and indulge in vulgar behavior like ordinary mortals. So here I am, just like you!"
Shock is among those experiences that have assumed decisive importance for Baude- 333
laire's personality. Gide has dealt with the intermittences between image and idea, word
and thing, which are the real site of Baudelaire's poetic excitation. 5 Riviere has pointed to 6.1
the subterranean shocks by which Baudelaire's poetry is shaken; it is as though they WALTER BENJAMIN

caused words to collapse.6 Riviere has indicated such collapsing words.

Et qui sa it si les fleurs nouvelles que je reve

Trouveront dans ce sol lave comme une greve
Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur?

[And who knows whether my dreams' new flowers

Will find within this soil, washed like a shore,
The mystic nourishment that would make them strong?]

Or: "Cybele, qui les aime, augmente ses verdures" ["Cybele, who loves them, augments her
verdure"]. Another example is this famous first line: "La servante au grand coeur dont
vous etiez jalouse" ["That good-hearted servant of whom you were jealous"].
To give these covert laws their due outside his verses as well was Baudelaire's inten-
tion in Spleen de Paris, his collection of prose poems. In the book's dedication to the
editor-in-chief of La Presse, Arsene Houssaye, Baudelaire wrote: "Who among us has not
dreamed, in his ambitious moments, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, yet without
rhythm and without rhyme, supple and resistant enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings
of the soul, the undulations of reverie, and the sudden leaps of consciousness. This obses-
sive ideal is born, above all, from the experience of giant cities, from the intersecting of
their myriad relations."
This passage suggests two insights. For one thing, it tells us about the close connec-
tion in Baudelaire between the figure of shock and contact with the urban masses. For
another, it tells us what is really meant by these masses. They do not stand for classes or
any sort of collective; rather, they are nothing but the amorphous crowd of passers-by, the
people in the street? This crowd, whose existence Baudelaire is always aware of, does not
serve as the model for any of his works; but it is imprinted on his creativity as a hidden
figure, just as it constitutes the figure concealed in the excerpt quoted above. We can dis-
cern the image of the fencer in it: the blows he deals are designed to open a path for him
through the crowd. To be sure, the neighborhoods through which the poet of"Le Solei!"
makes his way are deserted. But the hidden constellation-in which the profound beauty
of that stanza becomes thoroughly transparent-is no doubt a phantom crowd: the words,
the fragments, the beginnings of lines, from which the poet, in the deserted streets, wrests
poetic booty.

v
The crowd: no subject was more worthy of attention from nineteenth-century writers. It
was getting ready to take shape as a public consisting of broad strata that had acquired
facility in reading. It gave out commissions; it wished to find itself portrayed in the con-
temporary novel, as wealthy patrons did in the paintings of the Middle Ages. The most
successful author of the century met this demand out of inner necessity. To him, "the
crowd" meant-almost in the ancient sense-the crowd of clients, the public. Victor Hugo
was the first to address the crowd in his titles: Les Miserables, Les Travailleurs de Ia mer. In
France, Hugo was the only writer able to compete with the serial novel. As is generally
known, Eugene Sue was the master of this genre, which came to be the source of revelation
for the man in the street. In 1850 an overwhelming majority elected him to the Chamber
 334 of Deputies as a representative from the city of Paris. It is no accident that the young
Marx chose Sue's Mysteres de Paris for an attack. At an early date, he realized it was his
SECTION 6 task to forge the amorphous masses-then being wooed by an aesthetically appealing
FRANKFURT ScHooL socialism-into the iron of the proletariat. Engels' description of these masses in his early
AND AFTER writings may be regarded as a prelude, however modest, to one of Marx's themes. In his
book The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels writes:
A town such as London, where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the
beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference
that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing. This colossal centralization, this
heaping together of two and a half million human beings at one point, has multiplied the
power of these two and a half million people a hundredfold .... But the sacrifices which all
this has cost become apparent later. After roaming the streets of the capital for a day or
two, making headway with difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of
vehicles, after visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realizes for the first time that these
Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature in order to
bring to pass all the marvels of civilization which crowd their city; that a hundred powers
which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed .... The very
turmoil of the streets has something repulsive about it, something against which human
nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of people of all classes and ranks crowding past
one another-are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with
the same interest in being happy? ... And still they crowd by one another as though they
had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is a
tacit one: that each should keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the op-
posing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honor another with so much as
a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each person in his private in-
terest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded
together within a limited space. 8

This description differs markedly from those found in minor French masters, such
as Gozlan, Delvau, or Lurine. It lacks the skill and nonchalance which the flaneur dis-
plays as he moves among the crowds in the streets and which the journalist eagerh·
learns from him. Engels is dismayed by the crowd. He responds with a moral reaction.
and an aesthetic one as well; the speed with which people rush past one another unset-
tles him. The charm of his description lies in the blend of unshakable critical integritY
with old-fashioned views. The writer came from a Germany that was still provincial; ht
may never have been tempted to lose himself in a stream of people. When Hegel went tc
Paris for the first time, not long before his death, he wrote to his wife: "When I wa:~:
through the streets, people look just as they do in Berlin. They wear the same clothe;
and their faces are about the same-they have the same aspect, but in a populous mass.-·
To move in this mass of people was natural for a Parisian. No matter how great the di;-
tance an individual wanted to keep from it, he still was colored by it and, unlike Enge:;
was unable to view it from without. As for Baudelaire, the masses were anything b:.:-
external to him; indeed, it is easy to trace in his works his defensive reaction to their<.:-
traction and allure.
The masses had become so much a part of Baudelaire that it is rare to find a descr:~ ·
tion of them in his works. His most important subjects are hardly ever encountered . -
descriptive form. As Desjardins so aptly put it, he was "more concerned with implant::-~
the image in the memory than with adorning and elaborating it." 10 It is futile to seard: . -
Les Fleurs du mal or in Spleen de Paris for any counterpart to the portrayals of the c:-
that Victor Hugo composed with such mastery. Baudelaire describes neither the Parisians 335
nor their city. Avoiding such descriptions enables him to invoke the former in the figure
of the latter. His crowds are always the crowds of a big city; his Paris is invariably over- 6.1
populated. It is this that makes him so superior to Barbier, whose descriptive method di- WALTER BENJAMIN

vorced the masses from the city.U In Tableaux parisiens, the secret presence of a crowd is
demonstrable almost everywhere. When Baudelaire takes the dawn as his theme, the de-
serted streets emit something of that "silence of a throng" which Hugo senses in nocturnal
Paris. As Baudelaire looks at the illustrations in the books on anatomy being sold on the
dusty banks of the Seine, a crowd of departed souls takes the place of the singular skeletons
on those pages. In the figures of the danse macabre, he sees a compact mass on the move.
The heroism of the wizened old women whom the cycle "Les Petites Vieilles" follows on
their rounds consists in their standing apart from the urban crowd, unable to keep up with
it, no longer mentally participating in the present. The masses were an agitated veil, and
Baudelaire views Paris through this veil. The presence of the masses informs one of the
most famous poems in Les Fleurs du mal.
In the sonnet "A une passante," the crowd is nowhere named in either word or phrase.
Yet all the action hinges on it, just as the progress of a sailboat depends on the wind.
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balan~ant le feston et l'ourlet;

Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.

Moi, je buvais, crispe com me un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide oil germe l'ouragan,
Ladouceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un eclair ... puis Ia nuit!-Fugitive beaute

Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaitre,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans I' eternite?

Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! Trop tard! Jamais peut-etre!

Car j'ignore oil tu fuis, tune sais oil je vais,
6 toi que j'eusse aimee, 6 toi qui le savais!
[The deafening street was screaming all around me.
Tall, slender, in deep mourning-majestic grief-
A woman made her way past, with fastidious hand
Raising and swaying her skirt-border and hem;

Agile and noble, with her statue's limbs.

And me-l drank, contorted like a wild eccentric,
From her eyes, that livid sky which gives birth to hurricanes,
Gentleness that fascinates, pleasure that kills.

A lightning-flash ... then night!-0 fleeting beauty

Whose glance suddenly gave me new life,
Shall I see you again only in eternity?

Far, far from here! Too late! Or maybe never?

For I know not where you flee, you know not where I go,
0 you whom I would have loved, 0 you who knew it too!]
 "But you ought to report the loss of your halo or inquire at the lost-and-found office." 337
"I wouldn't dream of it. I like it here. You're the only person who has recognized me.
Besides, dignity bores me. And it amuses me to think that some bad poet will pick up the 6.1
halo and straightway adorn himself with it. There's nothing I like better than to make WALTER BENJAMIN

someone happy-especially if the happy fellow is someone I can laugh at. Just picture X
wearing it, or Y! Won't that be funny?" 17

The same scene is found in Baudelaire's diaries, except that the ending is different. The
poet quickly picks up his halo-but now he is troubled by the feeling that the incident
may be a bad omen. 18
The man who wrote these pieces was no flaneur. They embody, in ironic form, the
same experience that Baudelaire put into the following sentence without any embellish-
ment: "Perdu dans ce vilain monde, coudoye par les Joules, je suis com me un hom me lasse
dont l'oeil ne voit en arriere, dans les annees profondes, que desabusememt et amertume,
et, devant lui, qu'un orage ou rien de neuf n'est contenu, ni enseignement, ni douleur." 19
["Lost in this base world, jostled by the crowd, I am like a weary man whose eye, looking
backward into the depths of the years, sees only disillusion and bitterness, and looking
ahead sees only a tempest which contains nothing new, neither instruction nor pain."] Of
all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out being jostled
by the crowd as the decisive, unmistakable experience. The semblance [Schein] of a crowd
with a soul and movement all its own, the luster that had dazzled the flaneur, had faded
for him. To heighten the impression of the crowd's baseness, he envisioned the day on
which even the fallen women, the outcasts, would readily espouse a well-ordered life,
condemn libertinism, and reject everything except money. Betrayed by these last allies of
his, Baudelaire battled the crowd-with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain
or the wind. This is the nature of the immediate experience [Erlebnis] to which Baude-
laire has given the weight of long experience [Erfahrung]. He named the price for which
the sensation of modernity could be had: the disintegration of the aura in immediate
shock experience [Chockerlebnis]. He paid dearly for consenting to this disintegration-
but it is the law of his poetry. This poetry appears in the sky of the Second Empire as "a
star without atmosphere."

NOTES

1. First published in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforsc- 7· To endow this crowd with a soul is the very
hung (January 1940) and reprinted in Walter special purpose of the flaneur. His encounters with
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: it are the experience that he never tires of telling
Surhkamp, 1991), I, 605-653; translated into about. Certain reflexes of this illusion are an
English by Harry Zohn for Illuminations, ed. integral part of Baudelaire's work. It has continued
Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969). to be an active force to this day. jules Romains'
2. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres, ed. Yves-Gerard unanimisme is an admirable late flowering of it.
Le Dantec (Paris: Bibliotheque de in Ple!ade, 8. Friedrich Engels, Die Lage der arbeitenden
1931-1932), vol. 1, p. 18. Klasse in England: Nach eigner Anschauung und
3. In the present context, there is no substantial authentischen Que/len, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1848),
difference between the concepts Erinnerung and pp. 36-37·
Gediichtnis as used in Freud's essay. 9. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, vol.
4· Paul Valery, Analecta (Paris, 1935), pp. 19, Briefe von und an Hegel (Letters to and from
264-265. Hegel), ed. Karl Hegel (Leipzig, 1887), part 2, p. 257.
5. Andre Gide, "Baudelaire et M. Faguet," in 10. Paul Desjardins, "Poetes contemporains:

.\1orceaux choisis (Paris, 1921), p. 128. Charles Baudelaire," in Revue Bleue: Revue
6. jacques Riviere, Etudes [18th ed. (Paris, Politique et Litteraire (Paris), 14, no. 1 (July 2,
1948), p. 14]. r887): 23.
 338 11. Characteristic of Barbier's method is his Trouve au ventre du gouffre un eternel
poem "Londres," which in twenty-four lines tom beau.
SECTION 6 describes the city, awkwardly closing with the
[And more than one who in his heart of hearts
following verses:
FRANKFURT SCHOOL had dreams
AND AFTER En fin, dans un amas de chases, sombre, Of home, sweet home, and of his wife's blue
immense, eyes,
Un peuple nair, vivant et mourant en silence. Finds, within the belly of the pit, an everlasting
Des etres par milliers, suivant !'instinct fatal, tomb.]
Et courant apres I'or par le bien et le mal.
With some masterful retouching, Baudelaire turns
[Finally, within a huge and somber mass of a "miner's fate" into the commonplace end of
things, big-city dwellers.
A blackened people, who live and die in silence. 12. Albert Thibaudet, Interieurs (Paris, 1924),
Thousands of beings, who follow a fatal p. 22.
instinct, 13. Proust, A Ia recherche du temps perdu (Paris,
Pursuing gold by good and evil means.] 1923), vol. 6, p. 138 (LaPrisonniere).
14. The motif of love for a woman passing by
Auguste Barbier, Iambes et poemes (Paris, 1841)
occurs in an early poem by Stefan George. The
Barbier's tendentious poems, particularly his poet has missed the important thing: the stream in
London cycle, Lazare [Lazarus], influenced which the woman moves past, borne along by the
Baudelaire more profoundly than people have crowd. The result is a self-conscious elegy. The
been willing to admit. Baudelaire's "Crepuscule du poet's glances-so he must confess to his lady-
soir" [Half- Light of Evening] concludes as follows: have "moved away, moist with longing/before
they dared mingle with yours" ("feucht vor
ils finissent
sehnen fortgezogen I eh sie in deine sich zu tauchen
Leur destinee et vont vers le gouffre commun;
trauten"). From Stefan George, "Von einer
L'h6pital se remplit de leurs soupirs.-Plus d'un
Begegnung" (Encounter), in Hymnen; Pilger-
Ne viendra plus chercher Ia soupe parfumee,
fahrten; Algabal (Berlin, 1922). Baudelaire leaves no
Au coin du feu, le soir, aupres d'une arne aimee.
doubt that he looked deep into the eyes of the
[they accomplish passer-by.
Their fate and draw near the common pit; 15. See jules Lemaitre, Les Contemporains:
Their sighs fill the hospital ward.- More than Etudes et portraits litteraires (Paris, 1897}, pp.
one 31-32.
Will come no more to get his fragrant soup, 16. Baudelaire, Oeuvres, vol. 2, p. 422 (''L'Ecole
At the fireside, in the evening, by the side of a pa!enne" [The Pagan School]).
loved one.] 17. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 483-484.
18. It is not impossible that this diary entry
Compare this with the end of the eighth stanza of
was occasioned by a pathogenic shock. The
Barbier's "Mineurs de Newcastle" [Miners of
form the entry takes, which links it to Baude-
Newcastle]:
laire's published work, is thus all the more
Et plus d'un qui revait dans le fond de son arne revealing.
Aux douceurs du logis, a l'oeil bleu de sa femme, 19. Baudelaire, Oeuvres, vol. 2, p. 641.
On Lyric Poetry and Society (r9s7; trans. 1991) 6.2
THEODOR W. ADORNO Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson 1

The announcement of a lecture on lyric poetry and society will make many of you un-
comfortable. You will expect a sociological analysis of the kind that can be made of any
object, just as fifty years ago people came up with psychologies, and thirty years ago with
phenomenologies, of everything conceivable. You will suspect that examination of the
conditions under which works are created and their effect will try to usurp the place of
experience of the works as they are and that the process of categorizing and relating will
suppress insight into the truth or falsity of the object itself. You will suspect that an intel-
lectual will be guilty of what Hegel accused the "formal understanding" of doing, namely
that in surveying the whole it stands above the individual existence it is talking about,
that is, it does not see it at all but only labels it. This approach will seem especially dis-
tressing to you in the case of lyric poetry. The most delicate, the most fragile thing that
exists is to be encroached upon and brought into conjunction with bustle and commo-
tion, when part of the ideal of lyric poetry, at least in its traditional sense, is to remain
unaffected by bustle and commotion. A sphere of expression whose very essence lies in
either not acknowledging the power of socialization or overcoming it through the pathos
of detachment, as in Baudelaire or Nietzsche, is to be arrogantly turned into the opposite
of what it conceives itself to be through the way it is examined. Can anyone, you will ask,
but a man who is insensitive to the Muse talk about lyric poetry and society?
Clearly your suspicions will be allayed only if lyric works are not abused by being
made objects with which to demonstrate sociological theses but if instead the social ele-
ment in them is shown to reveal something essential about the basis of their quality. This
relationship should lead not away from the work of art but deeper into it. But the most
elementary reflection shows that this is to be expected. For the substance of a poem is not
merely an expression of individual impulses and experiences. Those become a matter of
art only when they come to participate in something universal by virtue of the specificity
they acquire in being given aesthetic form. Not that what the lyric poem expresses equiv-
alent to what everyone experiences. Its universality is no volonte de taus, not the univer-
sality of simply communicating what others are unable to communicate. Rather, immer-
sion in what has taken individual form elevates the lyric to the status of something
universal by making manifest something not distorted, not grasped, not yet subsumed. It
thereby anticipates, spiritually, a situation in which no false universality, that is, nothing
profoundly particular, continues to fetter what is other than itself, the human. The lyric
work hopes to attain universality through unrestrained individuation. The danger pecu-
liar to the lyric, however, lies in the fact that its principle of individuation never guaran-
tees that something binding and authentic will be produced. It has no say over whether
the poem remains within the contingency of mere separate existence.
The universality of the lyric's substance, however, is social in nature. Only one who
hears the voice of humankind in the poem's solitude can understand what the poem is
 340 saying; indeed, even the solitariness oflyricallanguage itself is prescribed by an individual-
istic and ultimately atomistic society, just as conversely its general cogency depends on
SECTION 6 the intensity of its individuation. For that reason, however, reflection on the work of art is
FRANKFURT ScHooL justified in inquiring, and obligated to inquire concretely into its social content and not
AND AFTER content itself with a vague feeling of something universal and inclusive. This kind of
specification through thought is not some external reflection alien to art; on the contrary,
all linguistic works of art demand it. The material proper to them, concepts, does not
exhaust itself in mere contemplation. In order to be susceptible of aesthetic contempla-
tion, works of art must always be thought through as well, and once thought has been
called into play by the poem it does not let itself be stopped at the poem's behest.
Such thought, however-the social interpretation of lyric poetry as of all works of
art-may not focus directly on the so-called social perspective or the social interests of
the works or their authors. Instead, it must discover how the entirety of a society, con-
ceived as an internally contradictory unity, is manifested in the work of art, in what way
the work of art remains subject to society and in what way it transcends it. In philosophi-
cal terms, the approach must be an immanent one. Social concepts should not be applied
to the works from without but rather drawn from an exacting examination of the works
themselves. Goethe's statement in his Maxims and Reflections that what you do not un-
derstand you do not possess holds not only for the aesthetic attitude to works of art but
for aesthetic theory as well; nothing that is not in the works, not part of their own form,
can legitimate a determination of what their substance, that which has entered into their
poetry, represents in social terms. To determine that, of course, requires both knowledge
of the interior of the works of art and knowledge of the society outside. But this knowl-
edge is binding only if it is rediscovered through complete submission to the matter at
hand. Special vigilance is required when it comes to the concept of ideology, which these
days is belabored to the point of intolerability. For ideology is untruth, false conscious-
ness, deceit. It manifests itself in the failure of works of art, in their inherent falseness,
and it is countered by criticism. To repeat mechanically, however, that great works of art,
whose essence consists in giving form to the crucial contradictions in real existence, and
only in that sense in a tendency to reconcile them, are ideology, not only does an injustice
to their truth content but also misrepresents the concept of ideology. That concept does
not maintain that all spirit serves only for some human beings to falsely present some par-
ticular values as general ones; rather, it is intended to unmask spirit that is specifically false
and at the same time to grasp it in its necessity. The greatness of works of art, however,
consists solely in the fact that they give voice to what ideology hides. Their very success
moves beyond false consciousness, whether intentionally or not.
Let me take your own misgivings as a starting point. You experience lyric poetry as
something opposed to society, something wholly individual. Your feelings insist that it
remain so, that lyric expression, having escaped from the weight of material existence.
evoke the image of a life free from the coercion of reigning practices, of utility, of the re·
lentless pressures of self-preservation. This demand, however, the demand that the lyric
word be virginal, is itself social in nature. It implies a protest against a social situatior:
that every individual experiences as hostile, alien, cold, oppressive, and this situation i;;
imprinted in reverse on the poetic work: the more heavily the situation weighs upon it.
the more firmly the work resists it by refusing to submit to anything heteronomous anc
constituting itself solely in accordance with its own laws. The work's distance from mere
existence becomes the measure of what is false and bad in the latter. In its protest the
poem expresses the dream of a world in which things would be different. The lyric spirit'>
idiosyncratic opposition to the superior power of material things is a form of reaction to 341
the reification of the world, to the domination of human beings by commodities that has
developed since the beginning of the modern era, since the industrial revolution became 6.2
the dominant force in life. Rilke's cult of the thing [as in his Dinggedichte or "thing po- THEoooR w.
ems"] is part of this idiosyncratic opposition; it attempts to assimilate even alien objects to AooRNo
pure subjective expression and to dissolve them, to give them metaphysical credit for their
alienness. The aesthetic weakness of this cult of the thing, its obscurantist demeanor and
its blending of religion with arts and crafts, reveals the real power of reification, which can
no longer be gilded with a lyrical halo and brought back within the sphere of meaning.
To say that the concept of lyric poetry that is in some sense second nature to us is a
completely modern one is only to express this insight into the social nature of the lyric in
different form. Analogously, landscape painting and its idea of"nature" have had an au-
tonomous development only in the modern period. I know that I exaggerate in saying
this, that you could adduce many counterexamples. The most compelling would be Sap-
pho. I will not discuss the Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic lyric, since I cannot read them
in the original and I suspect that translation involves them in an adaptive mechanism
that makes adequate understanding completely impossible. But the manifestations in
earlier periods of the specifically lyric spirit familiar to us are only isolated flashes, just as
the backgrounds in older painting occasionally anticipate the idea of landscape painting.
They do not establish it as a form. The great poets of the distant past-Pindar and Al-
caeus, for instance, but the greater part of Walther von der Vogelweide's work as well-
whom literary history classifies as lyric poets are uncommonly far from our primary
conception of the lyric. They lack the quality of immediacy, of immateriality, which we
are accustomed, rightly or not, to consider the criterion of the lyric and which we tran-
scend only through rigorous education.
Until we have either broadened it historically or turned it critically against the sphere
of individualism, however, our conception of lyric poetry has a moment of discontinuity
in it-all the more so, the more pure it claims to be. The "I" whose voice is heard in the
lyric is an 'T' that defines and expresses itself as something opposed to the collective, to
objectivity; it is not immediately at one with the nature to which its expression refers. It has
lost it, as it were, and attempts to restore it through animation, through immersion in the
'T' itself. It is only through humanization that nature is to be restored the rights that hu-
man domination took from it. Even lyric works in which no trace of conventional and
concrete existence, no crude materiality remains, the greatest lyric works in our language,
owe their quality to the force with which the 'T' creates the illusion of nature emerging
from alienation. Their pure subjectivity, the aspect of them that appears seamless and har-
monious, bears witness to its opposite, to suffering in an existence alien to the subject and
to love for it as well-indeed, their harmoniousness is actually nothing but the mutual ac-
cord of this suffering and this love. Even the line from Goethe's "Wanderers Nachtlied"
["Wanderer's Night-Song"], "Warte nur, balde I ruhest du auch" ["Only wait, soon I you too
shall rest"] has an air of consolation: its unfathomable beauty cannot be separated from
something it makes no reference to, the notion of a world that withholds peace. Only in
resonating with sadness about that withholding does the poem maintain that there is
peace nevertheless. One is tempted to use the line "Ach, ich bin des Treibens miide" ["I am
weary of restless activity"] from the companion poem of the same title to interpret the
"Wanderers Nachtlied." To be sure, the greatness of the latter poem derives from the fact
that it does not speak about what is alienated and disturbing, from the fact that within the
poem the restlessness of the object is not opposed to the subject; instead, the subject's own
 342 restlessness echoes it. A second immediacy is promised: what is human, language itself,
seems to become creation again, while everything external dies away in the echo of the
SECTION 6 soul. This becomes more than an illusion, however; it becomes full truth, because through
FRANKFURT ScHooL the expression in language of a good kind of tiredness, the shadow of yearning and even of
AND AFTER death continues to fall across the reconciliation. In the line "Warte nur, balde" the whole of
life, with an enigmatic smile of sorrow, turns into the brief moment before one falls asleep.
The note of peacefulness attests to the fact that peace cannot be achieved without the
dream disintegrating. The shadow has no power over the image of life come back into its
own, but as a last reminder of life's deformation it gives the dream its profound depths
beneath the surface of the song. In the face of nature at rest, a nature from which all traces
of anything resembling the human have been eradicated, the subject becomes aware of its
own insignificance. Imperceptibly, silently, irony tinges the poem's consolation: the sec-
onds before the bliss of sleep are the same seconds that separate our brief life from death.
After Goethe, this sublime irony became a debased and spiteful irony. But it was always
bourgeois: the shadow-side of the elevation of the liberated subject is its degradation to
something exchangeable, to something that exists merely for something else; the shadow-
side of personality is the "So who are you?" The authenticity of the "Nachtlied," however,
lies in its moment in time: the background of that destructive force removes it from the
sphere of play, while the destructive force has no power over the peaceable power of conso-
lation. It is commonly said that a perfect lyric poem must possess totality or universality,
must provide the whole within the bounds of the poem and the infinite within the poem's
finitude. If that is to be more than a platitude of an aesthetics that is always ready to use the
concept of the symbolic as a panacea, it indicates that in every lyric poem the historical
relationship of the subject to objectivity, of the individual to society, must have found its
precipitate in the medium of a subjective spirit thrown back upon itself. The less the work
thematizes the relationship of 'T' and society, the more spontaneously it crystallizes of its
own accord in the poem, the more complete this process of precipitation will be.
You may accuse me of so sublimating the relationship oflyric and society in this defi-
nition out of fear of a crude sociologism that there is really nothing left of it; it is precisely
what is not social in the lyric poem that is now to become its social aspect. You could call
my attention to Gustav Dore's caricature of the arch-reactionary deputy whose praise of
the ancien regime culminated in the exclamation, "And to whom, gentlemen, do we owe
the revolution of 1789 if not to Louis XVI!" You could apply that to my view oflyric poetry
and society: in my view, you could say, society plays the role of the executed king and the
lyric the role of his opponents; but lyric poetry, you say, can no more be explained on the
basis of society than the revolution can be made the achievement of the monarch it deposed
and without whose inanities it might not have occurred at that time. We will leave it an
open question whether Dore's deputy was truly only the stupid, cynical propagandist the
artist derided him for being or whether there might be more truth in his unintentional
joke than common sense admits; Hegel's philosophy of history would have a lot to say in
his defense. In any case, the comparison does not really work. I am not trying to deduce
lyric poetry from society; its social substance is precisely what is spontaneous in it, what
does not simply follow from the existing conditions at the time. But philosophy-Hegel's
again-is familiar with the speculative proposition that the individual is mediated by the
universal and vice versa. That means that even resistance to social pressure is not some-
thing absolutely individual; the artistic forces in that resistance, which operate in and
through the individual and his spontaneity, are objective forces that impel a constricted
and constricting social condition to transcend itself and become worthy of human be-
ings; forces, that is, that are part of the constitution of the whole and not at all merely
forces of a rigid individuality blindly opposing society. If, by virtue of its own subjectiv- 343
ity, the substance of the lyric can in fact be addressed as an objective substance-and
otherwise one could not explain the very simple fact that grounds the possibility of the 6.2
lyric as an artistic genre, its effect on people other than the poet speaking his monologue- THEoooR W.
then it is only because the lyric work of art's withdrawal into itself, its self-absorption, its AooRNo
detachment from the social surface, is socially motivated behind the author's back. But
the medium of this is language. The paradox specific to the lyric work, a subjectivity that
turns into objectivity, is tied to the priority oflinguistic form in the lyric; it is that priority
from which the primacy of language in literature in general (even in prose forms) is de-
rived. For language is itself something double. Through its configurations it assimilates
itself completely into subjective impulses; one would almost think it had produced them.
But at the same time language remains the medium of concepts, remains that which es-
tablishes an inescapable relationship to the universal and to society. Hence the highest
lyric works are those in which the subject, with no remaining trace of mere matter,
sounds forth in language until language itself acquires a voice. The unself-consciousness
of the subject submitting itself to language as to something objective, and the immediacy
and spontaneity of that subject's expression are one and the same: thus language mediates
lyric poetry and society in their innermost core. This is why the lyric reveals itself to be
most deeply grounded in society when it does not chime in with society, when it commu-
nicates nothing, when, instead, the subject whose expression is successful reaches an ac-
cord with language itself, with the inherent tendency oflanguage.
On the other hand, however, language should also not be absolutized as the voice of
Being as opposed to the lyric subject, as many of the current ontological theories of lan-
guage would have it. The subject, whose expression-as opposed to mere signification of
objective contents-is necessary to attain to that level oflinguistic objectivity, is not some-
thing added to the contents proper to that layer, not something external to it. The moment
of unself-consciousness in which the subject submerges itself in language is not a sacrifice
of the subject to Being. It is a moment not of violence, nor of violence against the subject,
but reconciliation: language itself speaks only when it speaks not as something alien to the
subject but as the subject's own voice. When the 'T' becomes oblivious to itself in language
it is fully present nevertheless; if it were not, language would become a consecrated abraca-
dabra and succumb to reification, as it does in communicative discourse. But that brings
us back to the actual relationship between the individual and society. It is not only that the
individual is inherently socially mediated, not only that its contents are always social as
well. Conversely, society is formed and continues to live only by virtue of the individuals
whose quintessence it is. Classical philosophy once formulated a truth now disdained by
scientific logic: subject and object are not rigid and isolated poles but can be defined only
in the process in which they distinguish themselves from one another and change. The
lyric is the aesthetic test of that dialectical philosophical proposition. In the lyric poem the
subject, through its identification with language, negates both its opposition to society as
something merely monadological and its mere functioning within a wholly socialized so-
ciety [vergesellschaftete Gesellschaft]. But the more the latter's ascendancy over the subject
increases, the more precarious the situation of the lyric becomes. Baudelaire's work was
the first to record this; his work, the ultimate consequence of European Weltschmerz, did
not stop with the sufferings of the individual but chose the modern itself, as the antilyrical
pure and simple, for its theme and struck a poetic spark in it by dint of a heroically stylized
language. In Baudelaire a note of despair already makes itself felt, a note that barely main-
tains its balance on the tip of its own paradoxicalness. As the contradiction between poetic
and communicative language reached an extreme, lyric poetry became a game in which
 344 one goes for broke; not, as philistine opinion would have it, because it had become incom-
prehensible but because in acquiring self-consciousness as a literary language, in striving
SECTION 6 for an absolute objectivity unrestricted by any considerations of communication, language
FRANKFURT ScHooL both distances itself from the objectivity of spirit, of living language, and substitutes a
AND AFTER poetic event for a language that is no longer present. The elevated, poeticizing, subjectively
violent moment in weak later lyric poetry is the price it has to pay for its attempt to keep
itself undisfigured, immaculate, objective; its false glitter is the complement to the disen-
chanted world from which it extricates itself.
Everything I have said needs to be qualified if it is to avoid misinterpretation. My
thesis is that the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism. But
since the objective world that produces the lyric is an inherently antagonistic world, the
concept of the lyric is not simply that of the expression of a subjectivity to which language
grants objectivity. Not only does the lyric subject embody the whole all the more cogently,
the more it expresses itself; in addition, poetic subjectivity is itself indebted to privilege:
the pressures of the struggle for survival allow only a few human beings to grasp the uni-
versa! through immersion in the self or to develop as autonomous subjects capable of
freely expressing themselves. The others, however, those who not only stand alienated, as
though they were objects, facing the disconcerted poetic subject but who have also liter-
ally been degraded to objects of history, have the same right, or a greater right, to grope
for the sounds in which sufferings and dreams are welded. This inalienable right has
asserted itself again and again, in forms however impure, mutilated, fragmentary, and
intermittent-the only forms possible for those who have to bear the burden.
A collective undercurrent provides the foundation for all individual lyric poetry.
When that poetry actually bears the whole in mind and is not simply an expression of the
privilege, refinement, and gentility of those who can afford to be gentle, participation in
this undercurrent is an essential part of the substantiality of the individual lyric as well: it
is this undercurrent that makes language the medium in which the subject becomes more
than a mere subject. Romanticism's link to the folksong is only the most obvious, cer-
tainly not the most compelling example of this. For Romanticism practices a kind of
programmatic transfusion of the collective into the individual through which the indi-
vidual lyric poem indulged in a technical illusion of universal cogency without that co-
gency characterizing it inherently. Often, in contrast, poets who abjure any borrowing
from the collective language participate in that collective undercurrent by virtue of their
historical experience. Let me mention Baudelaire again, whose lyric poetry is a slap in the
face not only to the juste milieu but also to all bourgeois social sentiment, and who never-
theless, in poems like the "Petites vieilles" or the poem about the servant woman with the
generous heart in the Tableaux Parisiens, was truer to the masses toward whom he turned
his tragic, arrogant mask than any "poor people's" poetry. Today, when individual ex-
pression, which is the precondition for the conception of lyric poetry that is my point of
departure, seems shaken to its very core in the crisis of the individual, the collective un-
dercurrent in the lyric surfaces in the most diverse places: first merely as the ferment of
individual expression and then perhaps also as an anticipation of a situation that tran-
scends mere individuality in a positive way. If the translations can be trusted, Garda
Lorca, whom Franco's henchmen murdered and whom no totalitarian regime could have
tolerated, was the bearer of a force of this kind; and Brecht's name comes to mind as a
lyric poet who was granted linguistic integrity without having to pay the price of esoteri-
cism. I will forgo making a judgment about whether the poetic principle of individuation
was in fact sublated to a higher level here, or whether its basis lies in regression, a weaken-
ing of the ego. The collective power of contemporary lyric poetry may be largely due to
the linguistic and psychic residues of a condition that is not yet fully individuated, a state 345
of affairs that is prebourgeois in the broadest sense-dialect. Until now, however, the tra-
ditional lyric, as the most rigorous aesthetic negation of bourgeois convention, has by 6.2
that very token been tied to bourgeois society. THEoooR W.
Because considerations of principle are not sufficient, I would like to use a few poems AooRNo
to concretize the relationship of the poetic subject, which always stands for a far more
general collective subject, to the social reality that is its antithesis. In this process the the-
matic elements, which no linguistic work, even poesie pure, can completely divest itself of,
will need interpretation just as the so-called formal elements will. The way the two inter-
penetrate will require special emphasis, for it is only by virtue of such interpenetration
that the lyric poem actually captures the historical moment within its bounds. I want to
choose not poems like Goethe's, aspects of which I commented on without analyzing, but
later ones, poems which do not have the unqualified authenticity of the "Nachtlied." The
two poems I will be talking about do indeed share in the collective undercurrent. But I
would like to call your attention especially to the way in which in them different levels of
a contradictory fundamental condition of society are represented in the medium of the
poetic subject. Permit me to repeat that we are concerned not with the poet as a private
person, not with his psychology or his so-called social perspective, but with the poem as
a philosophical sundial telling the time of history.
Let me begin by reading you Eduard Morike's "Auf einer Wanderung" [On a Walking
Tour]:

In ein freundliches Stadtchen tret' ich ein

In den Strassen liegt roter Abendschein,
Aus einem offenen Fenster eben,
Ober den reichsten Blumenflor
Hinweg, hi:irt man Goldglockenti:ine schweben,
Und eine Stimme scheint ein Nachtigallenchor,
DaB die Bliiten be ben,
DaB die Liifte Ieben,
DaB in hoherem Rot die Rosen leuchten vor.

Lang' hielt ich staunend, lustbeklommen.

Wie ich hinaus vors Tor gekommen,
Ich weiss es wahrlich seiher nicht,
Ach hier, wie liegt die Welt so Iicht!
Der Himmel wogt in purpurnem Gewiihle,
Riickwarts die Stadt in goldnem Rauch;
Wie rauscht der Erlenbach, wie rauscht im Grund die Miihle!
Ich bin wie trunken, irrgefiihrt-
0 Muse, du hast mein Herz beriihrt
Mit einem Liebeshauch!

[I enter a friendly little town,

On the streets lies the red evening light,
From an open window,
Across the richest profusion of flowers
One hears golden bell-tones hover,
And one voice seems to be a choir of nightingales,
So that the blossoms quaver,
 346 So that the breezes are lively,
So that the roses glow forth in a higher red.
SECTION 6
I stood a long while marvelling, oppressed with pleasure.
FRANKFURT SCHOOL
How I got out beyond the city gate,
AND AFTER
I really do not know myself,
Oh, how bright the world is here!
The sky surges in purple turbulence,
At my back the town in a golden haze;
How the alder stream murmurs, how the mill roars below!
I am as if drunken, led astray-
Oh muse, you have touched my heart,
With a breath of love!]

Up surges the image of the promise of happiness which the small south German town
still grants its guests on the right day, but not the slightest concession is made to the
pseudo-Gothic small-town idyll. The poem gives the feeling of warmth and security in a
confined space, yet at the same time it is a work in the elevated style, not disfigured by
Gemutlichkeit and coziness, not sentimentally praising narrowness in opposition to the
wide world, not happiness in one's own little corner. Language and the rudimentary plot
both aid in skillfully equating the utopia of what is close at hand with that of the utmost
distance. The town appears in the narrative only as a fleeting scene, not as a place of lin-
gering. The magnitude of the feeling that results from the speaker's delight in the girl's
voice, and not that voice alone but the voice of all of nature, the choir, emerges only out-
side the confined arena of the town, under the open purple-billowing sky, where the
golden town and the rushing brook come together in the imago. Linguistically, this is
aided by an inestimably subtle, scarcely definable classical, ode-like element. As if from
afar, the free rhythms call to mind unrhymed Greek stanzas, as does the sudden pathos of
the closing line of the first stanza, which is effected with the most discreet devices of trans-
position of word order: "DaB in hoherem Rot die Rosen leuchten vor." The single word
"Muse" at the end of the poem is decisive. It is as if this word, one of the most overused in
German classicism, gleamed once again, truly as if in the light of the setting sun, by being
bestowed upon the genius loci of the friendly little town, and as though even in the process
of disappearing it were possessed of all the power to enrapture which an invocation of the
muse in the modern idiom, comically inept, usually fails to capture. The poem's inspira-
tion proves itself perhaps more fully in this than in any of its other features: that the choice
of this most objectionable word at a critical point, carefully prepared by the latent Greek
linguistic demeanor, resolves the urgent dynamic of the whole like a musical Abgesang. 2 In
the briefest of spaces, the lyric succeeds in doing what the German epic attempted in vain,
even in such projects as Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea.
The social interpretation of a success like this is concerned with the stage of historical
experience evidenced in the poem. In the name of humanity, of the universality of the
human, German classicism had undertaken to release subjective impulses from the con-
tingency that threatens them in a society where relationships between human beings are
no longer direct but instead mediated solely by the market. It strove to objectify the sub-
jective as Hegel did in philosophy and tried to overcome the contradictions of men's real
lives by reconciling them in spirit, in the idea. The continued existence of these contra-
dictions in reality, however, had compromised the spiritual solution: in the face of a life
not grounded in meaning, a life lived painstakingly amid the bustle of competing inter-
ests, a prosaic life, as artistic experience sees it; in the face of a world in which the fate of
individual human beings works itself out in accordance with blind laws, art, whose form 347
gives the impression of speaking from the point of view of a realized humanity, becomes
an empty word. Hence classicism's concept of the human being withdrew into private, 6.2
individual existence and its images; only there did humanness seem secure. Of necessity, THEoooR W.
the idea of humankind as something whole, something self-determining, was renounced AooRNo
by the bourgeoisie, in aesthetic form as in politics. It is the stubborn clinging to one's own
restricted sphere, which itself obeys a compulsion, that makes ideals like comfort and
Gemutlichkeit so suspect. Meaning itself is linked to the contingencies of human happi-
ness; through a kind of usurpation, individual happiness is ascribed a dignity it would at-
tain only along with the happiness of the whole. The social force of Mi:irike's genius, how-
ever, consists in the fact that he combined the two experiences-that of the classicistic
elevated style and that of the romantic private miniature-and that in doing so he recog-
nized the limits of both possibilities and balanced them against one another with incompa-
rable tact. In none of his expressive impulses does he go beyond what could be genuinely
attained in his time. The much-invoked organic quality of his work is probably nothing
other than this tact, which is philosophically sensitive to history and which scarcely any
other poet in the German language possessed to the same degree. The alleged pathologi-
cal traits in Mi:irike reported by psychologists and the drying up of his production in later
years are the negative aspect of his every highly developed understanding of what is pos-
sible. The poems of the hypochondriacal clergyman from Cleversulzbach, who is consid-
ered one of our naive artists, are virtuoso pieces unsurpassed by the masters of /'art pour
/'art. He is as aware of the empty and ideological aspects of elevated style as of the medi-
ocrity, petit-bourgeois dullness, and obliviousness to totality of the Biedermeier period,
in which the greater part of his lyric work falls. The spirit in him is driven to create, for
the last time, images that would betray themselves neither by their classical drapery nor
by local color, neither by their manly tones nor by their lip-smacking. As if walking a fine
line, the residues of the elevated style that survive in memory echo in him, together with
the signs of an immediate life that promised fulfillment precisely at the time when they
were already condemned by the direction history was taking; and both greet the poet on
his wandering only as they are about to vanish. He already shares in the paradox of lyric
poetry in the ascending industrial age. As indeterminate and fragile as his solutions are
the solutions of all the great lyric poets who come afterwards, even those who seem to be
separated from him by an abyss-like Baudelaire, of whom Claude! said that his style was
a mixture of Racine's and that of the journalists of his time. In industrial society the lyric
idea of a self-restoring immediacy becomes-where it does not impotently evoke a ro-
mantic past-more and more something that flashes out abruptly, something in which what
is possible transcends its own impossibility.
The short poem by Stefan George I would now like to discuss derives from a much
later phase in this development. It is one of the celebrated songs from the Seventh Ring, a
cycle of extremely condensed works which for all their lightness of rhythm are over-
heavy with substance and wholly without ]ugendstil ornament. Their eccentric boldness
was rescued from the frightful cultural conservativism of the George circle only when the
great composer Anton von Webern set them to music; in George, ideology and social
substance are very far apart. The song reads:

Im windes-weben
War meine frage
Nur traumerei.
Nur lacheln war
 348 Was du gegeben.
Aus nasser nacht
SECTION 6 Ein glanz entfacht-
FRANKFURT SCHOOL Nun drangt der mai
AND AFTER Nun muss ich gar
Urn dein aug und haar
Aile tage
In sehnen Ieben.

[In the winds-weaving

My question was
Only daydreaming.
Only a smile was
What you gave.
From a moist night
A gleam ignite-
Now May urges
Now I must
For your eyes and hair
Everyday
Live in yearning.]

Unquestionably, this is elevated style. Delight in things close at hand, something that
still colors Mi:irike's much earlier poem, has fallen under a prohibition. It has been ban-
ished by the Nietzschean pathos of detached reserve which George conceives himself to be
carrying on. The remains of Romanticism lie, a deterrent, between him and Mi:irike; the
remains of the idyll are hopelessly outdated and have degenerated to heartwarmers. While
George's poetry, the poetry of an imperious individual, presupposes individualistic bour-
geois society and the autonomous individual as its preconditions, a curse is put on the
bourgeois element of conventional form no less than on the bourgeois contents. But be-
cause this poetry can speak from no overarching framework other than the bourgeois,
which it rejects not only tacitly and a priori but also expressly, it becomes obstructed: on its
own initiative and its own authority, it simulates a feudal condition. Socially this is hidden
behind what the cliche refers to as George's aristocratic stance. This stance is not the pose
that the bourgeois, who cannot reduce these poems to objects of fondling, waxes indig-
nant about. Rather, despite its demeanor of hostility to society, it is the product of the
social dialectic that denies the lyric subject identification with what exists and its world
of forms, while that subject is nevertheless allied with the status quo in its innermost core:
it has no other locus from which to speak but that of a past seigneurial society. The ideal of
nobility, which dictates the choice of every word, image, and sound in the poem, is derived
from that locus, and the form is medieval in an almost undefinable way, a way that has
been virtually imported into the linguistic configuration. To this extent the poem, like
George altogether, is neoromantic. But it is not real things and not sounds that are evoked
but rather a vanished condition of the soul. The artistically effected latency of the ideal, the
absence of any crude archaicism, raises the song above the hopeless fiction it nonetheless
offers. It no more resembles the medieval imitations used on wall plaques than it does the
repertoire of the modern lyric; the poem's stylistic principle saves it from conformity.
There is no more room in it for organic reconciliation of conflicting elements than there
was for their pacification in the reality of George's time; they are mastered only through
selection, through omission. Where things close at hand, the things one commonly calls
concrete immediate experiences, are admitted into George's lyric poetry at all, they are 349
allowed only at the price of mythologization: none may remain what it is. Thus in one of
the landscapes of the Seventh Ring the child picking berries is transformed, wordlessly, as 6.2
if with a magic wand, through a magical act of violence, into a fairy-tale child. The har- THEoooR W.
mony of the song is wrested from an extreme of dissonance: it rests on what Valery called AooRNo
refus, on an unyielding renunciation of everything through which the conventions oflyric
poetry imagine that they have captured the aura of things. The method retains only the
patterns, the pure formal ideas and schemata of lyric poetry itself, which speak with an
intensity of expression once again in divesting themselves of all contingency. In the midst
of Wilhelmine Germany the elevated style from which that lyric poetry emerged as po-
lemic has no tradition at all to which it may appeal, least of all the legacy of classicism. It is
achieved not by making a show of rhetorical figures and rhythms but by an ascetic omis-
sion of whatever might diminish its distance from a language sullied by commerce. If the
subject is to genuinely resist reification in solitude here, it may no longer even try to with-
draw into what is its own as though that were its property; the traces of an individualism
that has in the meantime delivered itself over to the market in the form of the feuilleton are
alarming. Instead, the subject has to step outside itself by keeping quiet about itself; it has
to make itself a vessel, so to speak, for the idea of a pure language. George's greatest poems
are aimed at rescuing that language. Formed by the Romance languages, and especially by
the extreme simplification of the lyric through which Verlaine made it an instrument of
what is most differentiated, the ear of George, the German student of Mallarme, hears his
own language as though it were a foreign tongue. He overcomes its alienation, which is an
alienation of use, by intensifying it until it becomes the alienation of a language no longer
actually spoken, even an imaginary language, and in that imaginary language he perceives
what would be possible, but never took place, in its composition. The four lines "Nun muss
ich gar I Urn dein aug und haar I Alle tage I In sehnen !eben," which I consider some of the
most irresistible lines in German poetry, are like a quotation, but a quotation not from an-
other poet but from something language has irrevocably failed to achieve: the medieval
German poetry of the Minnesang would have succeeded in achieving it if it, if a tradition of
the German language-if the German language itself, one is tempted to say-had suc-
ceeded. It was in this spirit that Borchardt tried to translate Dante. Subtle ears have taken
umbrage at the elliptical "gar," which is probably used in place of "ganz und gar" [com-
pletely] and to some extent for the sake of the rhyme. One can concede the justice of this
criticism and the fact that as used in the line the word has no proper meaning. But great
works of art are the ones that succeed precisely where they are most problematic. Just as the
greatest works of music may not be completely reduced to their structure but shoot out be-
yond it with a few superfluous notes or measures, so it is with the "gar," a Goethean "residue
of the absurd" in which language escapes the subjective intention that occasioned the use of
the word. It is probably this very "gar" that establishes the poem's status with the force of a
deja vu: through it the melody of the poem's language extends beyond mere signification. In
the age of its decline George sees in language the idea that the course of history has denied
it and constructs lines that sound as though they were not written by him but had been
there from the beginning of time and would remain as they were forever. The quixotism of
this enterprise, however, the impossibility of this kind of restorative writing, the danger of
falling into arts and crafts, enriches the poem's substance: language's chimerical yearning
for the impossible becomes an expression of the subject's insatiable erotic longing, which
finds relief from the self in the other. This transformation of an individuality intensified
to an extreme into self-annihilation-and what was the Maximin cult in the late George
but a desperate renunciation of individuality construing itself as something positive-was
 350 necessary in creating the phantasmagoria of the folksong, something the German lan-
guage had been groping for in vain in its greatest masters. Only by virtue of a differentia-
SECTION 6 tion taken so far that it can no longer bear its own difference, can no longer bear anything
FRANKFURT ScHooL but the universal, freed from the humiliation of isolation, in the particular does lyrical
AND AFTER language represent language's intrinsic being as opposed to its service in the realm of
ends. But it thereby represents the idea of a free humankind, even if the George School
concealed this idea from itself through a base cult of the heights. The truth of George lies
in the fact that his poetry breaks down the walls of individuality through its consumma-
tion of the particular, through its sensitive opposition both to the banal and ultimately
also to the select. The expression of his poetry may have been condensed into an indi-
vidual expression which his lyrics saturate with substance and with the experience of its
own solitude; but this very lyric speech becomes the voice of human beings between
whom the barriers have fallen.

NOTES

1. "Rede iiber Lyric und Gesellschaft" was first Akzente (1957), and reprinted in Theodor Adorno,
delivered by Adorno as an adult education lecture Noten zur Literatur I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1958).
for a radio broadcast in Berlin in 1957; it was 2. The Abgesang was the closing portion of a

published in expanded form in the literary journal stanza in medievally ric poetry.

6.3 Baudelaire as Modernist and

Postmodernist: The Dissolution
of the Referent and the Artificial
"Sublime" (19ss)
FREDRIC JAMESON

The inaugural, the classical, status of Baudelaire in Western poetry can be argued in a
number of different ways: a privileged theory of poetic value as it has been developed and
transmitted by the modernist tradition is, however, a historicizing one, in which, for each
successive period or moment-each successive new present-some new ghostly emana-
tion or afterimage of the poet peels off the inexhaustible text. There are therefore many
Baudelaires, of most unequal value indeed. There is, for instance, a second-rate post-
Romantic Baudelaire, the Baudelaire of diabolism and of cheap frisson, the poet of blas-
phemy and of a creaking and musty religious machinery which was no more interesting
in the mid-nineteenth century than it is today. This is the Baudelaire of Pound and of
Henry James, who observed, "Les Fleurs du Mal? Non, vous vous faites trop d'honneur.
What you call evil is nothing more than a bit of rotting cabbage lying on a satin sofa."
This Baudelaire will no doubt linger on residually into the fin de siecle.
 Then there is the hardest of all Baudelaires to grasp: the Baudelaire contemporary of 351
himself (and of Flaubert), the Baudelaire of the "break," of 1857, the Baudelaire the eternal
freshness of whose language is bought by reification, by its strange transformation into 6.3
alien speech. Of this Baudelaire we will speak no further here. FREDRIC jAMESON

Instead, I propose two more Baudelaire-simulacra-each identical with the last, and
yet each slightly, oddly, distinct: these are the Baudelaire inaugural poet of high modern-
ism (of a today extinct high modernism, I would want to add), and the Baudelaire of post-
modernism, of our own immediate age, of consumer society, the Baudelaire of the society
of the spectacle or the image. As my title suggests, I will attempt a reading of this society in
our present (and of the Baudelaire it deserves) in terms of the machine and the simula-
crum, of the return of something like the "sublime." This will then be a speculative and
prophetic exercise. I feel on more solid ground with that older period about which we are
gradually reaching some general consensus, namely the long life and destiny of high mod-
ernism, about which it is safe to assert that one of its fundamental events concerned what
we now call the "referent." It is therefore in terms of the disappearance of this last, its
eclipse or abolition-better still, its gradual waning and extinction-that we will make
our first approach to the poetic text.
CHANT D'AUTOMNE, PART I.

Bien tot no us plongerons dans les fro ides tenebres;

Adieu, vive clarte de nos etes trop courts!
)'entends deja tomber avec des chocs funebres
Le bois retentissant sur le pave des cours.

Tout l'hiver va rentrer dans mon etre: colere,

Haine, frissons, horreur, labeur dur et force,
Et, com me le solei! dans son enfer polaire,
Mon coeur ne sera plus qu'un bloc rouge et glace.

)'ecoute en fremissant chaque buche qui tombe;

L'echafaud qu'on batit n'a pas d'echo plus sourd.
Mon esprit est pareil a !a tour qui succombe
Sous les coups du belier infatigable et lou rd.

II me semble, berce par ce choc monotone,

Qu'on cloue en grande hate un cercueil quelque part.
Pour qui?-C' eta it hier I' ete; voice l'automne!
Ce bruit mysterieux sonne comme un depart.

[Autumnal
Soon cold shadows will close over us
and summer's transitory gold be gone;
I hear them chopping firewood in our court-
the dreary thud oflogs on cobblestone.

Winter will come to repossess my soul

with rage and outrage, horror, drudgery,
and like the sun in its polar holocaust
my heart will be a block of blood-red ice.

I listen trembling to that grim tattoo-

build a gallows, it would sound the same.
 352 My mind becomes a tower giving way
under the impact of a battering-ram.
SECTION 6
Stunned by the strokes, I seem to hear, somewhere,
FRANKFURT SCHOOL
a coffin hurriedly hammered shut-for whom?
AND AFTER
Summer was yesterday; autumn is here!
1
Strange how that sound rings out like a farewell.]

Three experiences (to begin modestly, with the common sense language of everyday
life)-three experiences come together in this text: one is a feeling of some kind, strong
and articulated, yet necessarily nameless (is it to be described as "anxiety" or that very
different thing, "sadness," and in that case what do we do with that other curious compo-
nent of eagerness, anticipation, curiosity, which begins to interfere with those two other
affective tones as we reach the so characteristic final motif of the "depart"-voyage and
adventure, as well as death?). I will have little to say about this affective content of the
poem, since, virtually by definition, the Baudelaire that interests us here is no longer
the Baudelaire of an aesthetic of expression: an aesthetic in which some pre-given and
identifiable psychological event is then, in a second moment, laid out and expressed in
poetic language. It seems to me at least conceivable that the poetic producer may have
thought of his work here in terms of some residual category of expression and expressive-
ness. If so, he has triumphantly (if even against his own will) undermined and subverted
that now archaic category: I will only observe that as the putative "feeling" or "emotion"
becomes slowly laid out in words and phrases, in verses and stanzas, it is transformed
beyond all recognition, becomes lost to the older psychological lexicon (full of names for
states of mind we recognize in advance), or, to put it in our own contemporary jargon, as
it becomes transmuted into a verbal text, it ceases to be psychological or affective in any
sense of the word, and now exists as something else.
So with this mention we will now leave psychology behind us. But I have suggested
that two more "experiences" lend their raw material to this text, and we must now register
their banal, informing presence: these are, evidently, a season-fall, the approach of a
dreary winter which is also and even more strongly the death of summer itself; and
alongside that, a physical perception, an auditory event or experience, the hollow sound
of logs and firewood being delivered in the inner courtyard of the Parisian dwelling.
Nature on the one hand, the city, the Urban, on the other, and a moment in the inter-
relationship of these two great contraries in which the first, the archaic cyclical time of
an older agriculture and an older countryside, is still capable of being transmitted
through what negates it, namely the social institutions of the City itself, the trium-
phantly un- or anti-natural.
One is tempted, faced with this supreme antithesis between country and city, with
this inner contradiction in the raw material of Baudelaire's text between precapitalist so-
ciety and the new industrial metropolis of nascent capital, to evoke one of the great aes-
thetic models of modern times, that of Heidegger, in the "Origins of the Work of Art."
Heidegger there describes the effect and function of the "authentic" work of art as the in-
auguration of a "rift" between what he calls World and Earth: what I will rewrite in terms
of the dimensions of History and the social project on one hand, and of Nature or matter
on the other-ranging from geographical or ecological constraint all the way to the indi-
vidual body. The force ofHeidegger's description lies in the way in which the gap between
these two incommensurable dimensions at once, in some irreconcilable of body and
spirit, or that of private and public. We are at all moments in History and in matter; at one
and the same time historical beings and "natural" ones, living in the meaning-endowment
of the historical project as well as in the meaninglessness of organic life. No synthesis- 353
either conceptual or experiential, let alone symbolic-is conceivable between these two
disjoined realms; or rather, the production of such conceptual synthesis (in which, say, 6.3
History would be passed off as "natural," or Nature obliterated in the face of History) is FREDRIC jAMESON

very properly the production of ideology, or of "metaphysics" as it is very properly the pro-
duction of ideology, or of "metaphysics" as it is often called. The work of art can therefore
never "heal" this rift: nothing can do that. What is misconceived is, however, the idea that
it ought to be healed: we have here indeed three positions and not two. It is not a question
of tension versus resolution, but rather of repression and forgetfulness, of the sham resolu-
tion of metaphysics, and then of that third possibility, a divided consciousness that
strongly holds together what it separates, a moment of awareness in which difference re-
lates. This is then, for Heidegger, the vocation of the work of art: to stage this irreconcil-
able tension between History and Nature in such a way that we live within it and affirm
its reality as tension, gap, rift, distance. Heidegger goes on to assimilate this inaugural
"poetic" act with the comparable acts of philosophy (the deconcealment of being) and
of political revolution (the inauguration of a new society, the invention of new social
relations).
It is an attractive and powerful account, and one can read "Chant d'automne" in this
way, as staging the fateful gap between organic death, the natural cycle, and the urban,
which here greatly expands beyond the city, to include the repressive institutions of soci-
ety generally, capital execution, war, ceremonial burial, and finally, most mysterious, the
faint suggestion of the nomadic, of the "voyage" which seems to mark the interface be-
tween nature and human society. One can read the poem in that way, but at what price?
This is the moment to say that the limits of Heidegger's grand conception are less to
be found in its account of the poetic act than in its voluntaristic implications for that
other act, the act of reception or of reading. Let us assume that the poet-or the artist
generally-is always in a position to open World and Earth in this fashion (it is not a dif-
ficult assumption to make, since "real" poetry does this by definition, for Heidegger, and
art which does not do so is therefore not "really" art in the first place). The problem arises
when the reader's turn comes, and in a fallen, secular or reified society is called upon (not
least by Heidegger himself) to reinvent this inaugural and well-nigh ritualistic act. Is this
always possible? Or must we take into account specific historical conditions of possibility
which open or close such a reading? I pass over Heidegger's own sense of historical pos-
sibility in the fateful and unnameable moment in which he elaborated this meditation
(1935). What is clear is that even this meditation must now return us to the historical in
the drearier humdrum sense of the constraints, the situation, which limits possibility and
traces the outer boundary even of that more transcendent vision of History as World.
So we now return to the narrower historical situation of this particular Baudelaire,
which is the situation of nascent high modernism. Conventional wisdom already defines
this for us in a certain number of ways: it is the moment, the Barthes of Writing Degree
Zero tells us, of the passage from rhetoric to style, from a shared collective speech to the
uniqueness of privacy of the isolated monad and the isolated body. It is also the moment,
as we know, of the break-up of the older social groups, and not least those relatively ho-
mogeneous reading publics to whom, in the writer's contract, certain relatively stable
signals can be sent. Both of these descriptions then underscore a process of social frag-
mentation, the atomization of groups and neighborhoods, the slow and stealthy dissolu-
tion of a host of different and coexisting collective formations by a process unique to the
logic of capital which my tradition calls reification: the market equivalency in which little
by little units are produced, and in the very act by which they are made equivalent to one
 354 another are thereby irrevocably separated as well, like so many identical squares on a
spatial grid.
SECTION 6 I would like to describe this situation, the situation of the poet-the situation this
FRANKFURT ScHoOL particular Baudelaire must resolve, in obedience to its constraints and contradictions-in
AND AFTER a somewhat different, yet related way, as the simultaneous production and effacement of
the referent itself. The latter can only be grasped as what is outside language, what lan-
guage or a certain configuration of language seems to designate, and yet, in the very mo-
ment of indication, to project beyond its own reach, as something transcendental to it.
The referent in "Chant d'automne" is not particularly mysterious or difficult of ac-
cess: it is simply the body itself, or better still, the bodily sensorium. Better yet, it is the
bodily perception-better still, even more neutral a term, the sensation-which mobilizes
the body as its instrument of perception and brings the latter into being over against it.
The referent here is then simply a familiar sound, the hollow reverberation of logs strik-
ing the courtyard paving. Yet familiar for whom? Everything, and the very mysteries of
modernism itself, turn on this word, about which we must admit, in a first moment, that
it no longer applies to any contemporary readership. But in a second moment, I will be
less concerned to suggest ways in which, even for Baudelaire's contemporaries, such a
reference might have been in the process of becoming exotic or obscure, than rather to
pose as a principle of social fragmentation the withdrawal of the private or the individual
body from social discourse.
We might sharpen the problem of reference by prolonging positivist psychology itself-
rigorously coeval with high modernism-and imagining the visual and graphic registra-
tion of this unique sound, whose "real nature"-that is to say, whose name-we could
never guess from looking at its complex spatial pattern. Such registrations perpetuate the
old positivist myth of something like a pure atomic sensation in the then nascent pseudo-
science of psychology-a myth which in the present context I prefer to read as a symptom
of what is happening to the body itself.
For this once "familiar" sound is now driven back inside the body of Baudelaire: a
unique event taking place there and utterly alien to anything whose "experience" we might
ourselves remember, a something which has lost its name, and which has no equivalents:
as anonymous and indescribable as a vague pain, as a peculiar residual taste in the mouth,
as a limb falling asleep. The semioticians know well this strange seam between the body
and language, as when they study the most proximate naming systems-the terms for
wine-tasting, say-or examine the ways in which a physician translates his patients' fum-
bling expressions into the technical code of nosology.
But it is this that must now be historicized. I would like to make an outrageous (or at
least, as they say, unverifiable) generalization, namely that before Baudelaire and Flaubert
there are no physical sensations in literature. This does not quite mean advancing a
proposition so sweeping as one which might be expressed, parodying Lionel Trilling,
namely, that on or around 1857 we must presume a fundamental mutation in human na-
ture. It does mean, more modestly, and on the side of the object (or the literary raw mate-
rial), that free-floating bodily perception was not, until now, felt to be a proper content for
literary language (you will get a larger historical sense of this by expanding such data to
include experiences like that of anxiety-Kierkegaard is after all the contemporary of
these writers). And it means, on the side of the subject, or of literary language itself, that
the older rhetoric was somehow fundamentally nonperceptual, and had not yet "pro-
duced" the referent in our current sense: this is to say that even where we are confronted
with what look like masses of sense data-the most convenient example will be, perhaps,
Balzac, with his elaborate descriptions, that include the very smell of his rooms-those
apparently perceptual notations, on closer examination, prove to be so many signs. In the 355
older rhetorical apparatus, in other words, "physical sensation" does not meet the opacity
of the body, but is secretly transparent, and always means something else-moral quali- 6.3
ties, financial or social status, and so forth. Perceptual language only emerges in the ruins FREDRIC jAMESON

of that older system of signs, that older assimilation of contingent bodily experience to
the transparency of meaning. The problem, however, and what complicates the descrip-
tion enormously, is that language never ceases to attempt to reabsorb and recontain con-
tingency; that in spite of itself, it always seeks to transform that scandalous and irreduc-
ible content back into something like meaning. Modernism will then be a renewed effort
to do just that, but one which, faced with the collapse of the older system of rhetorical
language and traditional literary meaning, will set itself a new type of literary meaning,
which I will term symbolic reunification.
But now we must observe this process at work in our poetic exhibit. The irreducible,
the sonorous vibration, with its peculiar hollowness and muffled impact, is here a pure
positivity which must be handled or managed in some fashion. This will first be attempted
metonymically, by tracing the association of this positive yet somehow ominous sound
with something else, which is defined as absence, loss, death-namely the ending of sum-
mer. For reasons I will develop later on, it seems useful to formulate this particular axis-
positivity/negativity-as one of the two principal operative grids of the poem, the other
being the obvious and well-known movement between metonymy and metaphor. The
latter will then be the second option of the poetic process: the pure sensation will now be
classed metaphorically, by way of analogies and similarities: it is (like) the building of a
scaffold, the sound of the battering ram, the nailing up of a coffin. What must be noted
here is that this alternate route, whereby the sensation is processed metaphorically rather
than metonymically, also ends up in negativity, as though the poetic imagination met
some barrier or loop which fatally prevents it from reaching relief or salvation.
This is of course not altogether true: and a complete reading of the poem (not my pur-
pose here) would want to underscore the wondrous reappearance of the place of the sub-
ject in the next line-the na!ve and miraculous, "Pour qui?" and the utter restructuration
of the temporal system, in which the past is now abandoned, the new present-now de-
fined, not negatively as the end of the summer, but positively, as autumn-reaffirmed to
the point at which the very sense datum of the sound itself becomes a promise rather than
a fatality.
Let me now rapidly try to theorize the two principal strands of the argument, the one
having to do with the production of the "referent," the other with the emergence of mod-
ernism. In "Chant d'automne" at least-and I don't want to generalize the model in any
unduly dogmatic way-the high modernist strategy can be detected in the move from the
metonymic reading of the sense datum to the attempt to reabsorb it in some new sym-
bolic or metaphorical meaning-a symbolic meaning of a type very different from the
older transparencies of the rhetorical sign to which I have already referred. What I have
not yet sufficiently stressed is the way in which this high modernist or symbolic move is
determined by the crisis of the reading public and by the social fragmentation from
which the latter springs. Given that crisis, and the already tendential privatization and
monadization of the isolated individuals who used to make up the traditional publics,
there can no longer be any confidence in some shared common recognition of the mysteri-
ous sense datum, the hollow sound, which is the "referent" of the poetic text: the multipli-
cation of metaphorical analogies is therefore a response to such fragmentation, and seeks
to throw out a range of scattered frameworks in which the various isolated readers can be
expected to find their bearings. Two processes are therefore here at work simultaneously:
 356 the sound is being endowed with a multiplicity of possible receptions, but as that new
multi-faceted attack on a fragmented readership is being projected (something whose ul-
SEcTJON 6 timate stage will be described in Umberto Eco's Open Work), something else is taking
FRANKFURT ScHooL place as well, namely the emergence of a new type of symbolic meaning, symbolic recu-
AND AFTER peration, which will at length substitute itself for an older common language and shared
rhetoric of what it might be too complicated to describe as a "realistic" kind.
This crisis in readership then returns us to our other theme, namely the production of
the referent: a paradoxical way of putting it, you will say, since my ostensible topic was
rather the "eclipse" or the "waning," the "disappearance" of the referent. I don't want to
be overly subtle about all this, but it seems to me very important to understand that these
two things are the same. The "production" of the referent-that is the sense of some new
unnameable ungeneralizable private bodily sensation-something that must necessarily
resist all language but which language lives by designating-is the same as the "bracket-
ing" of that referent, its positioning as the "outside" of the text or the "other" of language.
The whole drama of modernism will lie here indeed, in the way in which its own peculiar
life and logic depend on the reduction of reference to an absolute minimum and on the
elaboration, in the former place of reference, of complex symbolic and often mythical
frameworks and scaffolding: yet the latter depend on preserving a final tension between
text and referent, on keeping alive one last shrunken point of reference, like a dwarf sun
still glowing feebly on the horizon of the modernist text.
When that ultimate final point of reference vanishes altogether, along with the
final desperate ideology-existentialism-which will attempt to theorize "reference"
and "contingency"-then we are in post-modernism, in a now wholly textual world from
which all the pathos of the high modernist experience has vanished away-the world of
the image, of textual free-play, the world of consumer society and its simulacra.
To this new aesthetic we must now turn, for as I suggested it also knows remarkable
anticipations in the work of Baudelaire. There would of course be many ways of ap-
proaching post-modernism, of which we have not even time enough to make a provi-
sional inventory. In the case of Baudelaire, one is rather tempted to proceed as follows, by
recalling the great dictum of the Philosopher already mentioned, "Language is the house
of being." The problem then posed by post-modernism, or more narrowly by the question
of what happens when Language is only the apartment of Being; when the great urban
fact and anti-nature, spreads and abolishes the "path through the field" and the very
space and coordinates of some Heideggerian ontological poetry are radically called into
question.
Consider the following lines, for example, from "Alchimie de !a douleur":

Et sur les celestes rivages

)e batis de grands sarcophages.

[to shroud my cherished dead,

and on celestial shores I build
enormous sepulchers.F

The entire poem amounts to a staging of or meditation on the curious dialectic of Baude-
laire's poetic process, and the way in which its inner logic subverts itself and inverts its
own priorities, something these concluding lines suggest rather well. It is as though the
imagination, on its way toward opening, or toward the gratifications of some positive and
well-nigh infinite wish-fulfillment, encountered something like a reality principle of the
imagination or fantasy itself. Not the transfigured nature of the wish-fulfillments of para-
dise, but rather the ornate, stubborn, material reality of the coffin: the poetic imagination 357
here explicitly criticizes itself, and systematically, rigorously, undermines its first im-
pulse, then in a second moment substituting a different kind of gratification, that of arti- 6.3
sana! or handicraft skill, the pleasures of the construction of material artifacts. The role FREDRIC jAMESON

of the essentially nostalgic ideal of handicraft labor in Flaubert and Baudelaire has often
been rehearsed; as has Baudelaire's fascination for un- or anti-natural materials, most
notably glass, which Sartre has plausibly read as part of a whole nineteenth-century
middle-class ideology of" distinction," of the repression of the organic and the constric-
tion of the natural body. But this essentially subjective symbolic act, in which human
craft manufacture is mobilized in a repression of the body, the natural, the organic itself,
ought not to exclude a more "objective" analysis of the social history of those materials,
particularly in nineteenth century building and furnishings, a perspective which will be
appropriate for our second exhibit, "La Mort des amants."
Nous aurons des !its pleins d'odeurs legeres,
Des divans profonds com me des tombeaux,
Et d' etranges fleurs sur des etageres,
Ecloses pour no us so us des cieux plus beaux.

Usant a l'envi leurs chaleurs dernieres,

Nos deux coeurs seront deux vastes flambeaux,
Qui reflechiront leurs doubles lumieres
Dans nos deux esprits, ces miroirs jumeaux.

Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique,

Nous echangerons un eclair unique,
Comme un long sanglot, tout charge d'adieux;

Et plus tard un Ange, entr'ouvrant Ies partes,

Viendra rani mer, fidele et joyeux
Les miroirs tern is et les flammes mortes.

[The Death of Lovers

We shall have richly scented beds-
couches deep as graves, and rare
flowers on the shelves will bloom
for us beneath a lovelier sky.

Emulously spending their last

warmth, our hearts will be as two
torches reflecting their double fires
in the twin mirrors of our minds.

One evening, rose and mystic blue,

we shall exchange a single glance,
a long sigh heavy with farewells;

and then an Angel, unlocking doors

will come, loyal and gay, to bring
the tarnished mirrors back to life.P

I am tempted to be brutally anachronistic, and to underscore the affinities between this

curious interior scene and the procedures of contemporary photorealism, one of whose
privileged subjects is not merely the artificial-in the form of gleaming luxury streets of
 358 automobiles (battered or mint)-but above all, interior scenes, furnishings without peo-
ple, and most notably bathrooms, notoriously of all the rooms in the house the least sup-
SECTION 6 plied with anthropomorphic objects.
FRANKFURT ScHooL Baudelaire's sonnet is also void of human beings: the first person plural is explicitly
AND AFTER displaced from the entombed chamber by the future tense of the verbs; and even where
that displacement weakens, and as the future comes residually to fill up the scene in spite
of itself, the twin protagonists are swiftly transformed into furnishings in their own
right-candelabra and mirrors, whose complex fourway interplay is worthy of the most
complicated visual illustrations of Jacques La can.
But I am tempted to go even further than this and to underscore the evident paradox-
even more, the formal scandal-of the conclusion of this poem, whose affective euphoria
(and its literal meaning) conveys the resurrection of the lovers, while its textual elements
in effect produce exactly the opposite, the reawakening of an empty room from which the
lovers are henceforth rigorously absent. It is as though the text had profited from the sur-
face or manifest movement of its narrative toward the wish-fulfillment of resurrection, to
secure a very different unconscious solution, namely extinction, by means of assimilation
to the dead (albeit refurbished) boudoir. Here "interior" knows its apotheosis, in very
much the spirit of Adorno's pages on Kierkegaard where the passion for Biedermeier fur-
nishings and enclosed space becomes the symbolic enactment of that new realm of the
private, the personal, of subjective or inner life. 4
Yet Baudelaire goes a good deal further than Kierkegaard in this historical respect,
and we will not do proper justice to this glorious poem without registering the properly
dreadful nature of its contents: what is tactfully conveyed here is indeed to be identified as
the worst Victorian kitsch already on its way to the modulation of fin de siecle decadence,
as most notably in the proto-Mallarmean flowers, of which we can at least minimally be
sure that "in real life" they are as garish as anything Des Esseintes might have surrounded
himself with. Even the "soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique" is mediated by the most doubt-
ful pre-Raphaelite taste, if I may use so moralizing a word.
Now this presents us with an interesting axiological problem, as the philosophers would
say: in our en grained Cartesian ism, it is always difficult to imagine how a whole might pos-
sess value whose individual parts are all worthless; meanwhile, our critical and aesthetic
traditions systematically encourage us in a kind of slavish habit of apologia in which,
faced with a text of great value, we find ourselves rationalizing all of its more questionable
elements and inventing ingenious reasons why these too are of value. But culture is often
more complicated and interesting than this; and I must here briefly invoke one of the
most brilliant pages in what remains I think Jean-Paul Sartre's greatest single book, Saint
Genet, whose riches, remarkably, have still been little explored: most notably the section
in which he reveals the inner hollowness of Genet's sumptuous style. The principal cate-
gory of Sartre's analysis is the concept of "le toe" -the phony, the garish, that which is in
and of itself and in its very essence in bad taste, all the way from religious emblems and the
Opera of Paris, to the cheapest excesses of horrific popular thrillers, porn ads, and the
junk adornments and heavy makeup of drag queens. In Genet, as Sartre shows us, the ac-
quired mental habits of Bossuet's style and classical rhetorical periods reorder and stamp
these tawdry materials with the tarnished aura of the sublime, in an operation whose
deepest inner logic is that of ressentiment and of the imperceptible subversion of the bour-
geois reader's most cherished values.
Baudelaire, of course, represents a very different order of elegance; his mastery of the
raw material of bad taste will be more tactful and allusive, more refined; nor do I wish to
follow Sartre along the lines of an analysis of individual or biographical impulses in this
writer. Nonetheless, there are curious analogies between the Sartrean analysis and this 359
extraordinary apotheosis of what should otherwise be an oppressively sumptuous inte-
rior, whose very blossoms are as asphyxiating as a funeral parlor, and whose space is as 6.3
properly funereal as the worst Victorian art photographs. These characterizations are FREDRIC jAMESON

not, clearly, chosen at random: the logic of the image here conveys death and the funereal
through its very tawdriness, at the same moment in which the words of the narrative af-
firm euphoria and the elation of hope.
We have a contemporary equivalent for this kind of stylistic operation, which must be
set in place here: and this is the whole properly poststructural language which Susan Son-
tag was the first to identify as "camp," 5 the "hysterical sublime," from Cocteau and Hart
Crane to Jack Spicer and David Bowie, a kind of peculiar exhilaration of the individual
subject unaccountably generated by the trash and junk materials of a fallen and unre-
deemable commodity culture. Camp is indeed our way of living within the junkyard of
consumer society and positively flourishing there: it is to be seen in the very gleam and
glitter of the automobile wrecks of photorealist paintings, in the extraordinary capacity
of our own cultural language to redeem an object world and a cultural space by holding
firmly to their surfaces (in mechanisms which Christopher Lasch and others would no
doubt identify as "narcissistic"). Camp, better than anything else, underscores one of the
most fateful differences between high modernism and post-modernism, and one which
is also, I believe, operative in this strange poem of Baudelaire: namely what I will call the
disappearance of affect, the utter extinction of that pathos or even tragic spirit with
which the high moderns lived their torn and divided condition, the repression even of
anxiety itself-supreme psychic experience of high modernism-and its unaccountable
reversal and replacement by a new dominant feeling tone: the high, the intensity, exhila-
ration, euphoria, a final form of the Nietzschean Dionysiac intoxication which has be-
come as banal and institutionalized as your local disco or the thrill with which you buy
a new-model car.
This strange new-historically new-feeling or affective tone of late capitalism may
now be seen as something like a return of the "sublime" in the sense in which Edmund
Burke first perceived and theorized it at the dawn of capital. Like the "sublime" (and the
"anxiety"), the exhilaration of which we are speaking is not exactly an emotion or a feel-
ing, not a way of living an object, but rather somehow detached from its contents-
something like a disposition of the subject which takes a particular object as a mere occasion:
this is the sense in which the Deleuze-Guattari account of the emergence, the momentary
and fitful sunburst of the individual psychological subject has always seemed exceedingly
relevant:

Something on the order of a subject can be discerned on the recording surface: a strange
subject, with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs, yet always
remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines, being defined by the share of the product
it takes for itself, garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward, in the form of a becom-
ing or an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new
state: "c'est done moi, c'est done a moi! ... " The subject is produced as a mere residue
alongside the desiring machines: a conjunctive synthesis of consumption in the form of a
wonderstruck: "c' eta it done ~a!""

Such an account has the additional merit of linking up with the great Lacanian theme of
"second death," 7 and of suggesting why death and resurrection should have been so
stimulating a fantasy-material for a poet intent on capturing the highs and the "eleva-
tions" of an intermittent experience of subjectivity. If the subject exists always and only
 360 in the moment of rebirth, then the poetic fantasy or narrative process must necessarily
first work its way along the path of death, in order to merit this unique "bonus of pleasure"
SECTION 6 whose place is carefully prepared in advance for it in the empty, dusted, polished, flower-
FRANKFURT ScHooL laden chamber. And the latter is of course, for us, as readers, the poem itself: the chamber
AND AFTER of the sonnet, Donne's "pretty room," waiting to be the faithful (and joyous) occasion of
our own brief, fitful, punctual exhilaration as subjects: "c'est done moi, c'est done a moi!''
Burke's problem, as he confronted an analogous and historically equally new form of
affect-the sublime-was to find some explanation-not for our aesthetic pleasure in the
pleasurable, in "beauty," in what could plausibly gratify the human organism on its own
scale, but rather for our aesthetic delight in spectacles which would seem symbolically to
crush human life and to dramatize everything which reduces the individual human be-
ing and the individual subject to powerlessness and nothingness. Burke's solution was to
detect, within this peculiar aesthetic experience, a relationship to being that might as
well have been described as epistemological or even ontological (and incidentally a
logic which is rigorously un- or a-symmetrical to that of his other term, "beauty"): as-
tonishment, stupor, terror-these are some of the ways in which the individual glimpses
a force which largely transcends human life and which Burke can only identify with the
Godhead or the divine. The aesthetic reception of the sublime is then something like a
pleasure in pain, in the tightening of the muscles and the adrenaline rush of the in-
stinct of self-preservation, with which we greet such frightening and indeed devastat-
ing spectacles.
What can be retained from this description is the notion of the sublime as a relation-
ship of the individual subject to some fitfully or only intermittently visible force which,
enormous and systematized, reduces the individual to helplessness or to that ontological
marginalization which structuralism and poststructuralism have described as a "decen-
tering" where the ego becomes little more than an "effect of structure." But it is no longer
necessary to evoke the deity to grasp what such a transindividual system would be.
What has happened to the sublime since the time of Burke-although he judiciously
makes a place of a concept which can be most useful to us in the present context, namely
the "artificial infinite"-is that it has been transferred from nature to culture, or the ur-
ban. The visible expression of the suprapersonal mode of production in which we live is
the mechanical, the artificial, the machine; and we have only to remember the "sublime"
of yesterday, the exhilaration of the futurists before the machine proper-the motorcar,
the steamship liner, the machine gun, the airplane-to find some initial contemporary
equivalent of the phenomenon Burke first described. One may take his point about self-
preservation, and nonetheless wish to formulate this affective mechanism a little more
sharply: I would have said myself that in the face of the horror of what systematically di-
minishes human life it becomes possible simply to change the valence on one's emotion,
to replace the minus sign with a plus sign, by a Nietzschean effort of the will to convert
anxiety into that experience physiologically virtually identical with it which is eagerness,
anticipation, anxious affirmation. And indeed, in a situation of radical impotence, there
is really little else to do than that, to affirm what crushes you and to develop one's capacity
for gratification in an environment which increasingly makes gratification impossible.
But futurism was an experiment in what Reyner Banham has called the "first ma-
chine age": we now live in another, whose machines are not the glorious and streamlined
visible vehicles and silhouettes which so exhilarated Le Corbusier, but rather computers,
whose outer shell has no emblematic or visual power. Our own machines are those of re-
production; and an exhilaration which would attach itself to them can no longer be the
relatively representational idolatry of the older engines and turbines, but most open some
access, beyond representation, to processes themselves, and above all the processes of 361
reproduction-movie cameras, videos, tape recorders, the whole world of the production
and reproduction of the image and of the simulacrum, and of which the smeared light and 6.3
multireflective glass of the most elegant post-contemporary films or buildings is an ade- FREDRIC jAMESON

quate analogon. I cannot, of course, pursue this theory of post-modernism in any more
detail here;8 but returning one last time to "La Mort des amants" it is appropriate to see in
the play of mirrors and lights of the funereal chamber some striking and mysterious an-
ticipation of a logic of the future, a logic far more consonant with our own social moment
than with that of Baudelaire. In that then, as in so much else, he is, perhaps unfortunately
for him, our contemporary.

NOTES

1. Charles Baudelaire, "Chant d'autonmne" I, in 5· Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp," in Against

Les Fleurs du mal (1857; Paris, 1958), p. 61. All Interpretation and Other Essays (New York, 1966).
subsequent references will be to this edition. pp. 275-92.
Translation by Richard Howard, "Autumnal!," in 6. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, The
Les Fleur du Mal: The Complete Text of the Flowers Anti-Oedipus: Criticism and Schizophrenia, trans.
of Evil in a New Translation (Boston, 1982), pp. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane
61-62. All subsequent translations will be from this (New York, 1977), p. 16.
edition. 7· jacques Lacan, "Kant avec Sade," in Ecrits
2. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, p. 82. Transla- (Paris, 1971), 2:119-48.
tion, p. 78. 8. But see, for a more complete discussion, my
3. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, p. 149. "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Translation, p. 149. Capitalism," New Left Review, 146 (July-August
4. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard (Frankfurt 1984). 53-92.
am Main, 1974).

In Memory of the Pterodactyl: The 6.4

Limits of Lyric Humanism (2001)
DREW MILNE

Theodor Adorno's essay "On Lyric Poetry and Society" argues that "the lyric work is al-
ways the subjective expression of a social antagonism," 1 but what of lyric's constitutive
inhumanity, its relation to non-human nature? According to Adorno, the first person 'T'
whose voice is heard in lyric expresses an individual particularity which is opposed to the
collectivity of human nature. There is then a tension or lack of identity in the illusory im-
mediacy of subjective experience in lyric poetry. The voice that seems most human ex-
presses the immediacy of human nature but does so as an expression of the historical
struggle to humanize nature in language. As Adorno puts it, the "I" whose voice is heard
"is not immediately at one with the nature to which its expression refers." Accordingly,
"It is only through humanization that nature is to be restored the rights that human
 362 domination took from it. The greatest lyric works in our language, owe their quality to the
force with which the T creates the illusion of nature emerging from alienation." 2 As
SEcnoN 6 Adorno points out, the assumption that immediacy and subjectivity are essential to lyric
FRANKFURT ScHOOL expression is modern. Greek lyricism in the works ofSappho, Pindar and the choral odes
AND AFTER of the tragedians positions the muses closer to the gods and the mythic forces of nature.
This brief essay seeks to suggest, against the grain of Adorno's conception oflyric, that the
limits of lyric humanism remain closer to this ancient conception of lyric and the specu-
lative experience of nature.
The ur-image of the human domination of human nature for the sake oflyric experi-
ence is provided by Homer's Odyssey and the story of Odysseus bound to the mast of his
ship to hear the sirens. This image informs central arguments in the Dialectic of Enlight-
enment which Adorno wrote with Max Horkheimer. 3 Adorno and Horkheimer do not
make the connections explicit, but Adorno's essay "Parataxis" intimates the way in which
Adorno's unusual historical imagination is informed by Holderlin: "Metaphysical passiv-
ity as the substance of Holder! in's poetry is allied, in opposition to myth, with the hope
for a reality in which humanity would be free of the spell of its entanglement in nature." 4
A different source, closer to Adorno's affinities with Walter Benjamin, is provided by
Franz Kafka's parable "The Silence of the Sirens." Kafka's retelling concludes with the
mischievous suggestion that Ulysses noticed that the sirens were silent but pretended to
have heard the sirens as a sort of shield. 5
Who or what are the sirens? If the nature of these creatures of the imagination is be-
yond the limits of human perception, myth nevertheless imagines them as feminine,
winged creatures. The sirens lose their allure if they are imagined as singing mermaids of
the sky, or as condors of the mediterranean. Pictorial representation or physical embodi-
ment of the sources of sublime sound is fraught with the risk of bathos. As opera singers
so often demonstrate, opera sounds better with the eyes shut. Where the thematics of
lyric are used as a tool of erotic seduction, as with pop songs, the presence of the singer
can be an added attraction. With lyric poetry of the page, however, there is a necessary
awkwardness when a lyric poet performs their work. As writing, lyric is freed from the
human clumsiness of speech, and in this freedom it is possible to imagine the voices of
nature beyond the human.
The sources of the imagination's siren songs are understood critically in a number of
modern poems, perhaps most beautifully in Wallace Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key
West" and its tale of the feminine voice that sings beyond the genius of the sea:

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made. 6

In this poem the humanization of the muse as a female voice of nature equivocates
with the powers of personification. The poem's blemish is the word "striding," which
somehow suggests an image of seaside health and athleticism: the physical form of the
female pronoun becomes too human. The potential for bathos would not be lessened if
the isolated figure were described as a flock of seagulls or as a bevy of bathing beauties of
the kind that enchanted Odysseus on the shores of Ithaca, or Proust's narrator at Balbec.
Such images find their critical recension in Cezanne's Bathers. Stevens nevertheless leaves
this blemish to lure the unwary poetry-lover into a false literalism. A feminized but in- 363
human lyric power of sea, song, wind and air could not be anything other than an imag-
ined projection. In this sense, the poem's pathetic fallacy composes its 'enchanting' 6.4
night to enjoy the artifice of the lyric imagination. The spell of enchantment neverthe- DREW MILNE

less hints at the illusory powers of the chanter, the incantatory web of the chanson. The
dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity in this poem is exemplary but perhaps too tidily
organized. Stevens's mask and poetic persona evades the lure of self-aggrandizing first
person sensitivity, but is a little too proud of his "idea" and of his ability to tame the
powers of nature in song.
The necessary skepticism before such visions is captured by Prufrock: "I have heard
the mermaids singing, each to each. I I do not think they will sing to me." 7 Eliot's dark
irony suggests that we drown when human voices wake us from the dream of poetry. The
limits of lyric irony are such that Prufrock's reflections on alienation from human ex-
pression seem too much like a knowingly performed identification with a nature that
cannot be known: "I should have been a pair of ragged claws I Scuttling across the floors
of silent seas." 8 In "The Waste Land" the critique of the "sylvan scene" above the antique
mantel gives voice to the raped Philomel who cries "Jug Jug" to dirty ears. 9 The myth of
Philomel's transformation into a swallow or a nightingale positions a lament for the vic-
tims of male rape within birdsong. Eliot's deliberately unpoetic "jug" intimates what
sticks in the jugular, and speaks of a distaste with the unspoken violence in tasteful repre-
sentations of classical myth. The rape victim's loss of human speech in the metamorpho-
sis from human to avian nature somehow returns from its poetic alienation in the refusal
to sing suggested by "jug." Eliot's investigation into the ruins of lyric nevertheless seems
to embrace alienation from the human world rather than working to disenchant the vio-
lence of human nature.
What makes such moments important, however, is the way they reveal the difficulty
of overcoming the lyric thematics of romanticism, perhaps most famously expressed in
the viewless wings of poesy in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." The immortal Bird of lyric
poetry may sing beyond death in the aching dreams of lyric illusion, but romanticism's
birdsongs are already sung at the limits of imaginative projection. The prophetic powers
of Shelley's west wind and the blithe spirit of the skylark are pitched at the limits of a
known estrangement from the ecstasies evoked. The crimes committed in the name of
nature's spirit find their most pointed allegorical form in Coleridge's "Rime of the An-
cient Mariner." The dead albatross of lyric projection hangs around the neck of the
would-be modernist. According to Hegel, the vocation of poetry is to liberate spirit "not
from but in feeling," 10 but romanticism's intimations of the sublimities to be felt in nature
protest too much about all the yearning. As Wordsworth puts it, the world is too much
with us, and poetry is reduced to presenting the protean dreams of Proteus and that male
mermaid Triton in the form of regret for the loss of paganism and poetry's spent powers. 11
This critique echoes in Keats's sonnet "On the Sea":

Oh ye! whose ears are dinn'd with uproar rude,

Or fed too much with cloying melody-
Sit ye near some old Cavern's Mouth, and brood
Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quir'd! 12

The affected antique spelling of "quire" might be read as a cheeky pun on choirs
and the booktrade meaning of "quire" (a set of four sheets of parchment paper). A more
plausible interpretation would put pressure on the sense of embarrassment with the
desire to have your sea-nymph cake and eat it too. You can imagine Busby Berkeley
 364 bathing babes, but the wild vulgarity of the mythic imagination needs to be tamed to
weariness.
SECTION 6 There is a comparable embarrassment with the artifice of song in a remark in Hegel's
FRANKFURT ScHooL Aesthetics which describes Gesang or songs sung domestically. The relevant passage is
AND AFTER translated by T.M. Knox as "the song proper, meant for warbling in private or for singing
in company. This does not require much substance or inner grandeur and loftiness." 13
There is a high-low opposition at work here, but the curious expression is "warbling in
private." F. P. B. Osmaston's earlier translation gives: "the genuine song intended for sing-
ing or purely musical practice, whether in private or before others. Much intelligible
content, ideal greatness and loftiness is not necessary." 14 This phrase "purely musical
practice" is footnoted with: "I presume Hegel means this by the words nur zum Triillern;
it might mean 'merely to be hummed.' "15 The doubt here is generated by the German verb
"trallern" which can mean to hum, trill or warble. It is tempting to see a grouping of ono-
matopoeic words clustered around the sound of trilling and "trill," with cognates in
French and Italian. There seems to be a poetic identity between the word and the action
of the tongue involved in saying the word. This temptation meets the thought that there
might also be some connection between "trallern" and "tra-la-la," a word which also ap-
pears to mime melodic utterance. In the context of Hegel's passage, the thought of songs
for domestic "warbling" jars in English, perhaps because "warbling" is somewhat pejora-
tive. The human songbird folds into associations with avian warblers, those small insec-
tivorous songbirds whose song has become their collective name. It seems plausible that
Hegel means something more like "humming" in private, but here too there are animistic
residues-humming birds, bees and the humdrum chores of routine work. Triillern and
its possible translations are positioned, then, between the grace notes of the nobler
human arts and the less dignified music of the private individual. "Warbling" ironically
indicates some of the social embarrassment with private singing that attaches to those
caught in the act of meditative whistling (the sign of a liar) or singing in the shower.
If there is something suspiciously ignoble, almost animalistic about such kinds of
lyric expression, this suspicion finds its inverse form in the anthropomorphic explana-
tions of birdsong. As Kant comments, "The song of the bird proclaims joyfulness and
contentment with its existence. At least this is how we interpret nature, whether anything
of the sort is its intention or not. But this interest, which we here take in beauty, absolutely
requires that it be the beauty of nature; and it disappears entirely as soon as one notices
that one has been deceived and that it is only art. What is more highly extolled by poets
than the bewitchingly beautiful song of the nightingale?" 16 Art, here, is critically con-
strued as that which is merely human and inferior to natural beauty. Kant is concerned to
distinguish the powers of human judgment as regards natural beauty, but the question of
beauty inevitably seems too anthropomorphic. One can imagine scientific experiments
designed to investigate whether birds sing because it is their "nature" to do so; whether
birdsong is predominantly the activity of male songbirds; whether birdsong functions as
a semiotics of danger-signalling, sexual display or territorial assertion; and so on. The
human perception of spirit in natural beauty nevertheless suggests the limits of scientific
reasoning, since there is evidently an unreconciled affinity between birds and humans in
such perceptions. This affinity allows the lyric poet to explore both the limits of human-
ism in our conceptions of song and the limits to disenchantment in the human domina-
tion of nature.
The thematics of disenchantment return the argument to Adorno's conception of
lyric poetry and society. Curiously, Adorno's essay chooses not to focus on the line from
Eduard Morike's "Auf einer Wanderung" that brings these questions into play: "Und eine
Stimme scheint ein Nachtingallenchor" I "And one voice seems to be a choir of nightin- 365
gales." 17 Adorno waxes somewhat lyrical and infers an identification between a girl's voice,
the muse, and the choir of nature, without quite noting the illusory projection onto nature 6.4
and femininity. A similar difficulty with sexuality and nature underlies Adorno's dialectic DREW MILNE

of enlightenment and the relation between Odysseus and the sirens. The eroticism of the
Homeric version of the myth is muted, and the spirit of wildness intimated by the image
of the sirens disguising death in alluring illusions is indeterminately dangerous. If there
is some violence in the way Horkheimer and Adorno read Homer as a parable of the capi-
talist division of labor, their reading of Odysseus's domination of human nature to
achieve a moment of aesthetic freedom now seems especially pertinent. The relevance of
their critical construction can be sensed in the way Denise Riley argues for the possibili-
ties of nonidentitarian solidarity in relation to what she calls "Lyric selves." 18 The central
chapter of The Words of Selves pursues her critical argument through a commentary on
her own poems, "The Castalian Spring, a first draught" and "Affections of the Ear." Riley
asks whether the lyric 'T' is an irretrievably outdated form. She cites The Poet's I in Archaic
Greek, ed. S. R. Sling (1990 ), to suggest the antiquity of the question. As Riley argues, "Pre-
senting the self and its fine sensibilities reaches fever pitch within some contemporary
poetics. Poetry can be heard to stagger under a weight of self-portrayal, having taken this
as its sole and proper object. Today's lyric form, frequently a vehicle for innocuous display
and confessionals, is at odds with its remoter history. What might transpire if this discon-
tinuous legacy in self-telling became the topic of a poem itself?" (R 94). Her poem "The
Castalian Spring, a first draught" explores these questions by working through some of
lyric's historical conditions of possibility: "Into the cooling air I gave tongue, my ears
blurred with the lyre I Of my larynx, its vibrato reverberant into the struck-dumb dusk"
(R 95). The poem's lyric persona identifies with a toad rather than with a nightingale, but
the reprise of alienation from anthropomorphic identification with nature generates a
moment oflyrical noise comparable to Eliot's "Jug Jug":
Could I try on that song of my sociologized self? Its
Long angry flounce, tuned to piping self-sorrow, flopped
Lax in my gullet-'But we're all bufo bufo,' I sobbed-
Suddenly charmed by community-'all warty we are.' (R 103)

Riley's other poem, "Affections of the Ear," reworks the Ovidian tale of Narcissus and
Echo to explore strategies of ironic classicism and shimmering anxieties about subjective
identifications. Part of the poetic strategy is the use of what Riley, with deliberate self-
defeating irony, calls "a chatty conversational tone" (R 94), a tone that seems closer to the
poetic theatricality of Frank O'Hara than the more classical lyricism of Holderlin, some
of whose poems Riley has translated. 19 The conversational tone sets up a dialogue be-
tween animal persona, human speech and classical myth but the domination of human
voice over the material works against the poem's uncertainties about lyric humanism. A
different exploration of lyric humanism informs the poems in Helen Macdonald's collec-
tion Shaler's Fish. Despite the fishy title, the collection is dominated by bird life thematics.
The opening poem "Taxonomy" begins: "Wren. Full song. No subsong. Call of alarm,
spreketh & ought/ damage the eyes with its form, small body, tail pricked up & beak like
a hair." 20 The quality of taxonomy involved interrupts the grammar of scientific descrip-
tion and the functional explanation of wren song. The title of a subsequent poem "Black-
bird!JackdawiTurdusiCorvus!merulalmonedula" plays with the anthropomorphic, scien-
tific language of bird-names, while the poem entitled "Hyperion to a Satellite" gives
further indications of the conflict between poetic antiquity and modern rationality. The
 366 notes to "Poem, for Bill Girden" in Keith Tuma's Anthology of Twentieth-Century British
& Irish Poetry help explain how, in Macdonald's words, "The poem responds to an article
SECTION 6 by Bill Girden I read in the falconry anthology A Bond with the Wild." 21 Wild birds ani-
FRANKFURT SCHOOL mate the poem:
AND AFTER
"This is hardly a flaw; it simply is" you say, then drop
like a lark in abeyance of song to mitigate sward.
My pen crumples into a swan, it is singing
inauthenticate myth, and not of future splendour. (M 22)

Talk of swans inevitably raises the specter of Leda and Yeats, but here the agency of
lyric writing as a form of nature (pen/quill/feather) offers an ambiguous swan song. Keith
Tuma comments that "it is not clear whether the pen wounds or becomes the swan. Might
the pen 'sing' a swan stripped of anthropomorphizing myth?" 22 The answer is that it can-
not. However much humans imagine bonds with the wild, not even poetic identification
can liberate itself from the taming of nature for human purposes. Macdonald's poetry is
intimate with such difficulties, to the extent that it seems important that her use of bird
imagery is not simply bookish but is grounded in experience. In the late 1990s she worked
for the National Avian Research Center, Abu Dhabi, breeding falcons. The authority of
experience usually seems an awkward critical ruse, and it may be that without this autho-
rial context the avian thematics would seem affected. The poems recurrently counterpose
antique fragments of poetic history with different bird-like perceptions. It becomes diffi-
cult not to over-interpret the status of wild birds and human agency where other ques-
tions might be more central. This said, the way bird similes are awkwardly humanized is
remarkable: "I am valorous in the face of such kindness, as ravens on pylons I stock doves
and the roll of limestone bulks out our version I ripping out a throat in even dreams, eyes
shut & breathing/ concentrating on the sodden lack of the heart, and its sharp depths I up
for retching on sweetness: sugar, tunes, airs, the memory of love" (M 42). Macdonald of-
fers one of the most sustained explorations of avian imagery in recent lyric poetry, and
this extends to speculative commentary on the human domination of the airwaves for
purposes of danger-signalling, sexual display and territorial assertion, from the radio
telescopes of Jodrell Bank to CNN. The poem "Earth Station" talks of: "constructing a
beautiful personal cosmology from the inclination I of space and communicative links,
where the dishes' upturned curves/ represent immortality and such, so that nights long
they could be watched I as the band of microwave radiation pushed up through low
cloud// as ravens slope-soaring on the updraught from the dish's face" (M 58). The evasive
"and such" seals the energy of uncertain identification. To imagine birds as ancient as ra-
vens adapting to large dishes (hyperion to a satellite-dish) within a speculative cosmology
prompts thoughts on the history of avian life and modern aviation. I'm reminded of Hans
Blumenberg's The Genesis of the Copernican World, and his account of the cosmology of the
heavens and anthropomorphic geocentrism. 23
In Sappho's lyrical world, the chariot of Venus is pulled by sparrows. In Macdonald's
world, mythic images have metamorphosed into intimations of the limits of human song.
Hegel's chosen image to represent the flight of philosophy was the Owl of Minerva. But as
well as providing the figurative resources of the classical muses, the Greek language also
persists in the supposedly technical language of poetry and scientific taxonomy. Consider
the etymology of the Pterodactyl: pteron is the Greek word for wing, and dactylos is the
Greek for finger. Nineteenth-century science named these dinosaur birds with words that
also find their way in classical prosody. If poetry is the language of winged words, then po-
etry has a curious affinity with these ancient creatures. Some birds sing with a sweetness
recognizable to humans, while others, such as croaking crows and ravens, make sounds 367
that seem haunted by ancient terrors, terrors perhaps most vivid in the popular imagina-
tion thanks to Hitchcock's film The Birds. What would a poetics of the birds of ill omen 6.4
sound like? Perhaps, at the limits of lyric humanism, the significance of poetic birdsong DREW MILNE

needs to be extended to hear the ancient ghosts and laments of the pterodactyl.

NOTES

1. T. W. Adorno, "On Lyric Poetry and Society," 12. john Keats, "On the Sea", The Poetical Works
Notes to Literature, vo!. 1, trans. Shierry Weber of john Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman (London:
Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, Oxford University Press, 1907), p. 295.
1991), pp. 37-54 (p. 45). 13. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T.M. Knox, vol. II,
2. Adorno, "On Lyric Poetry and Society," p. 41. p. 1143·
3. T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic 14. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art,
of Enlightenment, trans. john Cumming (London: trans. F. P. B. Osmaston, 4 vols., (London: G. Bell,
Verso, 1979), esp. "Excursus 1: Odysseus or Myth 1920), vol. IV, p. 230.
and Enlightenment," pp. 43-80. For a critique, see 15. Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F.P.B.
)iirgen Habermas, "The Entwinement of Myth and Osmaston, vol. IV, p. 230.
Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor 16. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of
Adorno," The Philosophical Discourse of Moder- judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and
nity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University
1987), pp. 106-130. Press, 2000), pp. 181-2.
4· T. W. Adorno, "Parataxis: On Holderlin's Late 17. Poem and translation quoted in Adorno, "On
Poetry," Notes to Literature, vo!. 2, trans. Shierry Lyric Poetry and Society", p. 47·
Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University 18. Denise Riley, The Words of Selves: Identifica-
Press, 1992), pp. 109-149 (p. 149). tion, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford, CA: Stanford
5. See Franz Kafka, "The Silence of the Sirens," University Press, 2000). References hereafter
trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, The Collected Short abbreviated to Rand page no.
Stories of Franz Kafka, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer 19. See Denise Riley, "Versions of six poems by
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), pp. 430-2. Friedrich Holder lin (1770-1843)," Dry Air (London:
6. Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key Virago, 1985), pp. 33-41.
West," Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 20. Helen Macdonald, Shaler's Fish (Buckfastle-
1955), pp. !28-30 (pp.129-30). igh: Etruscan, 2001), p. 7. References hereafter
7. T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of ).Alfred abbreviated to M and page no.
Prufrock," Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (London: 21. Keith Tuma, ed., Anthology of Twentieth-
Faber and Faber, 1974), pp. 13-17 (p. q). Century British & Irish Poetry (New York: Oxford
8. Eliot, "Prufrock," p. 15. University Press, 2001), p. 934·
9· Eliot, "The Waste Land," Collected Poems, 22. Tuma, p. 931.
pp. 61-92 (p. 66). 23. Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the
10. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Copernican World, trans. Robert M. Wallace
Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1987). On the themat-
vols., vol. II, p. m2. ics of mythic residues more generally, see also
11. William Wordsworth, "The world is too much Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans.
with us," William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 270. 1985).
6.5 The Lyric in Exile (2004)
STATHIS GOURGOURIS

to the memory of Edward Said

This essay belongs to a series of writings on what I call "transgressive listening." 1 They
involve meditations on musical instances where the conditions of listening are altered,
not only because of the formal nature (compositional and/or performative) of certain
musical pieces, but also as a result of social-historical relations and practices. I consider
the problem of listening less a matter of production of musical form or musical innova-
tion as such-though no doubt this is a decisive element in the process-and more a
matter of social practice, of history, of patterns oflife and response to life in the world. In
this respect, the composer or the musician faces the predicament of being listened to not
as an agent of what s/he does as a practitioner of music but as a member of a society who
listens-or doesn't.
Listening certainly does not involve some natural talent. One might not say this about
composing or playing an instrument or even having an ear for proper pitch, although in
all these cases an effective performance depends on serious application and practice. Lis-
tening, in any case, is learned. (Or unlearned: whole communities can be rendered un-
skilled to listening, generation by generation, through certain patterns in musical pro-
duction; that's what the hit market of commercial music is all about.) One certainly learns
to listen by listening, and by listening further: by expanding one's boundaries of exposure
to sound, as well as by repeating the listening experience of a well known piece of music in
the spirit of discovery. These two aspects are interrelated. Discovering something new in a
familiar piece of music often occurs as a result of inadvertent comparison with other listen-
ing experiences-the discovery of affinities between otherwise disparate musical works.
This is why it is essential to listen to the broadest range of music possible-not out of
some compulsion to eclecticism, but out of the desire to enrich (that is, alter) one's habits
of listening.
On this occasion, I draw on the problematic of listening from an additional source.
Beyond the strictly musical questions that emerge out of a bold experiment in the song
form-the collaboration between the poet Bertolt Brecht and the composer Hanns Eisler
during their Hollywood exile-the issues addressed here pertain to an array of contigu-
ous problems, more generally concerning the societal parameters of lyric poetry and
more specifically the historical conditions of exile that produce a radical (and, one must
say, unique) musical and poetic response. In this respect, this inquiry is introduced with
a critical review of Theodor Adorno's classic essay "Lyric Poetry and Society," which is
read in full cognizance of Adorno's intimate connection to the entire problematic: his
own groundbreaking reflections on the problematic oflistening as well as on the relations
between artistic experimentalism and cultural politics (where music signifies the pri-
mary frame of reference), in addition, of course, to his share of the exile experience under
the same conditions.
 The impetus for this meditation is informed by a self-consciously restrospective lis- 369
tening experience. The experience of listening to the Hollywooder Liederbuch today rests
on a range of historical problems, posed at one time by the two collaborators and the 6.5
conditions they encountered and addressed with inarguably bold gestures. These prob- STATHIS

!ems and gestures strike at the heart of a whole set of interrogative concerns regarding GouRcouRJs
both the significance oflyric poetry in modern society and the song form in strictly musi-
cal terms. The challenge to imagine the conditions of this creative collaboration and what
it meant within a certain musical and lyrical tradition at the time must meet the chal-
lenge of assessing precisely in what terms, within our historical present, this composition
blew open the horizon of the song form and set the highest standards in the traditionally
'difficult' association of experimental art with political praxis.

[ ... ]

In the essay "On Lyric Poetry and Society," Theodor Adorno makes a shrewd dialectical
argument that confirms the transcendental substance oflyrical subjectivity by abolishing
its metaphysical framework, a gesture that, on first sight at least, appears impossible by
mere logic. Though the essay has achieved classic status as one of the most lasting ges-
tures of literary criticism, its impetus is expressly philosophical, and it has as much to say
about the trappings of logic as about the tribulations of poetry. To my mind, the essay is
exemplary of Adornian dialectics and deserves, even if briefly and as a way of passing on
to the matter at hand, a precise rehearsal of its argument.
Adorno reiterates at the outset the predominant view of the lyric substance: namely,
immersion into an individual form enables the grasping of what remains universally un-
distorted, untamed, not yet subsumed-in other words, the essence of the human unfet-
tered by the pronounced boundaries of false particulars. But, the argument goes, the lyric
poem's presumed achievement of universality through "unrestrained individuation"
runs the risk, by definition, of stark inauthenticity or unrestrained distortion, to play
along with Adorno's language, if nothing else because of the presumption of an uncon-
tested link between voice and subject. Adorno's quick answer to this risk institutes a shift
in conception and marks his own point of departure in the argument: "The universality
[Allgemeinheit] of the lyric's substance is essentially social [wesentlich gesellschaftlich]. Only
one who hears the voice of humankind in the poem's solitude [Einsamkeit] can understand
what the poem is saying." 2 Right away, the problem becomes one of understanding what is
social. By virtue of the way the matter is conceived, this problem comes before the examina-
tion of what is universal. Indeed, the old dichotomy between particular and universal, or if
you will, subjective and objective, is recast in this essay as a relation that is not dichotomous
at all, as a relation between the lyric and the social in which no term bears the primary defi-
nitional position and where both terms signify problem-domains within a specific histori-
cal framework-this has to be underlined-that the lyric poem as a form addresses.
Adorno nullifies from the start any indication that the social element in the lyric might
be deduced from the social content of the poem or the social interests of the poet. Such an
aspiration would already be unattainable in the sense that society is "an internally con-
tradictory unity" (39) and thus cannot be represented as a definitive signification, whether
in terms of literary content or authorial intention. In fact, the lyric engages with precisely
this unrepresentability of the social in immanent fashion-as the very pulse of the lyric's
peculiar handling of the subject-object relation. To go even further: lyric subjectivity is
constituted as a refusal of inherited terms of social recognition and is expressed in a lan-
guage that trumps social communication, all in order to render readable, expressible, the
 370 significational instability of social relations, the antagonism of meanings, and the internally
contradictory conceptual frameworks, which in all instances permeate the subject-object
SEcnoN 6 relation even though consistently veiled and streamlined by ideological structures.
FRANKFURT ScHOOL I shall bypass here Adorno's predictable terms of codifying this quandary in favor of
AND AFTER the canonical-namely, that great works of art are the exemplary indicators of unmasking
ideological falsity-in order to focus on the claim. 3 Adorno insists that the remoteness of
the lyric voice, a seemingly disembodied presence, is hardly an instance of disengagement
from the real but an exemplary indication of an idiomatic resistance fostered by the
streamlining pressures of social conformity. He expressly identifies the constitutive ges-
ture of the lyric as "the refusal to submit to anything heteronomous" (40). But to leave it at
that would be merely to reiterate the commonplace view associated with Adorno's notions
of art: aesthetic autonomy is the means of social resistance. To my mind, the essay insinu-
ates something murkier, less stable propositionally. Yes, it is true that the lyric poem con-
structs an autonomous universe as a refusal of the heteronomous oppression of social
norms, but this hardly means that the lyric disappears in a constructed world of its own.
The autonomy of the lyric may be aesthetic in the sense that it pertains to the making of an
art-form, but as a gesture of poiesis, it bears indeed the gestures of social autonomy-by
which I mean, the position in society, within a social imaginary, that enables us to recon-
ceptualize, rearrange, reimagine the very framework of the social reality we inherit: "In its
protest the poem expresses the dream of a world in which things would be different" (40).
Though in my book, poiesis, to the degree that it matters at all, is always social poiesis,
in the parallel sense that autonomy is always social autonomy or is nothing at all, the wa-
ger here is to see how the lyric poem, perhaps the most 'aestheticist' ofliterary forms (dare
I say akin to abstract art in painting?), might bear the gestures of society's unknown,
unarticulated, vision-even more, the gestures of 'another' society, as yet unborn, un-
dreamt. It is in this latter sense, and not in what otherwise appears to be hopelessly con-
ventional, that we may attribute Adorno's claim that lyric poetry is a phenomenon of
modernity. He knows all too well-and mentions it outright-that lyric instances in an
archaic world, whether Greek or Chinese, Japanese or Arabic, abound. The point he
makes-or let me be bold: the point on which this argument stands as a radical argument
(whether Adorno actually makes it or not is rather irrelevant)-is that the lyric encapsu-
lates the predicament of modernity insofar as modernity is the social formation that re-
mains perversely open to its own undoing, to its alteration, for good or ill.
In this sense then, the lyric is a profoundly political form because: a) it testifies to an
alienated subjectivity that constructs an extreme, almost inscrutable, internal universe
which it then uses as an antagonistic gesture to fortify (and perhaps even refine) its alien-
ation; b) it pursues an altered imaginative framework, whereby this alienation works
productively to outwit the social-imaginary that causes it and, on certain occasions, pro-
vide the language that in turn alters the terms of alienation itself. I would stand clear of
Adorno's rather romantic claim that this double alienation-the alienation of alienation,
as we would say dialectically-restores the lyric 'T' from its formative dehumanization.
This, in any case, is a matter to be debated. In crude terms, I would rather say that the
emancipatory force of the lyric-if we could even put it that way-is not a matter of hu-
manization (or 'rehumanization') but of self-alteration, of a genuine autonomous social
imagination. In the same way, I would hold my distance from the easily producible claim
that the lyric as a form, in the terms we have just rehearsed, is always in exile, constituted
in exile almost by definition. Even if true in some generalizable metaphoric sense, this
seems to me to be the easy path of thinking through this problem and I propose we leave
it aside at the outset.
 Instead, let us focus on Adorno's formalist (perhaps we may say technical) terms of 371
assessing the politically emancipatory nature of the lyric. As one can imagine, the matter
is not one of content but of form-more precisely, of form as content. I quote at length: 6.5
STATHIS
It is precisely what is not social in the lyric poem that is now to become its social aspect. ...
GOURGOURIS
The highest lyric works are those in which the subject, with no remaining trace of mere
matter [ohne Rest von blossem Stoff], sounds forth in language until language itself ac-
quires a voice. The unself-consciousness [Selbstvergessenheit] of the subject submitting it-
self to language as something objective, and the immediacy and spontaneity of that sub-
ject's expression are one and the same: thus language mediates lyric poetry and society in
their innermost core. (42-43)

"With no remaining trace of mere matter" or perhaps, unwinding the metaphor, "without
the barest thread left": I shall begin the reading with this provocative phrase. The rhetori-
cal impulse is recognizable to all trained readers of Adorno. The extreme negation aspires
at the disintegration of what is conventionally expected but in order to produce not an-
nihilation but alteration. The difference is crucial. The challenge is to grasp that the tran-
scendental language of the lyric does not signify the dissolution of what it leaves behind
but its sublation (following somewhat the Hegelian figure of Aujhebung), which is to say,
at least in part, the preservation of an altered alienation: a disruptive preservation of what
exists by altering its force and placing it in a different set of relations.
To reiterate it, if possible, in more tangible fashion: The lyric subject assumes a disem-
bodied voice because it emerges from a world that has deprived it of body. (In more ex-
pressly political terms, we would say: a world that has appropriated and dominated its
body thereby tearing the connection between body and voice.) The lyric subject assumes
this position as an arche: as point of departure and as constitutive principle. It thus fash-
ions a disembodied language, which, however, bears within it the trace of this tearing
between body and voice-"a trace of no mere matter" but a trace of disembodiment none-
theless. Its evident immateriality-evident in the language, evident as language-consists
in the gesture by which the lyric subject submits to the "objectivity of the language"
(Adorno says). In other words, it is sort of a magic act, an act of disappearance. It is rather
amusing, I think, that the conventional responses to the lyric fall prey to this magic act
and tend to attribute to language the essence of the poem, the "lyric substance." But
Adorno recalls us to order at once. Language is but mediation-it is always mediation,
even in its purest, most incommunicable form-between poetry and society. In other
words, language is a means of social poiesis, bearing neither arc he nor telos. It is certainly
not an essence. A subsequent step in the argument would be to say that this mediation in
fact enables us to trace the dialectical process of engagement-disengagement with the
social, the very process of (self-) alteration.
When Adorno claims that "the lyric reveals itself to be most deeply grounded in soci-
ety when it does not chime with society, when it communicates nothing" (43), he is hardly
playing dialectical games. He is just reiterating the absolutely negative process that soci-
ety needs in order to alter itself. In this process, language itself undergoes a transforma-
tion. Shielding its mediating attributes, it becomes the vehicle of an alternative imagi-
nary framework. But what differentiates the lyric from even the most avant-garde
political poem is that this framework is hardly recognizable, not to say applicable, from
the standpoint of present (inherited) social reality. The social mediation in lyrical lan-
guage is truly shielded. It is shielded by the trope itself, the trope which we have come to
recognize as the lyric subject. Hence the legitimacy of the phrase "with no remaining
trace of mere matter."
 372 Given this line of argument, the essay raises a crucial theoretical problem which, I
dare say, leads us beyond the question of language. What should be visible so far is that
SECTION 6 the language of the lyric mediates the peculiar relation between poetry and society. But
FRANKFURT ScHooL insofar as this relation takes place in the realm of language-as opposed, let us say, to
AND AFTER the realm of dramatic action-the weight falls on the voice and specifically the voice of
the subject who commands the linguistic action, the lyric "I." No doubt, this has been the
most contested category in the enormous discussion on the nature of lyric poetry as a genre.
Adorno chooses an interesting, peculiar, way to configure this category: what he calls
"unself-consciousness." Even without knowing of Adorno's obsessions and prejudices, a
close reading of the remainder of the essay makes evident that his philosophical critique is
directed simultaneously against both Kant and Heidegger, against both the transcendental
subject and the notion oflanguage as the 'voice' of Being. The latter is articulated fully:

The moment of unself-consciousness in which the subject submerges itself in language is

not a sacrifice of the subject to Being. It is a moment not of violence [Gewalt], nor of vio-
lence against the subject, but reconciliation [Versohnung]: language itself speaks only
when it speaks not as something alien to the subject but as the subject's own voice. When
the 'T' becomes oblivious to itself in language it is fully present nonetheless; if it were not,
language would become a consecrated abracadabra and succumb to reification, as it does
in communicative discourse. (44)

The last sentence just raises the stakes. To outwit the magic of language acting on its
own (a language that shields itself as mediating force), Adorno posits a subject that sheds
the cornerstone of its subjectivity-its consciousness. But, keeping in mind the unmiti-
gated, irreversible, nature oflanguage as mediation, he claims that the "unself-conscious"
subject passes into language as subjectivity intact. 4 Herein lies the crux of the dialecti-
cal nature of materiality that Adorno seeks to theorize not just in this essay but in most
of his work, a materiality that alters the terms of perceiving matter. The otherwise
imperceptible-otherwise than in language - trace of the lyric subject in the poem is
what overturns the magic-the "consecrated abracadabra"-of conventional linguistic
practice, which assumes an unproblematic, non-antagonistic, relation between poetry
and society, between individual and collective, between subject and object: namely, "com-
municative discourse."
The stakes are both philosophical and social, as I mentioned at the outset. From
Adorno's point of view, it couldn't be otherwise: "The lyric is the aesthetic test of [the]
dialectical proposition" that "subject and object are not rigid and isolated poles but can be
defined only in the process in which they distinguish themselves from each other and
change [abarbeiten und veriindern]" (44). To which we must juxtapose a direct and unam-
biguous phrase: "My thesis is that the lyric work is always the subjective expression of
social antagonism" (45). It would be impossible to grasp the impetus of this line of argu-
ment and guaranteed to miss its meaning, if we read it under the conventional frame that
proposes an uncompromised distinction between individual and society. Adorno's nega-
tive dialectical mind rejects not merely the Kantian subject/object divide but also dis-
credits any sort of either liberal privilege of individualism or Marxist privilege of society.
For him "the individual is inherently socially mediated [der Einzelne in sich gesell-
schaftlich vermittelt]" and at the same time "society is formed and continues to live only
by virtue of the individuals whose quintessence [Inbegriffl it is" (44). Notice the emphasis
on inherently and quintessentially. It isn't enough simply to say that society and the indi-
vidual are dialectically related under the assumption that each term is intact in some do-
main of its own. To say that they are dialectically related is to say that each bears within
itself, inherently, quintessentially, the antagonistic relation to the other. This is the very 373
least of Hegel's lesson. Dialectics is always an internal, not external, dynamic.
This way we can outmaneuver the trap of positing the lyric subject as some sort of 6.5
representative of society, even if unconscious or unacknowledging of this representation. STATHIS

Dialectics-at least the negative dialectics I have in mind-dispenses with the question of GouRcouRis
representation, and this is not meant to be some grand statement. If we understand in
what sense the lyric subject embodies, in its disembodied voice, its antagonistic relation
with society, then we see how "the lyric work is always the subjective expression of social
antagonism," to reiterate the quotation from above. Adorno says that the lyric work is in
this sense a socially produced privilege of a certain kind of alienation, hardly universaliz-
able: the privilege of immersing oneself in one's alienated subjectivity and expressing it in
poetic form, which is itself a specific social language. At the same time, however, he re-
minds us that even when this privilege is not produced, the right to express it, even if in
failure, is not only present in society at large but imperative:

The others, those who not only stand alienated, as though they were objects, facing the
disconcerted poetic subject but who have also literally been degraded to objects of history,
have the same right, or a greater right, to grope for the sounds in which sufferings and
dreams are welded. This inalienable right [unveriiusserliche Recht] has asserted itself again
and again, in forms however impure, mutilated, fragmentary and intermittent-the only
forms possible for those who have to bear the burden ... A collective undercurrent pro-
vides the foundation for all individual lyric poetry (45).

[ ... ]

I take Adorno's essay as a point of departure for an investigation of the lyric as a political
gesture, in which the political element will not be sought in the aesthetic content or even in
the lyric form, strictly speaking, but in the undercurrent that produces a specific mode of
expression. The case study, as it were, that concretizes this investigation is a song cycle with
the evocative title Hollywooder Liederbuch, signed by the composer Hanns Eisler. The song-
book is altogether comprised of fifty songs, sometimes exceedingly brief, mostly based on
poems by Brecht, some from his exile years in Denmark, some (such as the Hollywood Ele-
gies) written specifically for the occasion, but it also includes musical settings on words by
Goethe, Eichendorff, Pascal, Rimbaud, Morike, Eisler himself, and fellow exile Berthold
Viertel, as well as Eisler's own redraftings of the Anacreon fragments and his montage frag-
mentations of six Holderlin poems. This work was never produced or performed during the
composer's lifetime, nor can I say with any certainty that it has ever been performed in its
entirety, though parts of it have been performed in a multitude of contexts and occasions.
Recordings of it that now exist don't seem to agree on a particular sequence of songs, but
seem at least to keep to the composer's conceptualized bare arrangement for baritone and
piano accompaniment-though Eisler himself years later recorded certain of these songs
for soprano. 5 We have a sense of the time frame of composition via the notes that Bertolt
Brecht kept in his Arbeitsjournal. By this account it seems that the cycle was completed
within a year (1942-1943). But Eisler's account of it remains more open ended. In this re-
spect, we cannot fix with any certainty the time frame of composition. One thing, however,
we know for sure: the place of composition which the work carries in its title. The song cycle
was composed in Los Angeles during the composer's exile in the United States, which alto-
gether lasted ten years (1938-1948). Of course, there is a reason why the specific locus in the
title is Hollywood, while the composer lived and worked in a beach house in Malibu-and
I don't mean to say simply that it is a matter of metonymy. The topos of exile is Hollywood,
 374 for this the domain of assimilation of skills and labor, as well as the definitive ground of
cultural clash. It is indeed a remarkable sociological phenomenon that the German emigre
SECTION 6 community in Los Angeles at that time was almost entirely occupied within and around the
FRANKFURT ScHooL Hollywood industry, whether in brilliant success or utter and repeated failure. 6
AND AFTER The Hollywood Songbook inherits, and in a certain formal sense reproduces, the re-
markable artistic experimentation of the previous collaboration, but it is actualized, by
comparison, in utter vacuum. The kind of urgency belied by the work in pre-Nazi Berlin
is now internalized. Essentially, this work is constructed without an audience, without a
social underpinning. In the mind of the artists it is indeed constructed in a world that
lacks any sort of tangible historical existence, a world that is itself an artistic construc-
tion: "Hollywood itself looks like a piece of film scenery that has not yet been disman-
tled," says Eisler in one of his earliest recollections from his first visit to America. 7 It is
thus a kind of direct product that is also an antidote, a pharmakon. This lyrical response
to exile, in other words, puts forth the argument that the lyric is not some sort of exilic
genre in an abstract sense, but precisely the concrete response, the political and aesthetic
response, to the altogether real exile experience in a particular historical moment. It is
thus as well a sort of documentary work, not a work of description but a work of notation,
a musical notebook of a personal political predicament, the dire predicament of political
praxis in the absence of political constituency.
We must appreciate the enormous difficulty of this task, of facing this predicament
and indeed facing it creatively. It is entirely against the grain and was very much con-
ceived to be against the grain. I quote Eisler's well known remark:

In this gloomy eternal spring here in Hollywood I said to Brecht: this is the perfect place
for writing elegies! I said: We've got to create something, even here; you can't be in Holly-
wood and just do nothing. We are not absolved in Hollywood. We must simply go along
with describing it ... The landscape here is appallingly idyllic, and the ocean climate
makes it dreadfully hard to concentrate ... The whole thing has arisen more from the
ideas of land speculators. If the water was shut off for three days, the jackals would be back
and so would the desert sands ... Hence, in this strange whitewashed idyll it becomes
important to learn to express oneself concisely by way of an antidote. 8

Brecht's response, at least initially, was much more negative and sardonic, clearly suggest-
ing a sense of incapacity. "In almost no other place was my life more difficult than here in
this mortuary of easy going," he writes at one point in his Arbeitsjournal; or "I get the
impression of having been removed from my era. This is Tahiti in metropolitan form. I'm
here as if in Tahiti, among palm trees and artists. It makes me nervous." 9 At other times,
he seems to respond with what nowadays we would call a sort of Woody Allen mentality:
"I live in a metropolitan area where people are born as drivers [and] the breed called pe-
destrians has either died out or been killed off." 10 Or, "nearly all of the town's inhabitants
possess a certain remoteness. Their houses do not become personal property by being
lived in, but only by checkbooks; their owners do not so much live in them as make use of
them. Here houses are mere appendages to garages." 11
But there is another side to this condition, a sense that displacement provides an op-
portunity to see matters in an altered state, indeed as well, to alter the terms of perception
even though unable to alter the conditions: "Emigration is the best school of dialectics.
Refugees are the keenest dialecticians. They are refugees as a result of changes and their
sole object of study is change. They are able to deduce the greatest events from the small-
est hints-that is, if they have intelligence. When their opponents are winning, they cal-
culate how much their victory has cost them; they have the sharpest eye for contradic-
tions." 12 This meaning of dialectical contradiction is all over the pieces that comprise the 375
Hollywood Songbook, deeply imbedded in both the musical and literary language. By
strict musicological convention, the Hollywood Songbook is not a proper song cycle. It 6.5
lacks any sort of unfolding narrative, it repeats no musical motifs, and is altogether het- STATHIS

erogeneous in musical style. The reigning characteristic overall is a kind of Expressionist GouRcouRrs
density of Schonbergian spirit, though more atonal than strictly serialist, but even so this
is due more to an attitude than strict adherence to Schonbergian principles. Strewn all
over, one also finds little chansons, certain jazz melodies, straight and simple songs, cer-
tain chordal patterns one recognizes from militant songs, even elements one hears else-
where in Eisler's film music. (Eisler continuously circulated musical motives between film
scores and other pieces of music precisely in the spirit of "applied music.")
All this is permeated by a sharp sense of vitality, of urgency that goes straight up
against the idyllic sense of leisure and distraction. This vitality is deeply idiomatic, in-
deed internal, and is achieved by forging a distance from the conditions of its production,
a strange gesture that lends to the work a certain remoteness. Brecht recognized the in-
evitability of retreating into an internal orbit: "To work lyrically here, even if relating to
the present ... is as if working in gold filigree. There's something whimsical, eccentric,
blinkered about it." 13 What makes this heterogeneous composition cohesive is precisely
this characteristic remoteness. Lyricism is fashioned here at the bare limit, stripping the
requisite sentimentalism one associates conventionally with lyrical expression. This
stripping happens at the core musical level. Most of the settings are a page long. Many of
them proceed along the lines of a continuously unraveling melodic line, no motifs, no
variation, peculiar and unconventional repetitions. They require a singer who forges a
sense of alienation from sentimental expression, who is in a peculiar sense another in-
strument that then proceeds through the musical text nimbly and forcefully. The overall
attitude is to subvert the Romantic pathos of the Lieder tradition, to dismantle any ten-
dencies toward self-satisfaction in one's despair, while keeping intact (and indeed up
front) all the foundational elements of despair, alienation, deprivation. The result is a
dislocating experience of listening, a "transgressive listening" as I mentioned at the out-
set, because though the lyrical sensibility is unmistakable, including indeed a certain
textual and musical atmosphere that makes for a recognizable lyrical tonality, the final
sense one gets is one of puzzlement, even astonishment.

[ ... ]

Though marred by the impossibility of the aural dimension in writing, I nonetheless ap-
pend here some brief comments on a few songs from the Hollywood Songbook that are, to
my mind, exemplary of the musical and lyrical innovation of the song cycle.

0BER DEN SELBSTMORD

In diesem Landen und in dieser Zeit

diirfte es triibe Abende nichte geben,
auch hohe Briicken ober die Flosse
Selbst die Stunden zwischen Nacht und Morgen
und die ganze Winterzeit dazu.
Das ist gefiihrlich!
Denn angesichts dieses Elends
werfen die Menschen in einem Augenblick
ihr unertriiglisches Leben fort.
 376 [On Suicide14
In such a country and at such a time
SECTION 6 There should be no melancholy evenings
FRANKFURT SCHOOL Even high bridges over the rivers
AND AFTER And the hours between the night and morning
And the long long winter time as well
All these are dangerous!
For in view of all the misery
People just throw, in a few seconds time,
Their unbearable lives away.

This is a poem that Brecht wrote around 1938, while still in Denmark. One also finds it in
The Good Person of Szechwan, which he began around that time and completed while in
Los Angeles, though it was not performed until his return to Germany. The song is in-
cluded in the Third Scene in the play, titled "Evening in a Public Park" where Shen Te,
having withdrawn from her disguise as Shui Ta encounters the young pilot under a tree
contemplating suicide. Shen Te sings this song to the audience in a classic Brechtian ges-
ture of stepping out of the role. But this is literally what the song demands: stepping out
of one's existence in the present moment-an existence which is dangerous-in order to
avert self-destruction. The dangerous elements, of course, are natural elements; in the
play, too, the scene takes place under torrential rain. But what makes this nature, this
dreary nature, dangerous is announced in the first verse: a certain time, a certain place in
history. In this respect, the text, insofar as it is a lyric, is decidedly anti-Romantic-a
warning about perilous sentiment. Nonetheless, it hardly compromises the intense sub-
jectivity of the lyric voice, particularly in this musical setting, which has a strange (even
if melancholy, and perhaps even dreary) beauty.
The core melody is written on top of a modal pulse that gradually and very subtly
ascends without any sort of resolution. The central verse in the poem, which is meant to
be declamatory ("Das ist gefahrlich!"), is actually pronounced slowly, quietly, almost
whispered. This whispered declaration of danger almost achieves the status of musical
motif-the only such moment in the song. It is repeated once as an instrumental phrase
right after the verse and then again at the very end as the last musical phrase. Eisler's
sense of staging against the grain is perfectly illustrated here. The musical phrasing ex-
emplifies the fact that the verse announcing danger splits the text in the middle, as the
warning that occurs between the setting of the destructive landscape and the description
of its effect. But it does so in a negative gesture. Having vocally de-emphasized the core
line while keeping its limit position, the song emphasizes instead the very last word
("fort"), which signifies the discarding oflife, the actual moment of annihilation, the end.
The reiteration of the instrumental motif of the middle line-the reminder of danger-
which is reinvoked as a closing phrase actually works against the climactic closure of the
act of destruction: an amazing gesture of repetition and suspension at the same time.
Given the haunting melody and weight of this song, I must quote a comment by Eisler
on the consoling function of music:
Concerning consolation, I can tell you something from the secret documents of the Austro-
Hungarian state police in the year 1805 in Vienna, which says: "In times like the present,
where manifold sufferings affect the character of the people, the police must pay more re-
gard than ever to the distractions of the people. The most dangerous hours are in the eve-
ning. How can these hours be better and more harmlessly spent than by listening to
music?, 15
The resemblance of this scene to the one in the poem is too uncanny for me not to invoke 377
it. Eisler, of course, is writing against the idea of music as consolation-insofar as conso-
lation here, if not music listening itself, has become the work of the state police. Yet, the 6.5
melancholy music and even the fact that Brecht stages it later as a song in a theatrical STATHIS

scene of consolation reproduces in this affinity a direct contradiction. Yet again, the rna- GouRcouRJs
jor operative principle in this collaborative project-the essence of what we may name
"Brecht/Eisler style" -is a continuous dialectical process of negation.
It has to be said that, though the text was written in Denmark before in fact the war
began, its being set to music in Hollywood in 1942 cannot but resonate with the experi-
ence of loss in the interim period. I am thinking specifically about the suicide of Walter
Benjamin, Brecht's dear friend, just before he is to cross the border that will bring him to
American exile. The effect of Benjamin's death on Brecht (and also Adorno) was decisive.
In response, Brecht wrote two brilliantly dispassionate poems about the news of his friend's
suicide. Their anti-lyrical manner is actually a profoundly 'emotive' tribute to the poetic
subject, and I would consider the inclusion of this lyric in the Hollywood Songbook as
Brecht's third gesture toward Benjamin.

OSTERSONNT AG

Heute, Ostersonntag frtih

Ging ein pliitzlicher Schneesturm tiber die Insel
Zwischen den grtinenden Hecken lag Schnee.
Mein junger Sohn
Holte mich zu einem Aprikosenbaumschen an der Hausmauer
Weg von einer Schrift, wo ich auf jene
mit dem Finger deute
Welche einem Krieg vorbereiten, der
Den Kontinent, diese Insel, mein Volk, meine
Familie und mich
Vertilgen muss. Schweigend
Legten wie einem Sack
tiber den frierenden Baum.
[Easter Sundayl 6
Early on an Easter Day
An impetuous snowstorm
Swept through the island
Among the budding hedges lay snow.
My little son asked me out
To see the little cherry tree
By the house wall of my writing desk
Where I was writing verses
Directed at the men who
Were preparing a war
That would destroy this island
And my people
And this continent of Europe
And my family
And me.
Silently we placed a sack
Around the freezing tree.]
 378 This song may be seen as the reverse of "On Suicide" in the sense that here nature needs
human protection because history is about to destroy it. Brecht was ambivalent toward
SECTION 6 nature to say the least. But here nature, having become interwoven with society, serves as
FRANKFURT ScHooL an antidote gesture against a 'denaturalized' society of utter destruction. At the same
AND AFTER time, nature registers the distraction of the poet from his task, which signifies, however,
in a kind of dialectical in-folding, also a moment of rejuvenation. The task, of course, is
explicitly the writing of political poetry. In a doubling gesture of the kind that Brecht was
so fond of, the poet interrupts his political writing in order to write a lyric, which consists
of a self-reflection upon an action whose 'natural' humanity signifies an act of resistance.
It is precisely in this doubling gesture-exemplary of Adorno's demands for the lyric
form-that a pure lyric achieves an explicitly social, and indeed in this case political, sig-
nificance. The event of the lyric poem's emergence out of the interruption of political writ-
ing is actualized in the poem itself. By a sort of dialectical reversal, whereby writing and
the interruption of writing are paradoxically interwoven, the lyric incorporates the politi-
cal, or to put it in more elaborative form, lyric and political writing are brought together in
a continuum forged by an unavoidably interruptive relation between writing and acting in
the world.
Musically, the song exhibits a particular idiom in terms of accents and patterns of
composition that is not unlike "On Suicide." The first three verses, describing the state of
nature, open with a rather tender musical motif that references the recognizable style of a
Romantic Lied. The piano repeats solo the last three-part melody of the description of the
snow before the poem shifts into the personal narrative. This melody serves as a kind of
signature phrase and returns at the very end when the state of nature is reconstituted by a
human act of protection against destruction. In between, from the verse "Mein junger
Sohn" onward, the music is constructed along an ascending pattern of arguably 'unlyri-
cal' nature, speaking in traditional Lieder terms. This ascent concludes in a staccato de-
livery of the objects of destruction, in the series ending with the poet himself ("und
mich"), before the melodious beginning is reiterated, slightly altered and slowed down,
for the last three verses of reconstitution. The effect is bizarre to say the least. Though we
are left with the sense that this is a beautiful song of highly evocative lyric sensibility, we
have undergone for a few seconds, right in the song's mid-section, an experience of mili-
tant singing-a militancy that emerges precisely from introducing the lyric 'T' and the
entire context of its social existence as the ultimate object of destruction. In this sense,
the incorporation of the political into the lyric, which we just saw in Brecht's verses, is
enacted with extraordinary precision in Eisler's musical interpretation. "Ostersonntag" is
an exemplary instance of the core wager posed by the Hollywood Songbook as a whole.

FROM THE HOLLYWOOD ELEGIES

Unter den griinen Pfefferbaumen

Gehen die Musiker auf den Strich, zwei und zwei
Mit den Schreibern. Bach
Hat ein Strichquartett im Taschen. Dante schwenkt
Den diirren Hintern.

[Beneath the green pepper trees

The musicians act like streetwalkers, two by two
With the writers. Bach
Has a 'street' quartet in his pocket. Dante wiggles
His shriveled bottom.f
 Jeden Morgen, mein Brot zu verdienen 379
Fahre ich zum Markt, wo Liigen gekauft werden.
Hoffnungsvoll 6.5
Reihe ich mich ein unter die Verkaufer. STATHIS

GOURGOURIS
[Every morning, to earn my daily bread
I go to the market where lies are bought.
Hopefully
I take my place among the sellers.]

Das DorfHollywood ist entworfen nach den Vorstellungen

Die man hierorts vom Himmel hat. Hierorts
Hat man ausgerechnet, class Gott
Himmel und Holle benotigend, nicht zwei
Etablissements zu entwerfen brauchte, sondern
Nur ein einziges, namlich den Himmel. Dieser
Dient for die Unbemittelten, Erfolglosen
Als Holle.

[The village of Hollywood was planned according to the notion

People in these parts have of heaven. In these parts
They have come to the conclusion that God
Requiring Heaven and Hell, didn't need to
Plan two establishments but
Just one: Heaven. It
Serves the unprosperous, unsuccessful
As Hell.]

Brecht wrote the "Hollywood Elegies" at Eisler's express request for a collaborative
gesture of self-reflection on their conditions of life in exile. They are the cornerstone of
the Hollywood Songbook, if such a thing may be said-the initial gesture that gave retro-
spective meaning to various other poems brought into the song cycle, which were written
earlier while Brecht was in Denmark, or verses written by other poets and included later
by Eisler. We must consider the "Hollywood Elegies" as quintessential musical and poetic
acts of self-reflection that distinctively mark the exile sensibility. The subject of the po-
ems may be Hollywood but it is clearly also the poet himself-and the composer, of
course, as we are talking about songs (Bach and Dante strolling arm in arm)-whose
alienation is chronicled by registering, with the sort of precision that only metaphor can
produce, the place of their displacement: "I take my place among the sellers." This verse is
one of Brecht's classic shrewd self-ironies. The recognition that, in this world, lies are the
order of the day comes with an understanding that, under such conditions, truth cannot
overcome them. In this order of things, when purity is impossible, one must fight to find
a place that ensures survival and readiness for the time of truth to come. For Brecht, the
Hollywood experience-and one may add, his entire life experience since the rise of Na-
zism, including his years in East Berlin-was a daily exercise in precisely this sort of sur-
vival, which is, as Derrida has famously described, an overcoming (sur-vie).
The "Hollywood Elegies" are, of course, hardly elegiac in a proper sense. Or rather,
the object of elegy here is the basest of elements. Hollywood is "a swamp," as another clas-
sic song in the cycle puts it. They are profoundly ironic elegies, which may in fact consti-
tute a genre all its own. In this swamp, the mode of life is prostitution and the currency is
the peddling of falsity. False pretensions, false works: art as commerce. The first of the
 380 three elegies quoted here is a classically self-mocking staging of prostitution. Bach and
Dante (standing in obviously for Eisler and Brecht but also the intertwined work of music
SECTION 6 and poetry in exile) literally "walk the line" (gehen auf den Strich) to peddle their goods.
FRANKFURT ScHooL Brecht bolsters the song's mockery by forging a hard pun-turning Streichquartett to the
AND AFTER neologism Strichquartett which in this context also suggests a kind of composition
quickly put together and stuffed in one's back pocket, a composition literally drafted on
the line of work. For Brecht, in this land of deception where lies are bought and sold, the
integrity of names is blown asunder. Meanings are mangled and manipulated to serve the
established order. This is in essence the significance of the marvelous verses of the third
of the elegies, which exploits the cliche of Hollywood as paradise on earth. With inimi-
table irony, Brecht agrees and takes the notion to its full conclusion, plunging the meta-
physical concept into the hard reality of capitalism, which is indeed a hellish reality for all
those who don't enjoy its privileges.
Musically, these are some of Eisler's most Schonbergian settings in the whole cycle.
The emphasis is on the barest texture of the Lied form, and though there is a strong me-
lodic line, particularly in the third piece, the singer delivers it with an air of lyrical dark-
ness that encapsulates the text's mood. In this elegy to the hellish nature of earthly para-
dise, the musical tone is positively funereal. Brecht was unequivocal as to his friend's
talent for creating performative interpretations of texts: "His settings are for me what a
performance is to a play; he reads the text with enormous exactitude." 18 We know Brecht
well to understand that for him performance is interpretation, a critical reworking of the
material. In the first of the three elegies, the musical phrasing acts as a performative/
interpretive shadow to the scene described by the verses. The notes suggest a brisk and
lithe walking, with chordal pairs that obviously evoke the tandem of writer and com-
poser. But against the grain of the piano melody which is just hopping along, the singer
performs the verses with a deliberate flatness, even coldness, removing from their articu-
lation any humorous traces, even though the actual words are so blatantly mocking. The
scene is pathetic but prostitution is a serious matter. Indeed, mockery is registered by the
pianistic ending of the song, where the melody is speeded up absurdly-one can imagine
the pair not merely 'streetwalking' but literally hopping around like badly wound up
machines-before it is altogether abruptly interrupted without resolution. An air of
grave seriousness envelops musically the second of the elegies as well. This song lasts
about fifty seconds, half of which is a concluding twelve-tone instrumental line in its
barest, most unchromatic, alienating expression. The air is of pure hopelessness. This
brilliantly counters the single-word verse "Hopefully," which is almost shouted by the
singer in utter desperation.
To conclude, by way of returning to Adorno, I would reiterate how the dislocation of
the subject expressed in both literary and musical text brings forth an experience of
transgressive listening. But I would add one more thing, which indeed hinges on the un-
dercurrent of this desperately shouted "hopefully": the Hollywood Songbook is really a
work written for the future. It is a meditation on the radical present-on the very condi-
tions of its production, as I mentioned-and it is simultaneously a distorting self-
reflection on the means of expression in the past (the German Lied tradition). But in the
sense that it is consciously produced without an audience, without a community of listen-
ers that would otherwise be its concern, it fashions this community in some future retro-
spective time: retrospective, because the song cycle is also a documentary gesture of a
certain present (a wretched present hopefully to be overcome) and future, because its
transgression against inherited modes (art forms, means of expression, listening habits,
alienation from one's environment, etc.) opens the way to an altered community, an as yet 381
imaginary community nurtured from within the experience of exile to be constituted as
its overcoming. 6.5
STATHIS
NOTES
GOURCOURIS
1. A longer version of this article was published thirty-three directors, twenty-three producers,
in Qui Parle 14.2 (2004): 145-76. ten actors, and nineteen composers working in
2. Theodor W. Adorno, "Lyric Poetry and the film industry." In james K. Lyon, Bertoli
Society" in Notes on Literature Vol. I (New York: Brecht in America (Princeton University Press,
Columbia University Press, 1990), 38. For the 1982), 46.
German original see "Rede iiber Lyrik und 7. Hanns Eisler, "A Musical journey through
Gesellschaft" in Nolen zur Literatur I (Frankfurt America" [1935] in A Rebel in Music, 90.
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1958), 73-104. 8. Hans Bunge, Frage Sie mehr iiber Brecht,
Subsequent page references in the text. Translation Hanns Eisler im Gespriich (Munich: Rogner &
modified where necessary. Bernhard, 1970), 293
3. The point isn't to say that great works of art 9. Quoted in Lyon, Bertoli Brecht in America, 33.
unmask ideological falsity, as if by rule, but that art 10. Ibid., 45
which unmasks ideological falsity, whatever its form 11. Quoted in Betz, Hanns Eisler. Political

or instance, is worth the qualification "great." This Musician, 189.

qualification is inevitably first a matter of politics 12. Bertolt Brecht, Flucht/ingsgespriiche
and then of aesthetics. Moreover, I would tend to (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), 112.
take for granted that the second statement assumes 13. Quoted in Betz, Hanns Eisler. Political
that the notion of"unmasking ideological falsity" is Musician, 185-186.
consistently under question by the art practice itself, 14. The translation is by Eric Bentley, the one
while the first statement may be itself an ideological consistently used in English language perfor-
falsity, if nothing else because it disregards the mances of this song. Eric Bentley himself recorded
mutability of histories and ideologies. this song and some of the ones I mention below in
4· One may consider that this intactness of a classic recording of solo performance, singing
subjectivity is achieved by virtue of submission to and playing the piano or the harmonium: The
language. This is one aspect of the argument in Songs of Hanns Eisler (Folkways, 1966). But the
judith Butler's The Psychic Life of Power, but the most extraordinary performance of "On Suicide"
matter is the concern of another essay. remains the one by the great experimental group
5. The crucial recording is Hanns Eisler, Art Bears, with Dagmar Krause singing, from
Hollywooder Liederbuch with baritone Wolfgang their recording Hopes and Fears (RERecords,
Holzmair and Peter Stamm at the piano (KOCH 1978). In their short and highly innovative
International CD, 1996). A much looser and not trajectory the Art Bears exemplify a contemporary
quite precise anthology is the collection performed Brecht/Eisler response to the song as a form in an
by the inimitable Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with extremely sophisticated experimental rock music
Aribert Reimann at the piano in the CD Hanns context.
Eisler, Lieder (Warner Classics, 1988). These 15. Hanns Eisler, "On Stupidity in Music" [1958]
recordings follow the original arrangements. in A Rebel in Music, 193.
Versions of some of these songs for soprano were 16. The translation is by Eric Bentley from his
recorded under the direction of Eisler himself recording of The Songs of Hanns Eisler. A certain
during his years in East Berlin by the great theater 'inaccuracy' is enacted here in order to serve the
singers Irmgard Arnold and Gisela May. But to my demands of the melody.
mind, the consummate interpretations of Eisler's 17. This translation is altered to catch more
songs generally belong to Dagmar Krause in two precisely Brecht's pun. The original translations
recordings: Tank Battles. The Songs of Hanns Eisler are by john Willet from Bertolt Brecht, Collected
(Island, 1988) and Supply and Demand (Hannibal, Poems (London: Methuen, 1983) 380-382.
1986), which also includes certain settings of 18. Quoted in Hans-Werner Heister, "Hollywood
Brecht poems by Kurt Weill. and Home: Hanns Eisler's 'Hiilderlin-Fragmente'
6. "By one count in 1944 there were fifty-nine for Voice and Piano" in David Blake, Hanns Eisler:
refugee German screen writers in Hollywood, A Miscellany, 214.
SECTION 7

Phenomenologies
of Lyric Reading

As we have seen, modern lyric theory did not spring from one source or follow one path.
The capacious modern idea of the lyric that emerged near the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury and developed in fits and starts over the course of the nineteenth century has shifted
in many directions over the last century. Phenomenology (philosophically, the study of
consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view) offers one way of turn-
ing those different directions toward a single lyrical current of thought. The phenomeno-
logical approach to lyric initiated by Heidegger in the middle of the twentieth century in
many ways dovetails with the Frankfurt School approaches also initiated in Germany
before and after 1945; whereas for Frankfurt School thinkers the lyric became an instance
of potential reconciliation between aesthetic expression and the modern social condi-
tions that threaten it, for phenomenological thinkers the lyric has become a privileged
instance of convergence between the aesthetic and the social, and between perception
and cognition. By focusing on the experience of the poem-or by defining poetry as ex-
perience, and by thinking about experience as poetry-phenomenology identifies poetry
with thought and, ultimately, with the conditions of our existence. In phenomenological
modernity, poems are us.
Susan Stewart, a prominent contemporary phenomenological lyric theorist we were
unable to include here, goes so far as to suggest that by the beginning of the twenty-first
century, "the cultural, or form-giving, work of poetry is to counter the oblivion of dark-
ness."1 For Stewart, that darkness is not the consequence of industrial capitalism or of the
Holocaust or of the post modern simulacrum but proof that consciousness itself depends
on poetry: "The entire enduring accomplishment of the history of poetic forms awaits as
a vast repertoire for anyone who hopes to enter again into an engagement with the
senses," Stewart writes, since "it is that history that has shaped our notion of the first per-
son, and it is that history that will make us intelligible to those who will inhabit the fu-
ture .... Perhaps I am writing at the end of a world" (333). Stewart takes the modern phe-
nomenological embrace of the lyric to its extreme when she writes that beyond the circle of
light thrown by lyric poetry, our very being is in danger of extinction, since engagement
with the senses can never be taken for granted, is always in danger of remaining in the
background rather than becoming sensible foreground. "As first-person expression in
measured language, lyric poetry lends significant-that is, shared and memorable-form 383
to the inner consciousness that is time itself" (42), and that form guarantees conscious-
ness an extended lifetime it might not otherwise have. Why the survival of both con- SECTION 7
sciousness and sense-certainty is in question remains mysterious in Stewart; in A Poet's PHENOMENOLOGIES

Freedom: A Notebook on Making (2011), she warns that "in our own time we are faced oF LYRIC READING

with an emergency regarding the future of the earth" and suggests that "the freedom to
act and the freedom to judge that art can provide, might help us to become, inversely, a
resource for that nature we have heretofore depleted" (205). Deprived of the world-making
form the lyric lends to consciousness, our lights might go out, but granted the archive of
lyric poetry as evidence that those lights once burned, our existence is reaffirmed across
space and time-and that reaffirmation might even teach nature a thing or two about
how not to be extinguished. Stewart's radical claims for the power of lyric make the
stakes of phenomenological lyricism crystal clear: the experience of the poem is not only
a way of thinking but a way of being, perhaps even the measure or definition of existence.
Perhaps our last best chance.
For Martin Heidegger, the philosopher who in many ways originated the line of
thought Stewart has pushed toward its limits, existence may seem threatened in moder-
nity in the most basic sense. In "... Poetically man dwells ... ," the essay we include in
this section, Heidegger meditates on a phrase from the German Romantic poet Friedrich
Holderlin:

"... poetically man dwells ..." If need be, we can imagine that poets do on occasion dwell
poetically. But how is "man"-and this means every man and all the time-supposed to
dwell poetically? Does not all dwelling remain incompatible with the poetic? Our dwelling
is harassed by the housing shortage. Even if that were not so, our dwelling today is ha-
rassed by work, made insecure by the hunt for gain and success, bewitched by the enter-
tainment and recreation industry.

Clearly Heidegger saw how social conditions after 1945 might make the notion of poetic
existence-of poetry as a place to be-both urgent and apparently impossible. Heidegger's
focus on a phrase from an early German Romantic poet throws both that urgency and
that impossibility into relief and also serves to lyricize the notion of poetry as a thing in
itself that is not subject to such conditions. As a poet who influenced both Goethe and
Hegel, Holderlin became a key figure in the shift in ideas of lyric from minor song to a
fundamental component of a literary system, and his revision of classical hymns marked
a starting point for modern lyric reading. When Heidegger juxtaposes Holderlin's notion
of poetic dwelling with the constraints of twentieth-century modernity, then, he claims a
genealogy of the modern lyric, or of modern lyric reading, that allows an idea of the lyric
to stand for an idea of poetry, and allows that idea of poetry to stand for what late moder-
nity needs to recover. By thinking through Holderlin's single phrase "poetically man
dwells," Heidegger works his way toward a definition of poetry that seems at first glance
anti-romantic, since it resists the idea that "poetic dwelling flies fantastically above real-
ity." Heidegger counters the idea that the poem is an imaginative departure with the idea
he credits to Holderlin that "the poetic is the basic capacity for human dwelling." In this
sense, the poem becomes not an escape from but the creation of a world, a world-making
phenomenon. We then become creatures of the world of the poem.
Yet to paraphrase Heidegger in this way is not quite right, since to say that the poem
is a world we inhabit still casts the poem as an imaginary creation we visit rather than as the
condition of our existence. "Dwelling can be unpoetic only because it is in essence poetic,"
Heidegger writes. "For a man to be blind, he must remain a being by nature endowed with
 384 sight." Because poetry is not only part of the world but world-making, the basic capacity
for human dwelling it affords is not an escape or a luxury or even a way to address the
SEcnoN 7 otherwise alienating social conditions of modernity (for example, the post-war housing
PHENOMENOLOCIES shortage or the distractions of mass culture). For Heidegger, poetry "builds up the very
OF LYRIC READJNc nature of dwelling": we only know what it is to dwell because poetry makes phenomeno-
logical experience (as opposed to subjective perspective) available to us-which is to say
that Being, what we understand as what or who or how we are, only becomes available in
and through poetry. In other essays (for example, "The Origin of the Work of Art"), Hei-
degger distinguishes between what he calls a "world" as a set of significant relations in
which we exist and in which meaning is disclosed and the concept of"earth," which is the
background against which such worlding happens. Recent post-Heideggerian thought
has emphasized the difference between being and presence, between the world within
and beyond the subject (ideas associated with the new object oriented ontology and specu-
lative realism), and that thinking has begun to have an influence on contemporary poet-
ics. But for most of the second half of the twentieth century, Anglo-American lyric
theorists took up phenomenology as a new license for the possibilities of thinking within
and as lyric poetry.
In the essay in this section, Heidegger limits his description of the poem as a set of
significant relations in which we exist, as a form of worlding, to an analysis of Holderlin's
language, since "we hear Holderlin's words more clearly when we take them back to the
poem in which they belong." For Heidegger, "the more poetic a poet is ... the greater is
the purity with which he submits what he says to an ever more painstaking listening, and
the further what he says is from the mere propositional statement." This insistence on
close reading and resistance to paraphrase aligns Heidegger with the New Critics,
making it possible (as we shall see) for later Anglo-American critics to adapt Heidegger's
radical version of the poem-as-world to Practical and New Critical reading practices that
began with very different premises. When Heidegger writes that "when we follow in
thought Holderlin's poetic statement about the poetic dwelling of man, we divine a path
by which, through what is thought differently, we come nearer to thinking the same as
what the poet composes in his poem," he may seem to propose an identification between
reading and writing, between the moment of reception and the moment of composition,
that mirrors claims like Helen Vendler's that the lyric offers us "a mind we take on as our
own." Heidegger's version of the lyric as world-making is in fact very different from post-
New Critical treatments of the lyric as a world in itself, but in Anglo-American criticism,
phenomenology has often been assimilated into other forms of lyric reading.
The problem with such assimilation is apparent in the essay we include here by Lacoue-
Labarthe, in which the question "is lyric a 'subjective' genre?" gains historical urgency.
Though one could say that this question has been around "at least since Schlegel and
Hegel," in his reading of "Two Poems by Paul Celan," Lacoue-Labarthe poses it "to the
post-Auschwitz era (in Adorno's sense)." Adorno's famous statement that "to write poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric" becomes in Lacoue-Labarthe's essay a starting point for
thinking through what happens to Holderlin's Romanticism and Heidegger's phenome-
nological commitment to it after the Holocaust, and also a way of placing Heidegger's
phenomenology against the background of Frankfurt School Marxism. 2 Celan's poems
become the occasion for that project in more than one sense: the poems explicitly invoke
both Heidegger and Holderlin; Adorno took them up as the definition of an historical
rupture; Celan himself, as a German Jew, lived through and documented the end of "a
world age-perhaps the world's old age" in his poems. The symptom of that end is "a
cancer of the subject, both the ego's and the masses'," a disease that resulted from German
idealism's exaltation of the subject. According to Lacoue- Labarthe, that post-1945 disease 385
of the subject is what makes lyric poetry seem such a barbaric, such a distasteful pursuit
by the second half of the twentieth century, since the lyric remained associated with the SECTION 7
culture that drove the ideology of the single subject to such tragic ends. Celan wrote PHENOMENOLOGIES

poems about those ends, about that distaste and subjective disease, and in doing so, oF LYRIC READING

Lacoue-Labarthe suggests, he revised Heidegger's version of poetic dwelling, since in

Celan "if there is no such thing as 'poetic experience' it is simply because experience
marks the absence of what is 'lived.'" That reversal would be Celan's explicitly post-
Heideggerian phenomenological poetics, since "it would be an understatement to say
Celan had read Heidegger. Celan's poetry goes beyond even an unreserved recognition of
Heidegger; I think that one can assert, unreservedly, that it is, in its entirety, a dialogue
with Heidegger's thought. And essentially with the part of this thought that was a dia-
logue with Holderlin." As we have seen, one part of Heidegger's dialogue with Holderlin
was a way to think about poetry "as what builds up the very nature of dwelling" at a mo-
ment when the very nature of dwelling had been put into question, had become literally
as well as figuratively untenable.
If for Heidegger an attentive reading of Holderlin proves that poetry's worlding ca-
pacity cannot be constrained by social conditions, Lacoue-Labarthe's reading of Celan's
attentive reading of both Heidegger and Holderlin reverses such assurance. "The ques-
tion of poetry's possibility-and Celan never asked another-is the question ... of the
possibility of going out of the self," according to Lacoue-Labarthe. If the idealized German
subject-the very basis of post-eighteenth-century notions of the lyric-has been evacu-
ated (in more than one sense) after Auschwitz, then what a persistent phenomenological
reading might put in its place is an emptied-out experience, an experience that "marks
the absence of what is 'lived,'" not subjective lyric Erlebnis but a sense of its impossibility.
Yet even this sense of ruin or impossibility is still a sense, an experience that has lyric
value. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, the "Two Poems by Paul Celan" that are the basis
of his essay constitute a single pressing entreaty directed to Heidegger: "that the thinker
who listened to poetry; the same thinker who compromised himself ... with just what
would result in Auschwitz [Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party and supported
National Socialism from 1933 unti11945]; ... that he say just a single word: a word about
pain." What Lacoue-Labarthe reads Celan as asking, in other words, is what the critic
himself asks. Lacoue-Labarthe wants phenomenological reading-a reading that would
invest in the lyric poem's capacity to bring worlds into being, to make lyric poetry the
basis of Being-to remain possible after the historical events that discredited Heidegger
and the German idealist tradition from which the lyric sprang. Even by asking the ques-
tion, of course, Lacoue-Labarthe sustains the phenomenological enterprise-though as
Stewart might say, he does so at the end of a world, after the positive sensation of "pain"
remains the single possibility for lived experience at the end of history.
Because of Heidegger's own historical position and because of the tradition of his
thought, the question of the persistence of poetic worlding after the end of the world would
seem inherent in all post-Heideggerian phenomenological approaches to the lyric. This is
to say that the pathos that comes to define phenomenological approaches to the lyric-the
sense that poetic worlding is only possible on the margins of impossible worlds-persists
even when its historical markers are no longer invoked. In Allen Grossman's Summa
Lyrica (1992), that persistence takes the form of a "Primer of the Commonplaces in Specu-
lative Poetics." For Grossman, an Anglo-American academic critic and poet writing
much later in the twentieth century, the notion of a primer, or elementary textbook that
serves as introduction to a subject of study (and particularly to an alphabet, to the tools of
 386 reading) indicates the necessity to begin by "constructing a culture in which poetry is
intelligible." The implication is that the culture in which poetry used to be intelligible has
SECTION 7 vanished, but Grossman is not concerned with the historical situation of poetry at the
PHENOMENOLOGIES present time; instead, he uses his series of aphorisms or commonplaces or philosophical
oF LYRIC READING "scholia" as attempts to "identify the alliances and relationships of the specific terms and
situations in poetic analysis ... as far out toward the horizon as possible ... and thus to
circumscribe a horizon in which poetry rises up and is present as in a world." In this
sense, the Summa Lyrica facilitates a Heideggerian reading by beginning where post-
Heideggerian critics like Lacoue-Labarthe end: if one can no longer take for granted the
proposition that poems build their own worlds, we can at least teach readers of poetry to
think about poetry as if this is what poems can still do. That "as if" stands for a set of
reading practices that date from the Practical and New Criticism (the orientation toward
"poetic analysis"), though as we have seen, the critics associated with those schools of
thought hardly agreed on what poems do. Instead, they agreed that teaching students to
read poems closely could, as Grossman puts it, "circumscribe a horizon" of expectation
for lyric experience available to all readers, and particularly to readers in the classrooms
in which such practices of reading are taught. Grossman joins modern Anglo-American
paradigms of close reading with a phenomenological version of the poem's own worlding
potential to create a way of reading that tempers Heideggerian absolutism with practice,
and that tempers institutional, academic literary practice with the Heideggerian yearning
for absolutes.
Thus rather than agreeing with Lacoue-Labarthe that "the question of poetry's possi-
bility" is the only question poets have left to ask, Grossman asserts (since the common-
places are assertions or, better, propositions "with a horizon") that "the function of poetry
is to obtain for everybody one kind of success at the limits of the autonomy of the will."
There is something very American about Grossman's distribution of the lyric's worlding
potential to anyone who reads (Grossman also writes on Whitman). At the same time,
Grossman maintains Heidegger's commitment to a poetic dwelling that is not merely
the property of the individual subject: "The abandonment of the autonomy of the will of
the speaking person as a speaker constitutes a form of knowledge-poetic knowledge. The
knowledge that not T speaks but 'language speaks' (Heidegger). The function of this
knowledge is to rescue the natural will at the point of its death." Here the midcentury
threat of the end of a world or the end of history is replaced with the glimmering threat of
the end of "the natural will." Grossman follows Heidegger here in thinking about the
ontological claims of the poem as not the claims of individual agency but the claim of
existence, of thought itself, of Being. Interestingly, for Grossman the abandonment of the
idealist individual subject and of the agency or "will" associated with that subject takes
the form of an embrace of a "poetic knowledge" identified with the fictional poetic
speaker that was the creation of twentieth-century lyric reading (or of earlier forms of the
poetry of the subject, if one follows the historical logic of the essays in Part One Section 2
of this anthology on "Models of Lyric"). One interesting result of Grossman's shift in
critical registers is his transformation of the fictive, dramatic 'speaker' of the poem into a
world in Heidegger's sense as well as a "going out of the self' in Lacoue-Labarthe's (or
Celan's) sense. Thus for Grossman the fiction of the speaker itself becomes a set of world-
making signifying relations that extend beyond the subject, so that poems come to con-
struct not only their own ontological but their own social worlds.
Grossman's assimilation of a paradigm for lyric close reading to the concerns of phe-
nomenological reading is seamless, and it is permitted by his explicit association of all
poetry with a radical version of the lyric: "Lyric is the most continuously practiced of all
poetic kinds .... Lyric is the genre of the 'other mind' as it has come to manifestation 387
through the abandonment of autonomy and the displacement toward fiction .... As the
kind which imitates man alone, lyric is the first and last poetic sort." For Grossman, per- SECTION 7
haps even more purely than for Heidegger, lyric is a humanist enterprise-indeed, lyric is PHENOMENOLOGIES

the guarantee of the human, the definition of the person, since "the speaking subject in oF LYRIC READING
the poem is always definable in social terms, that is to say, 'is always a person.'" In this
new lyric humanism, what is at stake is not "poetry as what builds up the very nature of
dwelling," in Heidegger's terms, but poetry as what makes personhood possible after the
ideal of the single subject has eroded. This is an idea oflyric poetry as what constructs the
very nature of the person, of poetic personhood as the ground of "ethical life," an idea
that "does not take place in the philosophical purity of possible worlds, but in the relent-
less and inescapable unity of the one world as recovered perpetually." The person repre-
sented by this idea of the lyric is a person to whom one has a responsibility, a person in a
world of social (so potentially ethical) relations. For Grossman as for the phenomenologi-
cal thinkers about poetics that preceded him, lyric allows the recovery of that better (not
ideal, but single and actual) world.
While Lacoue-Labarthe and Grossman take up the large ideas of poetic existence and
poetic knowledge framed by Heidegger, the last two essays in this section think about
where to locate that way of thinking within the structure of poems, since if one takes the
idea of the poem as a world literally, poetic thinking or being (poetic dwelling) must find
within the poem a local habitation and a name. In his reading of Hi:ilderlin, Heidegger
lingers over the notion of"measuring" and suggests that poems are not only measured, or
metrical, language but that "in poetry there takes place what all measuring is in the
ground of its being." The phenomenology of poetic experience depends upon a way of
framing the dimensions of that experience, and for phenomenology the dimensions of
experience become uniquely available in the poem. For Giorgio Agamben, one clear way
to begin to gauge poetic experience is to take the measure of the poem at its defining mo-
ment, its end. Casting "The End of the Poem" as "a poetic institution that has until now
remained unidentified," Agamben makes finitude into the literal definition of poetry,
since "the verse is, in every case, a unit that finds its principium individuationis only at the
end, that defines itself only at the point at which it ends." Beginning with Valery's famous
definition of poetry as "a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense," Agamben's fo-
cus on the end of the poem may at first seem structuralist (Jakobson also adopted Valery's
phrase in his essays on poetics). But while the structuralists used the paradigm of modern
linguistics to understand that hesitation, Agamben uses paradigms borrowed from medi-
eval authors, since he claims that the phenomenon of the end of the poem "has remained
nameless among the moderns." Thus in Agamben's essay the abundant available struc-
turalist vocabulary for the relation between the semiotic and the semantic, between sense
and sound, gives way to a premodern vocabulary for poetry as "the possibility of em-
jambment," which Agamben defines as "the opposition of a metrical limit to a syntactical
limit, of a prosodic pause to a semantic pause." Not incidentally, the poet laureate of en-
jambment and therefore of poetic definition turns out to be Dante, the maestro of the
transition between classical and modern poetics, the historical authority (especially in
Italian) on the nature of verse.
Although Agamben says that his short essay "is not the place ... to conduct a phenom-
enology of the end of the poem," he points toward such a phenomenology in Dante's terms,
since "Dante seems, at least implicitly, to pose the problem of the end of poetry." Under the
sign of Dante, the question of the linear end of the poem-the poem's last line or final
tercet-becomes a question of the end of poetry itself. Dante writes, "The endings of the
 388 last verses are the most beautiful if they fall into silence together with the rhymes" (Pul-
cherrime tamen se habent ultimorum carminum desinentiae, si cum rithmo in silentium
SECTION 7 cadunt). "What is this falling into silence of the poem?" Agamben asks, "What is the
PHENOMENOLOGIEs beauty that falls? And what is left of the poem after its ruin?" These attendant questions
oF LYRic READING shift the register offormal structure into the register of last rites, a familiar shift in phe-
nomenological lyric reading. According to Agamben, the shift is Dante's own, since "what
Dante says about the most beautiful way to end a poem" is that "the last verses fall,
rhymed, in silence." That silence becomes the place of phenomenological poetic dwelling,
since according to Agamben, "it is as if the verse at the end of the poem, which was now
to be irreparably ruined in sense, linked itself closely to its rhyme-fellow and, laced in this
way, chose to dwell with it in silence." Thus Dante may have achieved what Heidegger
imagined poetry as making possible, the sense of a world articulable only within and by
way of the poem itself. Agamben ends not with Heidegger but with Wittgenstein, whom
he cites to the effect that "philosophy should really only be poeticized," to which Agam-
ben replies, "poetry should really only be philosophized." For Agamben as for other phe-
nomenological readers, poetry is a way of thinking, and the end of the poem is a thought.
But what kind of thought? For Simon Jarvis, the question of poetic thinking is the
question of what he calls "prosodic thinking," and in the essay with which we conclude
this section, he is concerned with the kind of thinking rhyme is or does. While Agamben
reached back to Dante to invoke a sense of rhymed endings that predated modern preju-
dices about rhyme as antithetical to serious poetic experience, Jarvis wants "to help open
up a wound, a cauterized place, in the body of our [modern] poetic culture; to attempt to
listen in to rhyme's thinking through and beneath the over-saturated symbolic roles it
has usually been made to play in our cultures." Jarvis's essay on rhyme is part of his larger
project on "the repertoire of prosodic gestures deployed by poets not through the idea of
form but rather as a distinctive mode of knowing," a project that has its feet (so to speak)
in phenomenological thinking about lyric poetry as a singular mode of consciousness but
that branches out in many historical and theoretical directions. In "Why Rhyme Pleases,"
those directions circulate around the British eighteenth century, around an era just be-
fore rhyme was discredited as at best frivolous and at worst idolatrous and evil. Not inci-
dentally, that place and time led toward what became known as the Romantic revolution
in the lyric. Jarvis argues that the false divide between Romantic lyric and the "incanta-
tory techniques" of pre-Romantic verse has eventuated in "a kind of historical falling-
silent of rhyme." In order to redeem that historical silence, to think rhyme differently,
Jarvis attempts to reverse the persistent modern association of musical rhyming with au-
tomatism and to put in its place "a kind of thinking in tunes."
One could think of thinking in tunes as a riff on Heidegger's poetic worlding, mea-
suring, and dwelling, and that riff is partially a tribute to Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. As
we have seen, the phenomenological approach to the lyric almost always winds its way
through Frankfurt School thought as post-1945 complement or counterpoint, and for
Jarvis, Adorno's "argument that technique is the way art thinks" allows him to move
away from the post-Romantic idea that rhyme is "simply a screen or a cocoon or an anaes-
thetic" toward an idea of virtuoso rhyming technique as "a medium for thinking, and for
thinking about historical experience, just when in the very act of apparently retreating
from it." In veering away from a pure phenomenological investment in poetic experience
that attempts to free itself of its historical constraints toward a sense of prosodic thinking
as consciousness that inheres in historical time, Jarvis tries to resolve the binary that
haunted phenomenological approaches to lyric after Heidegger (about which, for in-
stance, Lacoue-Labarthe was so anguished). Through a long, intricately rhyming passage
from Pope's Rape of the Lock (1712), Jarvis attempts "to account for an overwhelming ex- 389
perience of [his] own, an experience of evanescent liquidity, or a powerful seduction
whose force is present precisely in its transience, in its continuous disappearance and SECTION 7
elusiveness, rather than in, say, its symmetry, or its balance or its order." PHENOMENOLOGIES

The experience Jarvis so lavishly describes and wants to bring into relief is at one oF LYRIC READING

striking moment in the essay set starkly against another modern experience "in front of
the television," an experience that testifies to the frightening way in which "we are today
undergoing the attempted decursification and infrastructuralization of the entire percep-
tual field." Here the familiar threat to experience and to the senses that haunts phenom-
enological criticism becomes visible; it becomes as well the reason we should value "the
very melody of bliss" available to us in Pope's virtuosic verse. If we could tear ourselves
away from the TV and be more like Wordsworth, who "lived before that radical emanci-
pation or deafening of the prosodic ear which reduced to a heading in a sub-romantic
narrative of dead ratiocination a verse repertoire which was in its time the occasion of
actual intensities of delight," we might be able to hear (and feel and think) that melody
once again. On this view, the experience of bliss always promised by but always eluding
phenomenological accounts of the lyric might still have the power to tease us out of
thought, since what intensities of delight could give back to us is something sexier than
Heidegger's plain poetic dwelling-may in fact be nothing less than ourselves.

NOTES

1. Stewart (2002), 1-2. Contemporary German Thought, trans. Shierry

2.Theodor Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Weber Nicholson and Samuel Weber (Cambridge,
Society" (1949), reprinted in Prisms: Studies in MA: MIT Press, 1983), 34·

FURTHER READING

Agamben, Giorgio. Language and Death: The Place Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
of Negativity (1982). Translated by Karen E. Jarvis, Simon. Wordsworth's Philosophic Song.
Pinkus with Michael Hardt (1991). Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of
2006. Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London:
--.Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Routledge, 1962.
Culture (1977). Translated by Ronald L. Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-
Martinez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Century Writers. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press
Press, 1992. of Harvard University Press, 1965.
Bache lard, Gaston. The Poetics of Reverie: Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Birth to Presence. Translated
Childhood, Language and the Cosmos (1960). by Brian Holmes. Stanford, CA: Stanford
Translated by Daniel Russell. Boston: Beacon University Press, 1993.
Press, 1971. Poulet, Georges. Exploding Poetry: Baudelaire!
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Atmosphere, Mood, Rim baud. Translated by Francoise Meltzer.
Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. 1977·
Harman, Graham. Heidegger Explained: From Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses.
Phenomenon to Thing. Peru, IL: Open Court, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
2007. - - . The Poet's Freedom. Chicago: University of
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. New York: Chicago Press, 2011.
Harper Perennial, 2008. Terada, Rei. Looking Away: Phenomenality and
!zen berg, Oren. On Being Numerous: The Poetic Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno. Cambridge MA:
Imagination of the Ground of Social Life. Harvard University Press, 2009.
(1951; trans. 1971)

MARTIN HEIDEGGER Translated by Albert Hofstadter 1

The phrase is taken from a late poem by Holderlin, which comes to us by a curious route.
It begins: "In lovely blueness blooms the steeple with metal roof." 2 If we are to hear the
phrase "poetically man dwells" rightly, we must restore it thoughtfully to the poem. For
that reason let us give thought to the phrase. Let us clear up the doubts it immediately
arouses. For otherwise we should lack the free readiness to respond to the phrase by fol-
lowing it.
"... poetically man dwells ..." If need be, we can imagine that poets do on occasion
dwell poetically. But how is "man"-and this means every man and all the time-
supposed to dwell poetically? Does not all dwelling remain incompatible with the poetic?
Our dwelling is harassed by the housing shortage. Even if that were not so, our dwelling
today is harassed by work, made insecure by the hunt for gain and success, bewitched by
the entertainment and recreation industry. But when there is still room left in today's
dwelling for the poetic, and time is still set aside, what comes to pass is at best a preoc-
cupation with aestheticizing, whether in writing or on the air. Poetry is either rejected as
a frivolous mooning and vaporizing into the unknown, and a flight into dreamland, or
is counted as a part of literature. And the validity of literature is assessed by the latest
prevailing standard. The prevailing standard, in turn, is made and controlled by the
organs for making public civilized opinions. One of its functionaries-at once driver
and driven-is the literature industry. In such a setting poetry cannot appear otherwise
than as literature. Where it is studied entirely in educational and scientific terms, it is
the object of literary history. Western poetry goes under the general heading of "Euro-
pean literature."
But if the sole form in which poetry exists is literary to start with, then how can hu-
man dwelling be understood as based on the poetic? The phrase, "man dwells poetically,"
comes indeed from a mere poet, and in fact from one who, we are told, could not cope
with life. It is the way of poets to shut their eyes to actuality. Instead of acting, they
dream. What they make is merely imagined. The things of imagination are merely made.
Making is, in Greek, poiesis. And man's dwelling is supposed to be poetry and poetic?
This can be assumed, surely, only by someone who stands aside from actuality and does
not want to see the existent condition of man's historical-sociallife today-the sociolo-
gists call it the collective.
But before we so bluntly pronounce dwelling and poetry incompatible, it may be well
to attend soberly to the poet's statement. It speaks of man's dwelling. It does not describe
today's dwelling conditions. Above all, it does not assert that to dwell means to occupy a
house, a dwelling place. Nor does it say that the poetic exhausts itself in an unreal play of
poetic imagination. What thoughtful man, therefore, would presume to declare, unhesi-
tatingly and from a somewhat dubious elevation, that dwelling and the poetic are incom-
patible? Perhaps the two can bear with each other. This is not all. Perhaps one even 391
bears the other in such a way that dwelling rests on the poetic. If this is indeed what we
suppose, then we are required to think of dwelling and poetry in terms of their essen- 7.1
tial nature. If we do not balk at this demand, we think of what is usually called the ex- MARTIN HEIDEGGER

istence of man in terms of dwelling. In doing so, we do of course give up the customary
notion of dwelling. According to that idea, dwelling remains merely one form of human
behavior alongside many others. We work in the city, but dwell outside it. We travel,
and dwell now here, now there. Dwelling so understood is always merely the occupying
of a lodging.
When Holderlin speaks of dwelling, he has before his eyes the basic character of hu-
man existence. He sees the "poetic," moreover, by way of its relation to this dwelling, thus
understood essentially.
This does not mean, though, that the poetic is merely an ornament and bonus added
to dwelling. Nor does the poetic character of dwelling mean merely that the poetic turns
up in some way or other in all dwelling. Rather, the phrase "poetically man dwells" says:
poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell. But through
what do we attain to a dwelling place? Through building. Poetic creation, which lets us
dwell, is a kind of building.
Thus we confront a double demand: for one thing, we are to think of what is called
man's existence by way of the nature of dwelling; for another, we are to think of the nature
of poetry as a letting-dwell, as a-perhaps even the-distinctive kind of building. If we
search out the nature of poetry according to this viewpoint, then we arrive at the nature of
dwelling.
But where do we humans get our information about the nature of dwelling and po-
etry? Where does man generally get the claim to arrive at the nature of something? Man
can make such a claim only where he receives it. He receives it from the telling of lan-
guage. Of course, only when and only as long as he respects language's own nature.
Meanwhile, there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and
broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master oflan-
guage, while in fact language remains the master of man. When this relation of domi-
nance gets inverted, man hits upon strange maneuvers. Language becomes the means of
expression. As expression, language can decay into a mere medium for the printed word.
That even in such employment of language we retain a concern for care in speaking is all
to the good. But this alone will never help us to escape from the inversion of the true rela-
tion of dominance between language and man. For, strictly, it is language that speaks.
Man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal.
Among all the appeals that we human beings, on our part, may help to be voiced, lan-
guage is the highest and everywhere the first. Language beckons us, at first and then
again at the end toward a thing's nature. But that is not to say, ever, that in any word-
meaning picked up at will language supplies us, straight away and definitively, with the
transparent nature of the matter as if it were an object ready for use. But the responding
in which man authentically listens to the appeal of language is that which speaks in the
element of poetry: The more poetic a poet is-the freer (that is, the more open and
ready for the unforeseen) his saying-the greater is the purity with which he submits
what he says to an ever more painstaking listening, and the further what he says is from
the mere propositional statement that is dealt with solely in regard to its correctness or
incorrectness.

"... poetically man dwells ... "

 392 says the poet. We hear Holderlin's words more clearly when we take them back into the
poem in which they belong. First, let us listen only to the two lines from which we have
SECTION 7 detached and thus clipped the phrase. They run:
PHENOMENOLOGIES
Full of merit, yet poetically, man
OF LYRIC READING
Dwells on this earth.

The keynote of the lines vibrates in the word "poetically." This word is set off in two di-
rections: by what comes before it and by what follows.
Before it are the words: "Full of merit, yet. ..."They sound almost as if the next word,
"poetically," introduced a restriction on the profitable, meritorious dwelling of man. But
it is just the reverse. The restriction is denoted by the expression "Full of merit," to which
we must add in thought a "to be sure." Man, to be sure, merits and earns much in his
dwelling. For he cultivates the growing things of the earth and takes care of his increase.
Cultivating and caring (colere, cultura) are a kind of building. But man not only cultivates
what produces growth out of itself; he also builds in the sense of aedificare, by erecting
things that cannot come into being and subsist by growing. Things that are built in this
sense include not only buildings but all the works made by man's hands and through his
arrangements. Merits due to this building, however, can never fill out the nature of dwell-
ing. On the contrary, they even deny dwelling its own nature when they are pursued and
acquired purely for their own sake. For in that case these merits, precisely by their abun-
dance, would everywhere constrain dwelling within the bounds of this kind of building.
Such building pursues the fulfillment of the needs of dwelling. Building in the sense of
the farmer's cultivation of growing things, and of the erecting of edifices and works and
the production of tools, is already a consequence of the nature of dwelling, but it is not its
ground, let alone its grounding. This grounding must take place in a different building.
Building of the usual kind, often practiced exclusively and therefore the only one that is
familiar, does of course bring an abundance of merits into dwelling. Yet man is capable of
dwelling only if he has already built, is building, and remains disposed to build, in an-
otherway.
"Full of merit (to be sure), yet poetically, man dwells ...." This is followed in the text
by the words: "on this earth." We might be inclined to think the addition superfluous; for
dwelling, after all, already means man's stay on earth-on "this" earth, to which every
mortal knows himself to be entrusted and exposed.
But when Holderlin ventures to say that the dwelling of mortals is poetic, this state-
ment, as soon as it is made, gives the impression that, on the contrary, "poetic" dwelling
snatches man away from the earth. For the "poetic," when it is taken as poetry, is sup-
posed to belong to the realm of fantasy. Poetic dwelling flies fantastically above reality.
The poet counters this misgiving by saying expressly that poetic dwelling is a dwelling
"on this earth." Holderlin thus not only protects the "poetic" from a likely misinterpreta-
tion, but by adding the words "on this earth" expressly points to the nature of poetry.
Poetry does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover over it.
Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings
him into dwelling.
Full of merit, yet poetically, man
Dwells on this earth.

Do we know now why man dwells poetically? We still do not. We now even run the
risk of intruding foreign thoughts into Holderlin's poetic words. For Holderlin indeed
speaks of man's dwelling and his merit, but still he does not connect dwelling with build-
ing, as we have just done. He does not speak of building, either in the sense of cultivating 393
and erecting, or in such a way as even to represent poetry as a special kind of building.
Accordingly, Holderlin does not speak of poetic dwelling as our own thinking does. De- 7.1
spite all this, we are thinking the same thing that Holderlin is saying poetically. MARTIN HEJDEGGER

It is, however, important to take note here of an essential point. A short parenthetical
remark is needed. Poetry and thinking meet each other in one and the same only when,
and only as long as, they remain distinctly in the distinctness of their nature. The same
never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is
merely identical. The equal or identical always moves toward the absence of difference, so
that everything may be reduced to a common denominator. The same, by contrast, is the
belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can
only say "the same" if we think difference. It is in the carrying out and settling of differ-
ences that the gathering nature of sameness comes to light. The same banishes all zeal
always to level what is different into the equal or identical. The same gathers what is dis-
tinct into an original being-at-one. The equal, on the contrary, disperses them into the
dull unity of mere uniformity. Holderlin, in his own way, knew of these relations. In an
epigram which bears the title "Root of All Evil" (Stuttgart edition, I, I, p. 305) he says:
Being at one is godlike and good; whence, then,
this craze among men that there should exist only
One, why should all be one?

When we follow in thought Holderlin's poetic statement about the poetic dwelling of
man, we divine a path by which, through what is thought differently, we come nearer to
thinking the same as what the poet composes in his poem.
But what does Holderlin say of the poetic dwelling of man? We seek the answer to the
question by listening to lines 24 to 38 of our poem. For the two lines on which we first
commented are spoken from their region. Holderlin says:
May, iflife is sheer toil, a man
Lift his eyes and say: so
I too wish to be? Yes. As long as Kindness,
The Pure, still stays with his heart, man
Not unhappily measures himself
Against the godhead. Is God unknown?
Is he manifest like the sky? I'd sooner
Believe the latter. It's the measure of man.
Full of merit, yet poetically, man
Dwells on this earth. But no purer
Is the shade of the starry night,
If I might put it so, than
Man, who's called an image of the godhead.
Is there a measure on earth? There is
None.

We shall think over only a few points in these lines, and for the sole purpose of hear-
ing more clearly what Holderlin means when he calls man's dwelling a "poetic" one. The
first lines (24 to 26) give us a clue. They are in the form of a question that is answered
confidently in the affirmative. The question is a paraphrase of what the lines already
expounded utter directly: "Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth."
Holderlin asks:
 394 May, if life is sheer toil, a man
Lift his eyes and say: so
SECTION 7 I too wish to be? Yes.
PHENOMENOLOGIES

oF LYRIC READING Only in the realm of sheer toil does man toil for "merits." There he obtains them for
himself in abundance. But at the same time, in this realm, man is allowed to look up, out
of it, through it, toward the divinities. The upward glance passes aloft toward the sky, and
yet it remains below on the earth. The upward glance spans the between of sky and earth.
This between is measured out for the dwelling of man. We now call the span thus meted
out the dimension. This dimension does not arise from the fact that sky and earth are
turned toward one another. Rather, their facing each other itself depends on the dimen-
sion. Nor is the dimension a stretch of space as ordinarily understood; for everything
spatial, as something for which space is made, is already in need of the dimension, that is,
that into which it is admitted.
The nature of the dimension is the meting out-which is lightened and so can be
spanned-of the between: the upward to the sky as well as the downward to earth. We
leave the nature of the dimension without a name. According to Holderlin's words, man
spans the dimension by measuring himself against the heavenly. Man does not undertake
this spanning just now and then; rather, man is man at all only in such spanning. This is
why he can indeed block this spanning, trim it, and disfigure it, but he can never evade it.
Man, as man, has always measured himself with and against something heavenly. Lucifer,
too, is descended from heaven. Therefore we read in the next lines (28 to 29): "Man mea-
sures himself against the godhead." The godhead is the "measure" with which man
measures out his dwelling, his stay on the earth beneath the sky. Only insofar as man
takes the measure of his dwelling in this way is he able to be commensurately with his
nature. Man's dwelling depends on an upward-looking measure-taking of the dimension,
in which the sky belongs just as much as the earth.
This measure-taking not only takes the measure of the earth, ge, and accordingly it is
no mere geo-metry. Just as little does it ever take the measure of heaven, ouranos, for itself.
Measure-taking is no science. Measure-taking gauges the between, which brings the two,
heaven and earth, to one another. This measure-taking has its own metron, and thus its
own metric.
Man's taking measure in the dimension dealt out to him brings dwelling into its ground
plan. Taking the measure of the dimension is the element within which human dwelling
has its security, by which it securely endures. The taking of measure is what is poetic in
dwelling. Poetry is a measuring. But what is it to measure? If poetry is to be understood as
measuring, then obviously we may not subsume it under just any idea of measuring and
measure.
Poetry is presumably a high and special kind of measuring. But there is more. Perhaps we
have to pronounce the sentence, "Poetry is a measuring," with a different stress. "Poetry is a
measuring." In poetry there takes place what all measuring is in the ground of its being.
Hence it is necessary to pay heed to the basic act of measuring. That consists in man's first of
all taking the measure which then is applied in every measuring act. In poetry the taking of
measure occurs. To write poetry is measure-taking, understood in the strict sense of the
word, by which man first receives the measure for the breadth of his being. Man exists as a
mortal. He is called mortal because he can die. To be able to die means: to be capable of death
as death. Only man dies-and indeed continually, so long as he stays on this earth, so long as
he dwells. His dwelling, however, rests in the poetic. Holderlin sees the nature of the "poetic"
in the taking of the measure by which the measure-taking of human being is accomplished.
 Yet how shall we prove that Hi:ilderlin thinks of the nature of poetry as taking mea- 395
sure? We do not need to prove anything here. All proof is always only a subsequent un-
dertaking on the basis of presuppositions. Anything at all can be proved, depending only 7.1
on what presuppositions are made. But we can here pay heed only to a few points. It is MARTIN HEIDEGGER

enough, then, if we attend to the poet's own words. For in the next lines Hi:ilderlin in-
quires, before anything else and in fact exclusively, as to man's measure. That measure is
the godhead against which man measures himself. The question begins in line 29 with
the words: "Is God unknown?" Manifestly not. For if he were unknown, how could he,
being unknown, ever be the measure? Yet-and this is what we must now listen to and
keep in mind-for Hi:ilderlin God, as the one who he is, is unknown and it is just as this
Unknown One that he is the measure for the poet. This is also why Hi:ilderlin is per-
plexed by the exciting question: how can that which by its very nature remains unknown
ever become a measure? For something that man measures himself by must after all
impart itself, must appear. But if it appears, it is known. The god, however, is unknown,
and he is the measure nonetheless. Not only this, but the god who remains unknown,
must by showing himself as the one he is, appear as the one who remains unknown. God's
manifestness-not only he himself-is mysterious. Therefore the poet immediately asks
the next question: "Is he manifest like the sky?" Hi:ilderlin answers: 'T d sooner I Believe
the latter."
Why-so we now ask-is the poet's surmise inclined in that way? The very next words
give the answer. They say tersely: "It's the measure of man." What is the measure for hu-
man measuring? God? No. The sky? No. The manifest ness of the sky? No. The measure
consists in the way in which the god who remains unknown, is revealed as such by the
sky. God's appearance through the sky consists in a disclosing that lets us see what con-
ceals itself, but lets us see it not by seeking to wrest what is concealed out of its concealed-
ness, but only by guarding the concealed in its self-concealment. Thus the unknown god
appears as the unknown by way of the sky's manifestness. This appearance is the measure
against which man measures himself.
A strange measure, perplexing it would seem to the common notions of mortals, incon-
venient to the cheap omniscience of everyday opinion, which likes to claim that it is the
standard for all thinking and reflection.
A strange measure for ordinary and in particular also for all merely scientific ideas,
certainly not a palpable stick or rod but in truth simpler to handle than they, provided
our hands do not abruptly grasp but are guided by gestures befitting the measure here to
be taken. This is done by a taking which at no time clutches at the standard but rather
takes it in a concentrated perception, a gathered taking-in, that remains a listening.
But why should this measure, which is so strange to us men of today, be addressed to
man and imparted by the measure-taking of poetry? Because only this measure gauges
the very nature of man. For man dwells by spanning the "on the earth" and the "beneath
the sky." This "on" and "beneath" belong together. Their interplay is the span that man
traverses at every moment insofar as he is as an earthly being. In a fragment (Stuttgart
edition, 2, 1, p. 334) Hi:ilderlin says:
Always, love! the earth
moves and heaven holds.

Because man is, in his enduring the dimension, his being must now and again be mea-
sured out. That requires a measure which involves at once the whole dimension in one. To
discern this measure, to gauge it as the measure, and to accept it as the measure, means
for the poet to make poetry. Poetry is this measure-taking-its taking, indeed, for the
 396 dwelling of man. For immediately after the words "It's the measure of man" there follow
the lines: "Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth."
SECTION 7 Do we now know what the "poetic" is for Holderlin? Yes and no. Yes, because we re-
PHENOMENOLOGIES ceive an intimation about how poetry is to be thought of: namely, it is to be conceived as
oF LYRIC READING a distinctive kind of measuring. No, because poetry, as the gauging of that strange mea-
sure, becomes ever more mysterious. And so it must doubtless remain, if we are really
prepared to make our stay in the domain of poetry's being.
Yet it strikes us as strange that Holder! in thinks of poetry as a measuring. And rightly
so, as long as we understand measuring only in the sense current for us. In this sense, by
the use of something known-measuring rods and their number-something unknown
is stepped off and thus made known, and so is confined within a quantity and order
which can always be determined at a glance. Such measuring can vary with the type of
apparatus employed. But who will guarantee that this customary kind of measuring,
merely because it is common, touches the nature of measuring? When we hear of mea-
sure, we immediately think of number and imagine the two, measure and number, as
quantitative. But the nature of measure is no more a quantum than is the nature of num-
ber. True, we can reckon with numbers-but not with the nature of number. When
Holderlin envisages poetry as a measuring, and above all himself achieves poetry as tak-
ing measure, then we, in order to think of poetry, must ever and again first give thought
to the measure that is taken in poetry; we must pay heed to the kind of taking here, which
does not consist in a clutching or any other kind of grasping, but rather in a letting come
of what has been dealt out. What is the measure for poetry? The godhead; God, therefore?
Who is the god? Perhaps this question is too hard for man, and asked too soon. Let us
therefore first ask what may be said about God. Let us first ask merely: What is God?
Fortunately for us, and helpfully, some verses of Holderlin's have been preserved
which belong in substance and time to the ambience of the poem "In lovely blueness ...."
They begin (Stuttgart edition, 2, 1, p. 210):
What is God? Unknown, yet
Full of his qualities is the
Face of the sky. For the lightnings
Are the wrath of a god. The more something
Is invisible, the more it yields to what's alien.

What remains alien to the god, the sight of the sky-this is what is familiar to man.
And what is that? Everything that shimmers and blooms in the sky and thus under the
sky and thus on earth, everything that sounds and is fragrant, rises and comes-but also
everything that goes and stumbles, moans and falls silent, pales and darkens. Into this,
which is intimate to man but alien to the god, the unknown imparts himself, in order to
remain guarded within it as the unknown. But the poet calls all the brightness of the
sights of the sky and every sound of its courses and breezes into the singing word and
there makes them shine and ring. Yet the poet, if he is a poet, does not describe the mere
appearance of sky and earth. The poet calls, in the sights of the sky, that which in its very
self-disclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that
which conceals itself. In the familiar appearances, the poet calls the alien as that to which
the invisible imparts itself in order to remain what it is-unknown.
The poet makes poetry only when he takes the measure, by saying the sights of
heaven in such a way that he submits to its appearances as to the alien element to which
the unknown god has "yielded." Our current name for the sight and appearance of some-
thing is "image." The nature of the image is to let something be seen. By contrast, copies and
imitations are already mere variations on the genuine image which, as a sight or spectacle, 397
lets the invisible be seen and so imagines the invisible in something alien to it. Because po-
etry takes that mysterious measure, to wit, in the face of the sky, therefore it speaks in "im- 7.1
ages." This is why poetic images are imaginings in a distinctive sense: not mere fancies and MARTIN HEIDEGGER

illusions but imaginings that are visible inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar. The
poetic saying of images gathers the brightness and sound of the heavenly appearances into
one with the darkness and silence of what is alien. By such sights the god surprises us. In this
strangeness he proclaims his unflattering nearness. For that reason Holderin, after the lines
"Full of merit, yet poetically, man Dwells on this earth," can continue:

... Yet no purer

Is the shade of the starry night,
If I might put it so, than
Man, who's called an image of the godhead.

"The shade of the night"-the night itself is the shade, that darkness which can never
become a mere blackness because as shade it is wedded to light and remains cast by it.
The measure taken by poetry yields, imparts itself-as the foreign element in which the
invisible one preserves his presence-to what is familiar in the sights of the sky. Hence,
the measure is of the same nature as the sky. But the sky is not sheer light. The radiance of
its height is itself the darkness of its all-sheltering breadth. The blue of the sky's lovely
blueness is the color of depth. The radiance of the sky is the dawn and dusk of the twi-
light, which shelters everything that can be proclaimed. This sky is the measure. This is
why the poet must ask:
Is there a measure on earth?

And he must reply: "There is none." Why? Because what we signify when we say "on the
earth" exists only insofar as man dwells on the earth and in his dwelling lets the earth be
as earth.
But dwelling occurs only when poetry comes to pass and is present, and indeed in the
way whose nature we now have some idea of, as taking a measure for all measuring. This
measure-taking is itself an authentic measure-taking, no mere gauging with ready-made
measuring rods for the making of maps. Nor is poetry building in the sense of raising and
fitting buildings. But poetry, as the authentic gauging of the dimension of dwelling, is the
primal form of building. Poetry first of all admits man's dwelling into its very nature, its
presencing being. Poetry is the original admission of dwelling.
The statement, Man dwells in that he builds, has now been given its proper sense. Man
does not dwell in that he merely establishes his stay on the earth beneath the sky, by rais-
ing growing things and simultaneously raising buildings. Man is capable of such building
only if he already builds in the sense of the poetic taking of measure. Authentic building
occurs so far as there are poets, such poets as take the measure for architecture, the struc-
ture of dwelling.
On March 12, 1804, Holderlin writes from Niirtingen to his friend Leo von Secken-
dorf: "At present I am especially occupied with the fable, the poetic view of history, and
the architectonics of the skies, especially of our nation's, so far as it differs from the
Greek" (Hellingrath V2, p. 333).
"... poetically, man dwells .... "

Poetry builds up the very nature of dwelling. Poetry and dwelling not only do not
exclude each other; on the contrary, poetry and dwelling belong together; each calling for
 398 the other. "Poetically man dwells." Do we dwell poetically? Presumably we dwell alto-
gether unpoetically. If that is so, does it give the lie to the poet's words; are they untrue?
SECTION 7 No. The truth of his utterance is confirmed in the most unearthly way. For dwelling can
PHENOMENOLOGIEs be unpoetic only because it is in essence poetic. For a man to be blind, he must remain a
oF LYRIC READING being by nature endowed with sight. A piece of wood can never go blind. But when man
goes blind, there always remains the question whether his blindness derives from some
defect and loss or lies in an abundance and excess. In the same poem that meditates on
the measure for all measuring, Holderlin says (lines 75-76): "King Oedipus has perhaps
one eye too many." Thus it might be that our unpoetic dwelling, its incapacity to take the
measure, derives from a curious excess of frantic measuring and calculating.
That we dwell unpoetically, and in what way, we can in any case learn only if we know
the poetic. Whether, and when, we may come to a turning point in our unpoetic dwelling
is something we may expect to happen only if we remain heedful of the poetic. How and
to what extent our doings can share in this turn we alone can prove, if we take the poetic
seriously.
The poetic is the basic capacity for human dwelling. But man is capable of poetry at
any time only to the degree to which his being is appropriate to that which itself has a lik-
ing for man and therefore needs his presence. Poetry is authentic or inauthentic according
to the degree of this appropriation.
That is why authentic poetry does not come to light appropriately in every period.
When and for how long does authentic poetry exist? Holderlin gives the answer in verses
26-69, already cited. Their explication has been purposely deferred until now. The
verses run:

... As long as Kindness,

The Pure, still stays with his heart, man
Not unhappily measures himself
Against the Godhead ...

"Kindness"-what is it? A harmless word, but described by Holderlin with the capi-
talized epithet "the Pure." "Kindness"-this word, if we take it literally, is Holderlin's
magnificent translation for the Greek word charis. In his Ajax, Sophocles says of charis
(verse 522):
Charis charin gar estin he tiktous aei
For kindness it is, that ever calls forth kindness.

"As long as Kindness, the Pure, still stays with his heart. ..." Holderlin says in an idiom
he liked to use: "with his heart," not "in his heart." That is, it has come to the dwelling
being of man, come as the claim and appeal of the measure to the heart in such a way that
the heart turns to give heed to the measure.
As long as this arrival of kindness endures, so long does man succeed in measuring
himself not unhappily against the godhead. When this measuring appropriately comes to
light, man creates poetry from the very nature of the poetic. When the poetic appropri-
ately comes to light, then man dwells humanly on this earth, and then-as Holderlin says
in his last poem-"the life of man" is a "dwelling life" (Stuttgart edition, 2, 1, p. 312).

VISTA

When far the dwelling life of man into the distance goes,
Where, in that far distance, the grapevine's season glows,
There too are summer's fields, emptied of their growing,
 And forest looms, its image darkly showing. 399
That Nature paints the seasons so complete,
That she abides, but they glide by so fleet, 7.1
Comes of perfection; then heaven's radiant height MARTIN HEIDECCER

Crowns man, as blossoms crown the trees, with light.

NOTES

1.Martin Heidegger wrote"... dichterisch 2. Friedrich Hiilderlin, Friedrich Holder/ins

wohnet der Mensch" (1951) on the occasion of the Siimtliche Werke, Groge Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed.
death of a German musician, and the essay was Friedrich Beigner (works) and Adolf Beck (letters
published in Vortriige und Aufsiitze (Pfullingen: and documents), 8 vols. in 16 parts (Stuttgart:
G. Neske, 1954). Cotta, 1943-85), 2, 372ff.

Poetry as Experience: Two Poems 7.2

by Paul Celan (1968; trans. 1999)
PHILIPPE LACOUE-LABARTHE Translated by Andrea Tarnowski

Expand art? No. But accompany art into your own unique place of no escape. And set
yourself free.
"The Meridian" 1

Here are two poems by Paul Celan:

TUBINGEN, JANNER

Zur Blindheit iiber-

redete Augen.
Ihre-"ein
Ratsel ist Rein-
entsprungenes"-, ihre
Erinnerung an
schwimmende Holderlintiirme, mowen-
umschwirrt.

Besuche ertrunkener Schreiner bei

diesen
tauchenden Worten:

Kame,
kame ein Mensch,
kame ein Mensch zur Welt, heute, mit
dem Lichtbart der
 400 Patriarchen: er diirfte,
sprach er von dieser
SECTION 7 Zeit, er
PHENOMENOLOGIES diirfte
OF LYRIC READING nur !allen und !allen,
immer-, immer-
zuzu.

("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")

TUBINGEN, JANUARY

Eyes talked into

blindness.
Their-"an enigma is
the purely
originated"-, their
memory of
Hi:ilderlin towers afloat, circled
by whirring gulls.

Visits of drowned joiners to

these
submerging words:

Should,
should a man,
should a man come into the world, today, with
the shining beard of the
patriarchs: he could,
if he spoke of this
time, he
could
only babble and babble
over, over
againagain.

("Pallaksh. Pallaksh."j2

TODTNAUBERG

Arnika, Augentrost, der

Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit dem
Sternwiirfel drauf,

in der
Hiitte,
die in das Buch
-wessen Namen nahms auf
vor dem meinen?-
die in dies Buch
geschriebene Zeile von
einer Hoffnung, heute,
auf eines Denkenden 401
kommendes
Wort 7.2
im Herzen, PHILIPPE

LACOUE·LABARTHE
Waldwasen, uneingeebnet,
Orchis und Orchis, einzeln,

Krudes, spater, im Fahren,

deutlich,

der uns fahrt, der Mensch,

der's mit anhiirt,

die halb-
beschrittenen Kniippel-
pfade im Hochmoor,

Feuchtes,
vie!.

TODTNAUBERG

Arnica, eyebright, the

draft from the well with the
starred die above it,

in the
hut,

the line
-whose name did the book
register before mine?-
the line inscribed
in that book about
a hope, today,
of a thinking man's
coming
word
in the heart,

woodland sward, unlevelled,

orchid and orchid, single,

coarse stuff, later, clear

in passing,

he who drives us, the man

who listens in,

the half-
trodden wretched
tracks through the high moors,

dampness,
much. 3
 402 These two poems are well known; each of them has been translated into French at
least twice. The first, which is part of the Niemandsrose collection (1963), was initially
SECTION 7 translated by Andre du Bouchet (appearing in L'Ephemere 7, and then in Strette, pub-
PHENOMENOLOGIES lished by Mercure de France in 1971) before figuring in the complete edition of La rose de
oF LYRic READING personne, edited by Martine Broda (Le Nouveau Commerce, 1979). The second, issued on
its own in 1968 and then republished in Lichtzwang in July 1970, two or three months after
Celan's death, was translated by Jean Daive as early as 1970, and then, several years later,
by Andre du Bouchet (Poemes de Paul Celan, Clivages, 1978). Other published versions of
these poems may exist. 4
It is obvious that the titles of both are places: Tiibingen, Todtnauberg. The poems seem,
in each case, to commemorate a visit. But it is also obvious that these place names can ad-
ditionally, even primarily, be names of people. Whatever trope we use, the indications, the
quotations, the allusions are all perfectly clear; and in any case, we already know that
Tiibingen is Holderlin, and Todtnauberg, Heidegger. I don't imagine it would be very useful
to stress the reasons that prompt us today (heute: each poem includes the word) to associate
the two poems. For everyone who is, as we say, "concerned about our times" and "mindful
of history" (European history), the two names, Holderlin and Heidegger, are now indissolu-
bly linked. They give voice to what is at stake in our era (dieser Zeit). A world age-perhaps
the world's old age-is approaching its end, for we are reaching a completion, closing the
circle of what the philosophical West has called, since Grecian times and in multiple ways,
"knowledge." That is, techne. What has not been deployed, what has been forgotten or re-
jected in the midst of this completion-and no doubt from the very beginning-must now
clear itself a path to a possible future. Let us agree to say that this pertains, as Heidegger says
himself, to the "task of thought." Such thought must re-inaugurate history, reopen the pos-
sibility of a world, and pave the way for the improbable, unforeseeable advent of a god. Only
this might "save" us. For this task, art (again, techne), and in art, poetry, are perhaps able to
provide some signs. At least, that is the hope, fragile, tenuous, and meager as it is.
While it may not be useful to stress, it is no doubt helpful at least to remark the
following:

1. Such thinking, the thinking of History, is essentially German. It is not exclu-

sively so, but since the end of the eighteenth century, Germans have brought it a
dimension never attained before or elsewhere; one reason for this, among others,
is that the question of the relation between Modern and Ancient, and of the pos-
sibility of uniqueness or identity for a whole people, has never been so much a
question as it has been in Germany. That is, first and foremost, a question for the
"nation"-the people-and in the language, a latecomer to the world after the
sumptuous, "renascent" display of European Latinity. German has never ceased
aspiring, on pretense of its strange similarity to Greek (the "language of origin"),
to the unique relation it has believed it could establish to everything most authen-
tically Greek about Greece.

2. Paul Celan (Ancel) was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, of German Jewish parents.
Whatever the fate of Bukovina in the years that marked the end of Celan's adoles-
cence (he was born in 1920)-it was, successively, annexed by the U.S.S.R. in 1940,
occupied by Germany and Romania in 1941, and reconquered by the Red Army in
1943-Celan was not just at the extreme fringes of Mitteleuropa; he was of German
birth, born into that language. In a true and understandably forgotten sense, his na-
tionality was German. This did not in any way preclude his having a completely dif-
 ferent origin, or to be more precise, a completely different heritage. Thus, his lan- 403
guage always remained that of the Other, an Other language without an "other
language," previously rather than laterally acquired, against which to measure itself. 7.2
All other languages were necessarily lateral for Celan; he was a great translator. PHILIPPE

lACOUE-lABARTHE

3. Paul Celan knew, as everything he wrote attests (and first and foremost, his ac-
ceptance of German as his working language), that today (heute) it is with Ger-
many that we must clarify things. 5 Not only because Celan suffered as the victim of
Germany's "Hellenic," "Hyperborean" utopia, but because he knew it was impos-
sible to elude the question that the utopia's atrocity had transformed into an an-
swer, a "solution." He embodied an extreme, eternally insoluble paradox in Ger-
many as one of the few people, almost the only person, to have borne witness to the
truth of the question that remains, as ever: (But) who are we (still, today, heute)?

4. The extermination gave rise, in its impossible possibility, in its immense and
intolerable banality, to the post-Auschwitz era (in Adorno's sense). Celan said:
"Death is a master who comes from Germany." 6 It is the impossible possibility, the
immense and intolerable banality of our time, of this time (dieser Zeit). It is al-
ways easy to mock "distress," but we are its contemporaries; we are at the end-
point of what No us, ratio and Logos, still today (heute) the framework for what we
are, cannot have failed to show: that murder is the first thing to count on, and
elimination the surest means of identification. Today, everywhere, against this
black but "enlightened" background, remaining reality is disappearing in the
mire of a "globalized" world. Nothing, not even the most obvious phenomena,
not even the purest, most wrenching love, can escape this era's shadow: a cancer
of the subject, whether in the ego or in the masses. To deny this on pretext of
avoiding the pull of pathos is to behave like a sleepwalker. To transform it into
pathos, so as to be able "still" to produce art (sentiment, etc.), is unacceptable.

I want to ask the most brutal question possible, at the risk of being obnoxious: Was
Celan able to situate not himself, but us vis-a-vis "it"? Was poetry still able to? If so, which
poetry, and what, in fact, of poetry? Mine is a distant way (distant now by many degrees,
heavily layered over the very man who first asked) of repeating Holderlin's questions:
Wozu Dichter? What for, indeed?

Here is how the two poems I believe carry all the weight of this question have been trans-
lated into French:

TUBINGEN, JANVIER

(TR. ANDRE DU BOUCHET)

A cecite meme
mues, pupilles.
Leur-'enigme cela,
qui est pur
jaillissement'-, leur
memoirede
tours Holderlin nageant, d'un battement de mouettes
serties.
 404 Visites de menuisiers engloutis par
telles
SECTION 7 paroles plongeant:
PHENOMENOLOGIES
S'il venait,
OF LYRIC READING
venait un homme,
hom me vena it au monde, aujourd'hui avec
clarte et bar be des
patriarches: illui faudrait,
dut-il parler de telle
epoque, illui faudrait
bah iller uniquement, babiller
toujours et toujours ba-
biller iller.

("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")

(TR. MARTINE BRODA)

Des yeux sous les paroles

aveugles.
Leur-"enigme
ce qui nait
de source pur"-, leur
souvenir de
tours Holderlin nageant, tournoyees
de mouettes.

Visites de menuisiers noyes

aces
mots qui plongent:

S' il venait,
vena it un homme,
venait un homme au monde, aujourd'hui, avec
Ia barbe de clarte
des patriarches: il devrait,
s'il parlait de ce
temps, il
devrait
begayer seulement, begayer
toutoutoujours
begayer.

("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")

TODTNAUBERG

(TR. jEAN DAIVE)

Arnika, centauree, Ia
boisson du puits avec, au-dessus,
l'astre-de,
dans le 405
refuge,
7.2
ecrite dans le livre
PHILIPPE
(que! nom portait-il
lACOU E-LABARTH E
avant le mien?),
ecrite dans ce livre
!a ligne,
aujourd'hui, d'une attente:
de qui pense
parole a venir
au coeur,

de !a mousse des bois, non aplanie,

orchis et orchis, clairseme,

de !a verdeur, plus tard, en voyage,

distincte,

qui no us conduit, l'homme,

qui, a cela, tend l'oreille,

les chemins
de rondins a demi
parcourus dans !a fange,

de !'hum ide,
tres.

(TR. ANDRE DU BOUCHET)

Arnika, luminet, cette

gorgee du puits au
cube etoile plus haut du de,

dans !a
hutte,

!a, dans un livre

-les noms, de qui, releves
avant le mien?-
la, dans un livre,
!ignes qui inscrivent
une attente, aujourd'hui,
de qui meditera (a
venir, in-
cessamment venir)
unmot
du coeur
humus des bois, jamais aplani,

orchis, orchis,
unique,
 406 chose crue, plus tard, chemin faisant,
claire,
SECTION 7
qui nous voitura,
PHENOMENOLOGIES
l'homme,
OF LYRIC READING
lui-meme a son ecoute,

a moitie
fraye le layon de rondins
la-haut dans le marais,

hum ide,
oui.

(At the end of Andre du Bouchet's slim volume, we read the following note:" 'Todtnau-
berg' was translated using the initial version of the poem, dated 'Frankfurt am Main, 2
August 1967.' From a word-for-word translation suggested by Paul Celan, I have kept the
French 'qui nous voitura' for 'der uns fahrt.' A.d. B.")

I am not juxtaposing these translations here in order to compare or comment on them. It

is not my intention to "critique" them. At most, I think it necessary to remark that what
we might call the "Mallarmean" style of Andre du Bouchet's translations, their effete or
precious quality, does not do justice to the lapidary hardness, the abruptness oflanguage
as handled by Celan. Or rather, the language that held him, ran through him. Especially
in his late work, prosody and syntax do violence to language: they chop, dislocate, trun-
cate or cut it. Something in this certainly bears comparison to what occurs in Holderlin's
last, "paratactic" efforts, as Adorno calls them: condensation and juxtaposition, a stran-
gling oflanguage. But no lexical "refinement," or very little; even when he opts for a sort of
"surreal" handling of metaphor or "image," he does not depart from essentially simple,
naked language. For example, the "such" (tel/e) used twice as a demonstrative in the "Mal-
larmean" translation of "Tiibingen, January" is a turn of phrase totally foreign to Celan's
style. Even more so the "A cecite meme I mue, pupilles" ("To blindness itselfI moved, pu-
pils") that begins the same poem in what is indeed the most obscure way possible. But I do
not wish to reopen the polemic initiated a decade or so ago by Meschonnic. 7
No, though I recall these translations, and though I will even, in turn, try my hand at
translating, I do not wish to play at comparison-a game oflimited interest. Nor do I cite
them as an obligatory preamble to commentary. I give the translations only so we can see
where we stand. I believe these poems to be completely untranslatable, including within
their own language, and indeed, for this reason, invulnerable to commentary. They nec-
essarily escape interpretation; they forbid it. One could even say they are written to forbid
it. This is why the sole question carrying them, as it carried all Celan's poetry, is that of
meaning, the possibility of meaning. A transcendental question, one might say, which
does to some extent inscribe Celan in Holderlin's lineage or wake: that of "poetry's po-
etry" (without, of course, the least concession to any sort of "formalism"). And a ques-
tion that inevitably takes away, as Heidegger found with both Holderlin and Trakl, all
forms of hermeneutic power, even at one remove: for example, envisioning a "herme-
neutics of hermeneutics." For in any case, sooner or later one finds oneself back at
"wanting to say nothing," which exceeds (or falls short of) all "wanting to say," all in-
tention of signifying, since it is always caught in advance in an archetypal double bind
of the "Don't read me" sort; in this instance, something like, "Don't believe in meaning
anymore." Since Rimbaud's time, let's say, this has always amounted to saying "Believe
me, don't believe in meaning anymore," which at once raises and demotes, pathetically, 407
risibly, or fraudulently, the 'T' that thus projects itself to (and from) the function of in-
carnating meaning. 7.2
The question I ask myself is indeed that of the subject, that cancer of the subject, both PHILIPPE

the ego's and the masses'. But it is first the question of whoever today (heute) might speak a LAcouE-LABARTHE

language other than the subject's, and attest or respond to the unprecedented ignominy that
the "age of the subject" rendered itself-and remains-guilty of. At least since Schlegel and
Hegel, it is also, indissociably, the question of the lyric: is lyric a "subjective" genre? In sum,
it is the question of the banished singularity of the subject or, what amounts to the same
thing, the question of idiom, of "pure idiom," if that can exist. Is it possible, and necessary,
to wrench oneself out of the language of the age? To say what? Or rather, to speak what?
Such a question, as you perceive-and here I am barely shifting angles-is not differ-
ent from that of the relation between "poetry and thought," Dichten und Den ken, a ques-
tion indeed specifically asked in German. What is a work of poetry that, forswearing the
repetition of the disastrous, deadly, already-said, makes itself absolutely singular? What
should we think of poetry (or what of thought is left in poetry) that must refuse, some-
times with great stubbornness, to signify? Or, simply, what is a poem whose "coding" is
such that it foils in advance all attempts to decipher it?
I have been asking myself this question, which I grant is naive, for a long time, and es-
pecially since reading Peter Szondi's analysis of"Du liegst ... ,"8 the poem on Berlin written
in 1967 and published in Schneepart in 1971; it is, along with two essays by Blanchot and by
Levinas published in the Revue des belles lettres ("Le dernier a parler" and "De l'etre a
l'autre"9 ), among the very few illuminating commentaries on Celan. But whereas Blanchot's
and Levinas's readings remain "gnomic," to recall Adorno's objection to Heidegger's inter-
pretation ofHolderlin 10 -that is, they found their arguments on phrases lifted from Celan's
poems (his verse contains many such isolatable bits, as does all "thinking poetry")-
Szondi's analysis is to my knowledge the only one11 to completely decipher a poem, down to
its most resistant opacities, because it is the only one to know what "material" gave rise to
the work: the circumstances remembered, the places traveled to, the words exchanged, the
sights glimpsed or contemplated, and so on. Szondi scouts out the least allusion, the slight-
est evocation. The result is a translation in which almost nothing is left over; almost, be-
cause we must still explain, beyond Szondi's delight at having been present in the right place
at the right time, a poetry based on the exploitation of such "singularity," and thus (i.e., in
this respect) forever inaccessible to those who did not initially witness what the poetry
transformed into a very laconic "story" or a very allusive "evocation."
The question that I have called that of idiom is therefore more exactly that of singu-
larity. We must avoid confusing this with another, relatively secondary or derivative
question, that of the "readable" and the "unreadable." My question asks not just about the
"text," but about the singular experience coming into writing; it asks if, being singular,
experience can be written, or if from the moment of writing its very singularity is not
forever lost and borne away in one way or another, at origin or en route to destination, by
the very fact oflanguage. This could be due to language's impossible intransitivity, or to the
desire for meaning, for universality, that animates voices divided by the constraint of a
language that is itself, in turn, only one of many. Is there, can there be, a singular experi-
ence? A silent experience, absolutely untouched by language, unprompted by even the
most slightly articulated discourse? If, impossibly, we can say "yes," if singularity exists or
subsists despite all odds (and beyond all empirical considerations, the presence of a witness
such as Peter Szondi, for example, or of someone else who knows), can language possibly
take on its burden? And would idiom suffice for the purpose-idiom of course different
 408 from the facile "crypting" or refusal to reveal one's point so terribly endemic to the "mod-
ern"? These questions pose neither the problem of solipsism nor that of autism, but very
SEcnoN 7 probably that of solitude, which Celan experienced to what we must justly call the utmost
PHENOMENOLOGIES degree.
OF LYRIC READING

I reread "Ttibingen, January" (a poem with an old-fashioned date, fiinner for Januar as if
in allusion to Holderlin's disconcerting manner of dating poems during his "mad" pe-
riod); I reread it as I read it, as I understand it, as I thus cannot but translate it. This effort
is partly unnecessary because of Martine Broda's beautiful French translation, which to
my mind can hardly be improved upon, and from which I will at least borrow the unsur-
passable phrase "wheeled with gulls" ("tour- I noyees de mouettes")} 2 But I cannot help
translating here. So I return, with emendations, to a rendering I attempted a few years ago
while working on Holderlin:

TUBINGEN, JANVIER

Sous un flot d'eloquence

aveugles, les yeux.
Leur-"une
enigme est le
pur jailli"-, leur
memoirede
tours Holderlin nageant, tour-
noyees de mouettes.

Visites de menuisiers submerges sous

ces
paroles plongeant:

Viendrait,
viendrait un homme
viendrait un homme au monde, aujourd'hui, avec
!a barbe de lumiere des Patriarches: il n'aurait,
parlerait-il de ce
temps, il
n'aurait
qu' a begayer, begayer
sans sans
sans cesse.

("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")

TUBINGEN, JANVIER

Beneath a flow of eloquence

blinded, the eyes.
Their-"an
enigma is the
pure sprung forth"-, their
memory of
Holderlin towers swimming,
wheeled with gulls.
 joiners' visits submerged beneath 409
these
diving words: 7.2
PHILIPPE
If there came
lACOUE·lABARTHE
if there came a man
if there came a man into the world today, with
the beard of light of the
Patriarchs; he would need only,
if he spoke of this
time, he would need only
to stutter, stutter
without, without
without cease.

("Pallaksh. Pallaksh.") 13

What these few, barely phrased phrases say, in their extenuated, infirm discourse,
stuttering on the edge of silence or the incomprehensible (gibberish, idiomatic language:
"Pallaksh"), is not a "story"; they do not recount anything, and most certainly not a visit to
the Holderlinturm in Tiibingen. They undoubtedly mean something; a "message," as it were,
is delivered. They present, in any case, an intelligible utterance: if a man, a Jewish man-a
Sage, a Prophet, or one of the Righteous, "with I the beard of light ofI the Patriarchs,"-
wanted today to speak forth about the age as Holderlin did in his time, he would be con-
demned to stammer, in the manner, let us say, of Beckett's "metaphysical tramps." He would
sink into aphasia (or "pure idiom"), as we are told Holderlin did; in any case, Holderlin's
"madness" came to define the aphasic myth:

MNEMOSYNE (II)

Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos

Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast
Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren. ~ 1

A sign we are, meaningless

Painless we are and have nearly
Lost our language in foreign places.

More precisely, we might say that to speak the age, it would be enough for such a man to
stammer-stutter; the age belongs to stammering, to stuttering. Or rather, stuttering is the
only "language" of the age. The end of meaning-hiccuping, halting.
Yet this message comes second in the poem; it is a little like the "lesson" or the
"moral" of a classic fable; its presence makes explicit, within though slightly detached
from the poem (see the colon at the end of the second stanza), what the poem says
before-what it says as a poem. It is a translation. The idiomatic poem contains its own
translation, which is a justification of the idiomatic. Or at least, we can formulate it this
way; the problem then becomes knowing what it explicitly translates.
I propose to call what it translates "experience," provided that we both understand
the word in its strict sense-the Latin ex-periri, a crossing through danger-and espe-
cially that we avoid associating it with what is "lived," the stuff of anecdotes. Erfahrung,
then, rather than Erlebnis. 15 I say "experience" because what the poem "springs forth"
from here-the memory of bedazzlement, which is also the pure dizziness of memory-is
 410 precisely that which did not take place, did not happen or occur during the singular event
that the poem relates to without relating: the visit, after so many others since the joiner
SECTION 7 Zimmer's time, to the tower on the Neckar where Holderlin lived without living for the
PHENOMENOLOGIEs last thirty-six years of his life-half of his life. A visit in memory of that experience,
oF LYRIC READING which is also in the non-form of pure non-event.
I shall try to explain. What the poem indicates and shows, what it moves toward, is its
source. A poem is always "en route," "underway," as "The Meridian" recalls. 16 The path the
poem seeks to open up here is that of its own source. And making its way thus to its own
source, it seeks to reach the general source of poetry. It says, then, or tries to say, the "spring-
ing forth" of the poem in its possibility, that is, in its "enigma." "An enigma is the pure
sprung forth;" 17 so speaks the first verse to the fourth stanza of the hymn "The Rhine,"
which in a way is the source here. Holderlin adds: "Even I The song may hardly reveal it."
But if the poem says or tries to say the source in this manner, it says it as inaccessible, or
in any case unrevealed "even [by] the song," because in place of the source, and in a way
which is itself enigmatic, there is dizziness, the instant of blindness or bedazzlement be-
fore the sparkling waters of the Neckar, the fragmenting glitter, the image of the visitors
swallowed up. Or because there is also the stark reminder that precisely in this place, it
was revealed to so many visitors that the source (of the poem, the song) had dried up. And
that previously it had indeed been an enigma that sprang forth.
Dizziness can come upon one; it does not simply occur. Or rather, in it, nothing oc-
curs. It is the pure suspension of occurrence: a caesura or a syncope. This is what "draw-
ing a blank" means. What is suspended, arrested, tipping suddenly into strangeness, is
the presence of the present (the being-present of the present). And what then occurs
without occurring (for it is by definition what cannot occur) is-without being-
nothingness, the "nothing of being" (ne-ens). Dizziness is an experience of nothingness,
of what is, as Heidegger says, "properly" non-occurrence, nothingness. Nothing in it is
"lived," as in all experience, because all experience is the experience of nothingness: the
experience of dizziness here, as much as the anguish Heidegger describes, or as much as
laughter in Bataille. Or the lightning recognition of love. As much as all the infinitely
paradoxical, "impossible" experiences of death, of disappearance in the present. How
poignant and difficult to think that Celan chose his own death (the most finite infinite
choice), throwing himself into the waters of the Seine.
To say this again in another way: there is no "poetic experience" in the sense of a "lived
moment" or a poetic "state." If such a thing exists, or thinks it does-for after all it is the
power, or impotence, of literature to believe and make others believe this-it cannot give rise
to a poem. To a story, yes, or to discourse, whether in verse or prose. To "literature," perhaps,
at least in the sense we understand it today. But not to a poem. A poem has nothing to re-
count, nothing to say; what it recounts and says is that from which it wrenches away as a
poem. If we speak of "poetic emotion," we must think of its cognate emoi, 18 whose etymology
indicates the absence or deprivation of strength. "A une passante" is not the nostalgic story of
an encounter, but the entreaty that arises from collapse, the pure echo of such an emoi, a song
or a prayer. Benjamin hardly dared say, though he knew perfectly well, that this is perhaps
(and I stress the "perhaps") what Proust did not understand in understanding Baudelaire,
and probably also what the overly nostalgic Baudelaire sometimes did not understand in
understanding himself (though he did write the prose poems, which redeem all). 19
But the poem's "wanting-not-to-say" does not want not to say. A poem wants to say;
indeed, it is nothing but pure wanting-to-say. But pure wanting-to-say nothing, nothing-
ness, that against which and through which there is presence, what is. And because noth-
ingness is inaccessible to wanting, the poem's wanting collapses as such (a poem is always
involuntary, like anguish, love, and even self-chosen death); then nothing lets itself be 411
said, the thing itself, and lets itself be said in and by the man who goes to it despite him-
self, receives it as what cannot be received, and submits to it. He accepts it, trembling that 7.2
it should refuse; such a strange, fleeting, elusive "being" as the meaning of what is. PHILIPPE

In the end, if there is no such thing as "poetic experience" it is simply because ex peri- LAcouE-LABARTHE

ence marks the absence of what is "lived." This is why, strictly speaking, we can talk of a
poetic existence, assuming existence is what at times puts holes in life, rending it to put us
beside ourselves. It is also why, given that existence is furtive and discontinuous, poems
are rare and necessarily brief, even when they expand to try to stay the loss or deny the
evanescence of what compelled them into being. Further, this is why there is nothing
necessarily grandiose about the poetic, and why it is generally wrong to confuse poetry
with celebration; one can find, in the most extreme triviality, in insignificance, perhaps
even in frivolity (where Mallarme occasionally lost himself), pure, never-pure strange-
ness: the gift of nothing or present of nothing comparable to the little token one describes,
saying: "It's nothing." Indeed, it is never nothing, it is nothing; it can as well be pitiable or
totally without grandeur, terrifying or overwhelmingly joyous.
We are told that when Holderlin went "mad," he constantly repeated, "Nothing is
happening to me, nothing is happening to me."

The dizziness of existence is what the poem "Tiibingen, January" says. It says it inasmuch
as it says itself as a poem, inasmuch as it says what arose from, or remains of, the non-
occurred in the singular event it commemorates. "In-occurrence" is what wrenches the
event from its singularity, so that at the height of singularity, singularity itself vanishes
and saying suddenly appears-the poem is possible. Singbarer Rest: a singable remainder,
as Celan says elsewhere. 20
This is why the poem commemorates. Its experience is an experience of memory. The
poem speaks of Erinnerung, but also secretly calls upon the Andenken of Holderlin's poem
on Bordeaux, and the Gediichtnis where Holderlin found Mnemosyne's resonance. The
poem was not born in the moment of the Holderlinturm visit. Properly speaking, it was not
born in any moment. Not only because dizziness or bedazzlement by definition never con-
stitutes a moment, but because what brings on the dizziness and recalls the waters of the
Neckar is not those waters, but another river: the Holderlinian river itself. A double mean-
ing here: first the river, or rivers, that Holderlin sings (the Rhine, the Ister, the source of the
Danube, etc.), and then the river of Holderlin's poetry. Or, as I've said, the "flood of
eloquence."
In "Tiibingen, January," the eyes are not in fact blinded; no bedazzlement takes place.
They are zur Blindheit iiberredete, persuaded to blindness. But to translate iiberreden by
"persuade," or "convince," does not convey the full sense of iiber and all it contains as a
signifier of overflow. To be iiberredet-I take this on Michel Deutsch's authority-is simply
"to be taken in," "run circles around," overwhelmed by a tide of eloquence. Less "taken for
a ride" than "submerged," "drowned," or, most accurately, "to be had." The eyes-the eyes
that see Holderlin's tower, the waters of the Neckar, the wheeling gulls-are blinded by a
flood of words or eloquence; the eyes are taken in, and the memory of the river poem
"The Rhine" recalls and calls forth the memory of the dizziness, the engulfing bedaz-
zlement: that is, as with all "involuntary memory," the memory of "what was neither
purposely nor consciously 'lived' by the subject," as Benjamin perfectly demonstrated for
Baudelaire using Freud's argument against Bergson. 21 Thus dizziness here indicates the
in-occurrence of which memory-and not merely recollection-is the paradoxical resti-
tution. The dizziness is memory because all real memory is vertiginous, offering the very
 412 atopia of existence, what takes place without taking place; giving a gift that forces the
poem into thanking, into ecstasy. This is why the poem is obliged into thought: "To think
SecnoN 7 and thank," says the Bremen speech, "denken und danken, have the same root in our lan-
PHENOMENOLOCIES guage. If we follow it to gedenken, eingedenk sein, Andenken and Andacht we enter the
oF LYRIC READ INC semantic fields of memory and devotion." 22
Thus, "Ti.ibingen, January" does not say any state of the psyche, any lived experience
of the subject, any Erlebnis. Nor is it-this follows logically-a celebration of Holderlin (it
comes closer to saying how Holderlin disappoints). It is definitely not a "sentimental"
poem, whether in Schiller's or the common sense. The poem says "drowning" in Holder-
lin's verse. It says it as its "possibility," a possibility infinitely and interminably paradoxi-
cal, because it is the possibility of the poem inasmuch as, possible-impossible, it says, if
not the pure impossibility, then at least the scant possibility of poetry.

[ ... ]

The time of distress is the time-now our history-of what Holderlin also called pain
(both Schmerz and Leiden), the word that runs through both "In Lovely Blueness" and
modern lyricism, from Baudelaire to Trakl and Mandelstam. Pain, which is not exactly
suffering, affects and touches man's "heart"; it is what is most intimate in him; the ex-
treme interior where, in his almost absolute singularity (his ab-soluteness), man-and not
the subject-is pure waiting-for-an-other; he is hope of a dialogue, of a way out of solitude.
I again cite "The Meridian":
But I think- ... I think that it has always belonged to the expectations of the poem in
precisely this manner to speak in the cause of the strange-no, I can no longer use this
word-in precisely this manner to speak in the cause of an Other-who knows, perhaps in
the cause of a wholly Other.

This "who knows," at which I see I have arrived, is the only thing I can add-on my own,
here, today-to the old expectations.

Perhaps, I must now say to myself-and at this point I am making use of a well-known
term-perhaps it is now possible to conceive a meeting of this "wholly Other" and an
"other" which is not far removed, which is very near.

The poem tarries, stops to catch a scent-like a creature when confronted with such
thoughts.

No one can say how long the pause in breath-the thought and the stopping to catch the
scent-will last ....

The poem is alone. It is alone and underway. Whoever writes it must remain in its
company.

But doesn't the poem, for precisely that reason, at this point participate in an encounter-
in the mystery of an encounter?

The poem wants to reach the Other, it needs the Other, it needs a vis a vis. It searches it
out and addresses it. ...

It becomes dialogue-it is often despairing dialogue. 23

From that place, that solitude-pain-Celan speaks. It is the same solitude and pain
that Holderlin felt in the end, when he had succumbed to the excess of eloquence and been
submerged, reduced to silence, by sacred pathos. "Tiibingen, January" is a poem to this 413
pain and solitude because it is the poem of this pain and of this solitude; that of always be-
ing thrown back from the dialogue one had thought possible and then, in withdrawal, 7.2
"huddling," as Heidegger says ofHolderlin, no longer able to speak; stuttering, swallowed PHILIPPE

up in idiom. Or falling silent. In a world with nothing and no one to authorize or even LAcoue-LABARTHE

"guarantee" the least dialogue, the slightest relation to one another, however or whoever he
may be, how to wrench away from aphasia, from silence? The poem, says Celan, once again
in "The Meridian," "today ... shows a strong inclination towards falling silent. ... It takes
its position ... at the edge of itself; in order to be able to exist, it without interruption calls
and fetches itself from its now-no-longer back into its as-always." 24
The question of poetry's possibility-and Celan never asked another-is the question
of the possibility of such a wrenching. The question of the possibility of going out of the
self. This also means, as "The Meridian" again recalls, going "outside the human," in the
sense, for example, (but is this still just one example?) that the (finite) transcendence of
Dasein in the experience of nothingness, in ek-sistence, is a going outside the human:
"Here we have stepped beyond human nature, gone outwards, and entered a mysterious
realm, yet one turned towards that which is human." 25

It would be an understatement to say Celan had read Heidegger. Celan's poetry goes beyond
even an unreserved recognition ofHeidegger; I think one can assert that it is, in its entirety,
a dialogue with Heidegger's thought. And essentially with the part of this thought that was
a dialogue with Holderlin's poetry. Without Heidegger's commentary on Holderlin, "Tiibin-
gen, January" would have been impossible; such a poem could simply never have been writ-
ten. And it would certainly remain incomprehensible if one did not detect in it a response to
this commentary. Indeed, the dizziness on the edge of Holderlinian pathos is just as much
dizziness vis-a-vis its amplification by Heidegger; vis-a-vis the belief in which Heidegger
persisted, whatever his sense of "sobriety" in other matters. A belief, not only in the possi-
bility that the word Holder! in "kept in reserve" might still be heard (by Germany, by us), but
also, and perhaps especially, in the possibility that the god this word announced or proph-
esied might come. This, even though Heidegger maintained until the end, up through the
last interviews granted to Der Spiegel, that it was also necessary to expect, and prepare for,
the definitive decline or in-advent of the god. "Praise be to you, no one."

[ ... ]

A dialogue like this is no way requires an encounter-an "effective" encounter, as we say.

Probably the opposite. The encounter is also that which can prohibit or break off dia-
logue. Dialogue, in this sense, is fragility itself.
Yet between Celan and Heidegger, an encounter took place. It happened in 1967, prob-
ably during the summer. Celan went to visit Heidegger in Todtnauberg, in the Black For-
est chalet (Hiitte) that was his refuge, the place where he wrote. From this meeting-to
which I know there were witnesses, direct or indirect-there remains a poem: a second
version of which, in conclusion, I invite you to read.
Here is how I hear it:

TODTNAUBERG
Arnica, baurne des yeux, Ia
gorgee it Ia fontaine avec
le jet d'etoiles au-dessus,
 414 dans le
chalet,
SECTION 7
Ia, dans le livre
PHENOMENOLOGIES
-de qui, les noms qu'il portait
OF LYRIC READING
avant le mien?-,
dans ce livre
Ia ligne ecrite sur
un espoir, aujourd'hui,
dans le mot
a venir
d'un penseur,
au coeur,

humus des bois, non aplani,

orchis et orchis, epars,

erudite, plus tard en voiture,

distincte,

qui no us conduit, l'homme,

a son ecoute aussi,
ademi
frayees les sentes
de rondins dans Ia fange,

humidite,
beaucoup.

TODTNAUBERG
Arnica, eye balm, the
draught at the fountain with
the spray of stars above,

in the
hut,

there, in the book

-whose, the names it bore
before mine?-
in that book
the line written about
a hope, today,
in the coming
word
of a thinker,
in the heart,

woodland humus, unlevelled,

orchis and orchis, scattered,

crudeness, later, in the car,

distinct,
 he who drives us, the man, 415
listening too,
7.2
half-
PHILIPPE
cleared the paths
lACOUE-lABARTHE
of logs in the mire,

dampness,
much.

My translation is very rough; witness or not, who can know what the allusions refer
to? "Todtnauberg" is really barely a poem; a single nominal phrase, choppy, distended
and elliptical, unwilling to take shape, it is not the outline but the remainder-the
residue-of an aborted narrative. It consists of brief notes or notations, seemingly jotted
in haste with a hope for a future poem, comprehensible only to the one who wrote them.
It is an extenuated poem, or, to put it better, a disappointed one. It is the poem of a disap-
pointment; as such, it is, and it says, the disappointment of poetry.
One could of course supply a gloss, try to decipher or translate. There is no lack of read-
able allusions. The Holzwege, for example; here they are no longer ways through the forest
toward a possible clearing, a Lichtung, but paths lost in a marsh where the poem itself gets
lost (water again, but without a source-not even; dampness-no more about the dizzy-
ing Neckar, the "spirit of the river," the bedazzlement-engulfment. Only an uneasiness).
Another example: one could pick, or cast, as it were, the image of the spray of stars above
the man drinking from the fountain, throwing back his head to the sky: dice thrown like
the "golden sickle" abandoned by Hugo's "harvester of eternal summer." And this could
be a gesture toward Buchner's Lenz, the figure of the poet, of whom "The Meridian" re-
calls, "Now and then he experienced a sense of uneasiness because he was not able to walk
on his head," 26 only to add, "Whoever walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, whoever
walks on his head has heaven beneath him as an abyss." 27 An echo, perhaps, ofHolderlin's
strange proposition: "Man kann auch in die Hohe fallen, so wie in die Tiefe" ("one can as
well fall into height as into depth"). 28 One could surely go very far in this direction, as in
many another.
But that is not what the poem says, if indeed it is still a poem.
What the poem says is, first, a language: words. German, with Greek and Latin woven
in. "Common" language: Augentrost, Waldwasen, Hochmoor, and so on. "Learned" lan-
guage: Arnika, Orchis. But still simple, ordinary words. The kind of words in another of
Celan's few explanatory prose texts, "Conversation in the Mountains" (a sort of tale, half-
way between Lenz and Hassidic Tales, where two Jews discuss language): words like
"turk's-cap lily," "corn-salad," and "dianthus superbus, the maiden-pink," that bespeak a
native relation to nature (or to the earth, as Heidegger would have said):

So it was quiet, quiet up there in the mountains. But it was not quiet for long, because when
a Jew comes along and meets another, silence cannot last, even in the mountains. Because
the Jew and nature are strangers to each other, have always been and still are, even today,
even here.

So there they are, the cousins. On the left, the turk's-cap lily blooms, blooms wild, blooms
like nowhere else. And on the right, corn-salad, and dianthus superbus, the maiden-pink,
not far off. But they, those cousins, have no eyes, alas. Or, more exactly: they have, even
they have eyes, but with a veil hanging in front of them, no not in front, behind them, a
moveable veil. No sooner does an image enter than it gets caught in the web ....
 416 Poor lily, poor corn-salad. There they stand, the cousins, on a road in the mountains, the
stick silent, the stones silent, and the silence no silence at all. No word has come to an
SECTION 7 end and no phrase, it is nothing but a pause, an empty space between the words, a
29
PHENOMENOLOGIES blank ...
OF lYRIC READING
Once again, a matter of blindness or half-blindness ("they ... have no eyes, alas"). But
because blindness, blinding-we understand now-is the empty space between the words
(and doubtless also a blank): not having the words to say what is. Words are not innate;
language is not altogether a mother tongue (or a father tongue-it hardly matters). There
is difficulty with it (there is also perhaps a question of place in language).
This difficulty-the difficulty-is named in the Bremen address when it evokes, as
Blanchot says, "the language through which death came upon him, those near to him,
and millions ofJews and non-Jews, an event without answer" (my emphasis): 30

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, lan-
guage. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its
own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of mur-
derous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went
through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all.
In this language I tried, during those years and the years after, to write poems: in order
to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was, where I was going, to chart my reality.
It meant movement, you see, something happening, being en route, an attempt to find a
direction. 31

What "Todtnauberg" speaks about, then, is this: the language in which Auschwitz
was pronounced, and which pronounced Auschwitz.
That is why the poem also says, and says simply, the meaning of the encounter with
Heidegger-that is, its disappointment. I suspected as much, but I confess that I was told
this, by a friend who had it on the best authority.
To Heidegger the thinker-the German thinker-Celan the poet-the Jewish poet-
came with a single yet precise entreaty: that the thinker who listened to poetry; the
same thinker who had compromised himself, however briefly and even if in the least
shameful way, with just what would result in Auschwitz; the thinker who, however
abundant his discussion with National Socialism, had observed total silence on Aus-
chwitz, as history will recall; that he say just a single word: a word about pain. From
there, perhaps, all might still be possible. Not "life," which is always possible, which re-
mained possible, as we know, even in Auschwitz, but existence, poetry, speech. Language.
That is, relation to others.
Could such a word be wrenched?
In the summer of 1967 Celan writes in the guestbook of the Hiitte in Todtnauberg. He
no longer knows who signed before him; signatures-proper names, as it happens-
matter little. At issue was a word, just a word. He writes-what? A line, or a verse. He asks
only for the word, and the word, of course, is not spoken. Nothing; silence; no one. The
in-advent of the word ("the event without answer").
I do not know what word Celan could have expected. What word he felt would have
had enough force to wrench him from the threat of aphasia and idiom (in-advent of the
word), into which this poem, mumbled against the silence, could only sink as if into a
bog. What word could suddenly have constituted an event.
I do not know. Yet something tells me it is at once the humblest and most difficult
word to say, the one that requires, precisely, "a going out of the self." The word that the
West, in its pathos of redemption, has never been able to say. The word it remains for us 417
to learn to speak, lest we should sink ourselves. The word pardon.
Celan has placed us before this word. A sign? 7.2
PHILIPPE
NOTES
lACOUE-lABARTHE
1. "Der Meridian" is in volume 3 of Celan's Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore, Md.:
five-volume Gesammelte Werke, ed. Beda johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 219-63.
.-\llemann and Stefan Reichert, in collaboration 12. The French "tour-/noyees" plays on a double
with Rolf Biicher (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983). meaning: the verb tournoyer can be translated as
This passage, p. 200. Unless otherwise noted, all "to wheel around, whirl, swirl," while dividing the
English translations from "Der Meridian" are from past participle of the verb into two parts evokes
Jerry Glenn's "The Meridian," in Chicago Review "tower/drowned." [Translator's note]
29, no. 3 (1978): 29-49. This passage, p. 38. 13. It is worth stressing that this English version
:Translator's note] translates Lacoue- Labarthe's French translation,
2. GW 1:226. English translations of Celan's rather than Celan's German. [Translator's note]
poems will be Michael Hamburger's unless 14. Friedrich Hiilderlin, Siimtliche Werke, vo!. 2.1
otherwise noted. "Tiibingen, Pinner" is in Paul (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1951), 195.
Celan: Poems (New York: Persea, 1988), 177. 15. I refer the reader to Roger Munier (respond-
[Translator's note] ing to an inquiry on experience in Mise en page I
3. GW 2: 25; Hamburger, Celan, 293. [Transla- [May 1972]): "First there is etymology. Experience
tor's note] comes from the Latin experiri, to test, try, prove.
4. Apart from Michael Hamburger's translations The radical is periri, which one also finds in
of both poems, there is an English version of periculum, peril, danger. The Indo-European root
Tiibingen, fanner in Joachim Neugroschel, Paul is per, to which are attached the ideas of crossing
Celan, Speech-Grille (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971), and, secondarily, of trial, test. In Greek, numerous
185. [Translator's note] derivations evoke a crossing or passage: peiro, to
5· Lacoue-Labarthe's phrase is "c'est avec cross; pera, beyond; perao, to pass through;
l'Allemagne qu'il faut ... s'expliquer." S'expliquer peraino, to go to the end; peras, end, limit. For
in this context means primarily "to discuss," "to Germanic languages, Old High Germanfaran has
clarify matters," even "to have it out with given us fahren, to transport, and fiihren, to drive.
someone." Yet the verb could also function as a Should we attribute Erfahrung to this origin as
simple reflexive; this would render the sense, "We well, or should it be linked to the second meaning
must explain ourselves with Germany." The import of per, trial, in Old High German,fara, danger,
of such ambiguity for reflections on the Holocaust which became Gefahr, danger, andgefiihrden, to
is self-evident. [Translator's note] endanger? The boundaries between one meaning
6. From "Todesfuge": "der Tod ist ein Meister and the other are imprecise. The same is true for
aus Deutschland." GW 1:42, "Death Fugue," the Latin periri, to try, and periculum, which
Hamburger, Celan, 63. [Translator's note] originally means trial, test, then risk, danger. The
7· Henri Meschonnic, "On appelle cela traduire idea of experience as a crossing is etymologically
Celan," in Pour Ia poetique II (Paris: Gallimard, and semantically difficult to separate from that of
1980). risk. From the beginning and no doubt in a
8. GW 2:334. Peter Szondi, "Eden," in Poesies et fundamental sense, experience means to
poetiques de Ia modernite (Lille: Presses universita- endanger."
ires de Lille, 1981). 16. The French translation I will refer to is not
9. Issues 2 and 3, 1972. Blanchot, Le dernier a Andre du Bouchet's in Strette (Paris: Mercure de
parter, was reissued by fata morgana in Paris in France, 1971), but jean Launay's (Poesie 9 [1979]).
1984. I make slight modifications when the argument
10. Theodor Adorno, "Parataxe," in Notes to warrants. [For this passage, see Glenn, 37: "The
Literature, vo!. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson poem is ... underway."-Translator's note]
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 17. In the original, this line reads "Ein Riithsel
109-49· ist Reinentsprungenes." In English, Michael
11. Along with, in an entirely different vein, Hamburger renders it "An enigma are things of
Werner Hamacher, "The Second of Inversion: pure source"; see Holder/in: His Poems (New
Movements of a Figure through Celan's Poetry," York: Pantheon, 1952), 199. I have modified the
trans. Peter Fenves, in Word Traces: Readings of English translation because of Lacoue- Labarthe's
 418 repeated use of jaili and jaillissement. [Transla- 22. Celan's Bremen address is published in the
tor's note] GW 3:186. The English translation cited here is by
SECTION 7 18. In English, agitation or excitement. Rosmarie Waldrop, in Paul Celan: Collected Prose
[Translator's note] (Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 1986), 33.
PHENOMENOLOGIES
19. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, Ein [Translator's note]
OF LYRIC READING
Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, in 23. Glenn, 35-37. [Translator's note]
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann 24. Ibid., 36. [Translator's note]
and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt am 25. Ibid., 32; GW 3:192. [Translator's note]
Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). English references: Charles 26. Glenn, 34; GW 3'195· [Translator's note]
Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High 27. Glenn, 35; GW P95· [Translator's note]
Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973). 28. sw 4.1:233·
20. GW 2:36. [Translator's note] 29. Paul Celan, trans. Waldrop, 18-19. [Transla-
21. Benjamin, "Uber einige Motive bei tor's note]
Baudelaire," Schriften, 1.2:605-53; "Some Motifs in a
30. Blanchot, Le Dernier parler, 45.
Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire, 107-54. 31. GW 3: 185-6; Paul Celan, Waldrop, 34·

7.3 Summa Lyrica: A Primer

of the Commonplaces in
Speculative Poetics (1990)
ALLEN GROSSMAN

Introductory Note
My purpose in the Summa Lyrica is to bring to mind "the poem," as an object of thought and
as an instrument for thinking, consistent with my account of poetic practice in the foregoing
conversations. In particular, I intend to facilitate (and exemplify) thinking as it may arise in
the course of inquiry directed toward the meaning of poetic structures. The Summa Lyrica
proceeds by stating-aphoristically-some of the commonplaces by means of which poetry
and poetic purposes are accounted for in the West. As a primer or handbook of common-
places, it is designed to befriend the reader of poetry (always supposing that the reader of
poetry needs a hermeneutic friend) by constructing a culture in which poetry is intelligible.
In aid of these intentions and purposes, the attempt has been made to make this work
total (a summa), that is to say, to place individual analyses in the context of a version of
the whole subject matter. This is of course not the same thing as attempting to make the
work complete (supposing that were possible). What is attempted to identify the alliances
and relationships of the specific terms and situations in poetic analysis (in something like
the same way that they arise in my own mind, when my mind is engaged with poetry), as
far out toward the horizon as possible (an aphorism is a proposition with a horizon), and
thus to circumscribe a horizon in which poetry rises up and is present as in a world.
The basis of order in the Summa Lyrica is the procession of commonplaces (loci com-
munes), assertions which are possible to be made (and generally are made) in the presence of
poems. Commonplaces are not pieces of theory but points of outlook. In the commonplace (as
in the aphorism), everybody can start from the same spot, because discourse is bound into the 419
authority of a human presence. Theory of poetry does not participate in the nature of poetry
(as perhaps the theory of something else participates in the nature of that thing)-except in- 7.3
sofar as the theory of poetry is also something that somebody says. In the Summa Lyrica, an ALLEN GRossMAN

attempt is made to stay inside the business of the thing, and to use the matrix of particular
personal presence as a system of paths along which to move among realms of being (for this
reason there is also a web of cross-references from title to title in the text). Flowing from the
commonplaces are comments (scholia) which show, in increasingly open styles of discourse,
how the commonplaces are amplified and serve to make audible the world-wide and history-
long discourse which is always going on (30.6) in the presence of the poem-with the inten-
tion of putting poetry and poetic knowledge in the service of human interests.
Above all, therefore, this is a text for use, intended like a poem to give rise to thoughts
about something else.

The Primer
Immortality I (14)
1. The function of poetry is to obtain for everybody one kind of success at the limits
of the autonomy of the will.

Scholium "in the wake of language." Here we conceive of poetry as doing moral
work, as having a function in the same way as a machine has a function but a
machine that speaks. (43)

Like language (but not identical with language)-perhaps it would be well to say
"in the wake of language"-poetry makes promises to everybody and keeps its
promises only to some. So when we say "the function of poetry is to obtain for
everybody one kind of success," we are running ahead of the fact (but doing so in
the name of the fact), and raising the question of justice.

By "success" we mean "outcome." Poetry serves to obtain a kind of outcome (a suc-

cess is any outcome) precisely at those points in experience where the natural will
is helpless.

1.1 The limits of the autonomy of the will discovered in poetry are death and the bar-
riers against access to other consciousnesses.

Scholium on limits. Poetry thematizes the abandonment of will of the speaking

person as speaker. "Sing, muse ...."The maxim is: "No mortal man speaks immor-
tal words." In this way poetry repeats its function as its subject matter. (This is
what is meant when poetry is said to "be about poetry.")

The abandonment of the autonomy of the will of the speaking person as a speaker
constitutes a form of knowledge-poetic knowledge. The knowledge that not 'T'
speaks but "language speaks" (Heidegger). The function of this knowledge is to
rescue the natural will at the point of its death, that is to say, at the point where
death arrests its intention.

Poetry is produced by the mortality of body and soul, the immiscibility of minds,
and the postponement of the end of the world.
 420 1.2 The kind of success which poetry facilitates is called "immortality."

SEcnoN 7 Scholium on immortality. Poetry functions as a machine for producing immortal-

PHENOMENOLOGIES ity in the form of the convergence of meaning and being in presence. (For modern
OF LYRIC READING immortality theory, see Becker, Lifton, Rank, Arendt, and Cullmann.) Note, for
example, Plato, Symposium, 208, 209:
Do you think, she went on, that Alcestis would have laid down her life to save Admetus, or
that Achilles would have died for the love he bore Patroclus, or that Codrus, the Athenian
king, would have sacrificed himself for the seed of his royal consort, if they had not hoped
to win "the deathless name for valor," which, in fact, posterity has granted them? No,
Socrates, no. Every one of us, no matter what he does, is longing for endless fame, the in-
comparable glory that is theirs, and the nobler he is, the greater his ambition, because he is
in love with the eternal.

Well then, she went on, those whose procreancy is of the body turn to woman as the object
of their love, and raise a family, in the blessed hope that by doing so they will keep their
memory green, "through time and through eternity." But those whose procreancy is of the
spirit rather than of the flesh-and they are not unknown, Socrates-conceive and bear
the things of the spirit. And what are they? you ask. Wisdom and all her sister virtues; it is
the office of every poet to beget them, and of every artist whom we may call creative.

Immortality may be thought of in any number of ways:

Civilization originates in delayed infancy and its function is security. It is a huge network
of more or less successful attempts to protect mankind against the danger of object-loss,
the colossal efforts made by a baby who is afraid of being left alone in the dark. The famous
poem of Horace may be regarded as a symbol of this effort:

Exegi monumentum, aere perennius

Regalique situ pyramidum altius.

(Geza R6heim, The Origin and Function of Culture)

1.3 The structural definition oflyric is "that poetic situation in which there is one speak-
ing person, who is nameless or to whom we assign the name of the author." (6.4)

Scholium on lyric. Lyric is the most continuously practiced of all poetic kinds in
the history of Western representation; and also the most endemic to the present
Postmodern situation. Lyric is the genre of the "other mind" as it has come to mani-
festation through the abandonment of autonomy and the displacement toward
fiction. (For the specific differentia of the lyric form considered as the imitation
or "fiction" of speech, see Barbara H. Smith, Poetic Closure, p. 122. For a beginning
with genre and the lyric genre in particular, see Claudio Guillen, Literature as Sys-
tem, pp. 398-400.)

Note the following (Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 366):

Lyric: A literary genre characterized by the assumed concealment of the audience from the
poet and by the predominance of an associational rhythm distinguishable both from re-
current metre and from semantic or prose rhythm.
 Frye's "concealment of the audience from the poet" is an abbreviation of Mill on 421
overhearing (cited at 16.7). The idea of"associational rhythm" is a reference to the
fact of lyric as the imitation of man alone, either as he is alone in himself, or as he 7.3
might be alone before or after society. As the kind which imitates man alone, lyric ALLEN GROSSMAN

is the first and last poetic sort.

Insofar as the lyric is associated with music, the music stands for those solitudes.
(For the history of poetry and music, see John Hollander, "The Poem in the Ear,"
in Vision and Resonance.) The assignment of the name of the author to the name-
less speaker in lyric reenacts (repeats) the normal social process of the naming of
the person with stress on the problematical nature of the naming of persons at all.
In addition, the question of singular and plural attends the self-reference of the
lyric speaker. For a beginning with this problem, see citation from Fox at 3 and
Emile Benveniste, "Relationships of Person in the Verb," in Problems in General
Linguistics (especially p. 203).

1.4 A poem facilitates immortality by the conservation of names.

Scholium on the conservation of names. The traditional function of poetry is the

conservation of names (Note 23.1 and Scholium, and 38.8). The strangeness and
point of lyric can be seen when we note that the speaker in lyric by contrast to
the speakers in drama (all of whom are named) and the speakers in epic narra-
tive (all of whom are named except the narrator) is only equivocally named, has
in effect a sponsor (the author) but no name, is prior to or posterior to name, is
an orphan voice. The name of the speaker in lyric is inferential (see 40) or intui-
tive. The speaker in lyric communicates with the past lives of the reader (Schol-
ium at 28.1). -

1.5 The features of the poem which are instrumental toward its immortalizing func-
tion are those which distinguish it from other forms of words, its prosody (for
example, meter and line).

Scholium on poetry and other kinds of utterance. The opposite of poetry is not
strictly speaking prose but rather the "not fictional." But this would hold for the
novel as well (see Barbara H. Smith, Poetic Closure, p. 15 and note 10). The ques-
tion arises as to what stage of the distancing of utterance from its natural situation
constitutes a difference, a destination sufficient to constitute a new or "fictional"
status. For another current treatment of this issue see Frank Kermode in The
Sense of an Ending, where the difference lies between the fictional and the myth
(see 38), and see also the distinction between the radical or participatory and the
aesthetic (32).

1.6 Immortality is the simultaneity of meaning and being. Immortality can be dis-
cussed only in relation to persons.

1.7 Neither immortality nor persons are conceivable outside of communities. Conse-
quently, reading engages the reader with the community in the interest of the
immortality of all persons.
 422
Reading 1 (22) (37)
SECTION 7 2. The poem is the destiny of the reader. (9)
PHENOMENOLOGIES

oF LYRIC READING 2.1 The reader is the destiny of the poem. (9)

Scholium on the circle of immortality. Immortality as the continuity of human

presence through acknowledgment is a "virtuous circle" (Goodman) on which all
persons stand (writer and reader being two) in mutual dependence. Hence, im-
mortality as presence is a collective human artifact in which the self-interest of
persons converges. "Creation" is creation not of poems but of presence, or immor-
tality, and is not an act (in the sense in which an act has a terminal moment) but a
process in the sense that it is always ongoing and only ongoing. The process of
creation of human presence through acknowledgment moves through persons
across time and is completed neither in the writer nor in the reader but in the
mutually honorable reciprocity of both. At any moment of reading the reader is
the author of the poem, and the poem is the author of the reader. The honor of
creation is not with one or the other, but among them. Above all, they are in-
tended (destined) for another in that the poem looks ahead to the reader, and the
reader (as reader) to the poem. In a culture in which honor is conferred asym-
metrically on the author rather than the reader, the dominance of the image of
the reader derogates from the good of reading by setting the self-interest of writer
and reader in conflict and breaking the circle. Such a situation gives rise to
theory.

2.2 We should not let anything enter our discussion of a poem but what we see for
ourselves.

2.3 While I am doing this, you are doing something else.

Scholia on the difference of tasks.

A. What difference does it make what other people say? What difference does it
make what other people say? The answer is: What other people say is what they
say, each of them as it were all the time. The difference is the saying of what is said.
In other words, what is said is first of all the portrait of the other person present
because of his or her speaking. The difference that the speech of another makes is
the difference of other being in its being as other. Scripture, written down speech,
does not make the difference. The good book stands in the difference of the other
person. Therefore, the good book pitches you away, makes a difference. Here I am
trying to make a difference, working with the problem of a good book.

Whatever I do (whatever you do) has the same weight as being, has the weight of
being in it. A sentence is of the same order as being; it is something a person does-
eidetic. You can say "Yes" to the eidos, or you can say "Not Yet," or you can say "Not
Mine," but you cannot say "No." Even if you say "No" it will not disappear.

B. Prudence in doing an eidetic science. The effort in doing poetics (eidetic science)
is not to tell anyone anything, and not to stop speaking. The clearest (simplest,
 most admirable) form of an essay in criticism of (any kind of talking about) the 423
poem must precipitate no conclusion that might be known ahead of time by either
of us, must acknowledge the inutility of anything that can be taught in this matter 7.3
and the splendor of anything that can be learned. ALLEN GROSSMAN

Who is so stupidly curious as to send his son to school in order to learn what the teacher
thinks? All those sciences which they profess to teach, and the science of virtue itself and
wisdom, teachers explain through words. Then those who are pupils consider within
themselves whether what has been explained has been said truly; looking of course to that
interior truth, according to the measure of which each is able. Thus they learn, and when
the interior truth makes known to them that true things have been said, they applaud, but
without knowing that instead of applauding teachers they are applauding learners, if in-
deed their teachers know what they are saying (Augustine, De Magistro, XIV).

In the matter of poetry, everybody is trying to say the same thing. Your business
and my business is with the commonplaces, helping one another to the world.
Whether I understand what I am saying is not the important thing. The impor-
tant thing is to be faithful to the event.

2.4 Reading presupposes a meditative sorting of the true situation of the self from
false versions (37.5). Reading also results in a sorting of the true situation of the
self from false versions.

2.5 The question "Why read?" depends for its answer on a true conception of
self-interest.

Scholium en teaching and learning. Teaching and learning is the facilitation of

understanding of self-interest by one person in the presence of another. Reading
is an instance of teaching and learning. It is something you do for yourself in the
presence of another person (whether at hand or absent) who is the living bound-
ary of the interest which you serve.

2.6 The poem is first prior to the self (ahead) and then posterior to the self (behind).

2.7 Reading recurs. Writing does not recur.

2.8 The poem is the reader's thing (Scholium at 40.2).

Scholium on "appropriation."

By appropriation I mean several things. I mean first that the interpretation of a text ends
up in the self-interpretation of a subject who henceforth understands himself better. This
completion of text understanding in self-understanding characterizes the sort of reflective
philosophy which I call concrete reflection. Hermeneutics and reflective philosophy are
here correlative and reciprocal: on the one hand, self-understanding provides a round-
about way of understanding the cultural signs in which the self contemplates himself and
forms himself; on the other hand, the understanding of a text is not an end in itself and for
itself; it mediates the relation to himself of a subject who, in the short circuit of immediate
reflection, would not find the meaning of his own life. Thus it is necessary to say just as
 424 strongly that reflection is nothing without mediation by means of signs and cultural works
and that explanation is nothing if it is not incorporated, as an intermediary stage, in the
SECTION 7 process of self-understanding. In short, in hermeneutical reflection-or in reflective
PHENOMENOLOGIES hermeneutics-the constitution of self and that of meaning are contemporaneous (Paul
OF LYRIC READING Ricoeur, "What Is a Text? Explanation and Interpretation").

Silence 1 (19) (Scholium 31.4)

3. A poem begins and ends in silence. Why not call it nothing? (36.3)

Scholium on the culture of silence. The meaning of silence is an implication of

speech which constructs silence as a "back-formation" or inference from itself. As
a preliminary instance of the culture or ethnography of silence (40), note the
following:

The Quakers of the seventeenth century were particularly concerned to do away with the
empty formalism in worship into which they considered Christianity had fallen, and since
many of the outward forms they rejected were verbal forms, their distrust of speaking and
the value they placed upon silence assumed especially high symbolic significance. Speak-
ing was a faculty of the outward man, and was therefore not as valuable as the inward
communion with God which could only be achieved through silence. In his curious trea-
tise "A Battle-Door for Teachers & Professors to Learn Singular & Plural," which was an
apology for the distinctive Quaker pronominal usage, George Fox, the principal founder
of Quakerism, wrote, "All Languages are to me no more than dust, who was before Lan-
guages were, and am come' d before Languages were, and am redeemed out of Languages
into the power where men shall agree ... all Languages upon earth is [sic] but Naturall and
makes none divine, but that which was before Languages, and Tongues were" (Fox, Stubbs,
Furley r66o:ii) (Richard Bauman, "Speaking in the Light: The Role of the Quaker Minis-
ter" in Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking).

Observe that silence is the topical space in which the scarce economics of speech
are no longer in force, and the possibility of relationship precluded by utterance as
a means of relationship becomes actuality. Silence is where "all men agree."

3.1 The silence out of which poetic speech arises is more or less busy.

3.2 To bring speech out of silence there must be an occasion generative of speech.

3.3 The "occasion generative of speech" is some dislocation or "disease" of the rela-
tionship of a subject and an object (for example, as between love and beloved or a
god and his world). Creation is not the speaking itself but the primordial disease
or fall which thrusts me into a predicament in which speech is the only way.

3-4 The poem achieves "closure" only when some new cognitive element has been
added to the relationship of subject and object. Terminal closure is "something
understood." Closure brings the poem to an end as apocalypse ("dis-closure")
brings Creation to an end (cf. 8).

Scholium on part and whole. One way of thinking about closure is as the comple-
tion of the inventory of part-whole recognitions. A basic moral component in the
 analysis of the literary work is the discovery of the part in relationship to its 425
whole. This discovery is a moral component because it is in effect an ethical func-
tion which carries the literary function-the immortality function-inside of it. 7.3
It is the business of the reader to discover the compositional harmony of the part ALLEN GROSSMAN

of the work in relationship to the whole of the work. It is the business of the moral
person-the business of consciousness with itself, the literary work being in this
respect a version of consciousness-to discover the ethical implication of this mo-
ment of consciousness in relationship to the whole career of consciousness; or,
stated another way, it is the business of the moral person (for which literary analysis
is a model) to discover the relationship between this moment of the story of this
person and the whole of the story. Each discriminable element of the work is re-
lated to the whole the work, and the work itself is a discriminable element in the
history of its own story (the "archetype" which has not one but many histories, as
many as the explanations proposed to account for its coming to be). Analogously,
each moment in the history of this consciousness has a place in the whole history of
consciousness. But we observe that consciousness is asymmetrical-consciousness
includes the past but not the future. We do not remember the future. Hence the
part-whole perception in the analysis of the literary work is an anticipation of the
mind in contemplation-per impossible-of the whole career of consciousness as a
completed system. In the work of art meaning is complete in a version of being, thus
fulfilling by anticipation the state of affairs in immortality-the accord of meaning
with being as a whole. For "parts and wholes" with reference to the important con-
cept of totality see Roberto Unger, Knowledge and Politics, pp. 125ff. See also Parts
and Wholes, ed. Daniel Lerner.

Behind the idea of wholeness of discourse is the organic analogy (see Plato, Pha-
edrus 264 C), and the organism which is assembled (the whole world which is as-
sembled) in analysis is the human countenance. Closure is therefore a form of
recognition.

3.5 The speaking subject in the poem is always definable in social terms, that is to say,
"is always a person" (1.7).

3.6 Love is the principle of life of the speaking person.

Poetic Language
4· All poems employ an artificial, that is to say, a "poetic language."

It is characteristic of artificial languages that historical mutability is precluded by their

very nature. Artificial languages are devised to exclude or control mutability (Edward
Sapir).

Scholium on the arbitrariness of regarding language in poetry as "language" at all.

Insofar as the poem is an artifact, its words have ceased to be language and be-
come objects, or merely have gotten lost in the totalization which arises when the
parts of a thing are superseded by the whole which they have become (Scholium at
35). The embarrassment of treating words in poetry as language can be seen in the
effort to identify sentences in poetry as statements. (Cf. I. A. Richards.) If sen-
tences in poetry are statements, then they are subject to the rules of verification
 426 and sense (such as the Aristotelian Law of Contradiction). But it is clear that these
rules disable too many of the sentences of poetry (for example, those which em-
SECTION 7 ploy metaphor). Further, statements are analyzed without reference to possible
PHENOMENOLOGIES differences between speaker's meaning and hearer's meaning; but language in
OF LYRIC READING poetry is always language which as become the speech of a person, and is therefore
no longer statement, or not yet statement, in any case. But as speech, as will be
seen, the words in poems are also in many ways disqualified. Hence, the choice,
which is always possible, of regarding the words in poems as pieces oflanguage in
any normal sense tends to be counterindicated. Language in poetry is an example
of a natural thing which by being framed or contextualized in a powerful and
singular way has changed its nature (35).

4.1 All poetic languages are versions of social language, that is to say, versions of so-
cially identifiable dialects. When I speak of them as "versions" I mean that we
encounter them as disguises (8.4, Scholium at 38.6).

4.2 Poetic languages are strategies to prevent the meaningless use of the human
speaker-the engagement of the labor of the speaker toward any stake but his or
her own.

4-3 The feature which distinguishes poetic versions of social language from natural
versions of social language is archaism (Owen Barfield). Speech which manifests
itself as poetic language has the authority of prior life (9.4).

Scholium on priority, interiority, and power. The idea of "archaism" associates

poetry with the power of prior life. It should be noted in assessing the claims for
poetry that priority, power, and divinity are mutually explanatory concepts in
Western culture. "Archaism" associates poetry with the power of origination
through which reality is established prior to conscious life, and toward which
consciousness directs its eyes backward-as it were in retrospect, and subject to
the irony of a mind known by a mind which (like the poem) cannot by its nature
be known in the same sense. Inside each moment of poetic language there is the
taunt (Job 38) "Where were you when I made you?"

Archaism also involves poetic language in the paradox of earliness and lateness;
the prior thing is at once the firstborn and the infant and also the thing longest in
the world and oldest. The poetic speaker is the archetypal senex puer (on this to-
pas, see Ernst Robert Curtius). The middle ground of strong life does not belong
to the iconology of the poem. "The novel is the art-form of virile maturity ..."
(Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 71).

The association of poetry and historical priority is legitimated as history by Vico

as follows (The New Science of Giambattista Vi co, in "Idea of the Work," p. 34):

We find that the principle of these origins both oflanguages and ofletters lies in the fact that
the first gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic
characters. This discovery, which is the master key of this Science, has cost us the persistent
research of almost all our literary life, because with our civilized natures we [moderns] cannot
at all imagine and can understand only by great toil the poetic nature of these first men.
 After romanticism, priority and power are modally subsumed by the category of 427
interiority so that the archaic and the interior become identified. For the refusal
of this position in modern structuralism and the return to the Semitic world con- 7.3
struction which places the archaic and the prior in the exterior, see Jean Starobin- ALLEN GROSSMAN

ski, "The Inside and the Outside":

Making the most remote past coefficient to our most intimate depth is a way of refusing
loss and separation, of preserving, in the crammed plenum we imagine history to be, every
moment spent along the way.... There is no reason, however, why our interest in the cul-
tural past should diminish if, instead of representing a part of ourselves, this past con-
sisted in things other men have accomplished within a conceptual framework which is not
and will never be ours, using a language in which we recognize nothing of ourselves. Leav-
ing aside cultures which have not contributed to making us what we are, it is moot whether
other cultures which have indeed influenced us form a history of assimilation rather than
the contrary-a history of evictions.

This exilic conception constitutes a refusal of typology and entails a hermeneutic

rather than a participatory civilization. Compare Blake's "ancient time" (Schol-
ium at 41.4).

4-4 The route taken by the speaker in the poem through the poem's problem of utter-
ance is (by the definition of speech in a poem) a unique route. Hence there is always
only one poem. (All versions of a poem are poems.) The extent to which an utter-
ance insists on its specificity as a unique event is the extent to which that utter-
ance participates in the poetic quality. The source of the poetic quality is the risk
of commitment of all being to an unalterably singular manifestation (19.1, Scholia
at 22.6, 31.15, 42.3).

Scholium on manifestation in the one world. The association of poetry and im-
mortality can be constructed by observing the eidetic utility inherent in the exact
repeatability of sentences. Note the following from William M. Ivins, Prints and
Visual Communication, p. 162:

The conventional exact repeatability of the verbal class symbols gave words a position in
the thought of the past that they no longer hold. The only important things the ancients
could exactly repeat were verbal formulae. Exact repeatability and permanence are so
closely alike that the exactly repeatable things easily become thought of as the permanent
or real things, and all the rest are apt to be thought of as transient and thus as mere reflec-
tions of the seemingly permanent things. This may seem a matter of minor moment, but I
have little doubt that it had much to do with the origin and development of the Platonic
doctrine of Ideas and the various modifications of it that have tangled thought until the
present day. The analytical syntax of sentences composed of words certainly had much to
do with the origin of the notions of substance and attributable qualities, which has not
only played a formative role in the history of philosophy but for long presented one of the
most formidable hurdles in the path of developing scientific knowledge. At any rate, until
comparatively recent times nominalism, with its emphasis on facts, its distrust of words,
and its interest in how things act rather than in what they essentially are, has had little
chance, and its great development has coincided remarkably with the ever-broadening
development of modern pictorial methods of record and communication.
 428 But it should be noted that all manifestation involves the risk of reduction under-
taken (with more or less confidence as the state of the community in history al-
SECTION 7 lows) in view of the great reward of perpetualization. All manifestation, whether
PHENOMENOLOGIES verbal or visual, is determinate. As Gombrich points out, we do not see ambigui-
OF lYRIC READING ties; we see one state of a thing and then another. (The idea of ambiguity as also of
metaphor is meaningless without the fact of the constraint of presence in manifes-
tation to univocality.) Hence in manifestation possibility is broken down. At the
point where manifestation really occurs (on the outer skin as it were of representa-
tion) presence is postcatastrophic. (On poetry and the brokenness of worlds, see
31.15.) Hence the ideology of the unique language event (style) is a repetition of the
nature of manifestation elevated to a moral allegory. Poetry incorporates as a rule,
as the differentia specific a of its kind, the sacrificial history of presence.

Poetry thus offers a symbol of the one world which appears, as it is founded on the
infinite plurality of worlds which cannot also appear. Poetry repeats in each of its
instances the story about the scarcity of existence, the cosmogonic story which
tells of the destruction of an infinity of worlds before the creation of this one
(Leibnitz, Monadology, #55 ff.).

The matter is worth dwelling on. We may say that poetry, like ethical life, does
not take place in the philosophical plurality of possible worlds, but in the relent-
less and inescapable unity of the one world as recovered perceptually.

Contrary to the Aristotelian implication that poetry is "more philosophical" than

history, poetry is part of history. Poetry is one thing (an instance of that sort of
thing) which actually has happened. Among all the possible things that could
happen-the myths (38)-it is the one actual thing (one of the actual things) that
did happen in the situation at hand. The poem as such is not the child of the expe-
riential esprit d'escalier, nor does it consist of experimental counterfactuals with
respect to a given state of affairs; it is the one thing that could be done by the
speaker then. (It is that thing that was done.) Consequently, poetry is a hostage in
the one world where finally and unexchangeably the one thing that happens (the
very thing) really comes to reside.

The poem as manifestation is mounted upon the ruins of excluded possibility; and
as manifestation it competes, within the horizon of human attention, for its spatia-
temporal moment. In this it is like the human body. The soul is a creature of the
plurality of metaphysically possible worlds; but the body, a case of representation,
is bound to the one world. The body is psychophanic, the picture of the soul, com-
peting for space in the museum of the human world. Therefore, the poem like the
body is subject to the law of the one world, as it comes to mind through the eye;
and the name of that law is scarcity. (Note the debate about synonymity by E. D.
Hirsch and Nelson Goodman in Critical Inquiry 1, nos. 3, 4.)

4·5 The frame of the poem (its prosody or closure) is coterminous with the whole
poem, and must be conceived as bounding the poem both circumferentially (the
outer juncture with all being) and internally (the inner juncture, produced sylla-
ble by syllable, with its own being). The minimal function of closure is to fence
the poem from all other statements, and most strenuously from alternative state-
 ments of the same kind. The closural frame may be more or less permeable. In 429
Wordsworth it is more permeable (where the space outside is filled with almost
audible, slightly disjunct versions of the space inside); in Ben Jonson it is less per- 7.3
meable (where the space outside is outer space, enemy and keeper). The quality of ALLEN GROSSMAN

singularity manifested in each instant of utterance is in each case of manifestation,

syllable by syllable, the frame of the poem (that is, its closure).

Scholium on frame as theater, the repetition of the sufficient conditions of percepti-

bility. Note the following from Barbara H. Smith, Poetic Closure, pp. 24, 25:

Meter serves, in other words, as a frame for the poem, separating it from a "ground" ofless
highly structured speech and sound .... Meter is the stage of the theater in which the
poem, the representation of an act of speech, is performed. It is the arena of art, the curtain
that rises and falls as well as the music that accompanies the entire performance.

The poem represents the act of speech in the metrical theater which is in turn a
representation of the space of appearance, the sufficient condition or meta-topos
of the perceptibility of persons. The theater as structure is the imitation of the
space in which meeting takes place, and all its enabling preconditions.

Meter (as frame or closure) as a repetition or imitation of the psycho-social world

construction which enables the preconditions of personal actualization is alluded
to in Heidegger ("The Origin of the Work of Art," in Hofstadter, ed., Poetry, Lan-
guage and Thought, p. 45):

A work, by being a work, makes space for that spaciousness. "The make space for" means
here especially to liberate the Open to establish it in its structure. This installing occurs
through the erecting mentioned earlier. The work as work sets up a world. The world holds
open the Open of the world. But the setting up of a world is only the first essential feature
in the work-being of a work.

The metaphor of "frame" propagates itself throughout the theory of perception.

As the enabling preformation of meaning, for example, it is the familiar paradigm
of Gombrich, Kuhn, and others. Note also Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis.
What should be emphasized is that frame is established through reduction by dif-
ferentiation and is thus postcatastrophic, the "formal feeling" which succeeds
upon "great pain." And framing in representation (including art) is the repetition
as a subject of consciousness of the unconscious world-construction which is an
automatic component of every moment of experience.

We cross the frame into the poem. But the edge may be anywhere like the border
of the sacred grove. Often we note only a slight shudder of difference.

4.6 All poetic speech implies both a speaker and also a class of speakers.

4-7 There is always a sense in which the object in the poem (the speaker's world, the
Beloved) is definable in terms other than social terms. That is to say, the distance
which modulates the relationship of subject (always social, as in 3.5) and object in
the poem is filled with ontological questions (theory), questions about the being
 430 of the object. All the Beloveds are alive in the philosophical ambience both of be-
ing and of being that. Such is poetic life.
SECTION 7
PHENOMENOLOGIES Scholium on consciousness and the philosophical estate of the Beloved. When I say
OF LYRIC READING that the Beloved is always in some sense philosophical I place her in the classical
estate of the object of consciousness. As, for example, Roberto Unger, p. 200:

To be conscious is to have the experience of being cut off from that about which one re-
flects: it is to be a subject that stands over against its objects. A prerequisite of the distinc-
tion between subject and object is that the subject be capable of defining its relationship to
the object as a question to which different answers might be given.

On lyric as a culture of consciousness, see 16 and Scholium at 24. It is also the case
that the Beloved in lyric is an image of the perceiver as perceived. What we cele-
brate in the Beloved is the self as known-the principle of whose life is the para-
dox of storytelling.

4.8 Obscurity occurs when the measure of the distance between subject and object
becomes indefinite. This phenomenon takes place (simultaneously and from the
same causes) (1) within the poem and (2) between the poem as object and its sub-
ject (the reader).

7.4 The End of the Poem (I996; trans. I999)

GIORGIO AGAMBEN Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen 1

My plan, as you can see summarized before you in the title of this lecture, is to define a
poetic institution that has until now remained unidentified: the end of the poem.
To do this, I will have to begin with a claim that, without being trivial, strikes me as
obvious-namely, that poetry lives only in the tension and difference (and hence also in the
virtual interference) between sound and sense, between the semiotic sphere and the seman-
tic sphere. This means that I will attempt to develop in some technical aspects Valery's defi-
nition of poetry, which Jakobson considers in his essays in poetics: "The poem: a prolonged
hesitation between sound and sense" (Le poeme, hesitation prolongee entre le son et le sens).
What is a hesitation, if one removes it altogether from the psychological dimension?
Awareness of the importance of the opposition between metrical segmentation and
semantic segmentation has led some scholars to state the thesis (which I share) according
to which the possibility of enjambment constitutes the only criterion for distinguishing
poetry from prose. For what is enjambment, if not the opposition of a metrical limit to a
syntactical limit, of a prosodic pause to a semantic pause? "Poetry" will then be the name
given to the discourse in which this opposition is, at least virtually, possible; "prose" will
be the name for the discourse in which the opposition cannot take place.
 Medieval authors seem to have been perfectly conscious of the eminent status of this 431
opposition, even if it was not until Nicolo Tibino (in the fourteenth century) that the fol-
lowing perspicuous definition of enjambment was formulated: "It often happens that the 7.4
rhyme ends, without the meaning of the sentence having been completed" (Multiocens GIORGIO AGAMBEN

enim accidit quod, fin ita consonantia, adhuc sensus orationis non est finitus).
All poetic institutions participate in this noncoincidence, this schism of sound and
sense-rhyme no less than caesura. For what is rhyme if not a disjunction between a se-
miotic event (the repetition of a sound) and a semantic event, a disjunction that brings
the mind to expect a meaningful analogy where it can find only homophony?
Verse is the being that dwells in this schism; it is a being made of murs et paliz, as
Brunetto Latini wrote, or an etre de suspens, in Mallarme's phrase. And the poem is an
organism grounded in the perception of the limits and endings that define-without ever
fully coinciding with, and almost in intermittent dispute with-sonorous (or graphic)
units and semantic units.
Dante is fully conscious of this when, at the moment of defining the can zone through
its constitutive elements in De vulgari eloquentia (II, IX, 2-3), he opposes cantio as unit of
sense (sententia) to stantiae as purely metrical units:

And here you must know that this word [stanza] was coined solely for the purpose of
discussing poetic technique, so that the object in which the whole art of the canzone was
enshrined should be called a stanza, that is, a capacious storehouse on receptacle for the
art in its entirety. For just as the canzone is the lap of its subject-matter, so the stanza en-
laps its whole technique, and the latter stanzas of the poem should never aspire to add
some new technical device, but should only dress themselves in the same garb as the first.
(emphasis mine)

[Et circa hoc sciendum est quod vocabulum [stantia] per solius artis respectum inven-
tum est, videlicet ut in qua tota cantionis ars esset contenta, illud diceretur stantia, hoc est
mansio capax sive receptaculum totois artis. Nam quemadmodum cantio est gremium
totius sententiae, sic stantia totam artem ingremiat; nee licet aliquid artis sequentibus ad-
rogare, sed solam artem antecedentis induere.]

Dante thus conceives of the structure of the canzone as founded on the relation between
an essentially semantic, global unit ("the lap of the whole meaning") and essentially met-
rical, partial units ("enlaps the whole technique").
One of the first consequences of this position of the poem in an essential disjunction
between sound and sense (marked by the possibility of enjambment) is the decisive im-
portance of the end of the poem. The verse's syllables and accents can be counted; its
synaloephae and caesuras can be noted; its anomalies and regularities can be catalogued.
But the verse is, in every case, a unit that finds its principium individuation is only at the
end, that defines itself only at the point at which it ends. I have elsewhere suggested that
the word versure, from the Latin term indicating the point at which the plow turns
around at the end of the furrow, be given to this essential trait of the verse, which-
perhaps on account of its obviousness-has remained nameless among the moderns.
Medieval treatises, by contrast, constantly drew attention to it. The fourth book of La-
borintus thus registers finalis terminatio among the verse's essential elements, alongside
membrorum distincto and sillabarum numeratio. And the author of the Munich Ars does
not confuse the end of the poem (which he calls pausatio) with rhyme, but rather defines
it as its source or condition of possibility: "the end is the source of consonance" (est au tern
pausatio fons consonantiae).
 432 Only from this perspective is it possible to understand the singular prestige, in Proven-
'fal and Stilnovist poetry, of that very special poetic institution, the unrelated rhyme, called
SECTION 7 rim'estrampa by Las leys d'amors and davis by Dante. If rhyme marked an antagonism be-
PHENOMENOLOGIES tween sound and sense by virtue of the noncorrespondence between homophony and
oF LYRic READING meaning, here rhyme, absent from the point at which it was expected, momentarily allows
the two series to interfere with each other in the semblance of a coincidence. I say "sem-
blance," for if it is true that the lap of the whole technique here seems to break its metrical
closure in marking the lap of sense, the unrelated rhyme nevertheless refers to a rhyme-
fellow in the successive strophe and, therefore, does nothing more than bring metrical
structure to the metastrophic level. This is why in Arnaut's hands it evolves almost natu-
rally into word-rhyme, making possible the stupendous mechanism of the sestina. For
word-rhyme is above all a point of undecidability between an essentially asemantic element
(homophony) and an essentially semantic element (the word). The sestina is the poetic form
that elevates the unrelated rhyme to the status of supreme compositional canon and seeks,
so to speak, to incorporate the element of sound into the very lap of sense.
But it is time to confront the subject I announced and define the practice that modern
works of poetics and meter have not considered: the end of the poem insofar as it is the ul-
timate formal structure perceptible in a poetic text. There have been inquiries into the in-
cipit of poetry (even if they remain insufficient). But studies of the end of the poem, by
contrast, are almost entirely lacking.
We have seen how the poem tenaciously lingers and sustains itself in the tension and
difference between sound and sense, between the metrical series and the syntactical se-
ries. But what happens at the point at which the poem ends? Clearly, here there can be no
opposition between a metrical limit and a semantic limit. This much follows simply from
the trivial fact that there can be no enjambment in the final verse of a poem. This fact is
certainly trivial; yet it implies consequences that are as perplexing as they are necessary.
For if poetry is defined precisely by the possibility of enjambment, it follows that the last
verse of a poem is not a verse.
Does this mean that the last verse trespasses into prose? For now let us leave this
question unanswered. I would like, however, at least to call attention to the absolutely
novel significance that Raimbaut d'Aurenga's "No sai que s'es" acquires from this per-
spective. Here the end of every strophe, and especially the end of the entire unclassifiable
poem, is distinguished by the unexpected irruption of prose-an irruption that, in extre-
mis, marks the epiphany of a necessary undecidability between prose and poetry.
Suddenly it is possible to see the inner necessity of those poetic institutions, like the
tornada or the envoi, that seem solely destined to announce and almost declare the end of
the poem, as if the end needed these institutions, as if for poetry the end implied a catas-
trophe and loss of identity so irreparable as to demand the deployment of very special
metrical and semantic means.
This is not the place to give an inventory of these means or to conduct a phenomenol-
ogy of the end of the poem (I am thinking, for example, of the particular intention with
which Dante marks the end of each of the three books of the Divine Comedy with the
word stelle, or of the rhymes in dissolved verses of Leopardi's poetry that intervene to
stress the end of the strophe or the poem). What is essential is that the poets seem con-
scious of the fact that here there lies something like a decisive crisis for the poem, a genu-
ine crise de vers in which the poem's very identity is at stake.
Hence the often cheap and even abject quality of the end of the poem. Proust once
observed, with reference to the last poems of Les fleurs du mal, that the poem seems to
be suddenly ruined and to lose its breath ("it stops short," he writes, "almost falls
flat ... despite everything, it seems that something has been shortened, is out of 433
breath"). Think of "Le cygne," such a tight and heroic composition, which ends with
the verse "Aux captifs, aux vaincues ... a bien d'autres encore!" (Of those who are cap- 7.4
tive or defeated ... and of many more others!) Concerning a different poem of Baude- GioRGio AGAMBEN

laire's, Walter Benjamin noted that it "suddenly interrupts itself, giving one the
impression-doubly surprising in a sonnet-of something fragmentary." The disorder
of the last verse is an index of the structural relevance to the economy of the poem of
the event I have called "the end of the poem." As if the poem as a formal structure would
not and could not end, as if the possibility of the end were radically withdrawn from it,
since the end would imply a poetic impossibility: the exact coincidence of sound and
sense. At the point in which the sound is about to be ruined in the abyss of sense, the
poem looks for shelter in suspending its own end in a declaration, so to speak, of the state
of poetic emergency.
In light of these reflections I would like to examine a passage in De vulgari eloquentia
in which Dante seems, at least implicitly, to pose the problem of the end of poetry. The
passage is to be found in Book II, where the poet treats the organization of rhymes in the
canzone (XIII, 7-8). After defining the unrelated rhyme (which someone suggests should
be called davis), the text states: "The endings of the last verses are the most beautiful if
they fall into silence together with the rhymes" (Pulcherrime tamen se habent ultimorum
carminum desinentiae, si cum rithmo in silentium cadunt). What is this falling into si-
lence of the poem? What is the beauty that falls? And what is left of the poem after its
ruin?
If poetry lives in the unsatisfied tension between the semiotic and the semantic series
alone, what happens at the moment of the end, when the opposition of the two series is no
longer possible? Is there here, finally, a point of coincidence in which the poem, as "lap of
the entire meaning," joins itself to its metrical element to pass definitively into prose? The
mystical marriage of sound and sense could, then, take place.
Or, on the contrary, are sound and sense now forever separated without any possible
contact, each eternally on its own side, like the two sexes in Vigny's poem? In this case,
the poem would leave behind it only an empty space in which, according to Mallarme's
phrase, truly rien n'aura lieu que le lieu.
Everything is complicated by the fact that in the poem there are not, strictly speaking,
two series or lines in parallel flight. Rather, there is but one line that is simultaneously
traversed by the semantic current and the semiotic current. And between the flowing of
these two currents lies the sharp interval obstinately maintained by poetic mechane.
(Sound and sense are not two substances but two intensities, two tonoi of the same lin-
guistic substance.) And the poem is like the katechon in Paul's Second Epistle to the
Thessalonians (2:7-8): something that slows and delays the advent of the Messiah, that is,
of him who, fulfilling the time of poetry and uniting its two eons, would destroy the po-
etic machine by hurling it into silence. But what could be the aim of this theological con-
spiracy about language? Why so much ostentation to maintain, at any cost, a difference
that succeeds in guaranteeing the space of the poem only on condition of depriving it of
the possibility of a lasting accord between sound and sense?
Let us now reread what Dante says about the most beautiful way to end a poem, the
place in which the last verses fall, rhymed, in silence. We know that for him it is a matter
of a rule. Think, for instance, of the envoi of"Cosi nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro." Here
the first verse ends with an absolutely unrelated rhyme, which coincides (and certainly
not by chance) with the word the names the supreme poetic intention: donna, "lady." This
unrelated rhyme, which seems to anticipate a point of coincidence between sound and
 434 sense, is followed by four verses, linked in couplets according to the rhyme that Italian
metrical tradition calls baciata ("kissed"):
SECTION 7 Canzon, vattene dritto a quella donna
PHENOMENOLOGIES
che m'ha ferito il coree che m'invola
OF lYRIC READING
quello ond'io ho pili gola,
e dillle per lo cor d'una saetta;
che bell'onor s'acquista in far vendetta.

[Poem, go straight to that woman who

has wounded my heart and stolen from
me what I most hunger for, and strike
her heart with an arrow, for one gains
great honor in taking revenge.]
It is as if the verse at the end of the poem, which was now to be irreparably ruined in
sense, linked itself closely to its rhyme-fellow and, laced in this way, chose to dwell with it
in silence.
This would mean that the poem falls by once again marking the opposition between
the semiotic and the semantic, just as sound seems forever consigned to sense and sense
returned forever to sound. The double intensity animating language does not die away in
a final comprehension; instead it collapses into silence, so to speak, in an endless falling.
The poem thus reveals the goal of its proud strategy: to let language finally communicate
itself, without remaining unsaid in what is said.
(Wittgenstein once wrote that "philosophy should really only be poeticized" [Philoso-
phie diirfte man eigentlich nur dichten]. Insofar as it acts as if sound and sense coincided
in its discourse, philosophical prose may risk falling into banality; it may risk, in other
words, lacking thought. As for poetry, one could say, on the contrary, that it is threatened
by an excess of tension and thought. Or, rather, paraphrasing Wittgenstein, that poetry
should really only be philosophized.)

NOTE
1. The lecture was presented in 1995 at the Agamben, Categorie Italiane: Studi di poetica
University of Geneva for a conference in honor of (Marsilio Editori, 1996).
Roger Dragonetti, and published in Giorgio

7.5 Why Rhyme Pleases (2on)

SIMON JARVIS

It does not please everyone. Even in the British eighteenth century, one of the times and
places of its highest dominance, rhyme could appear to one critic an important compo-
nent of "the source of the disorders of Great Britain" (his choice of words). "A foolish ad-
miration of this trifling and artificial ornament," wrote Thomas Sheridan, "has turned
people's thoughts from the contemplation of the real and natural beauty of numbers. Like 435
the Israelites, we have gone whoring after our own fancies, and worshipped this idol with
so infatuated a zeal, that our language has in great measure fallen a sacrifice to it." 1 Sheri- 7.5
dan's view was not unusual. Edward Young deprecated thus Pope's decision to translate SIMON )ARVIs

Homer into rhyme.

Had Milton never wrote, Pope had been less to blame: But when in Milton's Genius, Homer,
as it were, personally rose to forbid Britons doing him that ignoble wrong; it is less pardon-
able, by that effeminate decoration, to put Achilles in petticoats a second time: How much
nobler had it been, if his numbers had rolled on in full flow, through the various modula-
tions of masculine melody, into those grandeurs of solemn sound, which are indispensably
demanded by the native dignity of Heroick song? How much nobler, if he had resisted the
temptation of that Gothic Daemon, which modern Poesy tasting, became mortal? ...
Blank is a term of diminution; what we mean by blank verse, is verse unfallen, uncurst;
verse reclaim' d, reinthroned in the true language of the Gods; who never thunder' d, nor
suffer' d their Homer to thunder, in Rhime; ... 2

Rhyme is here denounced as from a pulpit. Rhyme, in Sheridan, is the whore of Baby-
lon, and, in Young, it is not only the apple offered by the serpent but is also a kind of
prosodic cross-dressing. The implication, of course, is Reformation. Rhyme has laid
waste to classic Rome, and erected the papist one. It is time to smash the idols. But there
is also a possibility of mock hovering over this characteristically English fusion of idol-
breaking with Duns-slaying. Not even the most zealous idol-breakers took themselves to
be reversing the Fall of Man, yet something like that seems to be envisaged by Young for
verse. We can at any moment speak the language of the gods again-by removing Achil-
les' skirt. The passage, in fact, snakes from light comedy to millennia! prophecy. The
question of rhyme is at once a matter of our everlasting salvation or perdition and, on the
other hand, it is not all that serious.
Young's and Sheridan's verdicts are only the most vehement deployments of a reper-
toire of rhyme-hating which expanded rapidly (though by no means uncontestedly) just
in the epoch of rhyme's most complete domination of English verse-practice. The lexi-
con itself also carries the double character evident in Young. Rhyme is an idol, it is witch-
craft, it is contemptible, it is depraved, it is a prostitute, it is a mercenary, it is a barbarian,
it is stupefaction. Yet rhyme is also a toy, a bawble, a gewgaw, a trifle; it jingles, it tinkles,
it rattles and babbles. In short, it is something of absolutely no importance whatever,
which must therefore be destroyed without further delay, because it is so deeply evil.
This is not just ancient history but also part of our history. These fantasies or observa-
tions about rhyme's meaning, whether rhymophilic or -phobic, still jingle in our heads
today. Whoever selects rhyme as a practicing poet today will find that, first of all, he will be
understood to have performed a socially symbolic act. Rhyme belongs, in the first place, to
that repertoire of metacommunicative winks and nods by which a series of poetical party
affiliations can be more or less adroitly negotiated: whether your lines begin with upper- or
lower-case letters, whether they are metrical or para-metrical or non-metrical, whether
they are left-justified or complexly indented or migrate everywhere across the page-these
devices and the choices they entail, quite certainly constitute in the case of significant po-
ets a timbral palette of tremendous complexity. 3 But today, partly because you can see
them without even needing to begin reading the poem, they are more immediately a kind
of rough badge or uniform, very rapidly legible to friend or foe, who, as it were, already
knows all about you even before you have begun to open your mouth. Their metacommu-
nicative hyper-saturation threatens altogether to blot out their prosodic coloration.
 436 There is in this way a kind of historical falling-silent of rhyme. As rhyme tends to
the condition of the pure sign, the badge, its body retreats from audibility. I conjecture
SECTION 7 that each great rhyming authorship is, amongst other things, a singular rhyme-
PHENOMENOLOGIES thesaurus, a repertoire of effects which are simultaneously and indissociably ideal,
oF LYRIC READING conceptual, semantic, syntactic, phonological, phonetic, material, contingent, stuff: in
which rhyme mutely rings out its refutation of the dead metaphysics which would bore
us into believing that all the categories I have just mentioned refer to real and really
separable fields or entities, instead of belonging amongst the mere conveniences of pro-
cedure itself. Rhyme sounds on all these instruments at once. The great philosophical
systems have their formulas, a kind of autopilots which keep the machine in motion
even when thinking may temporarily not in fact be taking place; the great rimaria,
rather than exposing the formula only inadvertently, where the apparatus hits a bump,
instead hold the formula out to us, admit to it as though admitting that thinking is
never all our own work or a matter of finding that impossible quiddity, the distinctive
personal voice, but that it is, rather, the question how we shall in the right way lose our
voices into those of the dead and of the unborn. When rhyme itself, however, has be-
come attenuated to a flag, a rallying point, a party card, these effects of long-term self-
interlocution and self-relinquishment appear blocked or choked. These colours of
sound are bound down beneath the myth: not form but its logo, not craft but its bro-
chure, a Cause.
One easily available response to this is to settle down into the narrative of irrevers-
ibility: to think that rhyme, just as is widely supposed to have happened to diatonicity or
to figurative painting, has died in history. But this view, even were it not already empiri-
cally deficient, mischaracterizes the very innovation it would wish for. Archaism and in-
novation have not in the history of poetry been chalk and cheese, but speaking twins. My
short essay is of course not going to be able to explain why or even prove that rhyme
pleases. Not only would even the attempt at such an explanation require some sort of
fabulated theory of human nature, but, still less plausibly, it would imply that rhyme itself
is in some way one thing, that it too has a nature remaining constant, rather than being a
device whose force is utterly caught up in the authorships, genres, and other auditory
habituations and economies within which it occurs. In this sense one might as well set
out to explain why a perfect cadence or a glockenspiel or the colour red pleases. Instead I
want to pursue a project I have been developing for a little while now in which I under-
stand the repertoires of prosodic gestures deployed by poets not through the idea of form
but rather as a distinctive mode of knowing. I want in this way to help open up a wound,
a cauterized place, in the body of our poetic culture; to attempt to listen in to rhyme's
thinking through and beneath the over-saturated symbolic roles it has usually been made
to play in our cultures.

14

In 1962 the young English poet and scholar J. H. Prynne gave a short but interesting radio
talk on the BBC. The talk charted what Prynne understood to be a revolution in the lyric
taking place in the shift from first to second-generation Romanticism.
Meditative poetry ... at some point after Wordsworth's last contact with the Augustan
tradition abandoned the ambition to present the reflecting mind as part of an experiential
context and withdrew into a self-generating ambience of regret. With this went an amaz-
ing degree of control over incantatory techniques, designed to preserve the cocoon of
dream-like involvement and to present a kind of constant threshold music-the apparent
 movement of a gravely thoughtful mind. While the melancholia is switched on this noble 437
undercurrent is unfailingly present. 5
7.5
What Prynne calls the "virtuoso incantation" thus developed is, for him, an alibi. It is as
SIMON jARVIS
though Wordsworth's sense of the anaesthetic properties of metre, metre's ability to
:nake the intolerably painful bearable and even pleasurable, were to have become full-on
:1arcosis. In such an account, Wordsworth's marked asceticism with respect to rich in-
strumentations of the verse line would have been lapsed from. What replaces it is, in this
account, designed not to reveal experience, but to blot it out. The techniques of incanta-
tion are a cocoon. Life, the unbearable, lies beyond them. So they are also a fetish, mere
stuff fixated upon so as to obviate experience.
One of the most important of such incantatory techniques, of course, is rhyme, which
Wordsworth had also deployed, but whose significance is much more foregrounded in
the second-generation British Romantics by the greater richness of intra-linear instru-
mentation with which it enters into relation. Prynne's remarks strikingly echo the analy-
sis of what still, perhaps, remains the single most important book ever written about
rhyme, Viktor Zhirmunsky's Rhyme: Its History and Theory, published in Petrograd or
Petersburg-the title pages, perhaps symptomatically, offer both-in 1923, and, sadly, still
awaiting translation into English. Zhirmunsky's book owes part of its importance to its
scepticism about the idea that rhyme is a natural fact. Zhirmunsky shows, much more
thoroughly than anyone had previously managed to, how what counts as a rhyme differs
radically in differing languages and in different historical epochs of the same language
and in differing authorships within those historical epochs.
Zhirmunsky develops an extended contrast between two different ways of handling
rhyme in modern European, and especially in Russian, poetry. One kind of poet, like
Pushkin and like Baratynsky, holds to a particular series of canons about rhyme. Mascu-
line and feminine rhymes alternate; dactylic rhyme is rare; and care is taken to avoid a
plethora of parallelisms-that is to say, the recurring parallelism of rhyme is in continu-
ous counterpoint to a recurring contrast at the level of semantics and of syntax. Push kin
prefers rhymes in which the two rhyme-words belong to different parts of speech. The
automatism associated with rhyme is thus in tension with a refusal of automatism at the
level of semantics and syntax. The rhymes both sound and think. 6 (The essential features
of the account which we, perhaps, know chiefly through Wimsatt on Pope are already in
place in Zhirmunsky on Pushkin.)
In contrast to this classical canon of rhyme-technique Zhirmunsky develops an ac-
count of what he calls a "musical-impressionistic" handling of rhyme, already gathering
in Lermontov, Tyutchev and Fet, but reaching a fortissimo in the verse of the Russian
Swinburne, Konstantin Bal'mont. Bal'mont delights in just that plethora of parallelisms
which had seemed vulgar to the earlier masters. Rhyme words very often come not only
from the same parts of speech but also as part of repetitions of entire phrasal and melodic
structures. What Roger Fowler later termed "metrical rhyme," the repetition from one
line to the next or to a later line of a parallelism which is both syntactic, because it is a
repetition of parts of speech, and melodic, because it is a repetition of rhythmic patterns,
this 'metrical rhyme' is made, over and over again, to coincide with rhyme proper. Dac-
tylic rhyme is favoured, and canons of alternation need not be observed. Internal rhyme
is not only more prevalent in Bal'mont than in Baratynsky, but, more importantly, when
combined with this drive to parallelism, changes its function. Two segments of the same
line will often perform a metrico-syntactic "rhyme" as well as a phonetic one, thus bring-
ing the integrity of the line itself into question.
 438 These two types of prosodic repertoire, of course, are also two repertoires of thinking.
Yet, for Zhirmunsky, it is clear that more thinking is going on in one repertoire than in the
SECTION 7 other. He remarks that "The romantic poets, who sought chiefly for effects of sound, are
PHENOMENOLOGIES especially fond of short measures: the latter, characterized by the marks of an incantatory,
oF LYRIC READ INC 'musical' effect, represent a darkening of the side of verse which has to do with meaning,
of the substantive significance of words, and a heightening of the general emotional col-
oration."7 Pushkin's and Baratynsky's or Batiushkov's rhyme-technique lights meaning
up, by counterpointing it; Bal'mont's obscures it, drowning it out in music. There are two
striking connections here with the account by Prynne which I discussed a little earlier on.
First, Zhirmunsky supplies that precisely technical account which is missing from
Prynne's short talk, and which would be needed in order to explain precisely what the
"virtuoso incantation" of which Prynne speaks might consist in. But second, we find in
both Zhirmunsky and Prynne a sharply Platonic consensus about what thinking is and
what its relation to sound might be. "Musical" rhyming, however "amazing" its "mas-
tery," is and must be cocoon or stimulant. It cannot itself be admitted to be a kind of
thinking or involved in noticing. Instead, it screens those perceptions out. Musical rhym-
ing is automatism. It is Ion's chain of magnets: the series of automatic transmissions of
inspiration awarded by Socrates to rhapsody so as to destroy the rhapsode's claim to
cognition. 8
Over the last decade or so, I have been trying to explore the question of whether mu-
sic need be opposed to thinking in this way. Can there not be a musical or a prosodic
thinking, a thinking which is not simply a little picture of, nor even a counterpoint to,
that more familiar kind of thinking whose medium is essentially semantic and syntactic,
but whose medium, instead, is essentially prosodic: a kind of thinking in tunes? Neces-
sarily central to the formulation of this question has been the German philosopher
Theodor Adorno's late Aesthetic Theory, and, in particular, two sets of arguments within
that book. 9 The first is the argument that technique is the way art thinks. The second is
the argument that art thinks historically, and that what it knows, when it thinks well, is
natural-historical experience. So-called "form" becomes in Adorno's account a kind of
inexplicit mimesis, a mimesis which is not of individual objects in the world, but of
those features of natural-historical experience which are at once the most elusive and
amongst the most important: of structural shifts in the texture of experience itself which
are too painful, or too blissful, directly to be thematized. No art is about itself. So tech-
nique knows something about the world. Yet it knows it, Adorno suggests, just by the
most obsessive, and perhaps even the most fetishistic and solipsistic, absorption in its
own proper stuff. We can see how this might suggest a different line of enquiry from that
pursued by Prynne. If technique is the way art thinks, and if self-absorption is, curi-
ously, the way art notices others, then might this "virtuoso incantation" be, not simply a
screen or a cocoon or an anaesthetic, but a medium-a medium for thinking, and for
thinking about historical experience, just when in the very act of apparently retreating
from it?

T. S. Eliot's essay of 1917, "Reflections on Vers Libre," expressed a hope which has hardly
been realized: that a liberation from rhyme might also be a liberation of rhyme. "Freed
from its exacting task of supporting lame verse," Eliot wrote, "it could be applied with
greater effect where it is most needed." 10 But rhyme's imagined liberation does not, the
way Eliot tells it, sound very free. If it were indeed intelligible to refer to a poetic device's
being "liberated" or "imprisoned," this would have to mean rhyme's coming in some way 439
into its own. But rhyme cannot come into its own as an instrument put in the service of
needs already known, but only as the generation of new needs. Contesting Schopenhau- 7.5
er's figures for rhyme, David Samoilov writes in his book about Russian rhyme that SIMON JARVIS

[P]oetic thought is "formed" in the rhythm, sound, and rhyme of verse. This is the novum
which the composer of poetry introduces into thinking. And the devices of verse composi-
tion are neither fetters nor a mask, but something which conduces to the emancipation of
thoughts and feelings. 11

Rhyme which did not merely serve already existing needs and thoughts, but also generate
new ones, would not really be perfectly emancipated, but perfectly dead.
It is not only possible, but perhaps even probable that, when Prynne was composing the
following passage of his poem "Aristeas, In Seven Years," he had Eliot's dictum in mind.

No one harms these people: they

are sacred and have no
weapons. They sit or pass, in
the form of divine song,
they are free in the apt form of
displacement. They change
their shape, being of the essence as
a figure of extent. Which
for the power in rhyme
7 is gold, in this northern clime
which the Greeks so held to themselves and
which in the steppe was no more
than the royal figment. 12

The "seven years" of the poem's title are also seven numbers in the left margin, so that a
"year" comes also to be a passage of verse, and so that the transition from one "year" to
another is marked by this marginal figure. And each line next to such a figure is itali-
cized, raising the possible implications that these lines are quotations, or that they should
be read in sequence with each other instead of or as well as being read in sequence with
the other lines of the poem. The previous such line has read "6 the true condition of bone,"
so that we may need to read "the true condition of bone is gold, in this northern clime."
But at the transition to the poem's final "year" something surprising happens. The poem,
which has been not only unrhymed but apparently non- or even anti-metrical through-
out, suddenly rhymes, and on the word "rhyme" itself.
At least, it seems to rhyme. But for many of the currently respectable definitions of
rhyme, this may not be a rhyme at all. Sheer sound replay is not enough. For Samoilov,
"Rhyme [ ... ] may not be something which can equally be present or not be present-its
presence must be necessary-for it constitutes a non-circumnavigable element of the com-
position of a given verse, one of its organizing principles." 13 In a long fragment left unpub-
lished at his death, Hugh Kenner described rhyme as "... the production of like sounds
according to a schedule that makes them predictable." 14 By neither of these accounts
would this place in Prynne count as a rhyme. Its presence does not seem either necessary
or predictable, because it is the only rhyme in the poem. Except that when you start to
look, there are others; or, there would be others, if we were permitted to treat them as
such. For example:
 440 But it was not blessing, rather a fact so
hard-won that only the twist in middle
SECTION 7 air would do it anyway, so even he be wise
PHENOMENOLOGIES or with any recourse to the darkness of
OF LYRIC READING his tent. The sequence of issue is no
more than this, ...

Lines one and five of this excerpt rhyme too, don't they? So: no. Here, though, we might
be likely to invoke the distance between these lines, the fact that these lines end with
particles (just as, throughout the poem, there is an extraordinarily high incidence oflines
which end with articles, prepositions, and other verbal small change), and, here, we
would be likely to invoke the absence of metre. For Viktor Zhirmunsky, in his treatise on
Rhyme: Its History and Theory, rhyme is "any sonic replay bearing an organizational
function in the metrical composition of the poem." 15 This leaves the question open about
our case, though. On one hand, this poem is not metrical, and therefore this replay of
"so: no" can hardly be said to have an organizational function in its metrical composi-
tion. On the other hand it can be argued that all verse is in a minimal way metrically
composed in that it is divided into lines. In that case, any sonic replay at line-end would
qualify. But this absence of metre also applies to "rhyme: clime." It begins to look as
though our certainty that this is a rhyme rests on the fact that it is a rhyme on the word
rhyme itself. Without that word, we perhaps would not even notice this replay at all.
At any rate, it does appear that there is a kind of gap between what metricians will
agree to call rhyme and what readers can recognize as rhyme. For most readers, these lines
by Prynne make a rhyme, and no amount of Kenner, Samoilov or Zhirmunsky will per-
suade them otherwise. In dominant theories of rhyme, we are in the presence, in fact, of a
metricization of rhyme. This metricization, I want to suggest, this insistence that sonic
replay which does not play an organizational role in the composition of the poem is not
rhyme, is also accompanied, in the corresponding poetics, by a logicization of rhyme's role.

3
Both the metricization and logicization of rhyme, of course, are in one way impeccably
motivated. Without its metricization we should, it is feared, be unable to distinguish
rhyme from sonic replays occurring any old where in lines; without its logicization we
should not see how rhyme is a form of thinking and not merely a species of sensation. Yet
that last motive should give us pause. John Hollander's fine discussion of some lines from
Wallace Stevens's "Notes towards a Supreme Fiction" illustrates the point.

There was a mystic marriage in Catawba,

At noon it was on the mid-day of the year
Between a great captain and the maiden Bawda,

This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon

We loved but would no marriage make. Anon
The one refused the other one to take ...

Hollander comments thus:

The epithalamium embedded in the firm stanzas is the rhyming couplet, pentameter to
Alexandrine, concluding the Spenserian stanza: "Anon we loved but would no marriage
make./ Anon the one refused the other one to take," where the inversion is part of the
Spenserian echo. The brilliantly framing and bracketing "Anon"s, the rhyming of the in-
 ternal, but marked "make" with the line-and-tercel terminal "take" typify Stevens's mag- 441
nificent control over the structures of his verse. 16
7.5
.-\nd he continues: "Rhyming for the later Stevens does the imagination's work and not SIMON JARVIS
the jingling and tinkling of evasions; it occurs as 'the luminous melody of proper
sound.' " 17 There's nothing to quarrel with in this impressive analysis and evaluation, but
there is something to notice: the re-appearance of some favoured terms from the lexicon
of rhyme-hating. Rhyme which is to be the imagination's has to do some serious "work."
Otherwise it is evasive, jingling and tinkling. The reproach that rhyme "jingles," perhaps
the most frequent of all in eighteenth-century attacks on bad rhyme or on rhyme in gen-
eral, accuses it of being a meaningless noise, like the jingling of bells. The strongly Prot-
estant character of attacks on rhyme can, here, coalesce with mockery of Papist ritual.
And to be attracted by such jingling is not only potentially idolatrous, but also fetishistic
or perverse. We are consuming the wrapping, not the product.
Isn't there a way, here, in which the attacks on rhyme have left some mark even on one
of its most ardent sympathizers? Good rhyme has to be serious rhyme which does work;
it must not be evasive; it must not jingle and tinkle. Its chimes, if any, must be fully mas-
culine, as in Emerson's resonant desiderata, quoted by Hollander:

Rhyme; not tinkling rhyme but grand Pindaric strokes as firm as the tread of a horse.
Rhyme that vindicates itself as an art, the stroke of the bell of a cathedral. Rhyme which
knocks at prose & dulness with the stroke of a cannon ball. Rhyme which builds out of
Chaos & Old night a splendid architecture to bridge the impassable, & call aloud on all the
children of morning that the Creation is recommencing. 18

The jubilation is infectious, but there's also quite a lot of hitting and knocking going on
here, not to mention a certain amount of military activity, and Emerson's account sug-
gests a rhyme which certainly does have an organizing role in metrical composition: the
firm tread of the Pindaric horse, the beat, precisely, of metre, will rescue rhyme from
perverse or effeminate tinkling (we note that rhyme plays little role in Pindar). 19 This
need to cleanse rhyme from the associative colorations of idolatry, fetishism, and perver-
sity, I want to suggest, is one of the fundamental but concealed motives behind the metri-
cization and logicization of rhyme in canonical rhyme-theory.
One of the peaks of that range, even today, is W. B. Wimsatt's essay "One relation of
rhyme to reason." In that essay Wimsatt argues that part of what makes Alexander Pope
an accomplished master of rhyme is the relationship between the logical and the alogical
in his rhyming. He shows, famously, how Pope varies the part of speech in his rhyme
words, so that instead of nouns continually rhyming with nouns, verbs with verbs, and so
on, rhyme-partnerships are more often exogamous: nouns with verbs, and so on. This
matters, in Wimsatt's view, because "In literary art only the wedding of the alogical with
the logical gives the former an aesthetic value. The words of a rhyme, with their curious
harmony of sound and distinction of sense, are an amalgam of the sensory and the logi-
cal, or an arrest and precipitation of the logical in sensory form; they are the icon in
which the idea is caught." 20 So that, for Wimsatt, when rhyme-partners present not only a
semantic distinction but also a syntactical contrast, the wedding of the logical with the
alogical takes place across a more marked disjunction, and is therefore more satisfying.
Illuminating as the account of Pope's technique here is, there lies behind it not only a
certain poetic but also, of course, a certain metaphysic. Both depend on first making a clean
cut between the sensory and the logical and, then, their subsequent satisfying wedding.
Without that wedding, the alogical, including the non-semantic and non-syntactical bits of
 442 rhyme words, has no aesthetic value. It is just stuff, a corpse, waiting to be given life by the
soul of logic. "The music of spoken words," Wimsatt is sure, "in itself is meager, so meager
SECTION 7 in comparison to the music of song or instrument as to be hardly worth discussion. It has
PHENOMENOLOGIES become a platitude of criticism to point out that verses composed of meaningless words af-
oF LYRic READING ford no pleasure of any kind and can scarcely be called rhythmical-let them even be
rhymed." 21 Like many platitudes, however, this one may not be true, not at least if the plea-
sure which small children can be observed to take in Velimir Khlebnikov's "Language of
the Gods" is anything to go by. 22 As the medievalist James I. Wimsatt has pointed out in an
important article, the assumption that the music of spoken words is "meagre" is not
proven. 23 In the first place, the richness or poverty of music is in no way dependent upon the
acoustic complexity of the forces involved. Otherwise the "music" of Bach's cello suites
would always be "meagre" in comparison to that of an orchestral suite by Delius. So that
even were we to grant, as I do not, the assumption that the repertoires of vocal gestures de-
ployed by poetry are in some absolute qualitative or quantitative sense insufficiently rich,
this would still tell us nothing one way or the other about the poverty or richness of verbal
music, which is dependent not upon the materials, but on what is done with them.
The elder Wimsatt's view has been influential, producing such significant develop-
ments and modifications of the thesis as Hugh Kenner's essay "Pope's Reasonable
Rhymes." 24 Yet other critics who have written since Wimsatt and Kenner have been
working at this question in ways that tend to break down the logicization of rhyme-we
can think immediately, for examples, of Garrett Stewart's work on transegmental
rhyme, 25 of Debra Fried's on rhyme as pun, 26 or of J. Paul Hunter's critique of what he
aptly calls the "second shoe" theory of couplet rhyming.27
Clive Scott has drawn attention to whole practices of rhyme which, in his phrase, free
rhyme from the rhyming dictionary, among them Louis Aragon's use of so-called rimes
enjambees. In one lyric from Les Yeux d'Elsa, as Scott shows, there are two line-end
rhymes but also a rhyme straddled deliberately across the line-end:

Bertrand mieux que Cheherazade

Savait fa ire passer le temps
Qui va Ia jeunesse insultant
Faut-il que le coeur me brise A
D'autres partir pour Ia croisade.

A "rhyme scheme" for this passage would require a new philological algebra able to incor-
porate verse fractions as well as integers. In this case we know that this is not simply the
critic's ingenuity, both because there are many such instances in Aragon's wartime lyrics,
and because in Aragon's essay, "La Rime en 1940," he explicitly promoted this kind of
rhyme. 28 Like Prynne's rhyme, Aragon's is there, is a rhyme, but refuses to play an organ-
izational role in the metrical composition of the poem (unless its deliberately disorgani-
zational role-as Scott says, rimes enjambees have a tendency "to dissolve the syllabic
integrity of the lines" -could be understood, via a kind of metrical theodicy, as an organ-
izational role by negation).

4
Picking up some of these hints from those who have gone before me, I want now to con-
sider a single passage from Pope's Rape of the Lock.

But now secure the painted Vessel glides,

The Sun-beams trembling on the floating Tydes,
 While melting Musick steals upon the Sky, 443
And soften'd Sounds along the Waters die.
Smooth flow the Waves, the Zephyrs gently play, 7.5
Belinda smil'd, and all the World was gay. SIMON jARVIS

All but the Sylph-With careful Thoughts opprest,

Th'impending Woe sate heavy on his Breast.
He summons strait his Denizens of Air;
The lucid Squadrons round the Sails repair:
Soft o'er the Shrouds Aerial Whispers breathe,
That seem' d but Zephyrs to the train beneath.
Some to the Sun their Insect-Wings unfold,
Waft on the Breeze, or sink in Clouds of Gold.
Transparent Forms, too fine for mortal Sight,
Their fluid Bodies half dissolv' din Light.
Loose to the Wind their airy Garments flew,
Thin glitt'ring Textures of the filmy Dew;
Dipt in the richest Tincture of the Skies,
Where Light disports in ever-mingling Dies,
While ev'ry Beam new transient Colours flings,
Colours that change, whene'er they wave their Wings. 29

If all is well you will, like me, be struck by a powerful sense of the intense musicality of
these lines. If not, the analysis which follows cannot have the foolish hope of, as Word-
sworth put it, trying to reason you into a belief that the lines are beautiful, but rather that
of attempting analytically to account for an overwhelming experience of my own, an ex-
perience of evanescent liquidity, of a powerful seduction whose force is present precisely
in its transience, in its continuous disappearance and elusiveness, rather than in, say, its
symmetry or its balance or its order.
Of course some of the chief and well-known features of Pope's couplet style are in play
here: the coincidence of line-ends with sentences or at least phrases, so that every large
metrical unit in this passage coincides with a syntactical unit; and, just as Wimsatt stipu-
lates, there is a high level of variation in the parts of speech placed in this position, so that
only two couplets end each line with the same part of speech (sight: light II skies: dies). Yet
it seems to me that this accounts very little even for the power of the rhymes in this pas-
sage, and that in order to account for that we need to think a little more about the cross-
contamination between rhyme and other kinds of "sonic replay."
The first of these would be assonance, by which I mean (following Percy Adams)
vowel echoes coinciding with stresses. 30 There is one very obvious reason to treat asso-
nance in relation to rhyme, which is that it can be an important feature linking rhyme-
pairs. So, if we look at the very opening of this passage, the rhyme glides/Tydes is imme-
diately followed by the rhyme Sky/die. In other words, the verse paragraph begins not
only, like every other passage, with a series of two rhyming pairs, but, much more unusu-
ally, with an emphatic series of four identical vowel sounds in identical stress-positions.
The effect, I would argue, is anything but ordered and balanced: it is, rather, excessive,
emphatic, enthusiastic, something like a series of cries of acclamation. The effect is some-
thing like that of rhyming rhymes, a geometrical, rather than an arithmetic, ratio of
rhyme. And, I would argue, the presence of a quadruple assonance, in such a heavily
metrically marked position, sheds an influence over the whole verse paragraph. Later on,
that is, when this vowel sound recurs in other rhymes, we are likely involuntarily to recall
 444 this pedal point which has been set at the start of the verse paragraph: when we have
Sight/Light, and Skies/Dies, we are at once likely unconsciously to recall the beginning of
SECTION 7 this passage. In these circumstances established by vowel-music, a series of thematic as-
PHENOMENOLOGIES sociations can begin to establish themselves. We are given a miniature rhyming diction-
OF LYRIC READING ary for this rhyme which establishes a set of semantic connections: Sky, Skies, Sight and
Light establish a temporary link between this vowel sound and the idea of lightness or
brightness. This is not the claim that there could somehow be a natural palette of vowel-
sounds, each bearing its appropriate thematic or semantic coloration. There is no such
natural correspondence. But there can, instead, be what one might call clouds or mists of
such associations, clouds whose force is not necessary or natural but is rather a kind of
prosodic weather formation gathering in the poet's peculiar handling of verbal music.
And I would want to argue that phonotextual clusters can with sufficient attention and
power become something more permanently established in the reader's repertoire of re-
sponse, too. They become in this sense something like a prosodic idiom, a widely under-
stood convention of response which poets and readers can become used to manipulating,
and which can even, in course of time, and misleadingly, come to feel to poets and readers
as though it were something like a feature of the language itself. This, I'd argue, is one
crucial difference between linguistic competence and art-verse competence. Poets' virtu-
osity with prosodic patterning and prosodic idiom is not something that can ever be
contractually assured. It is, instead, a performance which, like a potlatch, calls for an an-
swering performance from the reader. Virtuosity in writing prosodic tunes calls forth an
answering virtuosity in hearing them: that such tunes can sometimes be, in Johnson's
word, nugatory, mists rising from the reader's brain, is in fact not simply a sign of error,
but a structural feature of what it is like to respond to prosodic virtuosity. A cloud, after
all, is not nothing. In Le plaisir du texte, Barthes writes that:

Si je lis avec plaisir cette phrase, cette histoire ou ce mot, c'est qu'ils ont ete ecrits dans le
plaisir (ce plaisir n'est pas en contradiction avec les plaintes de l'ecrivain). Mais le con-
traire? Ecrire dans le plaisir m'assure-t-il-moi, ecrivain-du plaisir demon lecteur? Nul-
lement. Ce lecteur, il faut que je le cherche (que je le «drague>>), sans savoir oil il est. Un es-
pace de !a jouissance est alors cree. Ce n'est pas Ia <<personne» de !'autre qui m'est necessaire,
c'est l'espace: Ia possibilite d'une dialectique du desir, d'une impn?vision de Ia jouissance:
que les jeux ne soient pas faits, qu'il y ait un jeu. 31

[If I read this phrase, this story or this word with pleasure, it is because they have been
written in pleasure (this pleasure is in no way contradicted by the complaints of the
writer). But the opposite? Does writing in pleasure guarantee me-me, the writer-the
pleasure of my reader? In no way. This reader, it is necessary that I seek him (that I "chat
him up"), without knowing where he is. A space for bliss is thus created. It is not the "per-
son" of the other which I require, it is the space: the possibility of a dialectic of desire, of an
unforeseenness ofbliss: that all bets are not already placed, that there be something in play]
(my translation).

I want to suggest that it may be just this kind of space for bliss (admittedly not the only
nor the usual translation of jouissance) that Pope's "unfixed" prosodic effects open up-
precisely one that can never be guaranteed but that is like a venture, a gamble, a surmise.
It is a seduction in which I do not know where the other is, and in which I therefore do not
know what it would take to please her, and in which I therefore take the risk that my plea-
sure can also be hers: in other words, in which I can seduce the other only by relinquish-
ing myself into my own art. Common sense and professional literary criticism alike have
often tended, for some good reasons, to operate an excluded middle between fantasy and 445
intention. Either the poet intended an effect or the reader is making it up. But because
prosodic thinking operates right at the threshold of intentionality, the difficulty of decid- 7.5
ing whether its effects are nugatory or real is in fact constitutive of the field of prosodic S1 MON jARVJs

thinking, both in its composition and in the recomposition which takes place every time
even a silent performance of verse is undertaken. All the right responses always have to be
fantasized first before they can be real. Art makes up what is already there, and then the
reader has to make it up again too.
What all this first of all instructs us in, I want to suggest, is the somewhat theoreticist
character of any sharp distinction between terminal-rhyme or "rhyme proper" and so-
called "casual" (Zhirmunsky) or intra-linear rhyme when compared with any actual ex-
perience of the phonotext. The distinction, that is, may be a clear one for the analyst, yet
in the experience of reading, rhyme and assonance are intimately linked, and especially
so when, as we have seen here, there is assonance among the rhyme-pairs themselves, and
especially so when these rhyming rhymes occur at the very beginning of a verse para-
graph. This passage is quite exceptionally saturated with assonantal and alliterative
echoes, and Pope continually varies the degree of saturation which he permits. In lines
53-54, for example, we have very little of this kind of instrumentation going on; the lines
stand as a kind of plain contrast to the prosodic fireworks set off around them. Let's take,
for example, the assonances in lines 59-60: "Some to the Sun their Insect-Wings un-
fold, I Waft on the Breeze, or sink in Clouds of Gold." Here we have rhymes not only at the
end of the line, unfold/Gold, but also "rhymes" buried right in the middle of the line
"sink" and "wings." The rhymes are buried here not only because they are in the middle
oflines, at different metrical positions, and therefore, according to Kenner's or Zhirmun-
sky's schedules, do not count as rhymes, but also because they are buried within word-
units: the rhyme in each case is "ing," and in both cases, the rhyme is completed before the
final consonant of the word-unit is finished. As I have said, for Kenner and Zhirmunsky
these are merely assonances. Yet "assonance" does not quite seem right either, because
assonance concerns only the stressed vowel, whereas here we have a complete replay of
both vowel and consonant. In other words, the only aspect which is missing for these to be
recognized as "rhymes" is metrical function. I should like to suggest that we think of these
replays as "fugitive" rhymes, or, to borrow my lexicon from the poem itself, as "quick" and
-unfixed" ones.
This, though, is only the start of the saturatedness of this couplet. In the second line
of it we not only have a buried fugitive rhyme with the middle of the first line, we also
iave a buried rhyme within the second line itself "ink ink": "sink in Clouds." Once ex-
:;:-lained, this subsides. It's like explaining a joke or making explicit a flirtation: not funny
)nee explained, not seductive once explained. But it is part of the poet's virtuosity that of
~ourse this event-and here it is completely unlike line-end rhyme-will go past far too
:-.:.st consciously to be noticed. Later these quick and unfixed rhymes sound out with the
..-hole band behind them. Those singing inks which have been seen and heard only be-
::cath the threshold now spill over or take flight into the end rhymes "flings" and "wings."

5
:.fter all this, then, I would like to propose a different interpretation of the power in
:: Jpe's rhyme than the logicized one given by Wimsatt and Kenner. Pope's rhyme has the
::- Jwer it does partly because of its opening itself to all sorts of other, less metrically fore-
;~ounded, tinklings and jinglings. The illicit, perverse attachment which Pope shows to
-:: 1ssages of deeply saturated phonotextual repetition achieves a power in itself which
 446 pulls sometimes against, rather than always with, the semantic organization of argu-
ment. Pope's virtuosity works through contamination between assonance and rhyme, so
SEcTION 7 that the emphatic chords of end rhyme gain half their power from the whispers and mut-
PHENOMENOLOGIEs terings which have gone before them. In this atmosphere they sound less like returns to
oF LYRic READING order after an excursion than like the full soundings out of an obsessiveness which has
earlier been kept suppressed. Here indeed is "virtuoso incantation," and long before the
date fixed for its ascent by the young Prynne.
In The Rape of the Lock Pope does something much more interesting than satirizing
the beau monde. What he does instead is to enter into its obsessions. The poem's first line
promises an account of "what mighty contests rise from trivial things." This is no joke.
Mighty feelings fix upon what are, from another point of view, mere toys. Readers are
never permitted to attain a secure distance from their magic. A well-known trap lies in
wait for anyone advertising calm detachment. Belinda's lock is compared to Othello's
missing handkerchief. But this is double mock: a handkerchief is no way grander than a
lock of hair, and so the irony redounds not on Belinda, but on whoever would imagine that
he himself could never be so foolish as to get upset about something so insignificant.
Of Pope's ways of understanding how deeply serious triviality is, the most significant,
I want to suggest, is not by the conventional means of characterizing it or exhaustively
describing it. Pope enters in by means of an obsessive attention to the requirements of his
own world ofluxury objects of desire, the world of the traps, toys, and devices of verse. He
is able to understand the polite world as a world of signs, of part-objects, partly because of
his own relationship to verse. I said earlier on that rhyme tends to fall silent, that its force
tends to become suppressed by its metacommunicative job. When Pope makes all Arabia
breathe from yonder box, what he is describing is the very fragrance of such metacommu-
nication. You inhale the perfume, but you smell Arabia. It is a scent more delicious and
more death-like and more tenaciously fixated upon than any earthly one could ever be,
the scent of a sign.
Here I am, in front of the television. I am watching a short film about a computer. In
the middle of the film, its undersong of bad imitation-Kraftwerk is interrupted. A glowing
logo (the death-mask of logos) shines out, and, simultaneously, a new musical element
breaks in upon me: the acoustic trademark, music's very coffin. This proprietor has suc-
ceeded in compelling every manufacturer who uses this component to stick this sound-
ing symbol in its film. Every last part of skin must be made symbolic. The ear is to be
branded from inside. We are today undergoing the attempted discursification and infra-
structuralization of the entire perceptual field. At every moment some kind sign, some
logico-sensuous avatar or other icon, would screen us from the unbearable reality of
perception.
For Wordsworth, the opposition between imagination and fantasy was cardinal. To
blur it risked raising counter-spirits. Matthew Arnold's view was that Pope was a classic
of our prose. But Wordsworth thought Pope was a witch, a sorcerer and seducer through
melody. The pleasures of verse in no way represent some entirely unmediated category
of "sheer sensuous pleasure," however much they might feel like that. The notion of
sheer sensuous pleasure, in the case of verbal art, is only the obverse of an inner logi-
cism. Yet might they be, not counter-spirits, but counter-fetishes? Collections of all sorts
of paralinguistic material are invested by the adepts with intensely powerful feelings,
meanings and associations which come from all sorts of other places. Can there be sub-
terranean affinities and reproaches operating among Pope's verse fetishism, the reader's
verse fetishism, and those relays and circuits of fetishism which organize and produce
pleasure in our collective life? That Pope's style was habitually and routinely by everyone
described as "polished"-this itself testifies to a felt link between the intensively worked- 447
over surface of his verse and the gleaming cabinets, tables, canes and snuff-boxes evoked
in The Rape of the Lock. Grant this, that rhyme is a bauble, a gewgaw, a toy; then Pope 7.5
might perhaps be playing about with it, yet in such a way that the whole toyshop is SIMON JARVIS

named and known.

It is Arnold's view, not Wordsworth's, which has prevailed, even and especially where
Pope is praised. Pope's technique-with some of the exceptions I mentioned earlier-is
taken for an exhibit in the imaginary museum of a so-called and in fact truly nugatory
"Augustanism." But it is Wordsworth, and not Arnold, who actually understood what
was at stake in Pope's writing, because he knew in person the tremors of those melodies,
having lived before that radical emancipation or deafening of the prosodic ear which re-
duced to a heading in a sub-romantic narrative of dead ratiocination a verse repertoire
which was in its time the occasion of actual intensities of delight. No one read Pope pri-
marily because of his balance, his orderliness, or his Augustan moral vision. What Pope's
contemporaries mostly noticed about his verse, instead (these are all their terms, not
mine-not all are compliments) was its sweetness, its variety, its gay finery, its embroi-
dery, its vivacity, its colouring, its glitterings, its flourish, its debauch, its embellishment,
its enjlure, its tunableness, its suavity, its easiness, its spirit, its elevation, its glare, its
dazzle, its fluency, its musicality, its melodiousness. 32 We have been well taught to distin-
guish rhyme which does the imagination's work from another kind of rhyme which offers
"the tinkling and jingling of evasions." But Pope, the verse-junkie, also offers us, if you
like, the tinklings and jinglings of imagination. In epochs of tendentially total deflection,
might imagination be bound also to work through and out of fantasy rather than only in
purification from it? Just as though, after all, these quick and unfixed rhymes might turn
out to be the very melody of bliss.

NOTES

1. Thomas Sheridan, British Education: Or, The 8. Plato, Ion 533C-535a, in Plato on Poetry, ed.
Source of the Disorders of Great Britain (London, Penelope Murray (Cambridge, Cambridge
1756), pp. 283-84. University Press, 1996), pp. 41-42.
2. Edward Young, Conjectures upon Original 9. T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert
Composition (London, 1759), pp. 58-6. Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002).
3. Compare Eleanor Berry, "The Emergence of 10. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode
Charles Olson's Prosody of the Page Space," (New York: Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1975),
journal of English Linguistics 30: 1 (March 2002), p.36.
51-72. 11. David Samoilov, Kniga o russkoi rifme
4. A version of this section of the argument (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1973), p. 5.
appears in an article on "The Melodies of Long 12. ). H. Prynne, "Aristeas, in Seven Years" in
Poems" in Textual Practice (Summer 2010). Poems (Tarset, Northumberland, and Fremantle,
5. ). H. Prynne, "The Elegiac World in Victorian Western Australia: Bloodaxe Books, 2005), pp.
Poetry," The Listener, February 14th, 1963, 290-91, 90-96, p. 94·
p. 290. 13. Samoilov, p. 13.
6. For example, V. M. Zhirmunsky, Rifma: eyo 14. Hugh Kenner, "Rhyme: An Unfinished
istoriya i teoriya (Petersburg, 1923) [repr. Monograph", in Common Knowledge 10:3 (2004),
Mu•nchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1970, ed. Dmitrij 377-425.
Tschiuewski et a!., with a new preface by the author 15. Viktor Zhirmunsky, Rifma: eyo istoriya i
[Slavische Propylaen: Texte in Neu- und Nach- teoriya ["Rhyme: Its History and Theory"]
drucken, 71]], p. 83, where Zhirmunsky discusses (Petersburg, 1923) [repr. Miinchen: Wilhelm Fink
this phenomenon in Pushkin's The Bronze Verlag, 1970, ed. Dmitrij Tschischewski eta!., with
Horseman, anticipating by some decades a new preface by the author [Slavische Propylaen:
Wimsatt's more often quoted article on the topic. Texte in Neu- und Nachdrucken, 71]], p. 3 (my
7. Zhirmunsky, pp. 39-40. translation).
 448 I6. Hollander, "Rhyme and the True Calling of 29. Alexander Pope, "The Rape of the Lock"
Words," in Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of [five-canto version] in The Rape of the Lock and
SECTION 7 Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, Other Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (London:
I975l. pp. ll7-34. pp. I32-3. Methuen and New Haven: Yale University Press,
PHENOMENOLOGIES
17. Hollander, p. I33· I962), pp. I62-64, II. 47-68.
OF LYRIC READING
I8. Emerson's journal, 27 june I839. Quoted in 30. Percy G. Adams, Graces of Harmony:
Hollander, p. u9. Alliteration, Assonance and Consonance in
I9. For a discussion of rhyme and near-rhyme in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry (Athens,
classical Latin and Greek, see Eva H. Guggen- Georgia: University of Georgia Press, I977).
heimer, Rhyme Effects and Rhyming Figures: A 31. Roland Barthes, "Le Plaisir du texte" [I973l in
Comparative Study of Sound Repetitions in the Oeuvres completes (5 vols, Paris: 2002), vol. 4, pp.
Classics with Emphasis on Latin Poetry (The Hague 2I9-6I, p. 220.
and Paris: Mouton, I972 [De proprietatibus 32. "Sweet", "sweetly": Leonard Welsted (John
litterarum, series maior, I8]). Barnard, ed., Pope: The Critical Heritage (London
20. W. B. Wimsatt, "One Relation of Rhyme to and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, I973), p. 53),
Reason," in The Verbal Icon. Studies in the George Granville, Baron Lansdowne (Barnard, p.
Meaning of Poetry (New York: The Noonday Press, 6o); "Variety": Thomas Parnell, "How ev'ry Music
I958), pp. I52-66, p. I65. varies in thy Lines!" (Barnard, p. 56), Lewis Theobald
21. Wimsatt, p. I65. (Barnard, p. I22), though john Dennis disagreed
22. Personal experiment, 4.iii. 2005. (Barnard, p. 76, p. 97); "finery": dialogists invented by
23. )ames I. Wimsatt, "Rhyme/Reason, Chaucer/ joseph Spence (Barnard, p. I74, p. I79); "embroidery":
Pope, Icon/Symbol," Modern Language Quarterly, in Spence (Barnard, p. I8o); "vivacity": in Spence
55.I (March I994), 17-46. (Barnard, p. I79); "colouring": in Spence (Barnard, p.
24. Hugh Kenner, "Pope's Reasonable 170); "glitterings": in Spence (Barnard, p. 17I);
Rhymes," English Literary History, 4I:I (Spring, "flourish": in Spence (Barnard, ibid.); "debauch": in
I974), 74-88. Spence (Barnard, p. I74); "embellish[ed]": William
25. Garrett Stewart, "Rhymed treason: A Melmoth (Barnard, p. I37); "Enfiure": in Spence, An
Microlinguistic Test Case," in Reading Voices: Essay on Pope's Odyssey (2 vols, London and Oxford,
Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University I726), vol. I, p. 7I; "tunableness": in Spence (Barnard,
of California, I990), pp. 66-99, p. 69. p. 178); "suavity of numbers": Gilbert Wakefield,
26. Fried, "Rhyme Puns," in On Puns: The Observations on Pope (London, I796), sig. a2; "easy
Foundation of Letters, ed. jonathan Culler (Oxford: measures": Leonard Welsted (Barnard, p. 53);
Basil Blackwell, I988), pp. 83-99, p. 89. "sprightly and easy": Richard Fiddes, A Prefatory
27. ). Paul Hunter, "The Heroic Couplet: Its Epistle Concerning Some Remarks to Be Published on
Rhyme and Reason," Ideas, 4.I (I996), http:// Homer's Iliad: Occasioned by the Proposals of Mr.
nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ideasv4I/hunter4. Pope towards a New English Version of That Poem
htm (accessed 28.vi.2oro). See also the same (London, I7I4), p. 9; "spirit": Berkeley (Barnard, p.
author's "Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical 94); "elevated beauties": in Spence (Barnard, p. I7I);
Aesthetics Worth Recovering?" Eighteenth- "glaring", "dazzling": in Spence, An Essay, vol. I, p.ro;
Century Studies 34.I (2ooo), I-20. "fluency": in Spence, An Essay, vol. I, p. 54 "musical",
27. 8 Clive Scott, "Aragon, Les Yeux d'Elsa" in The "melodious": joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius
Riches of Rhyme: Studies in French Verse (Oxford: and Writings of Pope (third edition, 2 vols, London,
Clarendon Press, I988), pp. 266-304, p. 271. I772), p. 10.
PART THREE

Lyric Departures
SECTION 8

Avant-garde
J\rlti-lyrricis111

In Part 3 of this anthology, we turn to departures from the ambitious claims for lyric made
by the essays in Parts 1 and 2. In his introduction to the Ubuweb Anthology of Conceptual
Writing, the poet and critic Craig Dworkin begins with a definition and a provocation:

Poetry expresses the emotional truth of the self. A craft honed by especially sensitive indi-
viduals, it puts metaphor and image in the service of song.
Or at least that's the story we've inherited from Romanticism, handed down for over 200
years in a caricatured and mummified ethos-and as if it still made sense after two centu-
ries of radical social change. It's a story we all know so well that the terms of its once avant-
garde formulation by William Wordsworth are still familiar, even if its original manifesto
tone has been lost: "! have said," he famously reiterated, "that poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquility."
But what would a non-expressive poetry look like? 1

Dworkin's literary history skips over the critical history presented in this anthology, and it
does so for a reason. By performing "a caricatured and mummified" definition of the lyric as
the remainder of the avant-garde energy of a Romanticism long gone but still invoked as a
norm, Dworkin can open the way for a future alternative, for contemporary avant-gardes
that free themselves of that outworn generic creed. If Romanticism was associated with the
personally expressive lyric, then the new poetry might define itself as nonexpressive, and
hence as nonlyric. This appositional framework for twentieth- and early twenty-first-century
poetics has by now become familiar, but in the context of The Lyric Theory Reader, it is worth
pausing over the definition oflyric against which avant-garde poets so often define their own
projects and which criticism has begun to adjust in order to take account of those projects.
In their 1988 "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto," a group of
such poets (Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman,
and Barrett Watten) complained that

the narrowness and provincialism of mainstream literary norms have been maintained
over the last twenty years in a stultifyingly steady state in which the "personal," expressive
 452 lyric has been held up as the canonical poetic form .... The elevation of the lyric of fe-
tishized personal "experience" into a canon of taste has been ubiquitous and unquestioned-
SECTION 8 leaving those writing in other forms and to other ends operating in a no-man's-land in
AVANT-GARDE terms of wider critical acknowledgement and public support (262).
ANTI-LYRICISM

Rather than cast the "'personal,' expressive lyric" as outworn romanticism, these poets sug-
gested that whatever its origin might have been, by the late twentieth century the lyric had
become "canonical,'' had become not only the mainstay in the "canon of taste" but the basis
of institutional policy and cultural transmission (in the creative writing programs that
emerged after the middle of the twentieth century as well as in the practice of institutionally
ensconced and professionally influential critics). By the end of the twentieth century, there
was general agreement that the lyric had become the icon of what Charles Bernstein fa-
mously called "official verse culture." Certainly the reaction against that official version of
poetics has produced a welcome proliferation of alternative verse cultures, but it has also
eventuated in a retrospectively normative and curiously narrow (even "mummified")
definition of the lyric.
As we have seen in previous sections of this anthology, twentieth-century critical
thought produced an increasingly capacious but highly variable sense of poetry as lyric.
The historical shift in and modern confusion between the function of poetic genres put
pressure on the lyric to be many things at once, and the modern lyric developed into
what Genette would call an "archi-genre" or super-sized category for modern critical
thought. That expansion followed the nineteenth-century history of the lyricization of
poetry itself, a process that began before the Romantics and continued long after them.
In the course of that uneven process, stipulative verse genres that once belonged to neo-
classical taxonomies or to certain communities or to specific modes of circulation grad-
ually collapsed into a more and more abstract idea of poetry that then became associated
with the lyric. The audience for that more abstract, lyricized poetic genre eventually
became literary critics, as professional reading practices displaced popular or local verse
reading practices. On this larger view, the avant-garde anti-lyricism of Dworkin or the
Language poets, or Bernstein, or many other loosely affiliated poets who would place
themselves in a no-longer-lyric modernist and post-modernist textual tradition are them-
selves part of the history of lyricization. As miscellaneous verse genres collapsed into a
lyricized version of poetry as a modern genre, so that modern lyricized notion of poetry
blurred until it gave way to an idea of poetry that no longer needed the lyric as a generic
placeholder, but that continues to need the lyric as the definition of the kind of poetry it
is not.
From the larger historical perspective of the process of lyricization, it is not hard to
see how and why avant-garde reactions against the lyric have entailed increased confu-
sion over what lyric means. While the late twentieth-century reaction formation of avant-
garde anti-lyricism offers a cleaner definition of the lyric than critics in the middle of the
twentieth century tended to maintain, a persistent confusion about the historical place-
ment of the lyric threatens that definition. Even (or perhaps especially) critics who agree
that the lyric is not a Romantic inheritance but the creation of modern literary criticism
have a hard time telling the difference. In a 2009 essay on "Lyric after Language Poetry,"
for example, Jennifer Ashton attaches a long footnote to "the kinds of projects we com-
monly identify either with lyric as such or with its critique." In that footnote, Ashton cites
Vendler, Johnson, Cameron, Grossman, and William Waters as critics who "have explic-
itly asserted or otherwise helped to secure the idea of lyric's domination" and Mark Jef-
freys as a critic who "reverses the idea of lyric domination,'' charging that "a reactionary
ideology inheres in the genre." She then suggests that Virginia Jackson "proposes an even 453
stronger version of Jeffreys's argument." 2 In the context of The Lyric Theory Reader, we can
understand Ashton's confusion as symptomatic of a particular moment in the history of SECTION 8
lyric reading. She begins by resisting the domination of a kind of criticism. She then moves AVANT-GARDE

to counter such critical domination by invoking Mark Jeffreys's description of a historical ANTI-LYRICISM

process through which "poetry was reduced to lyric," but she conflates that historical pro-
cess with a later moment in twentieth-century criticism when she quotes Jeffreys as claim-
ing that "a reactionary ideology inheres in the genre." In fact, by describing the process of
what Virginia Jackson later called lyricization, Jeffreys meant to suggest that the assign-
ment of a reactionary ideology to the lyric (often mistaken as the actual reactionary poli-
tics of the New Critics themselves) was a mistake. Ashton then compounds that mistake
when she attributes the claim Jeffreys does not make to Jackson, who also does not make it.
Jackson actually argues that modern lyric reading is so capacious that it cannot have one
ideology, least of all that associated with the New Critics. Jackson does not extend Jef-
freys's argument any more than the New Critics extended a Romantic lyric ideology, but
critical accounts of avant-garde anti-lyricism have often had a difficult time in distin-
guishing between a critical construction of the lyric that by the late twentieth century had
come to seem like a regime in need of being overthrown and the longer history oflyrici-
zation, in which what avant-garde poets retrospectively call the lyric may be a stage in the
process of abstracting all verse genres into a larger and ever more capacious idea of po-
etry, a process in which avant-garde poetics is itself a later stage.
Marjorie Perloff is perhaps the foremost critic who early and often took up the cause
of that later poetics against a normative or canonical-and, retrospectively, apparently
both narrow and dominant-conception of poetry as lyric. In the 1987 essay with which
we open this section of the anthology, Perloff begins by presenting her readers with a se-
ries of texts "explicitly presented by their authors as poems" but which "readers brought
up on Romantic and modernist poetry may have difficulty recognizing" as such. Accord-
ing to Perloff's logic, the reason that such recognition would not have been forthcoming
in the late 1980s was that most readers would have agreed with Paul de Man that "the
principle of intelligibility, in lyric poetry, depends on the phenomenalization of the po-
etic voice." 3 Perloff's adoption of de Man's definition of a lyric norm he also wants to de-
construct may be ironic, but it also indicates that, like de Man, Per!off wants to destabilize
the reading practices that have made a certain version of the lyric-specifically, the short
poem representing a dramatic speaker or "lyric I"-into an object of general cultural
recognition. Thus it is not poetic practice itself but a particular critical reading practice
that is the target of Perloff's critique, though that critique claims to represent the point of
view of avant-garde poets for whom "Poetry ... has less to do with the Romantic concep-
tion of the lyric as 'an intensely subjective and personal expression' (Hegel), the 'utterance
that is not so much heard as overheard' (John Stuart Mill), than with the original deriva-
tion of lyric as a composition performed on a lyre, which is to say that it is a verbal form
directly related to its musical origins." Perl off shuttles very quickly here between a modern
critical norm, a nineteenth-century ideal, and an apparently premodern, pre-Romantic
archaic association oflyric with the music produced by the lyre. As we have seen, that latter
definition of the lyric is no more original or fundamental than the Romantic subjective
ideal, and there is hardly a straight line between that Romantic ideal and the modern
lyric, but the persistent association of the lyric with music allows Perloff to extend a lyri-
cized notion of poetry to include poems that are textually promiscuous, that are bound
to the page rather than to the fiction of an overheard speaker. Perloff wants to keep an
essentially lyric sense of poetics alive in those texts, since lyricism is what has come to
 454 define poetry as such; what she wants to reject is a normative (what Dworkin might call
"mummified" or Ashton a "dominant") definition of the lyric as the form lyricism needs
SECTION 8 tO take.
AVANT·CARDE Not surprisingly, Perloff locates that outmoded sense of the lyric in literary criticism,
ANTI·LYRICISM and particularly in the mid-1980s criticism that announced its departure from the New
Criticism. Instead of the desired rejection of the self-enclosed and self-expressive lyric as
poetic norm (desired not only by Perloff and avant-garde poetics but also, professedly, by
the critics included in the volume that announced itself in 1985 as a new set of readings
of Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism), Perloff finds an embrace of that definition of
the old normative lyric by the very critics who claim they want to surpass or circumvent
old poetic models. "The reason for this is clear," Perloff argues:

The genre continues to be defined normatively-it is this situation that bedevils current
discourse about poetry. For nowhere in Lyric Poetry do we find discussion of the following
questions: (r) Is 'lyric' merely another word for 'poetry,' as the interchangeable use of the
words in the collection would suggest? If so, why talk about 'lyric poetry'; if not, what other
kinds of poetry are there and what is their relationship to lyric? (2) How has lyric poetry
changed over the centuries? ... (3) since the etymology of the word lyric points to its musi-
cal derivation, what does it mean to write of lyric poetry as if its sound structure were
wholly irrelevant .... What, for example, does the choice of a particular meter mean?

These are all good questions, and Perloff is right that the answers to them have been
bedeviled, but this discursive confusion may not be the result of a normative definition of
the lyric. The tangle is caused instead by the confusion inherent in contemporary dis-
courses about the lyric. To take the first question seriously and answer "yes," one would
need to understand the history of lyricization as what happened when stipulative verse
genres gave way to the larger idea of the lyric as a genre; but if one thinks about the his-
tory of the genre in that way, then question 2 becomes moot and question 3 no longer
needs to be posed, since the definition of the genre cannot be fixed by its archaic origin.
Perloff recognizes this problem and so turns her discussion away from contemporary
critical discourse toward the nineteenth-century British poem on which her essay's title
puns. Tennyson's memorial poem to the British cavalry regiment that was wiped out at
Balaclava in 1854 serves as counterpoint to the abstract versions of the modern lyric late
twentieth-century literary critics tended to maintain. Perloff attempts a historical read-
ing of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (via Jerome McGann) to point out the ways in
which it does not conform to later critical models of the lyric and thus casts those critical
models into question. "The 'differential' that a poem like 'The Light Brigade' represents,"
Perloff writes, "should prompt us to reconsider the forms our own postmodern lyric is as-
suming." Perloff's suggestion is that Tennyson's poem is a lyric, but a different sort oflyric
than the poems modern critics tend to recognize as such, in part because Tennyson's poem
did a very different kind of cultural work than the "intersubjective confirmation of the
self" that Herbert Tucker names as the task of the lyric (see section 2). So might postmod-
ern poetry remain lyric but perform a different sort of cultural work since "form ... is
never more than the extension of culture." If Perl off began her essay by resisting the nor-
mative modern critical sense of the lyric, she ends it by arguing for a more liberal critical
sense oflyricism, a sense that would embrace historical shifts in verse genres. In this view,
avant-garde poetics would not be anti-lyrical, but would be lyric in a way we have yet to
learn to recognize as such.
The extension of lyricism (or as he prefers to call it, "rapture") out toward new hori-
zons of expectation is also Charles Altieri's theme in "What Is Living and What Is Dead
in American Postmodernism: Establishing the Contemporaneity of Some American Po- 455
etry." Like Perloff, Altieri wants to bridge the gap between modern critical models and
postmodern poets' sense that they need to push back against those models. What sort or SECTION 8
critical account could accommodate and adapt its paradigms to that push? Altieri begins AvANT-GARDE

by giving Robert Creeley and Frank O'Hara credit for departing from the mid-twentieth- ANTI-LYRICISM

century American New Critical ideals that "left the poet trapped in a culture of vague
idealizations and insufficiently examined psychological constructs." The result was what
Altieri calls "a directly instrumental rather than contemplative use oflanguage," a "resis-
tance to artefactuality." Altieri's "best single contemporary example of this anti-
artefactuality" is the last stanza of O'Hara's friend John Ashbery's 1979 poem, "As We
Know," because, Altieri writes, "this poem is remarkable primarily for what it refuses to
do." What it refuses to do is embrace its own "lyric climax," which "takes place as a mo-
ment of embarrassment." This is to say that in Altieri's reading, "As We Know" is lyric
despite itself, lyric despite the fact that "this kind of poetry cannot hope to provide any
overt imaginative order for the particulars it engages; nor can it build capacious struc-
tures." The poem's last words, "really now," become for Altieri "only marks of an alien-
ation that cannot find its way to lyric expression." The reader's task is thus to inherit the
burden of lyricism the poem approaches but can't quite own. Altieri extends the proto-
cols oflyric reading past the poem itself, into the affirmations the poem itself refuses.
This is a tricky strategy for overcoming the divide between a postmodern poetics that
resists or plays at the edges of older lyric models and the critic's wish to sustain those mod-
els. Altieri acknowledges this trickiness, especially when he turns to the work of "recent
self-consciously ethnic poetry that attempts to reconfigure how the lyric imagination can
engage the memories and desires binding agents to specific communal affiliations." Here
"lyric" has shifted toward its Romantic resonance, and that sense of individual expression
is set in tension with collective identity. We have seen this tension invoked many times in
the Lyric Theory Reader, notably in Frankfurt School thought about the lyric as social ve-
hicle, and indeed Altieri takes up Hegel's "notion of substance" in order to account for "the
dense cultural networks within which agents feel at once interpellated and alienated." As
we have seen, for Adorno such Hegelian logic allowed the lyric to become the objective
correlative of the simultaneous alienation and interpellation of the modern subject, but
perhaps because Altieri's objects of study are not the crystalline, abstract post-Symbolist
poems of Stefan George but the postmodern poetry of Myung Mi Kim, which scoots
around on the page between consonants and phonemes, his use of Hegel's idea differs
from Adorno's. Rather than fix the alienation of the subject in a glittering lyric artefact,
the poetry that Altieri considers tends to emphasize "the range of expressive registers that
agents bring into focus simply by manipulating and elaborating deictics." Altieri wants to
preserve some version of Hegelian subjective agency, but he does so on the run, as it were,
or as in his reading of Ashbery, he manages to do so despite the poets' own refusals to be
affiliated with that lyric ideal. Thus deictics-"pointing" words such as here, now, you,
there, I, this-which, as we have seen, are so often associated with the phenomenology of
present-tense lyric reading, become the remaining traces of the lyric ideal, become all
that is left after "the elemental decomposition and reorientation of subjectivity" that post-
modern poetics pursues.
Altieri's exemplary instance of that double movement, of the now-you-see-it-now-
you-don't lyricism that characterizes his reading of postmodern American poetry, is Lyn
Hejinian's long poem The Cell. Too lengthy and scattered to conform to the older defini-
tion of the lyric as brief and expressive, Hejinian's book-length poem becomes for Altieri
"a lyric diary." The difference between a lyric and Hejinian's "lyric diary" is the difference
 456 between the modern genre and its postmodern successor; for Altieri, that new genre can
resist the lyric without abandoning the lyric since it still relies on "lyric self-reflection" but
SECTION 8 does so in a way that "sets the mind against its own images, not simply to maintain ironic
AVANT-GARDE distance but also to dramatize the resonant forces that circulate around the desire for self-
ANTI-LYRICISM representation." Here as elsewhere, Altieri wants to trace the the fort-da game that post-
modern poetics plays with modern lyric models. He does not allow avant-garde poetics
simply to resist or reject the critical "elevation of the lyric of fetishized personal 'experi-
ence' into a canon of taste," as Hejinian and her fellow avant-garde collaborators had
wanted to do a decade earlier; instead, he wants to map the contours of a "lyrical intelli-
gence responsive to the delights embedded in the panoramas language affords, as if in
this alternative to specular self-reflection, in this gentle and mobile distance, may lie our
peace." What is interesting about Altieri's account of Hejinian's "lyric diary" is the way
Hejinian needs a sense of a conventional modern lyric sensibility to resist and the critic
needs that resistance to reaffirm the persistence of a lyrical afterlife.
As Christopher Nealon points out in the next essay in this section, "both Perloff and
Altieri were at the forefront of the expansion of the poetic canon to include more ex peri-
mental writing in the 1980s, and both helped turn American poetry criticism away from
a reduction of the poetic to the lyrical." Yet as we have seen, both Perloff and Altieri sus-
tained an expanded sense of the lyric in their new critical poetics. For Nealon, that new
critical poetics "tended to merely name, then draw back from, the conditions that made it
urgent to restore to the study of poetry a sense of high intellectual stakes," namely "the
crises and triumphs or global capitalism from about 1973 on." While "these developments
are keenly felt in the poetry of the period," according to Nealon, "they are felt and dis-
missed, or felt and shunted to the side, in the criticism." Nealon picks up where an earlier
generation of critics left off, by taking the development of global capitalism seriously as the
subject matter oflate twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century American poetry. Not inci-
dentally, that project entails also reexamining the beleaguered status of the lyric within that
poetics and that poetry.
Nealon invokes "two critical traditions-a New Critical tradition in which modern
poetry has been understood generically, as always gesturing back to an originally oral
'lyric' in one sense or another, and a postructuralist tradition in which the idea of textual-
ity takes on such powerful philosophical overtones that its mundane history is eclipsed."
Neither New Criticism nor poststructuralism actually cast modern poetry as purely lyric
or as purely textual, but Nealon's point in painting in such broad strokes is to produce a
third alternative, a "textual imaginary" of modern and postmodern American poetry
that has gone unrecognized because the competing strands of lyric and nonlyric have
eclipsed it. This textual imaginary also turns out to be much more engaged with "the
matter of capital" than previous critics have understood. Yet like the critics who preceded
him, Nealon needs to define and reduce the lyric as the genre too narrow to convey the
matter of capital and so in need of adjustment by contemporary critical practice. He sug-
gests that "Virginia Jackson has argued that the professionalization of literary criticism
from the time of New Critics has produced a tendency to read all poems as lyrics, where
'lyric' means a record of the voice or the mind speaking to itself, as in T. S. Eliot's concep-
tion of the mode." Like Ashton, Nealon gives a reductive paraphrase of Jackson's account
oflyricization as an alignment of the lyric with the reactionary ideology of the New Criti-
cism (as if John Crowe Ransom woke up one morning in 1941 and invented the lyric over
breakfast). Also like Ashton, Nealon separates the work he wants to do from this reduc-
tive version of the lyric, since while Jackson's account "seems true of the New Criticism,"
he is "interested in a related phenomenon, which is how, beginning in the 1970s, the Ian- 457
guage of philosophy stepped in to fill the gap left by New Critical insistence on the aes-
thetic autonomy of the poem." SecnoN 8
This is where Nealon's account of poetics after the lyric joins Perloff's and Altieri's, AVANT·GARDE

since while "work like Altieri's and Perloff's ... gave us a powerfully depoliticizing Ian- ANTI-LYRICISM

guage for poetry in the 1980s and 1990s," at the beginning of the second decade of the
twenty-first century, Nealon gives us a politicizing language for poetry that still casts the
lyric as the oddly outworn poetic genre to which post-lyric poetics continues to respond.
While Perloff tried to show the alternative to contemporary lyric critical models by going
backward to Tennyson and forward to Bernstein, and Altieri tried to mark the limitation
of those models by showing how Ashbery and Hejinian played around their edges, Nea-
lon shows their limitations by exploring what he suggests is a counter-tradition to the
New Critical tradition of thinking about the lyric, namely the poststructuralist tradition,
in which "the idea of textuality takes on such powerful theoretical overtones." Nealon
seeks to prove that appearances to the contrary, this latter tradition has been just as depo-
liticizing for the study of poetry as was the former, though the politics of a Derrida may
seem more progressive than the politics of a Ransom. Derrida's "leveraging of modernist
poetry into an antidialectical argument with Hegel becomes the gesture into which the
idea of 'poetry' is incorporated in the French theory that traveled to American shores in
the 1970s and 1980s," according to Nealon, becoming a paradigm for such diverse French
poststructuralists as Kristeva, Nancy, Deleuze, and Badiou, who all "have kept alive,
from very different philosophical positions, the practice of pitting one literary modern-
ism or another against a cartoon of Hegel." This cartoon of Hegel may be taken to stand
for a caricature of the lyric notion of an intact subjectivity, against which the free play of
modern poetics can riff. This riff is neither strictly lyric nor anti-lyric, though the impli-
cation is that modern poetic textuality undoes the Hegelian Romantic lyric ego. What,
then, to make of Adorno, who seems to celebrate just that self-enclosed sense oflyricism?
While Nealon admits that "unfortunately, Adorno himself facilitates this drift in the di-
rection of generic reading," he suggests that what Adorno actually wrote moves beyond
the sanctification or reification of the lyric. Still, Adorno does tend to limit "our under-
standing of the relationship between poetry and capitalism to the negative: the lyric's
compression and intensity are a sacrificial austerity, or a scream, and the rejections such
stances or cries signify become a definition of the lyric." In comparison to Perloff and
Altieri, who wrote about lyrically resistant avant-garde poetics without writing about
capitalism, the French and German critical traditions "have encouraged ways of thinking
about that relation that tend to imply that poetic writing is prima facie political, or that
the only significant relation between a poem and capitalism is rigorous eschewal." While
Nealon's book goes on to think about the ways in which "the record of actual poetry in
the twentieth century does not bear out this claim," it is worth noting that the claim itself
is still made in the name of the lyric, a term that is the product of so many confused
histories and discourses that any resistance to it inherits that confusion.
In the final essay in this section, "Lyric and the Hazard of Music," Craig Dworkin at-
tempts a canny circumvention of that inheritance by starting the discussion at a different
point. Rather than take up the question of the relation of avant-garde textual poetics to
older lyric models directly, Dworkin begins with the question of the relation of sound to
poetry. Although we might suspect that Dworkin is up to something more than an ac-
count of this relation when he includes an epigraph by the art historian T. J. Clark to the
effect that "lyric cannot be expunged by modernism, only repressed," for the first several
 458 pages of his essay, the point of his discussion is not the lyric but the question of the poet-
ics of sound. Dworkin's radical point about sound in poetry is that "sound ... is that spe-
SECTION 8 cies of homograph which produces its own antonym." A word that means both its oppo-
AvANT-GARDE site and itself, "at once the antithesis of meaning and the very essence of meaning, sound
ANTI-LYRICISM in poetry articulates the same problems that have attended early twentieth-century defi-
nitions of the category of 'poetry' itself, reflecting the identical logic at a fractal remove."
It is this fractal remove that interests Dworkin, since he can use it to expose the self-
similar logics that bedevil (as Perl off would say) current discourses on poetry. The prob-
lem of extricating avant-garde or conceptual poetry from the inheritance of lyric dis-
course emerges in the course of Dworkin's essay as parallel to the problem of extricating
meaning from sound.
This is a subtle variation on the performative statement with which we began this
headnote. Dworkin's rendition of the lyric as "a caricatured and mummified ethos" in his
introduction modulates into another set of associations in this essay. Since "no sound
pattern ... is inherently meaningful in and of itself," yet we associate meanings with
sounds, accounts of the relation between sound and sense in poetry veer wildly between
the strictly formalist account of a John Cage (for whom poetry "was a non-expressive, non-
communicative extrusion of form into recursive content") and the affective register of a
John Hollander, whose entry on "Music and Poetry" in the 1993 edition of the Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics states that poetry and music "move to affect a listener
in some subrational fashion, just as both are in some way involved in the communication
of feeling rather than knowledge." From this comparison, it is a short step to the relation
between music and lyric, and indeed Dworkin returns, like Perloff, to Johnson's defini-
tion of the lyric in that same edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia, the older definition
that suggests that "the irreducible denominator of all lyric poetry" must be "those ele-
ments which it shares with the musical forms that produced it." To think about the rela-
tion of sound to poetry turns out to be a way to think about the lyric as potentially non-
expressive, and thus as the image of what a nonexpressive poetry might look like.
Here is where Dworkin's essay takes a sharp turn. Having taken apart the relation be-
tween sound and sense, and then having invoked the associations between musical sound
and lyric discourse, he can put both "what might be meant by music" and what might be
meant by lyric into question. "What if the music represented by the lyric were Cage's own
Music for Piano," Dworkin mischievously asks, a composition made "by enlarging the im-
perfections found when a sheet of staff paper is scrutinized under a magnifying glass? Or
Erik Satie's Vexations, a few bars of fragmentary melody meant to be repeated 840 times in
succession? Or Stephanie Ginsburgh's extrapolation of Marcel Duchamp's Erratum Musi-
cal: each of the eighty-eight notes on the piano keyboard played once, in aleatory order?

The list goes on, and as it does, Dworkin makes his point: as one considers the expanded
field of musical possibilities, one also considers an expanded field for poetic possibilities,
a field that stretches beyond narrow conceptions of the lyric as it bends narrow concep-
tions of music, a field in which a multiplicity of poetries and a multiplicity of musics (840
or 88 or 100 or 1000) become possible. This way of maintaining an outdated definitional
association between lyric and music is itself arbitrary, but the very arbitrariness of the
alliance fascinates Dworkin, since while "the terms are irreversibly linked ... their deno-
tations are not as fixed as our habitual use of them, in forging that linkage, would like us
to believe. Or, in brief, to paraphrase David Antin's aphorism on the connection between
modernism and post-modernism: from the music you choose, you get the lyric you de-
serve." Dworkin revises the critical apparatus attached to the false binary between lyric
poetry and the avant-garde, making that apparatus itself into a conceptual poem. We could 459
call that poem a lyric, or you could call it whatever you like.
SECTION 8
NOTES
AVANT-GARDE
1. Online at www.ubu.com/concept/. Theory: Riffaterre and jauss," in Lyric Poetry: ANTI-LYRICISM
2. jennifer Ashton, "Sincerity and the Second Beyond the New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and
Person: Lyric after Language Poetry," Interval(le)s Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
2.2-3-1 (Fall2oo8-Winter 2009), 94· Press, 1985), 55.
3. Paul de Man, "Lyrical Voice in Contemporary

FURTHER READING
Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein, ed. The Interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Poetics of the Press, 2012.
New). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Noland, Carrie. Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics
Press, 1984. and the Challenge of Technology. Princeton, Nj:
Armand, Louis, ed. Contemporary Poetics. Princeton University Press, 1999.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry.
2007. Princeton, Nj: Princeton University Press,
Ashton, jennifer. From Modernism to Postmodern- 1996.
ism: American Poetry and Theory in the Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies
Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. Cambridge:
University Press, 2006. Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge, MA: - - . Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and
Harvard University Press,1992. Postmodernist Lyric. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
--."The Task of Poetics, the Fate oflnnova- University Press, 1990.
tion, and the Aesthetics of Criticism." In The --.The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to
Consequence of Innovation: 21st-Century Poetics, Cage. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
edited by Craig Dworkin, 37-57. New York: Roof Press, 1999.
Book, 2008. - - . Poetry On and Off the Page. Evanston, IL:
Bernstein, Charles, and Bruce Andrews, eds. Close Northwestern University Press, 1998.
Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New - - . Postmodern Genres. Norman: University of
York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Oklahoma Press, 1988.
Dworkin, Craig. Reading the Illegible. Evanston, Silliman, Ron. The Alphabet. Birmingham:
IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. University of Alabama Press, 2008.
Filreis, Alan. Counter-revolution of the Word: The Silliman, Ron, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian,
Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett
1945-1960. Chapel Hilll: University of North Watten. "Aesthetic Tendency and The Politics of
Carolina Press, 2007. Poetry: A Manifesto." Social Text 19-20
Morris, Adalaide Morris, and Thomas Swiss, eds. (Autumn 1988): 261-75.
New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Moment: From
Theories. Boston: MIT Press, 2006. Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown,
Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
8.1 Can(n)on to the Right of Us,
Can(n)on to the Left of Us: A Plea for
Difference (1987)
MARJORIE PERLOFF

Some months ago, the following flyer from SUNY Buffalo appeared in my campus
mailbox:

THE BLACK MOUNTAIN II REVIEW, a student-run journal devoted to the arts, is accept-
ing submissions for its fifth issue of poetry, short fiction, artwork ... interviews, and film,
literary, music and cultural criticism. The theme of this issue-"From Word to Sign: A
Special Double Issue"-will be so-called Language-Oriented Writing, its antecedents and
its future. Significant practitioners of this writing include Bruce Andrews, Charles Bern-
stein, Clark Coolidge and Robert Cree ley. Among the antecedents of these writers may be
included Gertrude Stein, John Cage, the Dadaists and William S. Burroughs. Possible
articulations may be explored between this writing and the theoretical work of Jacques
Derrida, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Guy Debord and the practitioners themselves.

And then, after some practical information about mailing and deadlines, we read: "P.S.
Poets and other creative writers: fear not! You may be writing 'Language-Oriented' works
without ever having heard of half these people."
What can this wonderful disclaimer (rather like those old ads for the Unitarian church
that said "You may be a Unitarian without knowing it!") possibly mean? What is it that
"poets and other creative writers" are producing today without being fully cognizant of its
nature? Consider the following six texts: 1
(r) Yesterday the sun went West and sucked
the sea from books. My witness
is an exoskeleton. Altruism suggestively fits.
It's true. I like to go to the hardware store
and browse on detail. So sociable the influence

ofVuillard, so undying in disorder is order.

Windows closed on wind in rows.
Night lights, unrumorlike, the reserve
for events. All day our postures were the same.
Next day the gentleman was very depressed
and had a headache; so much laughing

had upset him he thought.

-Lyn Hejinian, from The Guard (1984)

 mAdness 461
coLd-water
fLats 8.1
MARJORIE PERLOFF
thE
braiNs
throuGh
with
aNd
academieS
Burning
monEy

maRijuana
niGht

After
endLess
cLoud
thE
motioNless
Green
joyride

suN

aSh can

Brain
drainEd of
bRilliance

niGht
-John Cage, "Writing for the second time through Howl" (1984)

H UR

tfOuRI
A I R

R
0
I
R Michel Leiris, "Le Sceptre miroitant"
(1969)
 462 (4) Nearly nothing These pondered, hand-
In Nature so won triumphs of
SECTION 8 spirits the eye containment, come,
AVANT-CARDE off-but off by tentatively,
ANTI-LYRICISM wayofin-to of earth-toughened
unveil detail fingers, father
as minimal to son, and on
as it's recep- to son, so long
tive to as does as the branches
this more than true- hold on each side,

to life, living bid us enter-

family of entertain notions of
diminutive days whose hours are
replicas of shorter than ours,
themselves .... (shrunken, misted ....

-Brad Leitha user, from "In a Bonsai Nursery." Part 3 of"Dainties: A Suite," Cats of the
Temple (1986)

(s) Did a wind come just as you got up or were

you protecting me from it? I felt the abridgement
of imperatives, the wave of detours, the sabre-
rattling of inversion. All lit up and no
place to go. Blinded by avenue and filled with
adjacency. Arch or arched at. So there becomes bottles,
hushed conductors, illustrated proclivities for puffed-
up benchmarks. Morose or comatose. "Life is what
you find, existence is what you repudiate." A good
example of this is 'Dad pins puck.' Sometimes something
sunders; in most cases, this is no more than a hall.
No where to go but pianissimo (protection of market
soaring).

-Charles Bernstein, from "Dysraphism" (1984)

(6) 463

d'elle-m!me; te p~re de Marte m'a p~sent6 l son grand- Cette apparence de noyau est d'oilleurs plus d<!nu-
~re. Celul qui a dit A 6pelle ensuite toutes les lettres d<!e, mieux lue et remarqu~e par le relief des 8.1
de l'alphabet. Et ainsi nous nous comportons devant le deux versions, celle de Poe et celle de Mallarme.
monde comme des fianc~. Par ailleurs vous savez que MARJORIE PERLOFF
celui qui a fond6 son affaire sur Ia bont~ des femmes -
Ce qui ne veut pas dire qu'il y ait un noyau absolu
en particulfer des femmes telles que celle<i - n'a pas et un centre dominant, le rythme ne se liant pas
blti sur le sable. [ ...] Nous nous semmes d~j~ si souvent seulement aux mots ni surtout ~ Ia proximit<! du
entretenus d'Erlangen que dans notre imagination notre contact entre deux lettres. Neanmoins, il. ignorerles
union et Erlangen se sont en quelque sorte fondus en un
seul ~tre, comme le mari et Ia femme. l'am~lioratlon
+
Cloches, F6nagy reste sourd ~ l'effet L (consonne
de rna situation ~conomique est n6cessaire, 6tant donn6 + L), non seulement dans les traductions o(J it
l'insuffisance de mes moyens, car rna ch~re Marie. dent n'occurre pas mais m!me dans celle, !'allemande,
le grand-p~re vit encore et dont le p~re a en dehors o~ it le fait : « Le principal objet de Ia traduc-
d'elle 7 enfants. ne peut recevoir, outre son trousseau, tion en prose est de traduire, par un simple mou-
qu'une somme annuelle de 100 florins ... » (...]
vement de translation, le message de Ia langue
votre ami sinc!:re Hgl. »
originate vers Ia langue vis~e. en substituant ~ Ia
forme a, emprunt<!e ~ !a langue de d~part, une forme
De 1'6te qui suit,lla veitle du mariage, on a encore deux b emprunt<!e ~ Ia langue d'arriv~e. [ ...] C'est le
lettres ~ Marie. contraire qui se passe, lorsque le traducteur s'atta-
que ~ Ia po~ie. lei, if retient et transpose certains
« Nuremberg, traits de Ia forme a pour les reproduire dans Ia
mesure du possible ~ l'arriv~e. dans Ia forme b.
Ch~re Marie,
Le tintement argentin des cloches dans l'air glac6
je t'al &rlt en pens6e durant presque toute Ia nuit. Ce
n'itait pas~ telle ou telle circonstanc:e particuliere de nos de Ia nuit, dans le po~me d'Edgar Allan Poe, se
relations que ma pensee s'attachait, mais il s'agissait retrouve exprime dans les traductions hongroise,
n.!:cessairement de cette pens~e essentielle : nous ren· allemande et italienne du po~me, par Ia pr<!domi-
drons-nous done malheureux (ungWcklich)l Une voix nance des sons 1, et les enchatnements des nasale• :
criait du plus profond demon !me: Cela ne peut pas, cela
ne doit pas etrei-Cela ne sera past (Dies Kann, dies soil ng, nk, nt, nd.
und darf nicht sein I - E:s wlrd nlcht sein I)
Mais ce que je t'al dit depuis longtemps se pr~sente 1 mes
yeux comme un r6sultat : le marlage est essentiellement
un lien (Bond) religieux; !'amour a besoln pour etre
compl6t~ de quelque chose de plus 61ev6 que ce qu'il
est seulement en lui~m~me et par lui·m~me. La satisfac~
tion compl~te - ce que !'on appelle « etre heureux » How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle
(giDckllch seln) - n'est accomplie que gr~ce 1 Ia religion In the Icy air of night
et au sentiment du devoir, car en eux seulement sont
&art6es toutes les partlcularit6s du moi-meme (Seibst) Halld, mind, pendUI, kondul, csendOI ...
tempore!, qui pourralent apporter du trouble dans Ia (Mih61y Boblt!)
rfalit~.laquelfe reste quelque chose d'inacheve et ne Wle sir klingen, klingen, kllngen,
peut ~tre prise pour Ia chose derniere, mais en qui Zwlnkernd slch zum Reigen schllngen ...
devrait r6sider ce qu'on appelle le bonheur terrestre. (Th. Etzel)
j'al devant moi le brouilton des !ignes que j'ai jointes 1 ta Come tlntfnnano, tintlnnano, tlntinnano
lettre l ma sceur; le post·scriptum, auquel tu as certal- 01 una crlstatllna detlzlo...
nement attache une trop grande importance, ne s'y (Frederico Olivero). ,.

Jacques Derrida, double page 221 of volume 2 of Glas (Paris: Denoe!, 1981)

Except for the passage from Derrida's Glas, these texts have been explicitly presented
by their authors as poems, but readers brought up on Romantic and modernist poetry may
have difficulty recognizing them as such. For if, as Paul de Man puts it, "The principle of
intelligibility, in lyric poetry, depends on the phenomenalization of the poetic voice," 2
what do we make of those poems like Lyn Hejinian's or Charles Bernstein's, whose appro-
priation of found objects-snippets of advertising slogans, newspaper headlines, media
cliche, textbook writing, or citation from other poets-works precisely to deconstruct the
possibility of the formation of a coherent or consistent lyrical voice, a transcendental ego?
Again, to build one's discourse on citation is to regard language less as a means of
representation than as the very object of representation. Thus, when John Cage "writes
through" Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," which is to say uses chance operations to select cer-
tain words from the parent text and then arrange those words in a mesostic (the name
ALLEN GINSBERG forms a column down the middle of the text, the rule being that a
given letter in the name cannot appear between its occurrence in a given line and that of
the next letter in the next line), it is difficult to know how the reader is to produce an ap-
parently phenomenal world through the figure of voice. For whose voice do we hear in
such minimalist echoes of "Howl" as "academieS/Burning/monEy/maRijuana/niGht"?
Or in Michel Leiris's "Le Sceptre miroitant," whose acrostic arrangement of three closely
 464 related words suggests that "amour" and "mourir" are in fact mirror ("miroir") images of
one another, even as the only letter that is not involved in the poem's complex system of
SECTION 8 duplication is the first in the alphabet, the eternal Alpha? And even in the work of a more
AVANT-GARDE traditional poet like Brad Leithauser, who is hardly allied with the "language" group or
ANTI-LYRICISM with French post-structuralism, the use of visual and phonemic device, specifically the
verbal play generated by the two-column structure, undercuts the controlling voice, creat-
ing what John Ashbery has called "an open field of narrative possibilities," in which "di-
minutive" may lead (vertically) to "replicas of themselves" or (horizontally) to "days whose
hours are replicas."
In a headnote to "Dysraphism," Bernstein explains his title as follows:
"Dysraphism" is actually a word in use by specialists in congenital diseases, to mean dys-
functional fusion of embryonic parts-a birth defect. ... "Raph" of course means "seam,"
so for me dysraphism is mis-seaming-a prosodic device! But it has the punch of being the
same root of rhapsody (rhaph)-or in Skeats-"one who strings (lit. stitches) songs together,
a reciter of epic poetry," cf. "ode" etc. In any case, to be simple, Dorland's [the standard U.S.
medical dictionary] does define "dysrhafia" (if not dysraphism) as "incomplete closure of
the primary neural tube; status dysraphicus"; this is just below "dysprosody" (sic): "distur-
bance of stress, pitch, and rhythm of speech." 3

This exuberant analysis of etymology, analogy, and punning might almost have appeared
in Derrida's Glas; indeed, in the right-hand column of a sample page from Glas [see figure],
we find a similar rumination on "le graphique de Ia mimesis," the materiality of the signifier
as it undergoes translation into other languages. Derrida's text is Edgar Allan Poe's 1848 poem
"The Bells," specifically the lines, "How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle I In the icy air of night"), and
he notes, on this particular page, that, whereas the French cloches picks up the I phoneme of
"tinkle" but not its nasal phoneme /nk/, other languages like Hungarian, German, and Ital-
ian foreground the latter at the expense of the former. As Leiris puts it in his "Glossaire: J'y
serre mes gloses": "By dissecting the words we like, without bothering about conforming ei-
ther to the etymologies or to their accepted significations, we discover their most hidden
qualities and the secret ramifications that are propagated through the whole language,
channeled by associations of sounds, forms, and ideas." 4
In Derrida's "epiphony in echoland," as Geoffrey Hartman calls Glas, 5 the rumination
on "le tintement argentin des cloches" in the right-hand or "Genet" column is played off
against the "Hegel" column on the left, specifically, in the case of our sample page, against
the conclusion of an 1811 letter from Hegel to his friend Niethammer explaining the eco-
nomic difficulties that still stand in the way of his marriage to his future wife Marie, and
then a melodramatic letter to Marie herself in which Hegel raises the terrible question:
"Nous rendrons-nous done malheureux (unglUcklich)?" Immediately, "Une voix criait du
plus profond de mon arne: Cela ne peut pas, cela ne doit pas etre-Cela ne sera pas! (Dies
kann, dies soli und darf nicht sein!-Es wird nicht sein!)." A romantic cry of the heart that
is quickly followed by a return to convention: marital happiness, Hegel tells his fiancee,
can only be based on religious and moral faith and on conjugal duty.
It is a nice question whether the juxtaposition of discourses in Derrida's Glas-the
conventionally romantic, somewhat bathetic letter to Marie set over against the practical
one to Hegel's colleague, and both of these spliced with the discourse on the glas of Poe's
bells, in its many incarnations-is any less "poetic" than the two-column "In a Bonsai
Nursery" of Brad Leitha user or the mixed discourse poems of Lyn Hejinian and Charles
Bernstein. Derrida's ironic insertions of the German original into the French translation,
as in "nous rendrons-nous done malheureux (unglUcklich)," is, for that matter, a device
frequently used by Cage in his portrait-lectures on such artists as Jasper Johns or such 465
composers as Arnold Schoenberg.
To read Glas or Leiris's "Glossaire" in conjunction with Cage's mesostic, Leithauser's 8.1
two-column poem, and the "language" texts of Hejinian and Bernstein is, in any case, to MARJORIE PERLOFF

note a curious phenomenon. Poetry, for these poets, has less to do with the Romantic
conception of the lyric as "an intensely subjective and personal expression" (Hegel), the
"utterance that is not so much heard as overheard" (John Stuart Mill), than with the origi-
nal derivation of lyric as a composition performed on the lyre, which is to say that it is a
verbal form directly related to its musical origins. 6 Thus Leithauser's "In a Bonsai Nurs-
ery" is written in intricate two-stress lines characterized by elaborate echo structure: "un-
veil detail/as minimal"; "fingers, father/to son, and on/to son, so long." Leithauser's use
of homonyms-" days whose hours are shorter than ours"-finds its counterpart in Hejin-
ian's punning, as in "Windows closed on wind in rows," and in Bernstein's parody rhym-
ing of"Morose or comatose." In "Dysraphism," as in Hejinian's The Guard, syntactic slots
are filled with words and phrases that fail to fit semantically but are phonemically appro-
priate, as in "Yesterday the sun went West and sucked/ the sea from books," or "Blinded by
avenue and filled with adjacency. Arch or arched at." Again, in Leiris's "Le Sceptre miroi-
tant," the first syllable of "mourir" echoes the second of "amour," thus underscoring the
union of love and death, even as in Cage's "Writing through Howl," it is sound that relates
"suN" to "aShcan" and that convinces us that "Brain" is "drainEd of/bRilliance."
How is it that in the late twentieth century we are once again foregrounding the sound
of lyric poetry? How has it happened that the rather flat free verse of the American mid-
century, with its emphasis on delicate epiphany and personal contingency, has given way,
in the eighties, to poetic language that, far from being speech based, depends upon parodic
reference to a particular convention-ladies' small talk, for example, in the case of Hejin-
ian's "I like to go to the hardware store I and browse on detail," or fin de siecle mannerism,
in the case of Bernstein's "I felt the abridgment of imperatives, the wave of detours, the
sabre- I rattling of inversion"?
Whatever the answers to these difficult questions, we are not, I would posit, likely to
find them in the recent academic criticism of lyric poetry. Consider, for example, a promi-
nent collection from Cornell University Press called Lyric Poetry (1985), based on a sympo-
sium at the University of Toronto and edited by Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker. Sub-
titled Beyond the New Criticism, Lyric Poetry purports to be the response of a poststructuralist
"new new criticism"-what we might call the "canon to the left of us," with its loose con-
federation of deconstruction (here represented by Paul de Man, Cynthia Chase, Joel Fine-
man, Barbara Johnson), reader response theory (Stanley Fish), feminism (Mary Jacobus,
Mary Nyquist), and Marxism (Fredric Jameson, John Brenkman), and various hybrids of
the above-to the "canon to the right of us," which is, of course, that now familiar whip-
ping boy (with "boy" used advisedly since it was the discourse of an almost exclusively
male establishment), the (old) New Criticism.
"This book," the editors inform us in their preface, "... is intended to appeal to stu-
dents, critics, and teachers of poetry, as well as to those interested in the application of
literary theory to the study of texts from several historical periods" (LP, 7). There are two
implications here that I find troubling. First, the book is certainly not intended for poets,
a species that seems to exist for no better reason than that "students, critics, and teachers
of poetry" (pretty much one and the same thing) can write about their work. And second,
that "literary theory" is something to be applied "to the study of texts," that it is, in other
words, a second-order discourse to be applied to a primary one and in any case separable
from it. We should note right away that (1) this separation replicates the New Critical clivi-
 466 sion between poetry and writing about poetry, and (2) that, ironically enough, the New
Critics took this separation rather less seriously than do their new challengers, given that
SECTION 8 many of them-Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, R. P. Blackmur-were
AVANT-GARDE themselves poets and hence quite unlikely to suggest that a book about lyric poetry is "in-
ANTI-LYRICISM tended to appeal primarily to students, critics, and teachers of poetry." Indeed, as Edward
Said has noted, "The New Criticism, for all its elitism, was strangely populist in inten-
tion," its aim being no less than to give all educated readers the tools by means of which
they might understand literary works. 7
A well-known weakness of the New Criticism, as Patricia Parker reminds us in her intro-
duction, is that it advocated "the program of treating the literary text as an isolated artifact or
object, dismissing concern with the author's intention and reader's response, and the tenet of
the text's organic wholeness, its reconciliation of tension or diversity into unity" (LP, 12). How
has poststructuralist criticism in America responded to this challenge? For organic unity and
reconciliation of opposites it has substituted the "allegory of reading" with its concomitant
recognition of the undecidability of poetic language. Words, phrases, and larger units are
now explicated with an eye to showing that they don't mean what they seem to mean, that the
readings they generate are contradictory. Yet, and this is the irony of much "new new criti-
cism," the premise that the poem is to be treated as "an isolated artifact or object, dismissing
concern with author's intention and reader's response" is hardly less operative here than it is
in the case ofCleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn or W. K. Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon.
Thus Cynthia Chase's examination of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" focuses on that
poem's difficult fifth stanza ("' cannot see what flowers are at my feet ... "), arguing, contra
such veteran Keats scholars as Earl Wasserman, that, read intertextually, against relevant
passages by Wordsworth and Milton, Keats's particular use of prosopopoeia and apostrophe
points to a central "ambivalence toward the visionary mode," a "nostalgia for pre-Romantic
or non-Romantic conditions" (LP, 224). Again, Joel Fineman brilliantly deconstructs Shake-
speare's "eye"/''I" imagery, positing that Shakespeare's persona can no longer elaborate his
subjectivity in accord with the ideal model of a self composed of the specular identification
of the poetic ego and the poetic ego ideal, of"''' and "you"-the "eye" and the "eyed." Eleanor
Cook gives a close reading of Wallace Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," dem-
onstrating that it is "a purgatorial poem in the anti-apocalyptic mode" (LP, 302), and Mary
Nyquist, in yet another essay on a single Stevens poem, this time "Peter Quince at the Cla-
vier," contrasts the "free-floating" Susanna of part 2, the Susanna who is "free simply, eroti-
cally, to be," with the Susanna "re-represented" through the "red-eyed gaze" of the elders,
who "has been arrested and fixed by the specular gaze," which is to say, "by the pornographic
and patriarchal eye, the eye that assumes it has a right to possession" (LP, 314). The strategy
of the poem, so Nyquist argues, is to transform this "violated Susanna" into the muse "whose
'music' has mothered the male poet's verbal artifact that contains her" (LP, 327).
Subtle and inventive as such readings are, it might be useful to consider what they do
not do. The critical project, for Parker and her fellow symposiasts, is wholly hermeneutic;
its aim is to explain what particular canonical poems-and I shall come back to the ques-
tion of the canon in a moment-mean; its purpose is to articulate what new meanings
Shakespeare's sonnets or Keats's odes or Stevens's meditative poems might yield when ex-
amined through the "new" prisms of feminist theory or deconstruction, or, as I shall sug-
gest below, an ahistorical Marxism now increasingly fashionable. In what is to my mind the
most trenchant essay in the Hosek and Parker collection, Annabel Patterson remarks that
"the newer criticisms ... have not, it seems, been able to disturb the premises of the preced-
ing dynasty with respect to lyric, or even to improve on its work." '"Lyric,"' writes Patter-
son, "remains a name for an ill-assorted collection of short(er) poems; but the genre con tin-
ues to be defined normatively, in ways that exclude dozens of poems that their authors once 467
thought of as lyric. The reason for this is clear. The modernist view of lyric as an intense,
imaginative form of self-expression or self-consciousness, the most private of all genres, is, 8.1
of course, a belief derived from Romanticism" (LP, 151). MARJORIE PERLOFF

The genre continues to be defined normatively-it is this situation that bedevils cur-
rent discourse about poetry. For nowhere in Lyric Poetry do we find discussion of the
following questions: (1) Is "lyric" merely another word for "poetry," as the interchange-
able use of the word in the collection would suggest? If so, why talk about "lyric poetry";
if not, what other kinds of poetry are there and what is their relationship to lyric? (2) How
has lyric poetry changed over the centuries? Is it meaningful to talk of Ben Jonson's proj-
ect in the same terms that we talk of, say, Stevens's or Pound's? How and why is lyric more
prominent in some periods than in ours? And (3) since the etymology of the word lyric
points to its musical derivation, what does it mean to write of lyric poetry as if its sound
structure were wholly irrelevant, a mere externality. What, for example, does the choice
of a particular meter mean? Or the choice of a particular set oflinguistic strategies?
To pose these questions is another way of saying that the thrust of Lyric Poetry: Be-
yond the New Criticism is, as Jonathan Arac notes in his acute afterword, "fundamentally
unhistorical, especially in its confidence about the extensive applicability of its operative
terms" (LP, 346). Theoretical and rhetorical terms-apostrophe, allegory, the word lyric
itself-are assumed to have transhistorical, typological validity. Indeed, concerned as these
critics are with the changing ways of reading lyric poetry, they too often fail to take into ac-
count that the writing oflyric poetry is itself a mode of production that undergoes change.
Thus the New Critical emphasis on the poem as autotelic object is ironically preserved.
This reluctance to engage the historical dimension oflyric poetry can be seen at many
levels. In "Changes in the Study of Lyric," Jonathan Culler observes, as do a number of the
other contributors, that recent criticism has "neglected lyric poetry in favor of narrative."
Roland Barthes, for instance, "has practically nothing to say about poetry, much less a
convincing or innovatory encounter with lyric" (LP, 41). But why, given Barthes's "broad
literary tastes," should this be the case? Because, so Culler posits, Barthes associates poetry
with "plentitude," with "the symbolic," and "thus sees it as the aspect of literariness" that
the writers he admires-say, Brecht and Robbe-Grillet-are "trying to combat" (LP, 42).
"Other contemporary critics," concludes Culler, "have not followed Barthes's lead, fortu-
nately," the point being, evidently, that a working definition of poetry must be broad
enough to obviate Barthes's objection to its urge toward the transcendence oflanguage.
Or must it? What Culler misses here is that Barthes's skepticism about "The Poem" is it-
self historically determined, that what Barthes is telling us-and I have argued this point
elsewhere8 -is that perhaps the "poetic," in our own time, is to be found, not in the conven-
tionally isolated lyric poem, so dear to the Romantics and Symbolists, but in texts not im-
mediately recognizable as poetry. Thus, when Barthes tells an interviewer, "J'aime le Roman-
esque, mais je sais que le roman est mort," 9 he is expressing, not the desire for an excessively
narrow definition of the novel, but his own inability, given his distrust of mimesis in the late
twentieth century, to create or to believe in something called "character" that is distinct from
its creator, his mistrust of fictionality even as he insists on the fictiveness of narrative.
No definition of the lyric poem or of the novel can, in short, be wholly transhistorical.
One would think that Marxist critics would be precisely the ones to recognize this axiom,
but in practice we now frequently encounter a brand of Marxist explication that, so to
speak, freezes the historical, that arrests its temporality. A particularly problematic ex-
ample of this kind of criticism may be found in John Brenkman's essay "The Concrete
Utopia of Poetry: Blake's 'A Poison Tree.'"
 468 Brenkman's essay opens with a minimal gesture toward historical context. Blake, we
learn, "was a poet of the volatile decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
SecnoN 8 turies, writing at the very point when the democratic revolutions were being institution-
AVANT-CARD£ ali zed as the class rule of the bourgeoisie"; his poetry is thus to be read as a response to
ANTI-LYRICISM "the new economic order of capitalism" and as the "struggle against dominant values and
institutions" (LP, 183).
Logically, the next step might be to take a close look at precisely those institutions
and cultural formations operative when Blake wrote the Songs of Innocence and Songs
of Experience. But Brenkman evidently has no use for such empiricism; on the contrary,
he now turns to the "social and aesthetic theories of thinkers like Ernst Bloch and Her-
bert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and T. W. Adorno"-theories with which Blake's poetry
evidently "resonates" (LP, 183). The actual writings of the Frankfurt school, it should be
said, are cited only briefly and rather perfunctorily, the references being almost exclusively
to certain scattered essays that have been translated into English. The point to be extracted,
in any case, is that "the first task of analysis is to dissolve the ideological shell of the work
by exposing the ways it serves particular rather than general interests and legitimates the
forms of domination prevalent in its own society; once this ideological shell is dissolved, the
utopian kernel of the work is supposed to shine through, a radiant core of meanings and
images expressing the strivings and hopes of humanity" (LP, 184).
How does this "utopian kernel" "shine through" the "ideological shell" of Blake's "A
Poison Tree," which is the essay's test case? Brenkman's analysis begins as follows:

Every time one reads the poem, I believe, the first stanza has the force of a moral state-
ment. The past tense establishes the twin perspective of Blake's action then and his judg-
ment now. The danger or unhappiness of a wrath that grows, as against a wrath that
ends, establishes a set of values or preferences that virtually goes without saying .... The
poem reads as a kind of confessional utterance in which Blake the speaker shares with
the reader a reflective judgment on the actions of Blake in the past, anchored in the view
that telling one's wrath is healthy and not telling it is harmful and even self-destructive.
(LP, 187)

This seemingly straightforward explication demands some unmasking of its own. First,
we might note that Brenkman makes no reference to the poem's textual history; he con-
cerns himself neither with prior Blake scholarship nor with the relation of the poem to its
illuminated plate. The fact that the Notebook version of "A Poison Tree" bore the title
"Christian Forbearance," for example, is evidently considered irrelevant to its meaning.
Second, Brenkman assumes that the lines in question have a particular meaning, and that it
is up to the critic to tell us what that meaning is. Indeed, he assumes that "every time one
reads the poem, ... the first stanza has the force of a moral statement," a kind of confes-
sional utterance in which Blake the speaker shares with the reader a reflective judgment
on the actions of Blake in the past."
But if the poem's 'T' is none other than the real William Blake, its final lines, "In the
morning glad I see I My foe outstretch' d beneath the tree," pose, so Brenkman argues,
something of a conundrum. Blake, he comments, "has gotten his satisfaction, and his wrath
has finally been expressed, yielding the sheer delight of seeing an enemy destroyed." As a
whole, then, the poem, "far from being a confessional utterance, is more like a set of in-
structions on how to do in an enemy and feel relief, even joy." And, sounding like a good
poststructuralist, Brenkman concludes, "The poem generates both readings. However, nei-
ther reading can account for the possibility of the other, except to declare that it is the
product of misreading" (LP, 187).
 This so-called undecidability, it seems, can only be resolved by unraveling the difficul- 469
ties posed by the conceit of the poison tree, and especially the "apple bright" of line 10.
"Within the logic of the conceit," writes Brenkman, "the image of the apple is only vaguely 8.1
motivated, as by the idea that it is the 'fruit' of his wrath. The meaning of'apple bright' is MARJORIE PERLOFF

otherwise unspecifiable from the standpoint of the conceit itself" (LP, 189).
How the image of an "apple bright," appearing in a late eighteenth-century poem writ-
ten in approximate hymn stanzas (iambic tetrameter rhyming aabb), could be taken as
"unspecifiable" or "unmotivated" must strike the reader as a mystery. For Blake's poem ap-
propriates, however subtly and ironically, the most basic iconography of Genesis: an 'T'
watering his tree and "sun[ning] it with smiles" who is clearly usurping the role of God, and
a "poison tree" in a "garden," proffering temptation in the form of an "apple bright" that
immediately brings to mind Satan and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
But Brenkman is impatient with such conventional topoi. The "apple bright," it turns
out, is neither more nor less than the "enviable possession of the speaker's," and the poem's
"story" thus "unveils the form of abstraction that is historically specific to capitalist society."
Blake's poem is thus to be read as a scathing "critique of bourgeois society and of capital-
ism." "Envy," we read, "a term borrowed from the ethics of precapitalist societies, is but a
name for the fundamental law of interactions in capitalist society as a whole" (LP, 190).
And "the utopian dimension of the poem is enacted in a poetic speaking which manifests
the struggle between the social conditions of the poet's speech [the contradictory narra-
tive of stanzas 1 and 4] and the latent possibilities of speech," as figured in the trope of the
"apple bright" (LP, 192).
The reductiveness of this reading concerns me less than the underlying assumptions
that make such a reading possible. First, Brenkman's "Marxist" reading ignores the po-
em's actual mode of production and distribution as well as its reception. Second, it, so to
speak, puts Blake's complex poem under glass, denying it access to its actual context,
whether literary, historical, or political. Third, it assumes that a given poem can be said to
have a specific, identifiable meaning-in this case, the critique of bourgeois society, con-
taminated by capitalism. And fourth, and most important, it assumes that poetic language
is, quite simply, transparent, that if the poem's first line reads, "I was angry with my friend,"
it means that Blake was angry with his friend, even as the poem's last lines mean that it is
Blake who is "glad to see his foe outstretch' d beneath the tree."
It is one of the paradoxes of recent poststructuralist criticism that, even as deconstruc-
tion has entered the mainstream of academic discourse, actual texts are once again being
read as if their language were as straightforward as a verbal command to open the door or
to pass the sugar. For critics like Brenkman, the "apple bright" is the nugget that, when
ingested, countermands the complexity of the reading process. The real questions about
Blake's great poem are thus suppressed. How, for example, does the stanzaic structure of
"A Poison Tree" qualify or ironize its overt statements? Or again, what is the function of the
poem's syntactic parallelism and repetition? Of its storybook language ("And into my gar-
den stole")? In imposing a particular theory on the text, one finds, as it turns out, what
one wanted to find in the first place. Brenkman's masters Benjamin and Adorno, it is only
fair to say, had little use for such reductionist reading.
A much more sophisticated and challenging version of what we might call Brenk-
man's spatialized Marxism may be found in another essay in the Hosek and Parker col-
lection, Fredric Jameson's "Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: The Dissolution
of the Referent and the Artificial 'Sublime.'" Jameson argues that there are two Baude-
laires. The first is the "inaugural poet of high modernism" who wrote such familiar lyrics
from Les Fleurs du mal as "Chant d'automne," which Jameson reads, quite brilliantly, I
 470 think, as a treatment of the moment of"withdrawal of the private or the individual body
from social discourse" (LP, 252). The second, the Baudelaire of such later poems as "La
SECTION 8 Mort des amants," on the other hand, is postmodern in his evocation of a world of pure
AVANT-GARDE textuality, "the world of the image, of textual free-play, the world of consumer society
ANn-LYRICISM and its simulacra" (LP, 256). In the Victorian kitsch world of "La Mort des amants,"
Jameson suggests, a world that has eliminated all trace of humanity in its stress on ob-
jects, especially on candelabra and mirrors, we find prefigured "the junk materials of a
fallen and unredeemable commodity culture," the "strange new-historically new-
feeling or affective tone of late capitalism" (LP, 260). "It is appropriate to see in the play
of mirrors and lights of the funereal chamber some striking and mysterious anticipation
of a logic of the future." As such, Baudelaire is, "perhaps unfortunately for him, our con-
temporary" (LP, 263).
Jameson's is a provocative and exciting essay; it makes one want to return to Baude-
laire, teasing out the threads that prefigure our own "fallen and unredeemable commod-
ity culture." But again I am troubled by the critic's urge to erase difference. Precisely how
does the capitalism of the Second Empire relate to that of late twentieth-century Amer-
ica? Or again, how can we explain that however anticipatory of postmodernism "La Mort
des amants" may be, the poem is instantly recognizable, whether rhetorically, linguisti-
cally, tonally, or metrically, as a poem that was not written in the latter part of the twen-
tieth century? Why, for that matter, do poets living in our own "late capitalist" America
write so differently? And further, why does a poet of the eighties like Charles Bernstein
write so differently from, say, the Beat poets of the not-quite-so-late capitalist fifties and
sixties?
The reluctance, of even a Marxist theorist like Jameson, to take on the problematic of
history (and, we might add, of geography and culture, a problematic that would lead us to
ask whether current Marxist ideology in, say, contemporary China, has in fact erased the
desire for the "junk materials of ... commodity culture," whether in the form of rock
video, automobiles, dishwashers, or spray deodorant) has produced a critical stance that,
far from moving beyond the New Criticism, seems to be haunted by its most characteris-
tic gestures. This is especially the case when we consider the choice of poets and poems
discussed in Lyric Poetry.
In her introduction Parker cites "the problem of canon-formation" as one of the "major
issues" confronted by the collection, and she stresses the necessity of questioning the ex-
isting canon. For example: "Can we really be certain ... that of the two poems Browning
himself thought of as a pair, 'My Last Duchess' -which is amenable to New Critical tech-
niques of analysis-is a 'better' poem and thus more worthy of inclusion in the curriculum
than 'Count Gismond,' whose inconsistencies more immediately frustrate the translation of
its written characters into the characters of a psychologically coherent utterance?" Or again,
"What does it reveal about the ideology of canon-formation that a poem such as Whitman's
ode to the Paris Commune-well known to students in the socialist bloc-is rarely en-
countered in North American classrooms?" (LP, 18-19).
Browning's "Count Gismond" rather than "My Last Duchess," Whitman's ode to the
Paris Commune rather than "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"-this is about as daring a depar-
ture from the canonical norm as we are likely to find in Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New
Criticism. If we except Eugene Vance's essay on trouvere lyric, whose focus is on the little
known poet Gace Brule, and David Bromwich's brief study of parody, which includes
discussion of contemporary versions of Donne, Milton, and Wordsworth at the hands of
the Canadian poets Daryl Hyne and Jay Macpherson, we may tabulate the authors whose
poems are analyzed, either in an entire essay or in a major part of an essay, as follows:
 English or American French 471
Surrey Hugo
Shakespeare Baudelaire 4 8.1
Jonson 2 Mallarme
MARJORIE PERLOFF
Blake 2

Wordsworth 4
Keats
Shelley 2
Browning
Tennyson
Hardy
Stevens 2

Auden

The index reveals further frequencies: the following poets, who are not discussed in indi-
vidual essays, are referred to more than five times: Milton, Donne, Byron, Coleridge, Poe,
Eliot, and Yeats.
For all its emphasis on feminist criticism, Lyric Poetry does not have a single essay de-
voted to a woman poet. 10 For all its claim that "the range of poems reflects the comparatist
outlook of recent theory in contrast to the New Critics' more exclusively English canon"
(LP, 15), the book includes discussion of only the most predictable French poets, Baudelaire
and Mallarme (Victor Hugo is cited because one of his short poems furnishes Paul de Man
with an example to question the theory of Michael Riffaterre). The "new new criticism," we
are told, is "increasingly cosmopolitan in its affiliations," but its canon oflyric poets is reso-
lutely Anglophile as Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn, and much more Anglophile
than, say, R. P. Blackmur's Language as Gesture, which included essays on Tolstoy and Dos-
toyevsky, along with those on Blackmur's contemporaries like Ezra Pound.
Indeed, it is the neglect of the contemporary that I find most problematic in the aca-
demic criticism of which Lyric Poetry is but one exemplar. The drive to move "Beyond the
New Criticism" does not, it seems, prompt the desire to learn about the poetry, indeed any
of the five discourses, of one's own world. Two essays on Stevens and a short reading of
W. H. Auden-this feeble concession to modernity should be measured against the atten-
tion paid to the Romantic tradition. Like our standard "classical" concert repertoire, our
poetry canon continues to privilege the nineteenth century. Indeed, critics like Jonathan
Culler and Stanley Fish seem to imply that poetry is something that has already happened,
that it is now safely over.
Hence the perplexity that greets poetic texts like the ones I introduced at the begin-
ning of my essay, the irony being that the poems of a Charles Bernstein or a Lyn Hejinian,
not to speak of Leiris or Cage, are much more consonant with the theories of Derrida and
de Man, Lacan and Lyotard, Barthes and Benjamin, than are the canonical texts that are
currently being ground through the poststructuralist mill. How and why poetry and
theory have come together deserves to be studied. And it is also important to ask why, say,
contemporary British poetry has swerved further and further away from the American
norm, opting for what often looks to us like merely clever vers de societe, even as, con-
versely, the poetry of Eastern Europe-especially that of Poland and Hungary-continues
to deploy figures of imaginative transformation, an intense, often visionary subjectivity.
If poetic discourse is, as the "canon to the left of us" would have it, a cultural forma-
tion, we had better have a look at the culture in question. Consider, for example, the status
of the famous poem that has given me my title, "Cannon to the right of them, I Cannon to
the left of them,/ Cannon in front ofthem/Volley'd and thunder'd"-these ringing lines
once memorized and recited by every schoolchild have become, in recent years, at best a
 472 faint echo. Indeed, I would hazard the guess that readers under forty are unlikely to recog-
nize their source, which is Tennyson's memorial poem to the British cavalry regiment that
SECTION 8 met its death at Balaclava in the Crimean War-a military disaster resulting from the tragic
AVANT·CARDE error of pitting a sword-bearing cavalry against a Russian army that had cannon at its dis-
ANTI·LYRICISM posal. The poem is called "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and it begins:

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!" he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

The drumbeat of Tennyson's trimeters with their insistent rhyme and hypnotic repe-
tition, their dramatic tale of sudden death on the battlefield, is considered something of
an embarrassment by our own post-World War II generation, suspicious as we are of ag-
gressive patriotism and the Victorian celebration of military exploits. Yet our current
denigration of such lyric poetry is, as Jerome J. McGann points out in an important essay,
itself just as time and culture bound as is our current preference for the muted rhythms and
subtle indirections of Wallace Stevens." Indeed, to understand "The Charge of the Light
Brigade" is "to expose the mid-Victorian ideology which informs every part of Tennyson's
poem" so as to "define critically the specific shape and special quality of its humanness" (BI,
190). If this program sounds at first like John Brenkman's "Marxist" reading of Blake's "Poi-
son Tree," the illusion is quickly dispelled. For whereas Brenkman talks vaguely and ab-
stractly of"capitalist society," "possessive individualism," and "proletarian revolution," Mc-
Gann studies the actual historical and political context of Tennyson's poem, its mode of
production and reception.
"The Charge of the Light Brigade" took its origin from a newspaper report; it was first
printed in the Examiner (9 December 1854) one week after Tennyson read the initial ac-
count of the Battle of Balaclava, and the poem is, as McGann notes, "in many respects a
distilled interpretation of the popular reaction to the charge as that reaction was expressed
in the newspapers." In reading the poem against its newspaper sources, the critic is imme-
diately struck by the "note of puzzlement" that colors the press reports, the repeated refer-
ence to "some misunderstanding" that brought on the disastrous "annihilation of the Light
Cavalry Brigade." Thus the Times leader of 13 November 1854 exclaims: "Even accident
would have made it more tolerable. But it was a mere mistake" (cited in BI, 192).
Whose mistake and why did it occur? Here textual study comes into play, McGann
noting that in the first printed version of the poem in the Examiner, lines 5-6 of the first
stanza read:
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
Take the guns," Nolan said ....

The specificity of reference was to be expunged in the second version, but precisely for
that reason it provides McGann with an interesting clue. For Nolan (Capt. Lewis Nolan),
McGann discovers, "was not just another cavalry officer, but a highly respected and even
celebrated figure" (BI, 193), whose books on the management and tactics of cavalry units evi-
dently created a sensation in military circles. Accordingly, the immediate newspaper linkage
of Capt. Nolan's name with the infamous "mere mistake" that sent the Light Brigade to its
fate, a mistake to which Tennyson refers in lines 11-12-"not tho' the soldier knew I Some- 473
one had blunder'd"-presents a troubling picture of the mid-Victorian British cavalry.
For how is Nolan's "blunder" to be justified? 8.1
Here, McGann suggests, we must imaginatively re-create the class status of the cav- MARJORIE PERLOFF

airy officer in Tennyson's England. The Light Brigade, he notes, "was in all respects like the
rest of the regiments sent to the Crimea; that is to say, they were all the most socially elite
units in the British army, spit-and-polish, dashing, and notoriously affected groups which
had never seen a battlefield. The units had not been in action since Waterloo" (BI, 194-5).
Indeed, the meaning of Balaclava can be understood only in the context of that earlier
battle, which had been a noble victory of the English infantry, that is to say, the lower
classes. To vindicate the cavalry was thus to pay tribute to the aristocratic virtues of those
who, as one newspaper account put it, "risked on that day all the enjoyments that rank,
wealth, good social position ... can offer. Splendid as the event was on the Alma, yet that
rugged ascent ... was scarcely so glorious as the progress of the cavalry through and
through that valley of death" (BL, 194).
But isn't Tennyson's tribute to the aristocratic virtues displayed at Balaclava a case of
misguided sentimentality? Can we share the jingoistic mid-Victorian sympathy for what
one newspaper called "a fatal display of courage which all must admire while they la-
ment''? And how can we admire a poem that seems to share so fully the dominant ideology
of its time? In tackling these difficult questions, the critic must probe the meaning of the
poem's original reception, in this case, its ability to "cross class lines and speak to the
nation at large" (BI, 197). Tennyson's strategy, McGann argues, is "hidden in the iconog-
raphy of the poem. The images in 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' are drawn from the
newspaper accounts of the day, but the form of these images is based upon an iconography
of heroism which Tennyson appropriated. His sources are French, bourgeois, and paint-
erly, and his use of them in his English, aristocratic, and verbal work represents another
struggle with foreigners which the entire English nation could sympathize with" (BI, 197).
Not only the content of the images but their form-here historical criticism becomes genu-
inely literary. For the critic's role is not merely to extract some ideological nugget or "apple
bright" from the poet's particular narrative but rather to study that narrative's specific
formal representations.
In the case of "The Charge of the Light Brigade," the first such form is metrical. "Half
a league, half a league, I Half a league onward"; the "inexorable rhythm" of these lines, as
McGann notes, "perfectly mirrors the cavalry's implacable movement," the spell the bri-
gade seems to be under. And we might add that the poem's pounding dactyls and trochees
enact a kind of ballet, a dance of death appropriate for cavalry discipline, which demands
that ranks never be broken, that closure is all.
At the same time, the poem's imagery gives this death dance an odd twist. Tennyson
was well aware, McGann remarks, that although Wellington had won the battle of Water-
loo, England had lost to France the ideological struggle that followed. Accordingly, he
endowed the Light Brigade with French cavalry postures, appropriating the iconography
of David, Gericault, and Delacroix, the representations of dazzling equestrian heroes,
depicted in all their Romantic force and energy:

Flash' d all their sabres bare,

Flash' d as they turn' din air
Sabring the gunners there
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder' d.
 474 Here the last line may well refer, so McGann posits, to a remark made by the French gen-
eral Bosquet when he heard of the tragedy at Balaclava: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas
SECTION 8 Ia guerre" (BI, 198). Tennyson's equestrian tableaux, in other words, endow the English
AVANT-GARDE cavalry with "the emblems of the heroism they deserved, but had never had," the emblems
ANTI-LYRICISM as they "had been defined in another, antithetical culture" (BI, 200).
"The Charge of the Light Brigade" is thus "grounded in a set of paradoxes, the most
fundamental of which is that [the poet's] model should have been French and Romantic
rather than English and Victorian. Out of this basic paradox Tennyson constructs a series
of new and changed views on certain matters of real cultural importance. Most clearly he
wants to show that the charge was not a military disaster but a spiritual triumph ... [and]
that the name of the 'Light Brigade' bears a meaning which transcends its technical mili-
tary significance" (BI, 201). The pointlessness of the military maneuver thus has its own
pathos, the pathos of a post-Waterloo Britain, not yet conscious of the obsolescence of its
flashing sabres, confronted as they were to be by the realities of modern cannon fire.
To read "The Charge of the Light Brigade" historically is not, however, to suggest that
we should share the attitudes that the poem embodies. "On the contrary," McGann ar-
gues, "the aim of the analysis is to make us aware of the ideological gulp which separates
us from the human world evoked through Tennyson's poem"; it reminds us that "we
too ... intersect with our own age and experience ... in certain specific and ideologically
determined ways" (BI, 201-2). Indeed, the "differential" that a poem like "The Light Bri-
gade" represents should prompt us to reconsider the forms our own postmodern lyric is
assuming.
Between the England of 1854, which generated Tennyson's vivid depiction ofbattle-
"Flash'd all their sabres bare,IF!ash'd as they turn'd in air" and the America of 1984,
which is, the scene of Charles Bernstein's critique, in "Dysraphism," of the contemporary
dissemjnation of "knowledge" with its accompanying exercise of authority-"! felt the
abridgment I of imperatives, the wave of detours, the sabre- I rattling of inversion"-the
"ideological gulf" is obviously large. The individual heroism of members of a threatened
class, the pathos of battle, the poet's emotional response to a public disaster-for Bernstein,
all these become, so to speak, "illustrated proclivities for puffed- I up benchmarks." In "Dys-
raphism," as in Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," "Sometimes something sunders,"
but for Bernstein such "mis-seaming" is less the function of a particular dramatic event
than of the social fabric itself. Hence the mise en question, in this and the other poetic texts
cited at the beginning of this essay, of such fixed forms as Tennyson's rhymed balladic
stanzas, centered on consecutive pages and isolated for our contemplation.
Indeed, the post modern displacement of the central and unique event, whether we
mean the event referred to in the poem or the poetic event itself, calls into question the
very possibility of submitting to analysis the single framed poem, the candidate for inclu-
sion in the hypothetical anthology of canonical poems. "Anthologies are to poets," David
Antin has quipped, "as the zoo is to animals." 12 The analogy is exact: not poem a but poiesis,
not the event but, in Lyn Hejinian's words, "the reserve I for events" is central to our lyric
discourse. A "reserve" that does not privilege one page or section of Glas over another, even
as "Writing through Howl" cannot be isolated from the other "writings through" of Gins-
berg's poem.
But how do we talk about such lyric "writings"? The answer, implicit in Derrida's Glas
as in Leiris's "Glossaire," is that language, not structure, becomes central. Indeed, recent
poetic theory is reviving the notion, at the heart of Russian Formalist poetics but in bad
repute throughout the sixties, that there is an inherent difference between "ordinary" and
"poetic" language. If the former is instrumental and transparent, a window through which 475
we look at the depicted world beyond the page, the latter deploys the resources of sound
and multiple, often undecidable, reference so as to call attention to its own materiality. 8.1
We should note that this emphasis on the materiality oflanguage is not quite the same MARJORIE PERLOFF

thing as the Russian Futurist doctrine of zaum or "transrational" poetry, the Formalist
stress on "orientation toward the neighboring word" and defamiliarization. For whereas
Futurist poetics construed defamiliarization as essentially a literary transform, a revolt
against the dominant aesthetic of Symbolism, our own postmodern ostranenie ("making
strange") has more to do with the discourses of the everyday world, of politics, culture,
and commerce, than with the literary model as such. Here the relevant frame is what I
should like to call the technological double blind.
On the one hand, we live in a technological world in which everything we say and
write is always already given-a storehouse of cliche, stock phraseology, sloganeering, a
prescribed form of address, a set of formulas that govern the expression of subjectivity.
Given this context, poetic discourse is that which most fully calls into question conven-
tional writing practices and which defies the authority of the chronological linear model. 13
"Prescribed rules of grammar & spelling," says Charles Bernstein, "make language seem
outside of our control, & a language, even only seemingly wrested from our control is a
world taken from us." 14 Or, as Susan Howe puts it in My Emily Dickinson (1985): "Who po-
lices questions of grammar, parts of speech, connection, and connotation? Whose order is
shut inside the structure of a sentence? What inner articulation releases the coils and com-
plications of Saying's assertion?" 15
Hence the disruption of the linguistic and syntactical order we find in Hejinian's The
Guard or Bernstein's "Dysraphism." Hence too the heavy reliance on citation, the graft
of the other, in texts like Glas and "Writing through Howl," as if to say that our words
can no longer be our own but that it is in our power to re-present them in new, imagina-
tive ways.
But-and this is the curious signature of postmodern poetry-the discourse of tech-
nology rejected at one level as no more than the discourse of the dominant ideology, re-
turns in the very structure, both aural and visual, of the poetic text. 1jhe double columns
of Glas and of Brad Leithauser's poem, the print format of Leiris's "Le Sceptre miroitant,"
and the acrostic "Allen· Ginsberg" buried in Cage's chance-generated lines-these breaks
with what Gregory Ulmer calls "the investiture of the book" 16 are themselves part of our
new technologized language. Indeed, poetry is now engaging the codes of the videotape
playback, the telephone answering machine, and the computer, especially in its capacity,
via modem, to address other computer terminals. At this writing, David Antin has been
commissioned to compose a video poem to be viewed alternately with the news flashes and
information tapes in the waiting lounge of the Miami airport.
Such experiments promise a curious literalization-delightful or sinister depending
upon one's point of view-of Pound's famous aphorism, "Poetry is news that stays news."
It seems in any case impossible to talk about something called "the lyric" as if the genre
were a timeless and stable product to which various theoretical paradigms can be "ap-
plied" so as to tease out new meanings. "Blinded by avenue and filled with I adjacency," we
find ourselves trying "to I unveil detail I as minimal I as it's recep- I tive."
"Poets and other creative writers: fear not!" we read in the flyer for the Black Mountain
II Review. Perhaps this imperative is not so foolish after all. "You may be writing 'Language-
Oriented' works without ever having heard of half these people." Form, to adapt Robert
Creeley's well-known injunction, is never more than the extension of culture.
 476 NOTES

1. The sources of these texts are as follows: (1) Constituencies, and Community," Critical Inquiry
SECTION 8 Lyn Hejinian, The Guard (Berkeley, Calif.: 9 (September 1982): 4-5.
AVANT-GARDE Tuumba Press, 1984), unpaginated; (2) john Cage, 8. See chap. 13, "Barthes, Ashbery, and the Zero
ANTI-LYRICISM "Writing for the second time through Howl" Degree of Genre," below, and my "Introduction,"
(1984), in a festschrift for Allen Ginsberg's sixtieth in Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie Perloff, Genre
birthday, courtesy of john Cage; (3) Michel Leiris, 20, nos. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 1987): 233-49; Cf. Ralph
"Le Sceptre miroitant," in "Glossaire," Mots sans Cohen, "History and Genre," New Literary
memoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 111; reprinted History 17 (Winter 1986): 203-18. Cohen writes,
in "Special Section: New Translations of Michel "What acts and assumptions are concealed in the
Leiris," ed. james Clifford, Sulfur, no. 15 (1986): infinitive to identify? After all, classifications are
4-125, on p. 29; (4) Brad Leithauser, "In a Bonsai undertaken for specific purposes .... different
Nursery," Part 3 of"Dainties: A Suite," Cats of the authors, readers, critics have different reasons for
Temple (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), p. 14; identifying texts as they do" (p. 205).
(5) Charles Bernstein, "Dysraphism," in The 9· Roland Barthes, Le Grain de Ia voix: Entretiens
Sophist (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1987), 1962-1980 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981), p. 210.
p. 44; (6) jacques Derrida, Glas, 2 vols. (Paris: For an English translation, see The Grain of the
Denoel, 1981), 2:221. Voice: lntervie~s 1962-1980, trans. Linda Coverdale
2. Paul de Man, "Lyrical Voice in (New York: Hill & Wang, 1985), p. 222.
Contemporary Theory: Riffaterre and jauss," in 10. The one exception is David Bromwich's brief
Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, ed. (4 pp.) discussion of the Canadian poet jay
Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca and Macpherson.
London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 55. 11. jerome j. McGann, "Tennyson and the
This collection is subsequently cited in the text Histories of Criticism" (1982), in The Beauties
as LP. of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Histori-
3. Charles Bernstein, headnote to "Dysra- cal Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon
phism," Sulfur, no. 8 (1983): 39. This headnote is Press, 1985), p. 222. Subsequently cited in the
omitted in the version of the poem printed in The text as BI.
Sophist. 12. David An tin, "George Oppen and Poetic
4· Michel Leiris, "Glossaire: j'y serre mes gloses," Thinking," panel discussion at the Oppen
in La Revolution surrealiste (1925); translated as Symposium, University of California, San Diego,
"Glossary: My Glosses' Ossuary," by Lydia Davis, 16 May1986.
Sulfur, no. 15 (1986): 27. 13. On this point see Gregory L. Ulmer, Applied
5. Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature! Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques
Derrida!Philosophy (Baltimore and London: johns Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore and London:
Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 33-66. johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), chap. 1,
"Epiphony in Echoland" is the title of Hartman's passim, esp. pp. 8-9.
second chapter. 14. Charles Bernstein, "Three or Four Things I
6. See, on this point, the article "Lyric" by james know about Him" (1975), in Content's Dream,
William johnson in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Essays 1975-84 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press,
Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger eta!., en!. 1986), p. 26.
ed. (Princeton, N.j.: Princeton University Press, 15. Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley,
1974), pp. 460-70, esp. pp. 460-61. Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1985), pp. 11-12.
7. Edward Said, "Opponents, Audiences, 16. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology, p. 13.
What Is Living and What Is Dead 8.2
in American Postmodernism:
Establishing the Contemporaneity
of Some American Poetry (1996)
CHARLES ALTIERI

[ ... ] 1) There is no way to claim that significant contemporary art can at once establish
what can be considered symptomatic about postmodernity and also provide some plausi-
ble notion of cure. It is not even reasonable to claim that art offers cogent general models
for escaping the play of simulacra or the alienations that stem from the collapse of scene
into screen and mirror into network. However, one can show how specific writers develop
imaginative energies that do not fit easily into these binaries. And one can hope to build on
those examples by showing that there are feasible imaginative strategies for finessing the
entire model of judgment that invites predicates like symptom and cure.
Robert Creeley and Frank O'Hara initiated what I take to be the most suggestive of
these strategies. Despite their very different emotional agendas, both poets refused to give
their texts the look and feel of well-made poems and turned instead to what we might call
an anti-artefactual aesthetics. They did this in part to resist the New Criticism, but in larger
part to develop an alternative way of realizing New Critical ideals of casting poetry as a
form of knowledge. For O'Hara and for Creeley, knowledge based on abstract meditation,
however committed to concrete ambivalence, left the poet trapped in a culture of vague
idealizations and insufficiently examined psychological constructs. So they turned instead
to a poetry that presented itself as testing at every moment its own formal and existential
choices simply in terms of the qualities of life that the poetic thinking made available for
the poet. Poetry becomes direct habitation, a directly instrumental rather than contempla-
tive use of language. And its test of value becomes the mobility and intensity immediately
made available to the poet, so that he or she need not rely on any of the abstract versions of
those values or even on any of the formulated social ideals that establish the markets in
which cultural capital is traded.
Now these values become even mofe important, or so it seems, if one notices how this
resistance to artefactuality has become fundamental to poets as diverse as Ashbery, C. K.
Williams, Robert Hass, and Adrienne Rich. Each writer refuses to separate the person from
the poem but does not collapse the poem into the person, as confessional work tends to do.
And each refuses to be content with an aesthetics of sincerity, since ideals like sincerity are
as abstract and media driven as more traditional ideals calling for a mature, tragic wisdom.
What matters is not sincerity per se but becoming articulate about the conditions within
which the process of imagining enriches the possibilities of fully investing in the specific life
one is leading. For by adapting these values poets can respond to a contemporary cultural
 478 theater where the old artefactuality, the old achievement of order out of chaos, has become
inseparable from the new trade in commodities, and poetry has now become little more than
SECTION 8 cultural capital effective primarily in allowing us to luxuriate in convictions about our own
AVANT-GARDE sensitivity and "insight." Even contemporary poetry's effort to extend the romantic psychol-
ANTI-LYRICISM ogy that sanctions new visions of imaginative power now seems to offer little more than
floating signifiers that circulate only within a very small social world and that even there
have very little effect on how people actually live their lives.
There may be no escaping that small social world. And we may have to do without the
belief that poetry somehow gives us access to a reality inaccessible to other discourses. It
may be task enough to show peopl(\how poetry is capable of giving civilized pleasure. But
the very terms of such pleasure do have their own potential cultural force. This is espe-
cially true when the poets develop imaginative investments adapting postmodern cri-
tiques of idealization to models of value that are not reducible to the rhetorics of the simu-
lacra! and the schizophrenic that emerge from those critiques.
The best single contemporary example I know of this anti-artefactuality is the last
stanza of Ashbery's "As We Know"-simply because of how Ashbery transforms the prob-
lematic term real into an example of the values that the adverb really is capable of bring-
ing to bear:

The light that was shadowed then

Was seen to be our lives,
Everything about us that love might wish to examine,
Then put away for a certain length of time, until
The whole is to be reviewed, and we turned
Toward each other, to each other.
The way we had come was all we could see
And it crept up on us, embarrassed
That there is so much to tell now, really now. 1

On one level this poem is remarkable primarily for what it refuses to do. The lyric climax
takes place as a moment of embarrassment, not as any sudden understanding of forces or
specific memories that bind the lovers, and not as any promise to change their lives. This
kind of poetry cannot hope to provide any overt imaginative order for the particulars it en-
gages; nor can it build capacious structures. Its attention must be focused on some immedi-
ate situation or flow of mind. But that compression of space allows the writer to concentrate
on how, within time, intricate folds and passages open among materials. Even though reflex-
ive consciousness can do no more than trace the ways we have come to and through those
situations, it can focus close attention on the contours of its own engagements, and it can lo-
cate an affirmative will simply in what thereby becomes visible and shareable, without any
need for or hope in more comprehensive allegorical structures.
"Now, really now" carries the full force of that willing, in a way that brilliantly evades
the self-congratulatory self-representation almost inescapable in love poetry. That phrase
becomes a simple instrument for engaging a present whose configurations can be willed
and whose intensities can be shared. And the minimalism here, the capacity simply to
mine the resources of grammar without having to pose more ambitious and abstract in-
terpretive structures, also allows the poem a way of responding to the quasi-metaphysics
of theorizing about simulacra, or about the symptomatic as our only access to the real.
Ashbery refuses to allow consciousness the thematizing distance necessary if one is even
to dream of distinguishing symptom from cure. What matters is the present-not as
some metaphysical absolute but as the locus of minute processes of judgment that simply
go into neutral if they are forced to deal with large questions. This does not at all entail any 479
relativism on that same large scale. Rather, it invites us to base our thinking about values
and about the paths our lives take simply on our capacity to appreciate the difference be- 8.2
tween "now" as a descriptive specification of time and "really now" as an assertion of some- CHARLEs ALTIERI

thing like a will able to envision itself stabilized by the world it sees itself sharing. "Really
now" so fully inhabits the simulacra! that all questions about reality seem only marks of an
alienation that cannot find its way to lyric expression.
2) It is comparatively easy to recognize the tensions between ideals of identity politics
and efforts to create a heterogeneous, multicultural stage on which competing versions of
identity can coexist. The challenge is figuring out how alternatives might be possible, so
that writers can articulate imaginative interests that are basic for minorities without rely-
ing on the autobiographical forms that pervade postmodern thinking on this subject.
Commitment to autobiography forces writers to either serve as a representative for some
community, which imposes the categorical on the personal, or to develop a bitter distance
from all general fealties and hence becomes indistinguishable from mainstream celebra-
tions of personal differences (as in V. S. Naipaul). Moreover in both cases the autobio-
graphical mode itself constantly risks making theatrical and personal what may be better
seen as structural and shareable features of the lives represented. 2 Or, probably worse, the
effort to construct identity gets transformed into a celebration of participating in multi-
ple identities, and sophisticated theory provides a self-congratulatory alternative to the
kind of cultural work that requires aligning the self with specific roles and fealties.
Against this backdrop I think it becomes important to turn to the work of recent self-
consciously ethnic poetry that attempts to reconfigure how the lyric imagination can engage
the memories and desires binding agents to specific communal filiations. Aware of the traps
that occur when one moves directly to the levels of psychology involved in postulating iden-
tities, this poetry turns to aspects of ethnic life in America too opaque and diffuse to be the-
matized by memory and too embedded in complex pressures and demands to be represented
in terms of dramatic scenes and narrative structures. Ethnicity, then, cannot be effectively
represented through a directly introspective psychology that enables agents to stage for
themselves what makes them different and to decide who they will be in the future. Instead,
these poets explore lyrical states where the conditions of agency are best understood by
adapting Hegel's notion of substance. Substance can help designate a sense of historicity re-
sistant to any of the predicates we have available for talking about personal identity.
The notion of substance plays two basic roles in our assessment of this work. It en-
ables us to shift our attention from the agents per se to the dense cultural networks within
which agents feel at once interpellated and alienated, at once too much and too little in-
volved in mainstream life. And it makes sense of the ways that experimental ethnic writ-
ing resists the temptation to offer clear, positive concepts by which we might describe ad-
equately what is involved in these engagements. Hegel's own awareness of such limitations
is of course complemented by his insistence that spirit/comes to full self-consciousness by
developing within substance its own sense of purposive direction, so that one can trans-
form what had been alien being-in-itself or being-for-others into the kind of awareness
that constitutes being-for-oneself. But the two poets I will look at here, Alfred Arteaga
and Myung Mi Kim, are much more wary of the romantic tendency to postulate within
substance precisely those attributes that can then be affirmed as the signs of spirit. They
have seen far too many efforts to treat the substance of minority experience as if it could
be adequately handled within discursive and autobiographical modes. For them the most
spirit can do is respond to the difficulties involved in developing images registering the
tensions that give resonance and intensity to the artist's work.
 480 This commitment makes both poets difficult to read, at least initially. And because
Arteaga's richest effects depend on familiarity with the over-lapping strands of his Can-
SEcTioN 8 tos, I can here only indicate what I find most exciting in his work. Poetry for Arteaga is not
AVANT-GARDE quite dramatic or scenic. It is better conceived of as letting desires enter echo chambers
ANTI-LYRICISM provided by the linguistic resources available to a bilingual community. In reading this
work we are constantly poised between feeling lost, feeling that this multiplicity is an im-
pediment to desire, and finding the overlap of languages opening new and surprising
emotional resonances. We enter a site of transformations where a moment that seems only
a "lacuna" for English speakers actually functions as Ia cuna, or the cradle, of possibilities
for one willing or able to set the two languages in relation to each other. 3 Then one finds
within the languages, and within the complex cultural grammars brought into conjunc-
tion, a dynamic cultural field where personal power lies not in the construction of personal
identities but in elaborating what the languages afford, as if they composed a home so rich
and intricate that autobiography comes to seem an indulgent and thin way to deploy one's
imagination. Concerns for personal identity-whether representative or deconstructively
multiple-require both scenes and narrative sequences that dramatize aspects of cultural
life not compatible with the versions of power and need offered by standard narrative pat-
terns of selfhood. 4
Myung Mi Kim's Under Flag provides a more overt thematic focus on the density of
substance because she reverses Arteaga's situation. For her the underlying drama consists
of the pressures that one feels as one tries to learn English. At one pole one's sense of self as
a dense assembly of substances emerges in negative form-as awareness of all that her new
English language does not contain but forces into a complex of memory and repression. At
the other pole the new language appears laden with more demands than permissions, as if
one could feel within it all those mutual understandings and prejudices that have emerged
within a dominant history the immigrant does not easily share. Identity poetics responds
to such pressures, but the language of autobiography will not quite register the intricate
phenomenology involved. And no political rhetoric will capture the range of emotions
evoked by the interplay oflanguage contexts-from rage to self-hatred to fear to hope, to
registering numerous partial identifications with other people.
This is the opening of"And Sing We," the first poem of Under Flag:

Must it ring so true

So we must sing it

To spawn even yawning distance

And would we be near then

What would the sea be, if we were near it

Voice

It catches its underside and drags it back

What sound do we make, "n", "h", "g"

Speak and it is sound in time

Depletion replete with barraging

Slurred and taken over

 Diaspora. "It is not the picture 481

That will save us."

8.2
All the fields fallow CHARLES ALTIERI

The slide carousel's near burn-out and yet

Flash and one more picture of how we were to be 5

I love the opening oscillation between question and command and the corollary play of
forces generated by repeating the same term with different grammatical functions. We
cannot know the referent of "it." But we can understand that whatever "it" is, it puts in
motion the dual senses of "so"-one an intensifier, the other a logical connective. Both
senses of "so" then provide the combination of intensity and logical force that helps flesh
out the full implications of "must."
But why is all this density so abstracted from any concrete scene? Perhaps we have toques-
tion our usual assumptions about what empirical concreteness can actually tell us in such sit-
uations. Can we usually specify and represent what counts as an imperative for us, especially
when the imperative involves song? The "it" seems irreducibly part of the situation, part of
what it means to be coming to terms with what a language affords. And this "it" also seems
inseparable from a need to worry about the limitations of what the person is learning to sing,
whatever the immediate context. Can the new language give form to old memories? Can what
becomes "sound" in time sufficiently resound to bring other times to bear?
Any more direct answers to such questions would make us risk deceiving ourselves by
letting our needs project more certainty than the situation warrants. Probably all we can
do is circulate through and around the conditions that this learning situation entails. That
is why the second section of my quotation (beginning with" depletion") puts such empha-
sis on the independent phrase units, most of which seem to fix the agent within certain
attributions that then must be worked through by exploring what associations follow. Here
the entire process of barraging culminates in the trope of feeling the self bound to some-
thing like a slide projector, with each picture imposing on the present an oppressive future.
Indeed, the sense of oppression is bound less to any given content than it is to the force of
that future as pure form and hence as a chilling abstract reminder of the designs that
language has upon us.
As the poem goes on through four more sections we witness the feeling of being bound
to the "ponderous" phrase ("AS," p. 14), relieved only by sudden and unsummoned memo-
ries of Kim's life in Korea. These memories help relieve the task oflearning a foreign lan-
guage by embedding in that process strangely liberating material qualities of specific
voices that enter the poem as both torment and hope. That tension then drives the poem to
the following resolution: "Mostly, we cross bridges we did not see being built" ("AS," p. 15).
Thematically, the bridges go back to a rural past while also indicating how important it is
to adapt to what one can neither control nor psychologize. The bridges do not depend on
our witnessing their being built; they simply make possible the range of transitions en-
abling us to live with loss. As evidence of that capacity we need look no further than
"mostly," which deliberately imposes a note of awkward qualification on the speaker's
knowledge. This "mostly" involves an act of wary trust-the only attitude that will allow
:ne to negotiate this poem's melange of external demands and haunting memories, each
.:...: too eager to trap the speaker in an autobiographical obsession. Here, instead of seeking
.;.::y one identity, the poet has to accept a range of possible identifications to be explored-
-each drop strewn into such assembly." 6
 482 3) Postmodern psychology creates the problem of having to dissolve fixed identity while
preserving a range of values like intimacy that derive from now-outmoded versions of self-
SECTION 8 hood. Moreover, a psychology adequate to postmodernity has to recognize the sublimity
AVANT-GARDE possible in pure self-dissolution (or related "cyborgian" experiments) while offering possible
ANTI-LYRICISM routes for reintegrating this sublimity within something resembling social life. One might
argue that the contemporary arts have responded to these demands in two fundamental
ways: one involves the refigurations of surrealist versions of how we inhabit our bodies that
Foster has analyzed, and the other involves the various experiments in deictic agency that I
have explored. These experiments, I have argued, appear quintessentially in assertions like
"now, really now" that allow us to reflect on investments that neither depend on nor lead to
the practices of self-representation fundamental to modern culture. Rather than accepting
either romantic inwardness or versions of subjective agency as entirely constituted by social
practices, this perspective emphasizes the range of expressive registers that agents bring
into focus simply by manipulating and elaborating deictics. Here I want to explore another,
differently gendered variant of this deictic model of agency that foregrounds issues of inti-
macy and responsiveness to the world while also refusing to invoke any traditional deep
psychology. So I will turn to the remarkably elemental decomposition and reorientation of
subjectivity explored in Lyn Hejinian's The Cell.
This volume brilliantly foregrounds a personal agency so vital in its silences, in its
ways of repeating itself, and in its shifting attentions that it convincingly inhabits the
form of a lyric diary while refusing the dramatic confrontations between represented and
representing selves fundamental to that form. Traditionally, such a focus on the subject's
experiences tempts authors to have each entry build to a climactic dramatic moment, as in
Robert Lowell's Notebook 1967-1968. But to Hejinian such climaxes lead away from what she
is most interested in. The dramatic organization blinds the author to the most intimate
features of repetition and change as life unfolds and greatly oversimplifies the play of voices
that constitutes self-consciousness within that unfolding. As Hejinian memorably puts it,
"personality is a worn egress I to somewhere in particular."7 Personality confines conscious-
ness to preestablished ends and, ironically, tells introspection what it is bound to find. So she
proposes instead exploring those imaginative paths where poetry can take up the "chance I of
enhancement," as if simply hearing the puns within the master term provides reason
enough to align oneself with more mobile versions of subjective agency (C, p. 42).
Once one grows suspicious of"personality," lyric self-reflection becomes a very differ-
ent enterprise:

A person decomposing the unity

of the subjective mind by
dint of its own introspection
[C, p. 157]

Introspection sets the mind against its own images, not simply to maintain ironic dis-
tance but also to dramatize the resonant forces that circulate around the desire for self-
representation. As an example of this interplay between decomposition and redeploymen:
of imaginative investments, consider the volume's penultimate poem. Its opening line;
invite us to recognize how many senses come into play around the act of seeing, or better.
around the way sight is poised between what disappears and what appears:

All sentences about the sense

of seeing, the sense of
 embarrassment 483
It could all disappear-instead
it appeared 8.2
My language CHARLES ALTIERI

My language is a genital-
let's say that
[C, p. 214]

Seeing involves a sense of embarrassment because it leaves one open to and dependent on
the supplementary pro.cesses that sentences bring into play. Even the syntax is ambiguous
because seeing cannot be given one stable position as it vacillates between serving as an
element within an extended clause (which, in its concern for sense, never achieves its
Yerb) and serving as the focal unit that everything "sentences about," as if the seeing were
the wellspring of possible meanings. No wonder that the "it" could all disappear: it de-
pends on the vagaries of these sentences and the difficult interplay between the time of
pure seeing and the work of sentencing. But "it" also can seem to come into focus, mak-
ing language itself seem inseparable from the person's hold on the scene. And that satis-
faction, framed by the fear of disappearance, invites the sexual analogies that Hejinian's
reference to genitals brings to bear.
"Let's say that" breaks the enchantment. If we can achieve the distance to treat these
sayings as provisional, we have to wonder whether we have lost touch with the immediate
impulses that have been shaping our investments in this "sense" of seeing. Language can
sustain a thinking at one with "the composition I of things I distinctions steering sun-
light," but such intensified self-consciousness can also get caught up in its own overdeter-
mined sequences, which now take over the poem (C, p. 214). However, rather than take
the time to track these movements, I will go directly to the moment when the poem de-
\·elops its conclusion:

It could all disappear

Streets
With remorse for individualism, provoking
scale
Dimension sinks
It's the event of seeing
what I speak of with
someone's eyes
The event of a carnality
covered by eye
The light proceeding along the
yellow sides of night
A word is a panorama
of a thing
It's the eye's duty to
tell
It's relevant-though a person
is implicated in the process
it keeps in sight
[C, pp. 214-15]
 484 These lines are not easy to interpret. They demand a good deal of guesswork. But in
responding to that demand we find ourselves embodying a cardinal principle of Hejini-
SECTION 8 an's poetics: it foregrounds processes of"conjecture" that force us to recognize the appar-
AvANT-CARDE ently arbitrary or uncaused leap of proprioceptive activity fundamental to a person's
ANTI-LYRICISM making any part of the world her own. Conjecture, in other words, is inseparable from
our sense of the ego taking up residence in a world that exceeds it but that also provides a
ground for its sense of its own free contingency. And because of its fluidity, conjecture
does not demand that the 'T' build a melodramatic stage on which to interpret its inde-
pendence (such staging only confirms the version of the self one initially postulates). So
for Hejinian even sex is best figured as "the pleasure of I inexactitude" (C, p. 140), because
the alternative is sex by the book, sex blind to the arbitrariness and playfulness by which
we come to appreciate how our lives might remain open to, even hungry for, what we can-
not control in other people. Why should poetry be different, since it seeks the same cor-
relation of intimacy and pleasure playing through the same absorbing interest in seeing
exact attention create indefinable edges?
My conjectures project Hejinian's using this fear of disappearance to highlight
what Heidegger might call "a worldliness of the world" constantly at risk of collapsing
into public pieties and private psychodramas. The passage from the poem begins with
a fear that landscape will turn into mapped streets that in their turn can instantly be
made into allegories of "remorse for individualism." What else can the demand for indi-
viduation produce except endless repetition feeding on anxieties that agency may be un-
representable? Since these are not the fears that admit of heroic confrontations, all one
can do is let the earlier querying within the poem generate a syntactic form around which
some resisting energies can be gathered. As dimension sinks, and hence as the specific
image collapses, the poem replaces "it could all disappear" with another "it" construction
leading beyond the eager scrutiny to a more general sense of how persons inhabit the
"eye." If the 'T' must give up the hope of somehow establishing private access to the real,
it can instead treat embodiment as simply accepting the carnality of its bodily func-
tions. This enables one to identify with the eye without making demands that vision be
tied closely to the demands of any specific ego. Instead, this abstracting of the eye leads
back to the panorama of words, as if words, too, open into vision as long as we maintain
enough distance from specific imaginary demands to explore the access language gives
us to the ways that our unconscious beings are deployed in particular moments.
This intricate balancing of "eye," "I," and "word" finally takes on its full emotional
and sexual implications in the last three lines:

It's relevant-though a person

is implicated in the process
it keeps in sight

We arrive at this sense of implication by recognizing that language is part of the eye's
imperative, even when one brackets individual sensibility, because language allows vision
its "sentences," in every sense of that term. Then once that process is grasped in its inde-
pendence, one can return to the issue of how particular persons make investments in
what they see. Rather than being the source of the seeing, the person is literally folded
into that which appears, so that one in effect learns about one's own desires in the very
processes that allow vision to unfold a world.
Everything the poem implies about the force of language as bearer of investments
comes into the foreground in the brilliant final pun on keeping materials in sight. For it
seems as if the plenitude of the pun arises out of nowhere, a grace within language at- 485
tuned to the situation it tries to articulate. The eye not only keeps objects in its sight; it
also has stakes in those objects, so that it matters how over time the person treasures what 8.2
is seen. Decomposing the ego into its carnal functioning, then, does not repress feeling CHARLES ALTIERI

but allows us to encounter its most elemental forms-forms that depend on a syntax that
works with an "it" in the subject position rather than a projected self-image. And this
sense of forms then helps temper the fear with which the poem began that thought will
make sight overdetermined. For the poem helps us to see how merely holding objects be-
fore the eye can modulate into actively keeping in sight, as if the eye expressed a version of
the containing force that can be associated with female genitals. And this active keeping
then becomes a full willing of what the eye sees, even though there has been no intro-
spection by which to organize that will. Here the power of commitment does not depend
on some inner state but on a specific way of engaging in events that prevents our isolating
that personal dimension as a unique and representable center. The only workable mirror
for the self seems to consist in folding consciousness within its own embodied activities.
Anything more speculative may entail self-divisive idealism.
I have to be this abstract ifi am to keep Hejinian in sight. But it is crucial that readers
not confuse the speculation required to orient ourselves within the poem with the very
different mode of expression by which the poetry itself engages the world. Hejinian can
be as minimalist as she is about emotions because she relegates much of the work of feel-
ing to a remarkably fluid and intricate play of tones. Tone makes it possible to keep a
mode of conjecture within experience, a mode that we easily lose if we push too hard to
capture the entire process as someone's possession and hence as an extension of personal-
ity. So I think it fair to say that Hejinian's poetry offers a dynamic alternative to the
modes of self-reflection generated by both analytic philosophy and the therapeutic prac-
tices postulated to save us from the self-division such thinking creates. In her work, what
makes us persons is not how we compose self-images but how the degrees and modalities
of concern that that tone embodies compose a world for our keeping. As Hejinian's final
poem in The Cell puts it, rather than worrying about a gulf between word and world, we
might think of how we can orient ourselves towards a "consciousness of unconsciousness"
attuned to the ways we are always already part of the sentences that our grammars afford
us. Then she adds, in order to close with her characteristic twinkle, "It is good to know I so"
(C, p. 217). That is, we may need only this playful cross of rhyme and pun in order to cor-
relate the "so" of method with the "so" of alignment and adjustment and, hence, to demon-
strate what consciousness of unconsciousness can afford us. And then it becomes possible
to have poetry speak what we might call the legislative "let it be so" rarely achieved in
postromantic poetry. Such a blessing depends only on managing to keep lyrical intelli-
gence responsive to the delights embedded in the panoramas language affords, as if in this
alternative to specular self-reflection, in this gentle and mobile distance, may lie our peace.
4) I still have the last two sets of contradictions to face and I have almost no space.
This will not seem much of a loss since I also have almost nothing to say about them that
I have not said elsewhere. The fourth set of contradictions takes place in postmodernist
moral theory's desire to undo the sense of demand basic to the masculine ego while also
cultivating versions of self-empowerment that help agents respond to their social situa-
tions. While poetry cannot be very helpful in developing specific moral arguments that
might address these contradictions, it can explore versions of agency that we then call
upon for our representations of moral powers and moral responsibilities. In particular
I have argued that contemporary poetry is keenly responsive to the Levinasian and
 486 Lacanian concern to replace the dream of autonomy with an insistence on how deeply
otherness pervades any experience of our own possible identities. Two basic features of
SECTION 8 moral agency then come to the fore: at one pole poets ranging from Hejinian to Hass ask
AVANT-GARDE us to shift from an emphasis on the ideals we pursue to an emphasis on the concrete tex-
ANTI-LYRICISM ture of needs and cares that bind us to other people and invite various kinds of reciproc-
ity; while at the other pole poets like Bernstein make that reciprocity fundamentally
structural by exploring the degree to which the very conditions of self-reflection bind us
to grammars we share with other people. 8 Both modes of writing then make the work of
reading inseparable from exploring what these bonds with other people afford us.
5) I can say even less on the last set of contradictions because I cannot think of any
conceptual or imaginative way to reconcile the pragmatist and deconstructive poles of
antifoundational thinking. It is no accident that Rorty remains a radical dualist in espous-
ing deconstructive irony as fundamental for individual subjectivity while basing public
thinking entirely on pragmatist principles. But that very impossibility may afford the
strongest possible argument for aligning postmodernism in the arts with basic modernist
imperatives, despite the many differences between them. For both orientations share a
commitment to resisting empiricism and to exploring plural worlds, where particulars
prove inseparable from the local frameworks that make them intelligible, whether these
frameworks be modernist constructivist wills or postmodernist conjectures. And much of
the best postmodern art shares modernism's refusal to bestow on social practices what it
denies to metaphysics; such art will not yield authority to those versions of will and judg-
ment that rely on social negotiations and idealized rhetorics of community. Instead it
foregrounds a tangential relation between the artist's work and any specific social agenda,
and hence it reminds us how unstable and self-divided all our idealizations must be. Yet
instability is not sufficient reason for renouncing idealization entirely in favor of the satiric
mode that comes far too easily within twentieth-century life. Postmodern art like the po-
etry we have been examining articulates one domain where it makes sense to bring mod-
ernist intensity to the post modern thematics of thriving on contradiction.

NOTES
1. Asbhery, "As We Know," As We Know (New entire story fits so neatly into a pragmatist
York, 1979), p. 74. I have developed a more psychology.
thorough reading of this poem in my "Contempo- 3· The relevant lines from Arteaga's poem are
rary Poetry as Philosophy: Subjective Agency in "[cctbc, Frida, I y cesa letra tdg a! kiss, a lacuna"
john Ashbery and C. K. Williams," Contemporary (Alfred Arteaga, "Respuesta a Frida," Cantos
Literature 33 (Summer 1992): 214-42. [Berkeley, 1991], p. 48). Literally, the lacuna here is
2. Consider the dilemma that pervades Homi K. thee that Frida Kahlo dropped from her name in
Bhabha's The Location of Culture (London, 1994). order to separate herself from Nazi Germany. I
He makes a forceful pragmatist case that there are take the concept of language as impediment from
no fixed identities but only a constant weaving of my colleague Gwen Kirkpatrick.
partial identifications and filiations. Yet he also 4. Notice the important difference from Pound's
has to distinguish ethnic identity-construction use of foreign languages. Pound justified this
from anything sanctioned by pragmatism in order practice in terms of capturing the exact character
to insist on the agonistic nature of public space of certain exalted expressions. He was not
and in order to keep in the foreground a constant interested in the qualities of the languages per se
focus on the repressive force of Enlightenment but in the truths that became available within
universals. But the agon depends on quite fixed them for those who could appreciate the precision.
identities, at least in principle, and the refusal to Arteaga, on the other hand, is less interested in the
forget the past seems an anachronistic demand specific moments captured by Spanish than in the
for authenticity. There is in fact nothing in his very fact of what it means to be a user of Spanish.
accounts of identity that applies specifically to He is absorbed by life in the language, not by
postcolonial or ethnic situations because the vision through the language.
 s. Myung Mi Kim, "And Sing We," Under Flag 8. I develop these alternatives at length in my 487
(Berkeley, 1991), p. 13; hereafter abbreviated "AS." "What Differences Can Contemporary Poetry
6. Kim, "Into Such Assembly," Under Flag, p. 31. Make in Our Moral Thinking?" in Renegotiating
This quotation is from the end of her most Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, ed.
accessible poem. jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, David Parker
7. Lyn Hejinian, The Cell (Los Angeles, 1992), p. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
42; hereafter abbreviated C. 113-32.

The Matter of Capital, or Catastrophe 8.3

and Textuality (2on)
CHRISTOPHER NEALON

It has been difficult for critics to probe the historical imagination that gets attached to the
idea of textuality in poetry in English because of the overlap of two critical traditions-a
New Critical tradition in which modern poetry has been understood generically, as
always gesturing back to an originally oral "lyric" in one sense or another, and a post-
structuralist tradition in which the idea of textuality takes on such powerful philosophi-
cal overtones that its mundane history is eclipsed.
There is another reason it has been difficult to recognize the textual imaginary of
modern poetry in English, which is that the canonical story of the emergence of textual
culture in the West, Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy, is told as a story of"the technolo-
gization of the word." Ong's technical history, with its yearning for a return to the orality
of dialectical pedagogy, not only obscures the ongoing coexistence of orality and literacy
in textual culture, but also flattens out the differences among the grammatical arts, which
encode different understandings of the social functions of texts and of literacy. Recent
scholarship in medieval studies, however, has provided a more multifaceted picture of the
shifts in the meanings of grammar and rhetoric as they became more enmeshed in tex-
tual cultures (Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture).
This scholarship also makes clear the enduring link between the textual culture
and civilizational crisis-not only via the traditional story, by which monastic textual
labor preserves the heritage of "western civilization" between the fall of Rome and the
rise of Europe, but also by way of the history of the literary arts as mediating agents in
the transfer of political power from Greece to Rome and, later, from Rome to the mod-
ern European centers of power. As Rita Copeland has shown, these transfers of power
demanded tremendous expenditures of skill on textual commentary and translation-
between Greek and Latin, and later between Latin and the emergent vernaculars. In
each case, concerns about creating literate classes, and developing a literary tradition
for an emergent language, made the writing of poetry-which is to say, the copying
down of poetry, paraphrasing it, translating it, imitating it-crucial to the advance of
the civilizational projects of emergent powers (Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and
Translation).
 488 So literary "matter" in the sense of the poetic record ofheroic deeds has a cousin sense
of "matter" as the material practices of making texts. Indeed, Eugene Vance has argued
SECTION 8 that in the chivalric romances of Chretien de Troyes we can see a historical movement
AVANT-GARDE "from topic to tale"-an incorporation of the projects of the older grammatical arts into
ANTI-LYRicisM an emergent sense of how to depict heroic action (From Topic to Tale). My use of the
phrase "the matter of capital" depends on such scholarship, along with the work of Ernst
Robert Curtius, for help in developing my sense of what "the matter of capital" might
mean in twentieth-century American poetry: topics, topoi, and techniques that produce
a textual imaginary for that poetry, which it uses to stage confrontations between poetry
and capital. I
As I say, however, the critical models available in the American academy after World
War II have made it difficult to discern the existence of this textual imaginary, or even the
persistence of capitalism as subject matter for American poetry-notwithstanding the
career-long effort of a scholar like Cary Nelson to broaden the canons of American poetry
to include poems written from in and around the American labor movement. 2 Before giv-
ing you a preliminary sense of the breadth of poetry we might include in the matter of
capital, then, I'd like to offer a brief account of why it's been so hard to name.

Virginia Jackson has argued that the professionalization ofliterary criticism from the time
of the New Critics has produced a tendency to read all poems as lyrics, where "lyric" means
a record of the voice or the mind speaking to itself, as in T. S. Eliot's conception of the mode
(Dickinson's Misery). This seems true of New Criticism. But I am also interested in a related
phenomenon, which is how, beginning in the 1970s, the language of philosophy stepped in
to fill the gap left by New Critical insistence on the aesthetic autonomy of the poem. In the
context of the long dominance of New Critical models that insisted that poems needed no
external frame by which to be read, the increasingly philosophical approach to the study of
poetry in the 1970s and 1980s served as a welcome countermove, an insistence that there
was something public, and something intellectual, about poetry, that it was not just grist for
the mill of undergraduate composition classes and introductory surveys, and that it could
not, and should not, be kept sequestered from the larger questions it raised.
Those questions, however, were themselves complexly determined by the political
situation of the era, which was never quite investigated by the new philosophical criti-
cism. This is plainly evident in the strongest criticism from the period, which by my
lights was written by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Altieri. Both Perl off and Altieri were at
the forefront of the expansion of the poetic canon to include more experimental writing
in the 1980s, and both helped turn American poetry criticism away from a reduction of
the poetic to the lyrical. Both, too, were indispensable in providing intellectual frame-
works by which the "mainstream" of American poetry could articulate what was becom-
ing an emphatic shift to the aesthetic left.
But even this strong work tended merely to name, then draw back from, the condi-
tions that arguably made it urgent to restore to the study of poetry a sense of high intel-
lectual stakes. By those "conditions," I mean both the crises and the triumphs of global
capitalism from about 1973 on. These crises have been felt in the trials of poor, working-
class, and middle-class people: the end of the post-World War II boom, the return of the
business cycle, and the increasingly hysterical speculative bubbles of the 1980s, the 1990s,
and the first decade of the twenty-first century, each in its way designed to find outlets for
wealth unmoored from the "real" economy. The triumphs have largely been those of the
capitalist classes: the defeats of the labor movement in the United States from the Reagan
era onward, and the successful capitalization of everyday life, the famous "dematerializa-
tion" of labor, or "flexible accumulation" that has meant, not so much the liberation of 489
working people from the demands of the wage labor, but the colonization of extrame-
chanical skills by the demands of the market. 8.3
These developments are keenly felt in the poetry of the period, as I hope to show; but CHRISTOPHER

they are felt and dismissed, or felt and shunted to the side, in the criticism, with the intel- NEALON

lectual cost that critics have had nothing other than a cursory account of the history of
the twentieth century. Take the case of Perloff, whose work has been indispensable for
reframing our sense of the norm by which we recognize "poetry." Perloff argued through-
out the 1980s and 1990s that the dominance of the Romantic lyric as a reference point in
poetic criticism made much of the most interesting poetic work of the century illegible.
She made it possible to see that collage forms-the mixture of verse and prose, or of visual
and textual elements, or even the play of chance operations-all were part of a legitimate
poetic tradition, one where ideas took precedence over "imagination." She is emphatic that
this is a poetry specific to the era: "In the poetry of the late twentieth century, the cry of the
heart, as Yeats called it, is increasingly subjected to the play of the mind" (The Dance of the
Intellect, 197). But she has no account of the history of the century such that it should have
produced an idea-driven poetry. Everywhere there are hints of what that history might be;
at one point in her pathbreaking 1981 book The Poetics of Indeterminacy, she cites the critic
James McFarlane's account of modernism as a tension between Symbolist "superintegra-
tion" of language, and a breakdown of coherence best rendered by Yeats's "things fall
apart"-but what mysterious force might have brought this volatile combination of inte-
gration and disintegration into being in the twentieth century is not answered. Elsewhere,
pressed by the specifics of a 1979 John Ashbery poem, "Litany," which reflects on the aim-
less frenzies of an "increasingly mobile populace," Perloff writes, "In this sense, Ashbery's
'hymn to possibility' is indeed a litany for the computer age. If it renounces the phrasal
repetition indigenous to the form [of the traditional litany], it is because things no longer
happen in precisely the same way twice" (287).
But when did they? These remarks amount to little more than a suggestion that ours
has been an especially Heraclitean age. At the end of The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Perl off
suggests that it's not just the age, but something about America, that generates collaged,
indeterminate, nonlyric forms:

When, in other words, the poetry of indeterminacy, of anti-symbolism, has reached its
outer limit, it comes back once more to such basic "literary" elements as the hypnotic sound
pattern, the chant, the narrative account, the conceptual scheme. In the poetry of the fu-
ture, we are likely to find more emphasis on these elements. The so-called "belatedness" of
our poetry-belated with respect to the Romantic tradition only-may turn out to be its
very virtue. "America," said John Cage, "has an intellectual climate suitable for radical ex-
perimentation. We are, as Gertrude Stein said, the oldest country of the twentieth century.
And I like to add: in our air way of knowing newness." (339)

So the sheer present-tense nature of America, its determining position in history, seems
to be exemplary of some unnamed process that is both radically disintegrative-it pushes
indeterminacy to its "outer limit" -and reintegrative, or possibly "superintegrative," re-
turning again and again to plunder raw materials. What might this mysterious process,
so closely identified with America, actually be? The oldest exceptionalist argument-that
we have no medieval past, we are the oldest young country-serves as an explanation that
isn't one.
By the early 1990s, the high poetic profile of the Language school had created an even
more pressing need for accounts of its historical emergence. But even a wonderful book
 490 like Joseph M. Conte's 1991 Unending Design fell back on quasi-mythic accounts of lan-
guage and the material world to account for the rise of Language poetics. Conte's book is
SECTION 8 immensely clarifying for its account of the importance of open-ended, serial forms to the
AVANT-GARDE poetry of the late twentieth century, and he hints at an analogous relationship between
ANTI-LYRICISM this open-endedness and the work of mass production, as when he offers the example of
the automobile as an instance of seriality (22, 41). He even notes that Robert Duncan, in a
late essay that critiques New Critical models of reading poetry, puts his critique in anticapi-
talist terms, comparing New Criticism's sense of form to the commodity form. After com-
ing extremely close to the possibility that there is a relationship between capitalism and the
emergence of serial forms as a poetic dominant in late-century American poetry, though,
Conte retreats to a physical formulation, suggesting that perhaps Language poetry's turn to
seriality simply reflects "the many ways beyond the logical and the sequential in which
things come together" (280). Elsewhere, Conte offers an alternative rendition, in which

the traditional lyric speaker who is firmly established and thought to preside over the busi-
ness of the poems is evicted by a variety of recycled rhetoric, multiple voices to which no
priority has been assigned. Without the endorsement of a dominant persona, the language
of the poem can be said to speak for itself. (44)

But what does "language," left to speak "for itself," actually say? Might the word "evicted"
in this passage carry a trace of the material history by which what scholars think of as mod-
ernism became what, less and less often these days, they call "postmodern"? And why is
"language itself" speaking now, as opposed to some other time, when it didn't? Questions
like these have been begged in American poetry criticism for more than thirty years,
Among the influential poetry scholars in this period, Charles Altieri comes closest to
acknowledging the circumstances by which critics became mute in the face of historical
crisis, though he does so, not in discussing critics, but in discussing poetry. In this pas-
sage from his powerful1984 book, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry,
Altieri reflects on the revolutionary sixties from the vantage point of the Reagan era. In
that decade, he writes,

poets felt that intense poetic experience might serve as witness and proof of the power of
mind to recover numinous values trampled underfoot by the assumptions of liberal in-
dustrial society. Now that the desire to transform society, or even to transform long-
standing aspects of American personality, has come to seem to many at best escapist and
at worst another of the illusions Americans create to avoid the contradictions in their
lives, poets have sought quieter, more distinctly personal and relativistic ways of adjust-
ing to what seem inescapable conditions ... Ours is an age that must come to terms with
failed expectations and, worse, the guilt of recognizing why we held such ambitious
dreams. (36-37)

This passage is exemplary of the refusal to think about the role of capital in political and lit-
erary history, for two reasons. One is that, in trying to dismiss left-wing political aspirations
as psychological flaws, and approvingly citing a turn to "quieter, more distinctly personal
and relativistic ways of adjusting to what seem inescapable conditions," Altieri ends up creat-
ing the contradiction he thinks this inward turn avoids-a contradiction between the qui-
etude of the inward personal life, rendered as a retreat, and the force required to keep the
world away from it. This contradiction as a psychic expression as well, which is the "guilt"
that Altieri, with heart-breaking candor, says attaches to having dreamed of a better world.
That guilt, like the wall around a gated community, blocks further political thinking by pun-
ishing the political thinker for having dared to imagine or to work for revolutionary change.
 In mentioning this guilt, Altieri touches on a powerful structure of feeling in Ameri- 491
can political life, one that has always posed problems for the left, which congeals in the
idea that it is a betrayal to think against the system-a betrayal against one's friends, one's 8.3
community, one's art. Distantly behind this idea lies the real material threat against CHRISTOPHER

workers who choose to strike-the possibility that striking would threaten their family's NEALON

security, or bring down violence on them. Transposed into an academic setting, the idea
seems to be that, in developing a critical analysis of capitalism, the critic forsakes daily
life, the small beauties; he becomes arrogant, unable to see what's right in front of his
nose; or she become preachy, solipsistic, hypnotized by abstractions. If one is a critic of
poetry, the too-critical critic loses the ability to perform subtle close readings.
And what if one is a poet? This book is not about the resistance to the idea of writ-
ing about capitalism. But a glance at some contemporary poetry that takes up that re-
sistance can serve as a handy measure of why, for so long, it has been difficult to name
exactly the extent to which many poets have written about it. Here is a 2005 poem by
the poet Katy Lederer, who gained extrapoetic notice during the financial crisis of
2008-2009 as the "Hedge Fund Poet," because she worked at D. E. Shaw, a private eq-
uity firm in New York:

A NIETZSCHEAN REVIVAL

I thought I was almost lost.

Or overwrought.
Or rotten.
As I stroked with quivering fingers this harp,
the tongue-perturbed minions running amok,
their scaffolded ears waiting isolately for the world that would deign to leave heaven.
In the morning, when I manufacture lyrics on these listless keys,
when the money and its happy apparatus do call and lure, do call and lure.
These poets speak of capital as if they have some faint idea.
Capital: a sexy word they read in Marx their freshman year.
I ask you: what do these poets know of capital?
Across its strings, their fingers play a Nietzschean revival.
I envy them their will to power. (42)

Capitalism, in this poem, is work for experts; poets, whether or not they or their families
have lost their mortgages, or their retirement, cannot "know of" it, because they don't
work at investment banks. And for a poet to write about capitalism is hubris, or worse, a
"will to power" that drowns out the vulnerable harpist, the real poet-notice that her
poems are "lyric" poems-who also, by chance, happens to work right at the heart of
things, where capital actually resides. All the ugliness is on the side of the critical poets;
the movements of money are just a "happy apparatus." The poem could not be more effi-
cient in performing the punishing, all-too-familiar reversal by which critics of capital,
not its agents, are imagined as the bringers of violence into the world.
Much subtler is this recent poem by Jennifer Moxley, who more than any poet of her
generation has blended a critical position on capitalism with a distaste for taking critical
positions (I cite the first and final stanzas):

OUR DEFIANT MOTIVES

And what if we succeed? Then what. What if we,

who are fond of thinking that our lives have been
 492 hindered vigorously by scheming statesmen
and entrepreneurs-scummy down to the one-
SECTION 8 find ourselves out on a stretch of open sea
AVANT·GARDE with none but a smooth trajectory
ANTI-LYRICISM that looks to be of our own making?

Are we ashamed of our own well-being?

Does it admit of a terrible pact somewhere in our past?
Let's not turn to face the wake, in which some may be
drowning. Rather, let's redraw its rippling "V" to suit
our need to feel that we are the ones who really suffered.
We suffered the most. More than anyone else, for we
understood their suffering, didn't we, and we
were the ones who took it upon ourselves to make it new. (Clampdown, 50-51)

As the poem moves from satirical self-chiding to a deeper self-damning, there emerges an
analysis of the flaws of leftist critique in which poets are mocked for accusing "structures" or
influential classes of injustice, without their realizing that they do so at the expense of those
who "really suffered," whose experience becomes mere material for the modernist transmu-
tations ("make it new") of suffering into negative art. The lancing double meaning of that
"make it new"-as in, make suffering into modernism, but also, make others suffer afresh-
expresses succinctly enough Moxley's reluctance to participate in what she clearly sees as a
ritualized, empty leftism-or, worse, a preening, damaging leftism. Once again, critique is
seen as guilty, as an injuring act, one that hurts others more vulnerable than the critic.
In psychological terms, it is hard to imagine a more durable twentieth-century victory for
the right than the persistence of this structure of feeling, which dates at least to the 1930s, and
the international left's horrified disavowal of Stalinism. This argumentativeness mutates
in the Cold War, when anti-Communist liberal intellectuals, not least major figures like Al-
bert Camus and Hannah Arendt, successfully equate communism with fascism via the port-
manteau concept of totalitarianism. They also pave the way for the poststructuralist critique
of"totalizing" thought that became so popular in the U.S. academy in the 1980s and 1990s, as
though it were the critic who tried to name the totalizing work of capital, rather than capital,
who was failing to do justice to its particulars, or to aesthetic experience. 3
For a poet like Moxley, the response to the suffering born of the scheming of "states-
men" and "entrepreneurs" is to look away, and to damn herself and her compatriots for
doing so. As we will see, this dynamic of"looking away" from suffering and cursing one-
self for doing it will have a crucial role to play in the poetry of John Ashbery, the subject
of my second chapter. Ashbery, like Moxley, is keenly aware of what it is, precisely, he's
looking away from-in his case, something like the consolidation of capitalist spectacle in
1970s New York. But poetry criticism-not only of Ashbery, but of the poetry of the last
third of the century-seems not to notice the agony in the turning away, or not to notice it
at all, or silently to assent to it. So Perloff, in her 1996 Wittgenstein's Ladder, champions the
philosophy of Wittgenstein as an analogy to the writing of the Language poets, because
Wittgenstein's sense of language as a closed game allows for the possibility of making the
everyday and the ordinary become strange. But she ignores the Language poets' own ac-
count of why the "ordinary" and the "everyday" were so important to them in the 198os-
not just because it was a countermove to the use of high-literary language, but also because
they saw the language of making the ordinary into the strange as a counterlanguage to the
amplified messages of the state and the mass media.
 Altieri, meanwhile, in his Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry of 1995, 493
adopts a defeated, Boethian attitude toward the relationship between poetry and mass
spectacle, sympathetically viewing "postmodern" poetry as consigned to the consolations 8.3
of a Kantian philosophy in which one tests one's capacities to judge within the carefully CHRISTOPHER

delimited, ever-narrowing space of what "politics" has not yet tainted. As he puts it: NEALON

In my view, these Postmodernist experiments introduce a substantially new spiritual dis-

pensation, finally making it possible to imagine an art that does not set itself against ap-
parently irresistible forces of social and historical change ... The more we see what the
task of accommodation involves, the more we shall need to challenge the contemporary
imagination, by reminding it of those moments when the mind sees itself capable of living
in, and for, communities not bound to that history and the compromises it entails. We
must continue to seek ideals of identity that insist on making their own forms for the noise
threatening to subsume all of our fictions into the world that is all too much with us. (379)

Reading Altieri's melancholic tribute to restricted action, and Perloff's amiable celebra-
tion of the bounded linguistic space of the everyday, it is easy to see why Adorno, in his
lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, remarked about Kantian critique that "what
has been codified in The Critique of Pure Reason is a theodicy of bourgeois life which is
conscious of its own practical activity while despairing of the fulfillment of its own uto-
pia" (6). In Altieri's case in particular, this theodicy operates as a transposition by which
political defeats for the left (the defeat of "the desire to transform society") mutate into a
defeat by politics, by the encroachment of "the political" per se into the domain of the
aesthetic.
Work like Altieri's and Perloff's thus gave us a powerfully depoliticizing language for
poetry in the 1980s and 1990s. Ironically, the critical language of that period that most
often kept some version of politics in view for American readers of poetry-that is, the
language of French poststructuralism-comes around to making its own versions of
these depoliticizing moves. This work has been more commanding in comparative litera-
ture departments than in English departments, partly because it is built around a Euro-
pean canon of poetry. But it has had wide influence on American work, both for the way
its structuralist heritage makes it possible to think of poetry in terms of a seemingly
cross-disciplinary notion of textuality, as opposed to a merely literary vocabulary of
genre or mode, and for how it invites critics to imagine the relationship between poetry
and politics.
This invitation involves, on the French side, subtle analogies between philosophical
arguments and political history; and, on the American side, a transposition of those
analogies into a different academic and political scene. So it is hard to describe their in-
fluence without pausing for a bit over the details of how such theoretical arguments actu-
ally tended to look on the ground. One might take any of a variety of examples, but I
think the work of Jacques Derrida is especially important here. Over the course of his
long career, Derrida revised his thinking about literature, philosophy, and politics count-
less times, but his early work is very clear in establishing a set of founding relays among
those domains. So I'd like to slow down for a moment and take a look at his influential
1966 essay "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve." The
essay leans on Alexandre Kojeve's Marxian interpretation of Hegel in order to produce an
allegory of Hegelian negativity as labor, then, enabled by this analogy or allegory, turns to
Bataille and a Kierkegaardian absurdism to argue that the negative must be understood
in terms other than those to which philosophy submits it; the negative, for Derrida, is con-
stantly being brought into philosophical service-exploited, he suggests-as the other of
 494 meaning, providing the prompt to philosophical concept honing. But it cannot be assimi-
lated to such uses.
SECTION 8 Derrida's essay makes two key moves that, taken together, proved extremely persua-
AVANT-GARDE sive on American shores. One is to transpose the question of the exploration of labor into
ANn-LYRICISM a philosophical register, by reading it as the capture and exploitation of negativity by
philosophy, where it is forced into the work of systematic thinking. The other is to suggest
that the true character of the negative is expressed in chance, and in play, and that this
true character of the negative is best understood in literary terms-or, more specifically,
modernist poetic terms, best exemplified by Mallarme's Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le
hasard. Derrida gestures at Mallarme's poem this way:

The poetic or ecstatic is that in every discourse which can open itself up to the absolute loss
of its sense, to the (non-)base of the sacred, of nonmeaning, of un-knowledge or play, to the
swoon from which it is reawakened by a throw of the dice. (261)

This move is significant because, having established the question oflabor as a philosophi-
cal question of negativity, and having posited the modernist poetics of Mallarme as a
privileged site for the expression of the negativity that philosophy seeks to capture, Der-
rida aligns the poetic specificity of the modernist lyric with the uncapturable life force of
the rebellious worker. He contrasts the "master" of Hegel's master-slave dialectic with a
Bataillean "sovereign" who laughs at philosophy's mere "amortization" of the negative,
who laughs at death: "laughter alone exceeds dialectics and the dialectician" (256). Noting
that "philosophy is work itself for Bataille," he adds that Hegelian Aujhebung is "laugh-
able" because it is merely a" busying of discourse" that starts panting as it "reappropriates
all negativity for itself" (252, 257). Philosophy, as the essay unfolds, is "work itself" in the
sense that it is a set of operations that compel work, that force the negative to produce
meaning and knowledge, and that bustles about breathlessly as it mistakenly thinks it is
achieving "knowledge" in the process. "Philosophy"-that is, Hegelian philosophy, Auf-
hebung, the dialectic-"philosophy," in this allegory, is a bourgeois.
Now the bourgeoisie, as a mercantile or a professional class, are not entirely, or not nec-
essarily, the same as the industrial capitalist class that actually would compel labor; so we
should note a slight shift or transposition in the Marxian critique here. Similarly, note that
it is not capital, but the dialectic, that is the enemy-so that the militant worker, when the
moment of rebellion finally becomes possible, rebels not against capital but against philoso-
phy. Indeed, at the moment when Derrida's allegory depicts rebellion, "the negative"-
figured, Derrida says, in the Hegelian slave, who Derrida says Kojeve suggests is the worker
(276)-at the moment of rebellion, the worker looks more existential than the militant. In-
deed, he looks more like a Resistance fighter in World War II than a proletarian. Here Der-
rida has been discussing the merely philosophical revolutions of Kant and Hegel, who can
be credited with discovering the philosophical import of the negative, but who made the
mistake of "[taking it] seriously." By contrast, he suggests, for Bataille, the negative (here,
again, personified) is more truly radical, to the point of its utter transformation:

It can no longer be called negative precisely because it has no reserved underside, because
it can no longer permit itself to be converted into positivity, it can no longer collaborate
with the continuous linking-up of meaning, concept, time, and truth in discourse; be-
cause it literally can no longer labor and let itself be interrogated as "the work of the nega-
tive." (259-260)

Note the italicized work "collaborate" in this passage, which to my ear is a giveaway signal
that the allegory of the negative-as-worker has now received an overlay of wartime militancy.
The italicization of the word "labor" signals the blending of the two background personifica- 495
tions, wound even tighter together by the word "interrogated," which links the refusal of the
worker and the developing militance of the resistance fighter in a pun on the interrogative. 8.3
What all these deft allegorical, anthropomorphic, and transposing gestures accom- CHRISTOPHER

plish, for Derrida, is the insight that German dialectical philosophy is no match for NEALON

French literary modernism:

In interpreting negativity as labor, in betting for discourse, meaning, history, etc., Hegel
has bet against play, against chance. He has blinded himself ... to the fact that play in-
cludes the work of meaning or the meaning of work. (260)

In 1966 this overlay of the figure of the militant Resistance fighter on top of the figure of
the worker, who is cannier than the philosopher-bourgeois about the work-canceling play
that modern poetry highlights, is a kind of backward glance. But it is also an echo of a
contemporary development in French politics. Here is a key passage from the 1966 Situa-
tionist pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life:

For the proletariat revolt is a festival or it is nothing: in revolution the road of excess leads
to the palace of wisdom. A palace which knows only one rationality: the game. The rules
are simple: to live instead of devising a lingering death, and to indulge untrammeled
desire. (S. Ford u6)

The distribution of this pamphlet by the students of the University of Strasbourg helped
trigger, two years later, the student alliance with workers in the uprisings of May 1968;
and it remains an exemplary text for non-Communist Party, Marxist anticapitalism in
France. I cannot trace the lines of commonality or influence between Derrida and the Sit-
uationists with much precision here; it is hard to say whether Derrida is leaning on rebel-
lious student energies, or the students are picking up on something that Derrida is also
aware of, a critique of Communist Party politics that is registered as a romantic (here,
Blakean) critique of Hegel (the "lingering death" of the dialectic as work, as opposed to
"untrammeled desire," which Derrida renders, in the title of his essay, as "Hegelianism
without reserve").
Is Derrida, in 1966, politicizing philosophy or academicizing Situationist politics?
Impossible to say; more easy to recognize is that the leveraging of modernist poetry into
an antidialectical argument with Hegel (and implicitly, doctrinaire, party-line Marxism)
becomes the gesture into which the idea of"poetry" is incorporated in the French theory
that traveled to American shores in the 1970s and 1980s. This antidialecticism is emphati-
cally present in Julia Kristeva's 1974 Revolution in Poetic Language, which pits the disrup-
tive literary practice of Mallarme and Lautreamont against a psychoanalytic subject
falsely unified by the state and society. And it organizes Jean-Luc Nancy's 1982 The Inop-
erative Community, which cites Bataille's remark from Literature and Evil that "literature
cannot assume the task of directing collective necessity," in order to position a Levinasian-
Heideggerian understanding of poetry as an "interruption" against both those literary
texts that seek after mere produced beauty and that Marxism that imagines "productiv-
ity" as the only engine of history.4 This is not to mention the work of Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, or, more recently, Alain Badiou, who have all kept alive, from very differ-
ent philosophical positions, the practice of pitting one literary modernism or another
against a cartoon of Hegel made to stand in for something like either the rigidness or the
insufficient militancy of the French Communist Party.
In 1986 it was already possible for a canny observer like Andreas Huyssen to observe of
the "postmodern" theory being consumed in the United States that "rather than offering a
 496 theory ofpostmodernity and developing an analysis of contemporary culture, French theory
provides us primarily with an archeology of modernity, a theory of modernism at the stage of
SECTION 8 its exhaustion" (After the Great Divide, 209). To this it seems useful to add that, along with an
AvANT·GARDE "archeology of modernity," French theory offered American literary critics a philosophical
ANTI-LYRICISM allegory of postwar French politics, centered by and large on a tiny canon of writers-
Mallarme, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Holderlin and Celan-whose modernist extremity (or, in
the case ofHolderlin, his modernism avant Ia lettre) converts that political allegory into an
allegory of the war between literature and philosophy. 5 I would suggest that in the absence of
a powerful American Communist Party, or an American Situationism, or a sustained Amer-
ican argument with Hegel, this allegorical war of the disciplines (poetry versus philosophy)
comes to explain the meaning or significance of "poetry" in those flanks of the American
literary academy that tilt in a continental direction. Though it has a very different prove-
nance than the American criticism that sequesters poetry against the noise of the spectacle,
then, American consumption of the political allegories of French theory amounts to a simi-
lar sequestration, where "literature" and "poetry" signify a realm of existentialist, or ab-
surdist, or monist freedom that the dialectic cannot capture.
Something different, but related, happens in the postwar history of German -language
stylistic analysis of poetry, which, primarily through the work of Theodor Adorno, has
had broad influence on American thinking about the relationship of poetry to capitalism.
The German tradition of poetry criticism, devolving from the work of Curtius, is more
philological than philosophical, and less interested in foregrounding the canon ofliterary
modernism than in establishing stylistic analyses that extend to pre-modern periods. But
it is strongly interested in the question of the individual's relation to the masses, as when
Erich Auerbach highlights the emergence of the Christian sermon in late antiquity as a
kind of"mass movement" that does not erase but prizes each individual, or when Adorno
frames the modernity of the lyric under capitalism as the struggle of the isolated poet, by
withdrawing himself from society, to preserve something socially free that exists only in
potential.6 I would like to take a moment to highlight some of the things American critics
have learned from this tradition, but also to show how it comes around, in Adorno, to a
stance that is closer to the stance of French poststructuralism than at first appears.
One of the major achievements of the German tradition of poetry criticism is to dem-
onstrate that the postclassical history of literary writing, even when we factor in wide
variability around what "the literary" had meant since the classical era, is bound up with
the imagination ofhistorical change and civilizational crisis. Hans-Robert Jauss has writ-
ten comprehensively on how the idea of"the modern," for instance, links historical writ-
ing, humanist scholarship, poetry, and aesthetics in a conversation about the meanings of
the present in relation to different understandings of history; reading his work, it be-
comes possible to see the method by which Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Charles Olson
draw parallels and contrasts between ancient and modern figures as a reworking and
continuation of an older historiographical and literary-critical genre, the "parallel," which
itself has ancient origins, and becomes a central genre for debates about modernity in the
late seventeenth-century French Querelle des anciens et des modernes ("Modernity and
Literary Tradition," 347). One of the fascinating things about Jauss's survey of the literary
idea of "the modern" is that, in the history he traces for the term, it mutates from a static
term of opposition to ancientness (as in the Querelle) to what, by the middle of the nine-
teenth century, he sees as a term that perpetually "repels itself" in what is experienced by
Stendhal and then Baudelaire as the onward rush of historical events. This latter experi-
ence, of course, is one way to describe the experience of time in commodity capitalism, as
a perpetual rush to the new; what Jauss's survey illuminates is the way in which the aes-
thetics of modernity we have come to associate with Baudelaire (and, since Baudelaire, 497
Walter Benjamin) have a long genealogy that extends at least as far back as early Christian
distinctions around the "modernity" of the Christian era. 8.3
The enduring persistence of problems of historical consciousness for literature is not CHRISTOPHER

only a question of how literary writing has developed understandings of periods and of NEALON

the meanings of periodization; it has also attached itself to questions of literary style. The
best-known example of this historiographical-stylistic link is Auerbach's argument that,
after Augustine, the ancient correlation of kinds of subject matter with degrees of stylistic
elevation was disrupted both by the need to preach of high matters to masses of less-
educated people, and by a doctrinal sense that Christ's resurrection brought the high low
and made the low high. For Auerbach, a Ciceronian low style, or sermo humilis, is reworked
by Augustine and others into a something like a "humble style" where high and low stylistic
registers can mix because the theme of humility is, in Christian preaching and apologetics,
also always the theme of sublimity (Literary Language). Helplessly, though, this style mix-
ing also obtains a historical-thematic element as well-sermo humilis in the Christian tradi-
tion also comes to signify being post-Roman, an after-the-fall humility that is historical as
well as theological. Down to the twentieth century, then, one of the available functions of
style mixing is to index catastrophic historical chance on the model of the fall of Rome:
Adorno's bravura mixture of essayistic and philosophical writing in the post-Holocaust
volume Minima Moralia is a good example, because its title not only inverts the praise
orientation of Plutarch's Moralia, but also points to Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job, a
signal instance for Auerbach of sermo humilis.
Indeed, Adorno's writing on poetry foregrounds its relation to historical catastrophe
at every turn, though his American readers have often taken his writing to demonstrate
generic truths about lyric intensity or compression as defining specificities of poetry. Un-
fortunately, Adorno himself facilitates this drift in the direction of generic reading, both
when he remarks in Negative Dialectics that he may have been wrong to say that it is bar-
baric to write poetry after Auschwitz, given that "perennial suffering has just as much
right to find expression as a victim of torture has to scream" (355), and when, in "Lyric
Poetry and Society," he refers to the lyric poem as a "philosophical sundial of history"
(221). These remarks have often been taken to mean that there is something generically
special about the lyric's intensity or its linguistic compression, but in formulating them-
especially the second remark-Adorno leans on and reworks the tradition of stylistics in
which literature is understood as gradually developing an idiomatic historiographical
function, not only an ahistorical "intensity." In "Lyric Poetry and Society," for instance,
Adorno turns to the poetry of Stefan George, whose compressed style he reads as anal-
legory of the generation of an older class imaginary out of the emergence of a new one:

While George's poetry-that of the splendidly individual-presupposes as a condition of

its very possibility an individualistic, bourgeois society, and the individual who exists for
himself alone, it nevertheless bans the commonly accepted forms, no less than the themes,
of bourgeois poetry. Because this poetry, however, can speak from no other standpoint or
configuration than precisely those bourgeois frames of mind which it rejects ... because of
this it is blocked, dammed at the source: and so it feigns a feudal condition. (224-225)

George's success, like the success Auerbach imagines for Christian sermo humilis,
emerges from rejecting a high rhetoric:

Elevated style is attained not by pretending to rhetorical figures and rhythms, but by as-
cetically omitting whatever would lessen the distance from the tainted language of com-
 498 merce. In order that the subject may truly resist the lonely process of reification he may not
even attempt anymore to retreat into himself-to his private property. He is frightened by
SECTION 8 the traces of an individualism which has meanwhile sold itself to the literary supplements
AVANT-GARDE of the marketplace. The poet must, rather, by denying himself, step out of himself. (226)
ANTI-LYRICISM
This dazzling passage, which has been so influential in developing an understanding of
the political value of the lyric poem, nonetheless limits our understanding of the relation-
ship between poetry and capitalism to the negative: the lyric's compression and intensity
are a sacrificial austerity, or a scream, and the rejections such stances or cries signify be-
come a definition of the lyric-not least the lyric as "philosophical sundial of history." But
the work of Jauss and others suggests that if the poem is a sundial of history, this is be-
cause the history of the literary is in part the history of the generation of historiographical
metaphors (standing on the shoulders of giants; postcatastrophic lowness) like the meta-
phor of the sundial in the first place. And when Adorno situates a poet like George in the
heritage of poesie pure-"this follower of Mallarme," Adorno calls him-his work ends up
reinforcing the figures of renunciation and sequestration that postwar French and Ameri-
can thinking about poetry have also privileged as the way to think about poetry and
capitalism.
So where the key critics of American poetry of the last twenty years have chosen not
to write about the relation of that poetry to capitalism, the French and German critical
traditions most widely referred to in the United States have encouraged ways of thinking
about that relation that tend to imply that poetic writing is prima facie political, or that
the only significant relation between a poem and capitalism is rigorous eschewal.
But the record of the actual poetry of the twentieth century does not bear out this claim.

NOTES
1. The classic review of Arthurian "matter" is case the best current example of this argument is
Roger Sherman Loomis, The Development of probably to be found in the work of the philoso-
Arthurian Romance (Norton, 1970). For recent pher jacques Ranciere, who, for instance, described
scholarship on "the matter of France," see Gabriele his work this way in a 2007 interview:
and Stuckey. I am grateful to Seeta Chaganti for What interests me more than politics or art is
this recommendation. the way the boundaries defining certain practices
2. See Curti us, European Literature and the Latin
as artistic or political are draw and redrawn. This
Middle Ages. Curtius's history of the different topoi
frees artistic and political creativity from the yoke
by which poets depicted the character of poetry, and of the great historical schemata that announce the
their social role as poets, has been an indispensable great revolutions to come or that mourn the great
model for my exploration of how poetry imagines revolutions past only to impose their proscriptions
itself in relation to capital. and their declarations of powerlessness on the
3· See, crucially, Nelson's Revolutionary present. (Ranciere, ArtForum, March 2007)
Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American
Left (Routledge, 2001), which not only helped Again, notice that it is Marxist theory, not
restore to visibility the poetry of individual capitalism, that oppresses.
writers like Tillie Olsen and Edwin Rolfe, but also 5. Kristeva makes fascinating use of Freud's
made clear that in the 1930s there was for account of the "binding" of excitation in the work
American poets on the left something like a of managing the death drive in her account of the
"Matter of Spain"-that is, a body of work devoted negativity of the best modern poetry, which, like
to hashing out the meanings of support for the Derrida's Bataille, smashes through negativity's
antifascist cause during the Spanish Civil War. mere "amortization":
4. The contours of the American discourse of This would seem to be "art" 's function as a
the critique of"totalization" would make for an signifying practice: under the pleasing exterior
entire book; arguably, Martin jay's splendid of a very socially acceptable differentiation, art
Marxism and Totality would be its prequel. In any reintroduces into societyfumlal11ental rejection,
which is matter in the process of splitting. (Revolu- community. It is a community of articulation, 499
tion in Poetic Language [Columbia, 1984], 180) not organization, and precisely because of that it
is a community situated "beyond the sphere of 8.3
Nancy, whose citation from Bataille analogizes the
material production properly speaking," where
wrong role for literature to th~ work of Party officials CHRISTOPHER
"begins the flowering of that human power that is
("the task of directing collectlye necessity"), rereads NEALON
its own end, the true reign of liberty. (The
Marx as a theorist, not of the sham "communism"
Inoperative Community [U of Minnesota, 1991], 77)
that is merely state-directed capitalism, but of
multiform, inorganic "articulation" or assemblage-a 6. I am grateful to joshua Clover for first
practice that looks a lot like modernist collage: pointing out to me the disproportionate amount of
critical energy spent on this small canon of poets.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Marx's
See Clover, "A Form Adequate to History: Toward
community is, in this sense, a community of
a Renewed Marxist Poetics," Paideuma 37, 2010.
literature-or at least it opens on to such a

Lyric and the Hazard of Music (2oos) 8.4

CRAIG DWORKIN

Lyric cannot be expunged by modernism, only repressed.

T. ). Clark

The relation of sound to poetry has always been triangulated, implicitly or explicitly, by
an equally nebulous third term: sense. The relation is ambiguous, and shifting, because
"sound"-especially in the context of poetry-is that species of homograph which pro-
duces its own antonym.' On the one hand, sound-defined as "the audible articulation of a
letter or word"-has been understood as something distinct from linguistic meaning: "the
sound must seem an echo to the sense," as Pope famously put it. 2 Furthermore, that distinc-
tion is often pushed to a full-fledged antonymy, so that sound is understood as being-by
definition-diametrically opposed to meaning: a "mere audible effect without significance
or real importance." 3 John Locke underscores that opposition in a passage from his Essay
Concerning Human Understanding: "for let us consider this proposition as to its meaning
(for it is the sense, and not the sound, that is and must be the principle or common no-
tion)." 4 Or, more famously, in Shakespeare's phrasing: "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound
and fury, signifying nothing." 5 At the same time, however, sound can also denote precisely
the signifying referent oflanguage: "import, sense, significance." 6 Indeed, rather than pos-
ing an alternative to meaning, sound in poetry has been heard as conveying meaning in its
own right. "In human speech," Leonard Bloomfeld asserts," different sounds have different
meanings." 7 Jan Mukarovsky concurs:" 'Sound' components are not only a mere sensorily
perceptible vehicle of meaning but also have a semantic nature themselves." 8
At once the antithesis of meaning and the very essence of meaning, sound in poetry
articulates the same problems that have attended early twentieth-century definitions of
the category of "poetry" itself, reflecting the identical logic at a fractal remove. From the
Prague School to Ludwig Wittgenstein to Tel Que!, modern philosophers of language
 500 have described poetry-which is to say, literary language broadly conceived or simply
"verbal art," in Roman Jakobson's eventual phrasing-as a kind of text that deviates from
SECTION 8 conventionally utile language by self-reflexively foregrounding elements other than the
AVANT-GARDE referentially communicative. Poetry, in these accounts, calls attention to structures such
ANTI-LYRICISM as sound while damping the banausic, denotative impetus oflanguage. 9
The ratios thus form a curious recursion: sound is to sense as poetic language is to
conventional language, but the relation of sound and sense, understood in this way, are
nested within the category of the poetic. Taken as the opposite of sense, sound, in the
formalist economy, encapsulates the logic of the poetic. One among the material, pal-
pable, quantifiable facets of language, sound contrasts with the ideas conveyed by the
referential sign. Behind the Slavic formalists, we might of course also think of Ferdinand
de Saussure's attempt to define signs not as the relation of names and things, but rather
as the coupling of the "concept" indicated by the signified and "!'image acoustique [the
sound shape]" of the signifier. And further behind Saussure, as the quotes from Pope
and Shakespeare attest, lies the intuitive sense that one can perceive aspects of language
without comprehending its message. More complicated still, however, the mise-en-abfme
of sound and poetry can also reflect (back on) the communicative side of the equation.
The relationship between material sound and referential meaning is often understood to
itself be referential. The two key words in Pope's declaration, for instance, both bind
sound to mimetic appearance: "sound must seem an echo to the sense." Sound, in this
understanding, thus also encapsulates the operation of meaning. The same is true when
sound is taken to be expressive in its own right and thought to "have a semantic nature"
in itself.
Simultaneously bridging and sequestering, sound has accordingly been understood as
both the defining opposite of meaning and the very essence of meaning. This duplicity is
due in part to the inadequacy of the vague term "meaning," but it also comes into play be-
cause of the belief-implicit in Pope's formulation-that the value of a poem lies in the rela-
tion between sound and sense. A mediocre term paper on "The Poetry of Sound," available
for purchase on the internet, states the basic position clearly (if rather ineptly):

Poems usually begin with words or phrase which appeal more because of their sound than
their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem. Every poem has a texture of
sound, which is at least as important as the meaning behind the poem. 10

Even when cast as the antithesis of meaning, the sound of poetry is still thought to be-in
all senses of the word-significant. Sound is central, it seems, but the question still re-
mains: exactly how does sound come to be important in poetry? This is neither the place
for a history of the poetics of sound, nor for a careful parsing of the theoretical variations
on the topic, but I do want to note the extent to which literary theorists have been both
certain about the central importance of sound to poetry and unable to exactly specify the
nature of that importance. Roman Jakobson is typical:

No doubt verse is primarily a recurrent "figure of sound." Primarily, always, but never
uniquely. Any attempts to confine such poetic conventions as meters, alliteration, or rhyme
to the sound level are speculative reasonings without any empirical justification.n

He goes on to quote Alexander von Humboldt: "there is an apparent connection between

sound and meaning which, however, only seldom lends itself to an exact elucidation, is
often only glimpsed, and most usually remains obscure." That obscurity results from
sound's lack of any absolute, a priori value, and the glimpse of connection, as Benjamin
Harshav argues in his work on the expressivity of sound patterns, arises when sound and 501
meaning enter into a dynamic dance of cathectic reflection. For Harshav, the relation
between poetic sound and sense is a back-and-forth process of recursive feedback. No 8.4
sound pattern, in his view, is inherently meaningful in and of itself; sibilants, for instance CRAIG DwoRKIN

(to take his central example), have been understood as representing both silence and
noise. However, once a reader identifies the presence of a sound pattern certain referential
statements from the poem-what one might think of as the conventional meaning of its
"message"-are transferred onto that pattern, which in turn loops back to reinforce and
foreground particular themes in the message:Z
When any less obscure, the connections between sound and meaning risk sounding
ridiculous. Alan Galt's Sound and Sense in the Poetry ofTheodor Storm, for one instance
of the more empiricist model of linguistic analysis, attempts to scientifically demonstrate
that the musical qualities of poetry "may be defined in terms of phonological 'skew,' i.e.
deviation from the normal proportional distribution of sounds in poetic language." 13
Galt (using a slide rule, no less) tabulated all of the phonemes in Storm's collected poetry,
some 78,965 consonants and 43,641 vowels, according to his count} 4 The outcome is al-
most pataphysical, combining a sober scientific tone with absurd results and evoking
nothing so much as the enthused phonemic dictionaries ofVelimir Klebnikov} 5 Galt de-
termines that the phoneme /1/, for instance, evinces:

Positive skews in love poems and in narratives; strong positive skews in "tender" and "mu-
sical" poems. Negative skews in poems of family and home, nostalgia, and humor, with a
negative skew for "non-musical" poems which is just below the level of significance. This
phoneme certainly distinguishes, in Storm's verse, between "musicality" and its opposite,
and its presence can evidently also contribute to a feeling of "tenderness." 16

The phoneme /u/, similarly, reveals "positive skews in nature poems, political poems, and
in 'musical' poems. Negative skews in poems of age and death, and in humorous and oc-
casional poems. Evidently this is a determiner of 'musicality.' " 17 And so on. Meaning, in
Galt's account is inseparable from sound, even as the significance of sound is impercep-
tible, recognizable only at the level of massive statistical analysis. Form, here, is indeed an
extension of content: "a group of poems which share the same theme or content tends to
show a phonological 'skew' which is broadly characteristic of that group." 18
While Galt's work may have greater affinities with avant-garde poetry than with con-
ventional literary criticism, I call attention to it because his focus on "musicality." As
James McNeill Whistler famously opined, "music is the poetry of sound," and poetry, in
turn, has often been characterized as musical: "lower limit speech," as Louis Zukofsky
ran his calculus, "upper limit music." 19 Or as John Cage put it: "poetry is not prose be-
cause poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reason of its content
or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced
into the world of words." 20 Poetry, for Cage, was a non-expressive, non-communicative
extrusion ofform into recursive content: "I have nothing to say I and I am saying it/ and
that is/poetry," as his "Lecture on Nothing" performs the point. 21 Cage's compositional
formalism stands in opposition to more affective formulations of poetry's musicality, but
the move to ground poetry in music, regardless of the poetics at stake, is telling. Consider
Sarah Stickney Ellis's early nineteenth-century account:

Sound is perhaps of all subjects the most intimately connected with poetic feeling, not
only because it comprehends within its widely extended sphere, the influence of music, so
 502 powerful over the passions and affections of our nature; but because there is in poetry itself, a
cadence-a perceptible harmony, which delights the ear while the eye remains unaffected. 22
SECTION 8
AvANT-GAR DE Ellis's argument echoes in John Hollander's entry on "Music and Poetry" in the Princeton
ANTI-LYRICISM Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which states that both poetry and music "move to af-
fect a listener in some subrational fashion, just as both are in some way involved in the
communication of feeling rather than of knowledge." 23 That involvement of music in po-
etry is of particular significance, moreover, because it bears on our understanding of the
lyric. According to J. W. Johnson's entry in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poet-
ics, lyric poetry "may be said to retain most pronouncedly the elements of poetry which evi-
dence its origins in musical expression [ ... ] the musical element is intrinsic to the work
intellectually as well as aesthetically." 24 Indeed, "the irreducible denominator of all lyric
poetry," according to Johnson, must be "those elements which it shares with the musical
forms that produced. Although lyric poetry is not music, it is representational of music in
its sound patterns." 25
The problem, of course-already stated by the distance between Cage and Ellis-is
what might be meant by music, a term no more stable or well-defined than lyric itself.
Music, in this context, is often taken to mean merely euphonious language: a mid-
nineteenth century sense of harmony and melodic line that "delights the ear." This defi-
nition, in fact, makes music a synonym for sound itself, one of the denotations of which is
"used with implications of richness, euphony, or harmony." 26 But "music" of course en-
compasses a range of works far more expansive than the classical and romantic imagina-
tion of the pleasant, mellifluous, or affecting. We might still define the lyric in terms of
music, but what if the music represented by the lyric were Cage's own Music for Piano,
composed by enlarging the imperfections found when a sheet of staff paper is scrutinized
under a magnifying glass? Or Erik Sa tie's Vexations, a few bars of fragmentary melody
meant to be repeated 840 times in succession? Or Stephane Ginsburgh's extrapolation of
Marcel Duchamp's Erratum Musical: each of the eighty-eight notes on the piano key-
board played once, in aleatory order? Or Gyorgy Ligeti's Poeme symphonique, scored for
100 carefully wound metronomes. Or Gilius van Bergeijk's Symfonie der Duizend (alfabe-
tisch), which strings together the first notes from one thousand compositions (arranged
alphabetically by their composers' names), with each note falling where the second note
would have come in the previous composition's rhythmic structure? Or the game pieces of
John Zorn, or the stochastic compositions of Iannis Xenakis, or David Soldier's orchestra
of Thai elephants, or any number of works that Ellis would likely not have recognized as
music at all.
In such an expanded field, music may no longer be especially useful for defining po-
etry with any sort of apodeictic certainty, but the diversity of its connotations makes it all
the more productive for thinking in new ways about what poetry (or a multiplicity of poet-
ries) might aspire to do. Just as rethinking the nature of sound has led, over the course of
the last century, to new understandings of what qualifies as music, rethinking the nature
of music, accordingly, expands the scope of what qualifies as poetry. In particular, because
of its inextricable historical enmeshment with music, lyric is stressed with a special pres-
sure by the degree to which the category of music is dilated and freighted and stretched.
The terms are irreversibly linked, but their denotations are not as fixed as our habitual use
of them, in forging that linkage, would like us to believe. Or, in brief, to paraphrase David
Antin's aphorism on the connection between modernism and post-modernism: from the
music you choose, you get the lyric you deserve.
 NOTES 503
1. joseph Shipley terms such words, like "cleave," 11. )akobson, Language, op. cit., 81.
autantonyms [The Origin of English Words: A 12. Benjamin Harshav (publishing originally as 8.4
Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots Hrushovski): Explorations in Poetics (Stanford: CRAIG DWORKIN
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Stanford U.P., 2007): 144 et passim; the work was
1984): !28. published originally under the name Benjamin
2. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Hrushovski as "The Meaning of Sound Patterns in
Edition, ed. john Simpson and Edmund Weiner Poetry: An Interaction Theory," Poetics Today 2: 1
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Alexander (Autumn, 1980): 39-56; cf Reuven Tsur: What
Pope: "An Essay on Criticism," The Major Works, Makes Sound Patterns Expressive? (Durham: Duke,
ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford U.P., World 1992).
Classics, 2006): 29. 13. Alan Galt: Sound and Sense in the Poetry of
3· Oxford English Dictionary, op. cit. Theodor Storm: A Phonological-Statistical Study.
4· john Locke: An Essay Concerning Human European University Papers Series 1, Vol. 84
Understanding (London: Tegg, 1841): §18. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1973): 1; cf Ivan F6nagy:
5. Macbeth V, v. "Communication in Poetry," Word 17 (1961):
6. Oxford English Dictionary, op. cit. 194-218.
7. Qtd. Roman jakobson: Language In Literature, 14. Galt, Sound and Sense, op. cit., 4.
ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy 15. See, for instance, Velimir Klebnikov: "The
(Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1987): 81. Warrior of the Kingdom" and "A Checklist: The
8. jan Mukarovsky: "Sound Aspect of Poetic Alphabet of the Mind," both in Imagining
Language," On Poetic Language, ed. and trans. john Language, ed. jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery
Burbank and Peter Steiner (Lisse: de Ridder, 1976): 23. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998): 362-367.
9. The literature is extensive, but see, for a 16. Ibidem, 91.
starting point: Bohuslav Havranek: Studie o q. Ibidem, 94·
spisovnem jazyce (Prague: Nakladatelstvi 18. Ibidem, 1.
Ceskoslovenske Akademie Ved, 1963) and "The 19. )ames McNeill Whistler: The Gentle Art of
Functional Differentiation of the Standard Making Enemies (London, Heinemann, 1904): 127;
Language," A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Louis Zukofsky: ''A" (Baltimore: The johns
Literary Structure, and Style, ed. and trans. Paul L. Hopkins U.P., 1993): 138.
Garvin (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown U.P., 20. John Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings
1964): 11-18 et passim; "Functional"; jan (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961): x.
Mukarovsky: "Standard Language and Poetic 21. Ibidem, 109.
Language," A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, 22. Sarah Stickney Ellis: The Poetry of Life
Literary Structure, and Style, ed. and trans. PaulL. (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1835):
Garvin (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown U.P., t68.
1964): 17-3; Roman )akobson, in two key essays: 23. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
"Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," And Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T.V. F.
Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960): 350-77, and "The 1993).
Dominant," trans. Herbert Eagle, Readings in 24. )ames William Johnson: "Lyric." Princeton
Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, op. cit., 713-37.
ed. Ladislav Mateika and Krystyna Pomorska 25. Cf Northrop Frye: "By musical I mean a
(Normal: Dalkey Archive, 2002): 82-87; and julia quality of literature denoting a substantial analogy
Kristeva: Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. to, and in many cases an actual influence from, the
Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia U.P., 1984). art of music" [Northrop Frye: "Introduction: Lex is
10. Shana Williamson: "The Poetry of Sound," and Melos," Sound and Poetry: English Institute
www.termpapersmonthly.com/essays/21769.html, Essays, 1956 (New York: Columbia U.P., 1957): x-xi].
accessed 15 December, 2007. 26. Oxford English Dictionary, op. cit.
SECTION 9

Lyric and Sexual

Difference

The introduction of feminist literary criticism, gender studies, queer theory, and sexual-
ity studies into the academy in the later twentieth century opened up new points of
departure from and for theories of the lyric. By raising questions about sexual difference,
Anglo-American critics of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s began to interrogate the abstrac-
tion of a normative lyric subject, emphasizing the gendered construction of that subject.
Yet unlike the resistance to earlier models of the lyric within avant-garde poetics, the
critical elaboration of gender and sexuality tended toward a reclamation of the modern
lyric in these last decades of the twentieth century. Those new lyric directions took many
forms: feminist critique (interrogating male authorship and the authority of a masculine
poetic tradition); gynocriticism (focusing on the conditions of female authorship and the
traditions of women's writing); gender criticism (demonstrating "gender trouble" inherent
in poetic performances of masculinity and femininity); gay and lesbian studies (identify-
ing the contemporary contexts and longer histories of homosexual writing); queer theory
(deconstructing masculine/feminine and heterosexual/homosexual binaries to move be-
yond the subject/object of desire in poems); psychoanalytic interpretation (using Freudian
and Lacanian paradigms to complicate the claim to poetic subjectivity); body studies (re-
thinking the politics of the body as played out in poetics); and minority studies (empha-
sizing the intersection of gender and sex with race, class, and other categories of identity
and difference among poets). We give just a few early examples of those forms here in order
to show the beginning (though certainly not the end) of an ongoing conversation. What the
many different varieties oflyric reading attentive to issues of sexuality and sexual difference
continue to have in common is the modern idea of the lyric as a genre that (as we have seen
in previous sections of this anthology) emerged and took hold earlier in the twentieth cen-
tury. In this section, we see how attention to ideologies of sexual difference also tend to call
into question ideologies of the lyric-though sometimes the very critics who want to desta-
bilize categories of gender and sexuality also end up keeping the category of the lyric itself
relatively stable. Lauren Berlant may be right that "the activity of being historical finds its
genre," but the historical shift in the understanding of the lyric along the subjective fault
lines of gender and sexuality has struggled to find alternative modes oflyric reading. 1
 The essay by Nancy Vickers included here is a feminist reading of Petrarch, whose 505
sonnets to Laura are often invoked as a model for Renaissance lyric. In the Petrarchan
tradition, a male subject is constituted by address to a female beloved and unified by the SECTION 9
repetition of her dismembered image: the scattered parts of Laura are re-collected by, in, LYRIC AND SEXUAL

and as the "scattered rhymes" of Petrarch's own poetic corpus. But in a further develop- DIFFERENCE

ment of this gendered analysis, Vickers goes on to emphasize the double dismemberment
of the desiring subject as well as the object of desire. Demonstrating how the poet is identi-
fied with the figure of Actaeon-through a pattern of identification and reversal in the
Greek myth, in which "Actaeon sees Diana, Diana sees Actaeon, and seeing is traumatic
for both"-Vickers traces the patterns of self-dispersal in Petrarch: "T knows that the
outcome of seeing her body is the scattering of his; hence he projects scattering onto her."
According to Vickers, the alternation between scattering and gathering in Petrarch's rime
sparse "reveals a textual strategy subtending his entire volume: it goes to the heart of his
lyric program and understandably becomes the lyric stance of generations of imitators."
Petrarch's legacy of fragmentation comes to define lyric in a tradition of writing that is
structured by sexual difference. What is understood (or, according to Vickers, is "under-
standably" assumed) in this tradition is not only an identification with Petrarch as a model
for lyric subjectivity but an identification with a lyric subject that goes to the heart of a
program for lyric reading, internalized by generations of critics as well as poetic imitators.
That lyric subject is normatively male, and his lyric object is a woman, but in Vickers's
reading, Petrarch's textual strategy is reincorporated into a critical tradition that re-
collects the masculine lyric subject as a form of feminine self-scattering.
Vickers identifies our modern model oflyric as emerging in the Renaissance (an argu-
ment we have encountered many times in the course of this anthology), and it is a model
coded by sex and gender in surprising ways. On the one hand, the model of the lyric that
emerges from Petrarch's sonnets is a genre of the masculine subject that objectifies women;
on the other hand, that very act of objectification threatens the integrity of the presumably
masculine subject. This idea that the paradigmatic sexuality of Renaissance sonnets even-
tuates in a definitive self-division of the male lyric subject was further elaborated in the
198os by Joel Fineman. Though we do not include Fineman in this volume, we recommend
that readers interested in the beginnings of queer lyric theory take a closer look at Shake-
speare's Perjured Eye, a deep reading of Shakespeare's sonnets that is also deeply im-
mersed in a Lacanian account of subject formation. Introducing a different sexual differ-
ence, Fineman was especially interested in how Shakespeare "adapted the heterosexual
tradition of the Petrarchist sonnet to the exigencies of poetic address to a man" because
such adaptation reveals a logic of differential repetition that structures the interiority of
the subject. 2 While Shakespeare's sequence of sonnets addressed to the dark lady demon-
strates the poet's disjunctive, heterogeneous, heterosexual relation to the lady, the se-
quence addressed to the young man internalizes that difference. An excess of likeness in
the young man sonnets generates the anti-Petrarchan elements in these poems, estranging
them from a previous tradition oflaudatory poetry and producing a self-estranging poetic
logic that has become so familiar in the Shakespearean tradition that it may have lost its
original strangeness. In place of sameness, Fineman's Shakespeare invents a language of
paradox and self-division, and that language becomes the language of sexual self-division
that queers subjects and sex in what becomes a lyric norm.
While in 1982 Vickers focused on the decomposition and recomposition of a mascu-
line lyric subject, and in 1986 Fineman drew attention to the sexual difference within the
modern masculine (post-Shakespearean) lyric subject, in 1979 Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar had begun to imagine a new feminist norm of thinking about the lyric and sexual
 506 difference by writing (as announced in their epigraph, quoted from Anne Finch) about
what happens to "a woman that attempts the pen." In this section, we reprint their intra-
SECTION 9 duction to Shakespeare's Sisters, a collection of critical essays on women poets that proved
LYRIC AND SEXUAL formative for feminist criticism in the 1980s. According to Gilbert and Gubar, the predica-
DIFFERENCE ment of the woman poet is determined, or overdetermined, by an abstract definition of the
lyric. Citing various critics in a "masculinist" literary tradition who seem to believe that
"the very nature of lyric poetry is inherently incompatible with the nature or essence of
femaleness," Gilbert and Gubar wonder how it is possible for women to write poetry when
"'woman' and 'poet' are being defined as contradictory terms." For Gilbert and Gubar, the
task of feminist criticism is to explore the gendered implications of that contradiction
rather than the generic complications of lyric. Starting from the assumption that "the lyric
poem is in some sense the utterance of a strong and assertive 'I,'" they conclude that "the
lyric poet must be continually aware of herself from the inside, as a subject, a speaker: she
must be, that is, assertive, authoritative, radiant with powerful feelings while at the same
time absorbed in her own consciousness-and hence, by definition, profoundly 'unwom-
anly,' even freakish." Through the recovery of women poets who assert a lyric "I,'' the pur-
pose of Shakespeare's Sisters is to introduce the possibility of an authoritative female lyric
subject who can claim female authorship. In Gilbert and Gubar, the modern theory of the
lyric became a potential vehicle of feminist self-empowerment. Quoting Sylvia Plath, they
ventriloquize the desire of women poets to declare themselves in the first person singular:
"I I have a self to recover, a queen."
But the separation of the pronoun 'T' from "a self" (marked in the enjambment of that
line) already suggests the degree to which the woman poet is a generic figure that embodies
the problem of writing as a woman: how can she "have" a self to "recover" from a masculine
poetic tradition that is not her own, or how will she discover alternate traditions in which to
claim a voice of her own? This, according to Gilbert and Gubar, is the double (or triple) bind
of the woman poet. By presenting the poetry of Plath and other "representative" women
poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, they call upon feminist
critics to explore "the crucial relationship between sexual identity and art" in general and
between sexual identity and lyric poetry in particular. In this version of feminist criti-
cism, the lyric vocation of the woman poet must mean that we agree that a lyric is the
stage for a dramatic persona, and that this dramatic persona is identical to the person of
the woman poet. Gilbert and Gubar assume a New Critical version of the lyric, but they
put that version in tension with the New Critical attempt to divorce the dramatic lyric
"speaker" from the biographical poet. Gilbert and Gubar's lyric poem is not a pudding or
a machine; it is a woman's daring chance at self-expression.
In retrospect, Gilbert and Gubar's defense of the lyric may seem symptomatic of a
particular moment in second-wave feminism, but it also made clear how difficult the
model of modern lyric reading was to escape. Changing the focus to addressing a "you"
rather than asserting an "I,'' the 1987 essay by Barbara Johnson makes visible the prob-
lems attending a feminist reclamation of the lyric, by shifting the focus to the figure of
address known as apostrophe. Her point of departure is Jonathan Culler's influential ar-
gument that apostrophe is "a rhetorical device that has come to seem almost synonymous
with the lyric voice" and perhaps even paradigmatic of"lyric poetry as such." To demon-
strate how the invocation of an absent, dead, or inanimate being in the second person
allows a first-person speaker to come into being, Johnson first considers two apostrophic
poems by Baudelaire and Shelley: she traces their attempt to build "the bridge between
the '0' of the pure vocative, Jakobson's conative function, or the pure presencing of the
second person, and the 'oh' of pure subjectivity, Jakobson's emotive function, or the pure
presencing of the first person." In her invocation of Jakobson, Johnson announces her 507
explicitly poststructuralist method, since it turns out that the structural categories break
down-though this time because the poets are women. In thinking about the problems of SEcnoN 9
address in the work of several contemporary women poets, Johnson notices how the co- LYRIC AND SEXUAL

native and emotive functions of apostrophe, and indeed apostrophe itself, become tan- DIFFERENCE

gled in poems about abortion: here it is unclear whether language serves to animate or
de-animate these object of address, and even the distinction between addresser and ad-
dressee becomes difficult to mark, since one is quite literally inside (or no longer within)
the other.
In a sustained rhetorical analysis of "The Mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks, for exam-
ple, Johnson traces shifting structures of address that complicate the assumption of a lyric
speaker: "It is never clear whether the speaker sees herself as an T or a 'you,' an addressor
or an addressee." Here Johnson introduces sexual difference not only thematically, to sug-
gest that "a great many poetic effects may be colored according to expectations articulated
through the gender of the poetic speaker," but also rhetorically, to suggest that "there may
be a deeper link between motherhood and apostrophe than we have hitherto suspected."
Linking apostrophe to the cry of an infant addressed to its mother, Johnson speculates that
"lyric poetry itself-summed up in the figure of apostrophe-comes to look like the fan-
tastically intricate history of endless elaborations and displacements of the single cry,
'Mama!'" This primal apostrophe returns us to a familiar theoretical question about the
origins oflyric as a genre, albeit with a gendered difference that prompts Johnson to gen-
eralize about the differences between male and female writing. While Johnson moves
post-structuralist reading toward differential analysis of gender in poems by Gwendolyn
Brooks, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, and Adrienne Rich, the idea of"lyric poetry itself"
remains undifferentiated: why can it be "summed up in the figure of apostrophe," and
what is the longer genealogy of that generic assumption? How much do Johnson's read-
ings differ from modern ideas about lyric as utterance overheard or as a script for the
reader to say? Even in her deconstruction of the speaking voice, suspended in the address
of 'T' to "you," Johnson sustains the New Critical paradigm of a dramatic persona who
performs the poem as a personal drama. As we saw in section 5 on "Post-Structuralist
Reading," Johnson's deft unravelling of the assumptions that guide the ways in which the
idea of the person has been ascribed to the idea of the poem must retain an idealized view
of the lyric.
Critics who are interested in articulating sexual difference and critics committed to
the articulation of different sexualities thus depart from a modern lyric norm that they
also maintain. To posit a subject for lyric reading makes it possible, and increasingly ur-
gent, not only to question the normative gender of that subject but to raise questions
about the object of its desire, and the heteronormativity of that desire. In his 1990 "The
Homosexual Lyric," Thomas Yingling posed such questions through a reading of Hart
Crane, demonstrating how Crane's poems "record the dialectical unfolding of Crane's
thought about the homosexual subject and poetry." At the same time, Yingling records
the dialectical unfolding of his own thinking about "the homosexual lyric," thinking that
is centered on the very de-centering of the lyric subject. As he surveys the development of
Crane's writing-from early poems that could be read as "homosexual autobiography"
to "more advanced inquiries into the problematics of homosexual intersubjectivity"
and to "later, more symbolic autobiographical texts"-Yingling is interested in exploring
how "Crane's lyrics test the structures of identity in a way that makes them theoretical inves-
tigations of the subject." Crane is thus folded into Yingling's own theoretical investigations of
lyric subjectivity, as the critic goes on to investigate the relationship between homosexuality
 508 and textuality in Crane's densely worked, increasingly abstract texts. We are not sur-
prised to learn that Yingling finds that what the poems foreground "most strongly as the
SECTION 9 problem of lyric-and the problem of the modern as well-is the textuality of subjectiv-
LYRIC AND SEXUAL ity." But what is "the textuality of subjectivity"? In a poem like "Possession," often read as
DIFFERENCE articulating modern urban homosexual experience, Yingling discerns "Crane's strategy
to keep syntactic relations, as homosexual desire remains, indeterminate"; by analyzing
how the first-person singular is suspended in and displaced by the rhetorical figures and
grammatical structures of this poem, Yingling suggests that "the difficult, unspeakable
quality of homosexuality stands clearly behind this construction." What is unspoken and
unspeakable in Crane's poetry leads Yingling to a double conclusion: first, that the earlier
experimental lyrics "present the search for an authentic voice and an ideological recogni-
tion of homosexual speech and writing, and-with an increasing clarity-the frustra-
tions and barriers to that project," and second, that in the later poems, "we must read the
disintegration of the speaking/writing subject ... within an ideology that made the ho-
mosexual poet's subjectivity a bizarre dialectic of anguish and ecstasy." Notwithstanding
this difficulty of articulation, Yingling ultimately emphasizes "Crane's refusal to surren-
der the homosexual subject in the lyric," reclaiming "the lyric" along with the subject it is
struggling to articulate.
Yingling's essay thus sets out to explore how the ideological interpellation of homo-
sexuality as a subject position "affected Crane's imagination of the lyric form as a genre of
self-presentation," and in doing so, Yingling demonstrates how the ideological interpella-
tion of his own subject position affects his imagination oflyric reading as a genre of critical
self-presentation. While assuming that presenting a self is what lyric does as a genre, Yin-
gling starts his essay by marking a break from "former critical theory" that "imagined the
lyric as the poetry of a single, unified voice, and imagined the task of criticism as elabora-
tion and reproduction of that voice." Yingling refers back in particular to "The Structure of
the Greater Romantic Lyric," where M. H. Abrams lays out a model of poetic and psycho-
logical realism for reading Romantic poems as the meditations of a lyric speaker, "whom we
overhear as he carries on" about tragic loss, a moral dilemma, or personal crisis, finally to
achieve an altered mood and deeper understanding. But according to Yingling, this meta-
physical pattern (from our perspective, a modern lyric imaginary retroprojected into Ro-
mantic poetry) is splintered by Crane, who "refuses these categories" and "breaks the con-
ventions of Romantic lyric." Instead, Yingling follows Allen Grossman in suggesting that
"Crane does not figure authenticity of voice by staging the speaker of the poem dramati-
cally at a distance from some more originary voice or presence" but by attempting to "re-
cord the unmediated speech, sea, song, presence of poetry itself." As we have seen in Gross-
man's phenomenological approach to lyric reading (and others included in section 7), in
this mode of lyric reading the fiction of the speaker is expanded beyond the single subject
to imagine a world of relations the poem brings into being, although Yingling is more
skeptical than Grossman about the possibility of dwelling there, adding, "we recognize the
impossible agenda of this, of course." For Yingling, the "lyricality" of Crane is the disinte-
gration of a subject that cannot inhabit the poem as a speaking voice but may be heard in
the seemingly unmediated "presence of poetry itself," albeit only as an echo of a line of
poetry in the final line of Yingling's lyrical essay: "the greatness of Crane's lyrics, written,
it is not hyperbolic to say, at the cost of his life, is that they allow homosexual subjectivity
to be heard as an authentic experience, as 'wind flaking sapphire.'"
Yingling's embrace of the elusive homosexual subject in lyric reading-that vanish-
ing object of his desire-is one way to articulate sexual difference; for other ways, we
might look at the emergence of queer theory since the last decade of the twentieth
century-a field too rich to survey here. In The Lyric Theory Reader, we include only the 509
beginning of a conversation, which would continue, for example, in Lee Edelman's ac-
count of rhetoric and desire in the poetry of Crane, introducing an early version of queer SECTION 9
reading that anatomizes figural strategies in the body of his writing without identifying LYRIC AND SEXUAL

(with) Crane as a lyric subject. By analyzing how the rhetorical figures of anacoluthon, DIFFERENCE

chiasmus, and catachresis play out in Crane's poetry in the processes of"breaking," "bend-
ing," and "bridging," Edelman discerns a "catachrestic" poetics: an improper or abusive
use of metaphor that associates perversion of poetic style with subversion of sexual norms.
"As a poet who strains toward catachresis, Crane invokes an ideology of rupture, of violent
transvaluation," Edelman argues, transvaluing his own critical practice as well: as a critic
who strains against lyric reading, though without explicitly naming it as such, he moves
toward an alternative that he later came to call "homographesis." 3 Hart Crane is a recur-
ring touchstone for other versions and variations of queer reading as well, most recently
for Michael Snediker in Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persua-
sions. Yet unlike Edelman, Snediker happily returns to the strains of lyric reading, re-
claiming "lyric personhood" as an extravagant performance of personification or (as in
the case of Bishop's "queer love" of Hart Crane) "transpersonification." 4 For Snediker this
is less an argument about the lyric as such than it is an attempt to perform and thus trans-
form the shame oflyric reading into the positive affect of queer optimism.
The productive potential of lyric shame is explored in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's essay,
"A Poem Is Being Written," too long for inclusion below but like Fineman important to men-
tion because of its highly original approach to queering the lyric. First published in 1987, it
was later reprinted in a selection of her essays written "across genders, across sexualities,"
thus arriving at the question oflyric and sexual difference from yet another angle. Riffing on
the title of Freud's essay, "A Child Is Being Beaten," Sedgwick transformed a child's memory,
or fantasy, of spanking into an identification with poetic form that associates the rhythmic
beating of the body with the beat of the poem (and vice versa). In the phantasmatic primal
scene of this "lyric tableau," Sedgwick places "a generic, i.e. ungendered, 'child' that finds its
way ... to a shiftily identificatory relation to, generically, the genre 'lyric poem.' "5 Shifting
between poetry and prose, and between writing in the first person and in the third person,
Sedgwick represented the child simultaneously as subject and object of her own lyric poem,
thus incorporating into her argument the longer generic history that has made lyric into a
genre for shifting identifications. But just as the Freudian primal scene can only be experi-
enced through deferred action, as an effect of Nachtraglichkeit, so also the lyric event is
manifested retroactively, in the repetition of an imaginary scene that Sedgwick performed
with virtuosity, not only in striking passages of lyrical writing, but more fundamentally as
an effect oflyric reading. Insofar as her riff on Freudian psychoanalysis is a meditation on
how to move "across the gaps between poetry and theory," what she discovers and exposes
in that gap are questions about the relation between gender and sexual difference and mod-
els of the lyric that we keep holding (even beating) into place, models we seem to be able to
work variations on but keep not giving up.
Even among recent poets and critics dedicated to "lyric innovation," that modern
model of lyric tends to be expanded but not exploded. In Juliana Spahr's introduction to
American Women Poets of the 21st Century, the essay with which this section concludes,
the subtitle, "Where Lyric Meets Language," indexes a "space within lyric for language
writing's more politicized claims." According to Spahr, "while most of the poets and critics
in this collection use the word 'lyric' to refer to interiority and/or intimate speech," they
also project this interiority outward, pushing beyond the limits of received lyric norms. At
the same time, writing "outside" the lyric is difficult if not impossible, according to Spahr,
 510 since twenty-first century women poets still struggle with twentieth-century ideas they
have inherited about lyric as a genre: "Many poets here speak of lyric as the genre of and
SECTION 9 about impossibility and difficulty. In short, when they talk of innovation, they often talk
LYRIC AND SEXUAL oflyric." For Spahr, avant-garde anti-lyricism returns to the lyric with a vengeance, since
DIFFERENCE "The emphasis on innovation ... is a return to what made lyric so valuable centuries ago.
Lyric is by definition innovative. When it stops being innovative it is no longer lyric." By
the twenty-first century, the task of lyricization is complete: to imagine poetry that de-
parts from lyric is to imagine a poetry that is not poetry. Instead, surveying various forms
of contemporary innovation, Spahr seeks to defend "the lyric" through a diversification
of "lyrics": "I find value in lyrics that retreat from individualism and idiosyncrasies by
pointing to heady and unexpected intimate pluralisms. And lyrics that help me to place
myself as part of a larger, connective culture." This mediation between the singular and
plural seems to move away from the feminist reclamation of the lyric 'T' two decades
earlier, but the claim to a gendered redefinition oflyric as a genre is actually an extension of
the claims of earlier feminist anthologies (including Shakespeare's Sisters). Rather than re-
covering past women poets (and critics) in her collection, what Spahr offers is a bigger and
bolder claim about the place of women's language poetry in the future oflyric: "Despite the
constant intrusion of new genres, and new media, lyric persists. Is it possible to have a cul-
ture without it?"
It is a good question. Taken apart, scattered, and reconstituted, the category of the
lyric continues to do important work in twenty-first-century ideas about sexual differ-
ence. That theory may be increasingly queer, but the lyric uncannily returns as poetic
norm. As long as we assume (as we do) the modern models of lyric reading this volume
represents, we will remain caught in the paradoxes of sexuality, gender, and genre that
those models themselves entail. To return to Berlant, while "the act of being historical"
may well be trying to "find its genre" in a new century's promise of new ways of thinking
through sex and gender, we have yet to find a critical poetic genre that does not look a lot
like the modern lyric reading that did not end when the last century ended.

NOTES
1. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, legibility is further explained and developed in Lee
NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 20. Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary
2. Fineman (1986), 2. and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994).
3. See Edelman (1987), 13. A deconstructive 4. Snediker (2009), 183.
rhetorical reading of figurations of homosexual 5. Sedgwick (1993), 187.

FURTHER READING

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Reading and Sexual Difference. Baltimore: Johns
Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Macmillan, 1975. Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare's Perjured Eye:
Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Signs The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the
1.4 (Summer 1976): 875-93. Sonnets. Berkeley: University of California
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Press, 1986.
Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa: University of Garber, Linda. Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the
Alabama Press, 2006. Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory. New
- - . The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
Practice. New York: Routledge, 1990. Goldberg, Jonathan. Desiring Women Writing:
Edelman, Lee. Transmemberment of Song: Hart English Renaissance Examples. Stanford, CA:
Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire. Stanford University Press, 1997.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987. Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley:
Felman, Shoshana. What Does a Woman Want? University of California Press, 2000.
Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Loeffelholz, Mary. Emily Dickinson and the 511
Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Boundaries of Feminist Theory. Urbana:
and Emily Dickinson. Princeton, Nj: Princeton University of Illinois Press, 1991. SECTION 9
University Press, 1980. Prins, Yopie, and Maeera Shreiber, eds. Dwelling
LYRIC AND SEXUAL
Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley, CA: in Possibility: Women Poets and Feminist
DIFFERENCE
North Atlantic Books, 1985; reprint, New York: Critics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
New Directions, 2007. 1997·
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Rose, jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath.
Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: London: Virago, 1991.
Cornell University Press, 1985. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet.
jackson, Virginia, and Yopie Prins. "Lyrical Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Studies." Victorian Literature and Culture 27.2 --."A Poem Is Being Written." Representations
(Fall1999): 521-30. 17 (1987): 110-43·
Keller, Lynn, and Cristanne Miller. Feminist Snediker, Michael. Queer Optimism: Lyric Person-
Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. Ann hood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. Minneapo-
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Kinnahan, Linda A. Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Vincent, john. Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure
Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse. in American Poetry. New York: Palgrave
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. Macmillan, 2002.
Kristeva, julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Yorke, Liz. Impertinent Voices: Subversive
Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Strategies in Contemporary Women's Poetry.
Columbia University Press, 1980. London: Routledge, 1991.

Diana Described: Scattered Woman 9.1

and Scattered Rhyme (1981)
NANCY J. VICKERS

The import ofPetrarch's description of Laura extends well beyond the confines of his own
poetic age; in subsequent times, his portrayal of feminine beauty became authoritative. As
a primary canonical text, the Rime sparse consolidated and disseminated a Renaissance
mode. Petrarch absorbed a complex network of descriptive strategies and then presented a
single, transformed model. In this sense his role in the history of the interpretation and the
internalization of woman's "image" by both men and women can scarcely be overempha-
sized. When late-Renaissance theorists, poets, and painters represented woman's body,
Petrarch's verse justified their aesthetic choices. His authority, moreover, extended beyond
scholarly consideration to courtly conversation, beyond the treatise on beauty to the after-
dinner game in celebration of it. The descriptive codes of others, both ancients and con-
temporaries, were, of course, not ignored, but the "scattered rhymes" undeniably enjoyed a
privileged status: they informed the Renaissance norm of a beautiful woman. 1
We never see in the Rime sparse a complete picture of Laura. This would not be excep-
tional if we were considering a single "song" or even a restricted lyric corpus; gothic top-to-
toe enumeration is, after all, more appropriate to narrative, more adapted to the "objective"
 512 observations of a third-person narrator than to those of a speaker who ostensibly loves,
and perhaps even addresses, the image he describes. But given an entire volume devoted to
SECTION 9 a single lady, the absence of a coherent, comprehensive portrait is significant. 2 Laura is
LYRIC AND SEXUAL always presented as a part or parts of a woman. When more than one part figures in a
DIFFERENCE single poem, a sequential, inclusive ordering is never stressed. Her textures are those of
metals and stones; her image is that of a collection of exquisitely beautiful disassociated
objects. 3 Singled out among them are hair, hand, foot and eyes: golden hair trapped and
bound the speaker; an ivory hand took his heart away; a marble foot imprinted the grass
and flowers; starry eyes directed him in his wandering. 4 In terms of qualitative attributes
(blondness, whiteness, sparkle), little here is innovative. More specifically Petrarchan,
however, is the obsessive insistence on the particular, an insistence that would in turn
generate multiple texts on individual fragments of the body or on the beauties of woman.
When the sixteenth-century poet Joachim Du Bellay chose to attack the French pro-
pensity for Italianizing, his offensive gesture against the Petrarchans (among whose num-
ber he had once prominently figured) culminated in just this awareness: in his final verses
he proposed to substitute the unified celebration of female beauty for the witty cliches of
Petrarchan particularization:

De voz beautez je diray seulement,

Que si mon oeil ne juge folement,
Vostre beaute est joincte egalement
A vostre bonne grace:

Si toutefois Petrarque vows plaist mieux,

)e choisiray cent mille nouveautez,

Dont je peindray voz plus grandes beautez
Sur la plus belle Idee.
["Contre les Petrarquistes," 11. 193-96, 201, 206-8]

[Of your beauties I will only say that, if my eye does not mistakenly judge, your beauty is
perfectly joined to your good grace: ... But if you still like Petrarch better ... I will choose
a hundred thousand new ways to paint your greatest beauties according to the most
beautiful Idea.]S

Du Bellay's opposition of "beauties" and "beauty" suggests the idiosyncratic nature of

Petrarch's depiction of woman as a composite of details. It would surely seem that toPe-
trarch Laura's whole body was at times less than some of its parts; and that to his imita-
tors the strategy of describing her through the isolation of those parts presented an at-
tractive basis for imitation, extension, and, ultimately, distortion. I will redefine that
strategy here in terms of a myth to which both the Rime and the Renaissance obsessively
return, a myth complex in its interpretation although simple in its staging. As a privi-
leged mode of signifying, the recounting of a mythical tale within a literary text reveals
concerns, whether conscious or unconscious, which are basic to that text. 6 It is only logi-
cal, then, to examine Petrarch's use of a myth about seeing woman in order to reexamine
his description of a woman seen. The story of Actaeon's encounter with the goddess Di-
ana is particularly suited to this purpose, for it is a story not only of confrontation with
forbidden naked deity but also with forbidden naked femininity.
In the twenty-third canzone, the canzone of the metamorphoses, Petrarch's "I" nar-
rates a history of changes: he was Daphne (a laurel), Cygnus (a swan), Battus (a stone),
Byblis (a fountain), Echo (a voice), he will never be Jove (a golden raincloud), and he is 513
Actaeon (a stag). He has passed through a series of painful frustrations, now experiences
a highly specific one, and will never be granted the sexual fulfillment of a god capable of 9.1
transforming himself into a golden shower and inseminating the object of his desire. His NANCY J. VIcKERs
use of the present in the last full stanza, the Actaeon stanza, is telling, for it centers this
can zone on the juxtaposition of what the speaker was and what he now is: "Alas, what am
I? What was I? The end crowns the life, the evening the day." 7 The end also crowns the
song, and this song paradoxically abandons its speaker in the form of a man so trans-
muted that he cannot speak:

I' segui' tanto avanti il mio desire

ch' un di, cacciando si com' io solea,
mi mossi, e quella fera bella et cruda
in una fonte ignuda
si stava, quando 'I sol piu forte ardea.
Io perche d'altra vista non m'appago
stetti a mirarla, ond' ella ebbe vergogna
et per fame vendetta o per celarse
l'acqua nel viso cole man mi sparse.
Vero din); forse e' parra menzogna:
ch'i' senti' trarmi de !a propria imago
et in un cervo solitario et vago
di selva in selva ratto mi trasformo,
et ancor de' miei can fuggo lo stormo.
[RS, 23. 147-60]

[I followed so far my desire that one day, hunting as I was wont, I went forth, and that
lovely cruel wild creature was in a spring naked when the sun burned most strongly. I,
who am not appeased by any other sight, stood to gaze on her, whence she felt shame and,
to take revenge or to hide herself, sprinkled water in my face with her hand. I shall speak
the truth, perhaps it will appear a lie, for I felt myself drawn from my own image and into
a solitary wandering stag from wood to wood quickly I am transformed and still I flee the
belling of my hounds.]

Petrarch's account of Actaeon's story closely follows the subtext that obviously sub-
tends the entire canzone-Ovid's Metamorphoses. Actaeon is, as usual, hunting with
friends. At noon, he stumbles upon a grove where he sees Diana, chaste goddess of the
hunt and of the moon, bathing nude in a pool. 8 In the Metamorphoses she is surrounded
by protective nymphs, but Petrarch makes no mention of either her company or of Ac-
taeon's. He thus focuses the exchange on its principal players. Actaeon is transfixed (a
stance Petrarch exaggerates), and Diana, both in shame and anger, sprinkles ("spargens")
his face ("vultum") and hair ("comas") with water. Although in the Rime sparse Diana is
significantly silenced, in the Metamorphoses she utters, "Now you can tell ['narres ... li-
cet'] that you have seen me unveiled ['posito velamine']-that is, if you can tell ['si poteris
narrare']." 9 Diana's pronouncement simultaneously posits telling (description) as the
probable outcome of Actaeon's glance and negates the possibility of that telling. Her
vengeful baptism triggers a metamorphosis: it transforms Actaeon from horn to hoof into
a voiceless, fearful stag (Metamorphoses 3.193-98). It is at this moment that Petrarch, with
his characteristic use of an iterative present, situates his speaker: No other sight appeases
me; "I am transformed"; "I flee." 10 The speaker is Actaeon, but, more important, he is a
 514 self-conscious Actaeon: he knows his own story; he has read his own text; he is defined by
it and even echoes it in articulating his suffering. What awaits him is annihilation through
SECTION 9 dismemberment, attack unto death by his own hounds goaded on by his own devoted
lYRIC AND SEXUAL friends.
DIFFERENCE Seeing and bodily disintegration, then, are related poles in the Ovidian context that
Petrarch brings to his text; they also are poles Ovid conjoins elsewhere. Actaeon's mytho-
logical antitypes in dismemberment, Pentheus and Orpheus, are both textually and ex-
perientially linked to his story. 11 His is the subtext to their suffering; he is the figure for
their pain. In Metamorphoses 3.708-33, Pentheus gapes with "profane eyes" upon the fe-
male celebrants of the sacred rites of Bacchus, and they, urged by his mother (the woman
who sees him), tear his body limb from limb: "Let the ghost of Actaeon move your heart,"
he pleads, but "she [his mother] knows not who Actaeon is, and tears the suppliant's right
arm away." In Metamorphoses 11.26-27, Orpheus is so grief stricken at having irrevocably
lost Eurydice by turning back to look at her that he shuns other women; falling victim to
an explosion of female jealousy, he is dismembered and scattered, "as when in the amphi-
theatre ... the doomed stag is the prey of dogs."
All three men, then, transgress, see women who are not to be seen, and are torn to
bits. But the Orpheus-Actaeon analogy is particularly suggestive, for in the case of Or-
pheus, seeing and dismemberment are discrete events in time. The hiatus between them,
the extended reprieve, is a span of exquisite though threatened poetry, of songs of absence
and loss. Petrarch's "modern" Actaeon is in that median time: he is fearful of the price of
seeing, yet to be paid, but still pleased by what he saw. The remembered image is the source
of all joy and pain, peace and anxiety, love and hate: "Living is such heavy and long pain,
that I call out for the end in my great desire to see her again whom it would have been bet-
ter not to have seen at all" (RS, 312.12-14). Thus he must both perpetuate her image and
forget it: he must "cry out in silence," cry out "with paper and ink," that is to say, write (RS,
71.6, 23.99). It is especially important to note that the productive paralysis born of this am-
bivalence determines a normative stance for countless lovesick poets of the Petrarchan
generations. As Leonard Barkan has recently shown, "From that source [Petrarch] Actae-
on's story becomes throughout the Renaissance a means of investigating the complicated
psychology oflove." 12 When Shakespeare, for example, lends a critical ear to Orsino in his
opening scene to Twelfth Night, we hear what was by 16oo the worn-out plaint of alan-
guishing lover caught precisely in Actaeon's double bind:
cuRIO: Will you go to hunt, my lord?
ORSINO: What, Curio?
CURIO: The hart.
ORSINO: Why, so I do, the noblest that I have.
0, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purg' d the air of pestilence!
That instant was I turn'd into a hart,
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E'er since pursue me.
[Act 1, sc. 1, II. 16-23]
Subsequent imitation, no matter how creative or how wooden, bears witness to the read-
er's awareness of and the writer's engagement in the practice of "speaking" in Actaeon's
voice. A reassessment of Petrarch's use of Actaeon's fate to represent the status of his
speaking subject, then, constitutes a reassessment of not just one poetic stance but of
many. When we step back from the Petrarchans to Petrarch, the casting of the poet in this
role (and, by extension, the beloved in that of Diana) is less a cliche than a construct that 515
can be used to explain both the scattering of woman and of rhyme in his vernacular lyric.
Here the "metaphor of appearance," so central to the volume, is paired with the myth of 9.1
appearance: the fateful first perception of Laura-an image obsessively remembered, re- NANCY J. VICKERS
worked, and repeated-assumes a mythical analogue and mythical proportionY What the
reader must then ask is why that remembrance, like the rhyme ("rimembra"/"membra"
[remember/members]) that invokes it, is one of parts: "Clear, fresh, sweet waters, where she
who alone seems lady to me rested her lovely body ["membra"], gentle branch where it
pleased her (with sighing I remember)" (RS, 126.1-5).'4
Although traces of Diana are subtly woven into much of the imagistic texture that
progressively reveals the composite of Laura, only one text refers to her by name:

Non al suo amante piu Diana piacque

quando per tal ventura tutta ignuda
Ia vide in mezzo dele gelide acque,

ch' a me Ia pastorella alpestra et crud a

posta a bagnar un leggiadretto velo
ch' a !'aura il vago et biondo cape! chiuda;

tal che mi fece, or quand' egli arde 'I cielo,

tutto tremar d'un amoroso gielo.
[RS, 52]

[Not so much did Diana please her lover when, by a similar chance, he saw her all naked
amid the icy waters,

as did the cruel mountain shepherdess please me, set to wash a pretty veil that keeps her
lovely blond head from the breeze;

so that she made me, even now when the sky is burning, all tremble with a chill oflove.]

This simple madrigal based on the straightforward equation of the speaker's pleasure at
seeing Laura's veil and Actaeon's pleasure at seeing Diana's body has, of late, received
lengthy and suggestive comment. Giuseppe Mazzotta, in an analysis centered on Pe-
trarch's "language of the self," reads it in relation to a reversibility of"subject and object." 15
John Freccero places Petrarch's use of the "veil covering a radiant face" motif within its
traditional context (Saint Paul to Dante), that of a "figure for the relationship of the sign to
its referent." He concludes that Laura's "veil, bathed in the water like the naked goddess
seen by Acteon, functions as a fetish, an erotic signifier of a referent whose absence the
lover refuses to acknowledge." That act of substituting the veil for the body, previously
linked by Freccero to the Augustinian definition of idolatry, ultimately associates the
fragmentation of Laura's body and the "nonreferentiality" of Petrarch's sequence:

One of the consequences of treating a signifier as an absolute is that its integrity cannot be
maintained. Without a principle of intelligibility, an interpretant, a collection of signs
threatens to break down into its component parts .... So it is with Laura. Her virtues and
her beauties are scattered like the objects of fetish worship: her eyes and hair are like gold
and topaz on the snow, while the outline of her face is lost; ... Like the poetry that cele-
brates her, she gains immortality at the price of vitality and historicity. Each part of her has
the significance of her entire person; it remains the task of the reader to string together her
gemlike qualities into an idealized unity. 16
 516 Freccero's analysis departs from a position shared by many contemporary Petrarch
critics-that of the centrality of a dialectic between the scattered and the gathered, the
SECTION 9 integrated and the disintegratedP In defining Petrarch's "poetics of fragmentation,"
LYRIC AND SExuAL these same critics have consistently identified as its primary figure the particularizing
DIFFERENCE descriptive strategy adopted to evoke Laura. 18 If the speaker's "self" (his text, his "cor-
pus") is to be unified, it would seem to require the repetition of her dismembered image.
"Woman remains," as Josette Feral has commented in another context, "the instrument
by which man attains unity, and she pays for it at the price of her own dispersion." 19
Returning to Rime sparse 52, some obvious points must be made: first, this text is read
as an emblem ofPetrarchan fragmentation; and second, it turns on a highly specific anal-
ogy ("I am pleased by Laura's veil as Actaeon was pleased by Diana's nakedness"; "My
fetish equals Diana's body"). It is the analogy itself that poses an additional problem.
While the enunciation of ''I" 's fetishistic pleasure through comparison with Actaeon's
voyeuristic pleasure might appear incongruous, it is both appropriate and revealing.
The Actaeon-Diana story is one of identification and reversal: Actaeon hunts; Diana
hunts; and their encounter reduces him to the status of the hunted. 20 This fated meeting,
this instant of midday recognition, is one of fascination and repulsion: it is a confrontation
with difference where similarity might have been desired or even expected. It is a glance
into a mirror-witness the repeated pairing of this myth with that of Narcissus (Metamor-
phoses 3.344-510)-that produces an unlike and deeply threatening image. 21 Perceiving that
image is, of course, prohibited; such a transgression violates proscriptions imposed on pow-
erless humans in their relation to powerful divinities. Similarly, such a transgression vio-
lates proscriptions imposed upon powerless men (male children) in relation to powerful
women (mothers): 22 "This is thought," writes Howard Daniel, "to be one of many myths
relating to the incest mechanism-punishment for an even accidental look at something
forbidden." 23 The Actaeon-Diana encounter read in this perspective reenacts a scene funda-
mental to theorizing about fetishistic perversion: the troubling encounter of a male child
with intolerable female nudity, with a body lacking parts present in his own, with a body
that suggests the possibility of dismemberment. Woman's body, albeit divine, is displayed
to Actaeon, and his body, as a consequence, is literally taken apart. Petrarch's Actaeon, hav-
ing read his Ovid, realizes what will ensue: his response to the threat of imminent dismem-
berment is the neutralization, through descriptive dismemberment, of the threat. He trans-
forms the visible totality into scattered words, the body into signs; his description, at one
remove from his experience, safely permits and perpetuates his fascination.
The verb in the Rime sparse that places this double dismemberment in the foreground
is determinant for the entire sequence-spargere, "to scatter." It appears in some form
(most frequently that of the past-participial adjective "sparso, -i, -a, -e") forty-three times;
nineteen apply specifically to Laura's body and its emanations (the light from her eyes, the
generative capacity of her footsteps) and thirteen to the speaker's mental state and its ex-
pression (tears, voice, rhymes, sighs, thoughts, praises, prayers, hopes). The uses of spargere
thus markedly gravitate toward ''I" and Laura. The etymological roots of the term, more-
over, virtually generate Laura's metaphoric codes: "'''knows that the outcome of seeing her
body is the scattering of his; hence he projects scattering onto her through a process of fe-
tishistic overdetermination, figuring those part-objects in terms of the connotations of
"scattering": spargere, from the Latin spargere, with cognates in the English "sprinkle"
and "sparkle" and in the Greek arrizpw-"I disseminate." Laura's eyes, as in the sequence of
three canzoni devoted exclusively to them (RS, 71-73), are generative sparks emanating from
the stars; they sow the seeds of poetry in the "muffled soil" of the poet (RS, 71.102-5), and they
sprinkle glistening drops like clear waters. Her body parts metaphorically inseminate; his do 517
not: "Song, I was never the cloud of gold that once descended in a precious rain so that it
partially quenched the fire of]ove; but I have certainly been a flame lit by a lovely glance and 9.1
I have been the bird that rises highest in the air raising her whom in my words I honor" (RS, NANCY). VIcKERs

23. 161-66). Desire directed in vain at a forbidden, distant goddess is soon sublimated desire
that spends itself in song. That song is, in turn, the celebration and the violation of that god-
dess: it would re-produce her vulnerability; it would re-present her nakedness to a (male)
reader who will enter into collusion with, even become, yet another Actaeon. 24
Within the context of Petrarch's extended poetic sequence, the lady is corporeally
scattered; the lover is emotionally scattered and will be corporeally scattered, and thus the
relation between the two is one of mirroring. "I," striking Actaeon's pose, tells us that he
stood fixed to see hut also to mirror Diana-Laura ("mirarla"). 25 He offers to eliminate
the only source of sadness for the "lovely eyes," their inability to see themselves, by mirror-
ing them (RS, 71.57-60). And he transforms the coloration of the lady's flesh into roses
scattered in snow in which he mirrors himself (RS, 146.5-6). The specular nature of this
exchange explains, in large part, the disconcerting interchangeability of its participants.
Even the key rhyme "rimembra/membra" reflects a doubling: twice the membra are his
(RS, 15 and 23); once those of the lost heroes of a disintegrating body politic, a dissolving
mother country (RS, 53); and twice hers (RS, 126 and 127). In reading the Diana-veil madri-
gal cited above, Mazzotta demonstrates this textual commingling, pointing out that Di-
ana's body, in the first tercet, is completely naked ("tutta ignuda") in a pool of icy waters
("gelide acque") but, by the last line, her observer's body is all atremble ("tutto tremor")
with a chill of love ("un amoroso gielo"). Mazzotta goes on to note that male/female roles
often alternate in Petrarch's figurations of the speaker/Laura relationship: he is Echo to her
Narcissus, Narcissus to her Echo; she is Apollo to his Daphne, Daphne to his Apollo, and
so on. 26 The space of that alternation is a median one-a space of looks, mirrors, and texts.
Actaeon sees Diana, Diana sees Actaeon, and seeing is traumatic for both. She is
ashamed, tries to hide her body (her secret), and thus communicates her sense of violation.
Her observer consequently knows that pleasure in the sight before him constitutes trans-
gression; he deduces that transgression, although thrilling (arousing), is threatening (cas-
trating). Their initial communication is a self-conscious look; the following scenario fills
the gap between them: "I ... stood to gaze on her, whence she felt shame and, to take re-
venge or to hide herself, sprinkled water ["mi sparse" -cf. Ovid, "spargens"] in my face
with her hand[s]. I shall speak the truth" (RS, 23.153-56). She defends herself and assaults
him with scattered water; he responds with scattered words: "You who hear in scattered
rhymes the sound of those sighs with which I flourished my heart during my first youth-
ful error, when I was in part another man from what I am now" (RS, 1.1-4). Water and
words, then, pass between them; hands and transparent drops cannot conceal her but do
precipitate a metamorphosis, preventing a full sounding of what was momentarily seen.
Threatened rhymes try to iterate a precious, fleeting image, to transmute it into an idol
that can be forever possessed, that will be forever present.
But description is ultimately no more than a collection of imperfect signs, signs that,
like fetishes, affirm absence by their presence. Painting Laura in poetry is but a twice-
removed, scripted rendering of a lost woman (body ~ introjected image of the body ~
textual body), an enterprise by definition fragmentary. 'T' speaks his anxiety in the hope
of finding repose through enunciation, of re-membering the lost body, of effecting an in-
verse incarnation-her flesh made word. At the level of the fictive experience which he
describes, successes are ephemeral, and failures become a way oflife.
 520 "Not that I do not see how much my praise injures you [the eyes]; but I cannot resist the
great desire that is in me since I saw what no thought can equal, let alone speech, mine or
SECTION 9 others'" (RS, 71.16-21).
LYRIC AND SEXUAL Silencing Diana is an emblematic gesture; it suppresses a voice, and it casts genera-
DIFFERENCE tions of would-be Lauras in a role predicated upon the muteness of its player. 31 A modern
Actaeon affirming himself as poet cannot permit Ovid's angry goddess to speak her dis-
pleasure and deny his voice; his speech requires her silence. Similarly, he cannot allow her
to dismember his body; instead he repeatedly, although reverently, scatters hers through-
out his scattered rhymes.

NOTES

An early version of this paper was shared with Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M. Dulling
the University Seminar on Feminist Inquiry at (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), canzone 23, II. 30-31:
Dartmouth College; I sincerely appreciate the time, all further references to the Rime sparse will be
attention, and suggestions of its members. I am included in the text with poem and line number in
particularly indebted to Richard Corum, jonathan parentheses and with Durling's translation. For
Goldberg, Katherine Hayles, Marianne Hirsch, recent analyses of Rime sparse 23, see Dennis
David Kastan, Stephen Orgel, Esther Rash kin, Dutschke, Francesco Petrarca: Can zone XXIII from
Christian Wolff and Holly Wulff for their First to Final Version (Ravenna, 1977), and Albert).
contributions. Rivero, "Petrarch's 'Net dolce tempo de Ia prima
1. On this "thoroughly self-conscious fashion," etade."' Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 92-112.
see Elizabeth Cropper, "On Beautiful Women, 8. For an extremely useful comparison of the
Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Ovid ian and Petrarchan narrations of this scene,
Style," Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 374-94. Cropper see Dutschke, Francesco Petrarca, pp. 200-209. On
shares many of the observations on Petrarchan the relationship between midday and sexuality in
descriptive technique outlined in the following this myth, see Nicolas). Perella, Midday in Italian
paragraph (see pp. 385-86). I am indebted to David Literature: Variations on an Archetypal Theme
Quint for bringing this excellent essay to my (Princeton, N.)., 1979), pp. 8-9.
attention. 9· Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Frank).
2. Description is, of course, always fragmentary Miller, 2 vols. (1921; London, 1971), bk. 3, II. 192-93;
in that it is by nature enumerative. Petrarch, all further references to the Metamorphoses will be
however, systematically avoids those structures included in the text with book and line number in
that would mask fragmentation. On enumeration parentheses. The quotations from this work are
and the descriptive text, see Roland Barthes, S/Z based upon but do not entirely reproduce Miller's
(Paris, 1970), pp. 120-22. edition.
3. For lengthy discussions of these qualities of 10. On the use of the present tense in relation to
Petrarchan descriptions, see Robert Durling, Actaeon, see Durling's introduction to Petrarch's
"Petrarch's 'Giovene donna sot to un verde Iauro,'" Lyric Poems, p. 28.
Modern Language Notes 86 (1971): 1-20, and John 11. On the association of Actaeon and Orpheus,

Freccero, "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch 's see ibid., p. 29. On Actaeon and Pentheus, see
Poetics," Diacritics 5 (Spring 1975): 34-40. Norman 0. Brown, "Metamorphoses II: Actaeon,"
4. On Petrarch 's role in the popularization of American Poetry Review 1 (November/December
this topos, see )ames V. Mirollo, "In Praise of 'La 1972): 38.
bella mano': Aspects of Late Renaissance 12. Barkan, "Diana and Actaeon," p. 335. On the
Lyricism," Comparative Literature Studies 9 (1972): use of this myth in medieval lyric, see Stephen C.
31-43. See also )ames Villas, "The Petrarchan Nichols, )r., "Rhetorical Metamorphosis in the
Topos 'Bel piede': Generative Footsteps," Romance Troubadour Lyric," in Melanges de langue et de
Notes 11 (1969): 167-73. litterature medievales offerts aPierre Le Gentil,
s. Italics and translation mine. Professeur a Ia Sorbo nne, parses collegues, ses
6. For a recent summary and bibliography of the eleves, et ses am is, ed. Jean Dufournet and Daniel
place of myth in the Renaissance text, see Leonard Poirion (Paris, 1973), pp. 569-85.
Barkan, "Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as 13. See Giuseppe Mazzotta, "The Canzoniere and
Synthesis," English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980). the Language of the Self,'' Studies in Philology 73
7· Petrarch 's Lyric Poems: The "Rime sparse" and (1978): 277·
:4. The connection between these verses and the Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (Autumn 1975): 6-18. 521
::>iana /Actaeon myth is noted by Durling, The On women conditioned by patriarchal culture to
Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic (Cambridge, see themselves as "sights," see jessica Benjamin, 9.1
Mass., 1965), p. 73· See also my "Re-membering "The Bonds of Love: Rational Violence and Erotic
NANCY J. VICKERS
Dante: Petrarch 's 'Chiare, fresche et do lei acque,'" Domination," in The Future of Difference, ed.
Modern Language Notes 96 (1981): 8-9. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston, 1980),
15. See Mazzotta, "The Canzoniere," pp. 282-84. p. 52, and Berger, Ways of Seeing, pp. 46-51
16. Freccero, "The Fig Tree," pp. 38-39. 25. I am, of course, alluding to the etymological
17. See, e.g., Durling, introduction to Petrarch 's associations and not the definition of the verb
Lyric Poems; Freccero, "The Fig Tree"; and mirare ("to stare").
Mazzotta, Canzoniere." 26. Mazzotta, "The Canzoniere," pp. 282-84. See
18. For the phrase "poetics of fragmentation," see also Durling, introduction to Petrarch 's Lyric
Mazzotta, "The Canzoniere," p. 274. Poems, pp. 31-32.
19. Josette Feral, "Antigone or The Irony of the 27. For recent analyses of the play on Laura/
Tribe," trans. Alice Jardine and Tom Gora, Iauro, see Francois Rigolot, "Nature and Function
Diacritics 8 (Fall1978): 7· I am indebted to Elizabeth of Paronomasia in the Canzoniere," Italian
Abel for calling this quotation to my attention. See Quarterly 18 (Summer 1974): 29-36, and Marga
also Durling, introduction to Petrarch 's Lyric Cottino- )ones, "The Myth of Apollo and Daphne
Poems, p. 21, and Mazzotta, "The Canzoniere," in Petrarch's Canzoniere: The Dynamics and
p. 273· Literary Function of"Transformation," in Francis
20. See Barkan, "Diana and Actaeon," pp. Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium, ed.
320-22, and Brown, "Metamorphoses II," p. 40. Aldo Scaglione (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975), pp.
21. See Barkan, "Diana and Actaeon," pp. 321, 152-76.
343; Brown, "Metamorphoses II," p. 39; Durling, 28. Cropper, "On Beautiful Women," p. 376.
introduction to Petrarch's Lyric Poems, p. 31; and 29. On the Diana/Actaeon myth and "the danger
Mazzotta, "The Canzoniere," pp. 274, 282. of losing the poetic voice, see Mazzotta, "The
22. This myth has often been used to point to Canzoniere," p. 278; see also Dulling, introduction
relationships of power through play on the words to Petrarch 's Lyric Poems, p. 28.
cervus/servus, cerf/serf(stag/slave): see Barkan 30. See Dutschke, Francesco Petrarca, pp.
"Diana and Actaeon," p. 328. The identification of 196-98.
Diana with women in political power is perhaps 31. For the problem of women writing within the
best exemplified by the frequent representation of constraints of the Petrarchan tradition, see Ann R.
Elizabeth I as Diana; see Barkan, pp. 332-35. )ones, "Assimilation with a Difference: Renais-
23. Howard Daniel, Encyclopedia of Themes and sance Women Poets and Literary Influence," Yale
Subjects in Painting, s.v. "Actaeon" (London, 1971). French Studies no. 62 (October 1981); on the impact
Daniel's point is, of course, supported by the of another masculine lyric tradition on women
tradition identifying Actaeon's hounds with the poets, see Margaret Homans, Women Writers and
Law, with his conscience: "Remorse, the bite of a Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte
mad dog, Conscience, the superego, the introjected and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, N.j., 1980), pp.
father or animal: now eating us even as we ate him" 12-40. Laura Mulvey comments on the silencing of
(Brown, "Metamorphoses II," p. 39); see also women in her rereading of a different medium,
Perella, Midday in Italian Literature, p. 42. On film: "Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as
Actaeon as "unmanned" or castrated, see Barkan, signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic
"Diana and Actaeon," pp. 350-51. order in which man can live out his phantasies and
24. See Daniel, "Actaeon." On the casting of the obsessions through linguistic command by
male spectator (reader) in the role of the voyeur, see imposing them on the silent image of woman still
also john Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York, 1977), tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker
pp. 45-64, and Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and of meaning" ("Visual Pleasure," p. 7).
9.2 Gender, Creativity, and the Woman
Poet (1979)
SANDRA M. GILBERT and SusAN GuBAR

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such an intruder on the rights of men,
Such a presumptuous Creature, is esteem' d,
The fault can by no vertue be redeem' d ...
How are we fal'n, fal'n by mistaken rules?
And Education's, more than Nature's fools,
Debarr' d from all improve-ments of the mind,
And to be dull, expected and dessigned .... 1

These lines were written by Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchilsea, in the late sev-
enteenth century, and more than two centuries later even so successful an artist as Vir-
ginia Woolf was still speculating on their meaning. If Shakespeare had had a "wonder-
fully gifted sister," she mused in 1928, society would have sternly discouraged her literary
aspirations. Judith Shakespeare might have run off to London to become a poet-
playwright, for "the birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she." Yet she
would have quickly found such a vocation impossible, "and so-who shall measure the
heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?-she
killed herself one winter night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses
now stop outside the Elephant and Castle." 2 Yet of course Shakespeare did-and does-
have many sisters. Perhaps none have attained the equality of renown Anne Finch and
Virginia Woolf envisioned, but neither are they all buried at an obscure crossroads. Some
have lived and worked in other lands, other times-Shakespeare's foreign relatives or older
sisters, to pursue the metaphor. Others, akin in language as well as vocation to the poet
himself, have struggled to perfect their art in England and America.
It is the purpose of this anthology [Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women
Poets] to examine the achievement of representative members of this last group of poets,
Shakespeare's English-speaking sisters, and to examine it specifically in relation to all
those patriarchal social strictures, all those obstacles that discourage women from at-
tempting the pen, which Anne Finch's lines describe and Virginia Woolf's parable de-
fines. For women poets, from Finch herself to Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, have
known very well that they are women poets. Readers, critics, and sometimes even friends
have reminded them that to attempt the pen has historically been a subversive act for a
woman in a culture which assumes that, as Poet Laureate Robert Southey told Charlotte
Bronte in 1837, "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it out not to be." 3
Significantly, Southey's remark was a response not to Bronte's fiction but to some po-
ems she had sent him. While a number of fine feminist studies have recently explored the
relationship between gender and creativity in the work of women novelists,4 the problems
as well as the triumphs of women poets in England and America still remain inexplicably 523
obscure. Yet the obstructions such literary women confronted were even more formidable
than those faced by female novelists. Though fiction writers like the Bronte sisters and 9.2
George Eliot were often measured against an intellectual double standard that made them SANDRA M. GILBERT

the targets of what Elaine Showalter wittily calls "ad feminam criticism,"5 their literary ef- AND SusAN GuBAR

forts evidently seemed less problematical than those of women poets, even to misogynistic
readers. Their art was not actively encouraged, but it was generally understood by the late
eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century that under conditions of press-
ing need a woman might have to live by her pen. As a professional novelist, however,
whether she was delighting her audience with fantasies of romance or instructing it with
didactic moral tales, such a woman was not so different from her less gifted but equally
needy sisters who went out into the world to earn their livings by "instructing" as govern-
esses (if they were respectable) or "delighting" as actresses (if they were less respectable).
As Woolf notes in A Room of One's Own, moreover, the realistic novel, with its appetite
for physical and social detail, requires precisely the sort of reportorial skill women could
develop even in their own drawing rooms, and since the discrimination of the passions
was supposedly a special female talent, female novelists could use their socially sanc-
tioned sensitivity to manners and morals in the delineation of characters or the construc-
tion of plots. Indeed, beginning with Aphra Behn and burgeoning with Fanny Burney,
Anne Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen, the English novel seems to have been
in some sense a female invention.
Despite a proliferation of literary ancestresses, however, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
commented mournfully in 1845 that "England has had many learned women ... and yet
where are the poetesses? ... I look everywhere for grandmothers, and see none." 6 In 1862,
moreover, Emily Dickinson, articulating in another way the same distinction between
women's prose and women's verse, expressed similar bewilderment. Complaining that

They shut me up in Prose-

As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet-
7
Because they liked me "still" -

she implied a recognition that poetry by women was in some sense inappropriate, unla-
dylike, immodest. And in 1928, as if commenting on both Barrett Browning's comment
and Dickinson's complaint, Woolf invented a tragic history for her "Judith Shakespeare"
because she so deeply believed that it is "the poetry that is still denied outlet."
Why did these three literary women consider poetry by women somehow forbidden
or problematical? Woolf herself, after all, traced the careers of Anne Finch and Margaret
Cavendish, admired the "wild poetry" of the Brontes, noted that Barrett Browning's verse-
novel Aurora Leigh had poetic virtues no prose work could rival, and spoke almost with awe
of Christina Rossetti's "complex song."8 Why, then, did she feel that "Judith Shakespeare"
was "caught and tangled," "denied," suffocated, self-buried, or not yet born? We can begin
to find answers to these questions by briefly reviewing some of the ways in which represen-
tative male readers and critics have reacted to poetry by representative women like Bar-
rett Browning and Dickinson.

Introducing The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1959, James Reeves quoted "a
friend" as making a statement which expresses the predominant attitude of many male
literati toward poetry by women even more succinctly than Woolf's story did: "A friend
who is also a literary critic has suggested, not perhaps quite seriously, that 'woman poet'
 524 is a contradiction in terms." 9 In other words, from what Woolf would call the "masculin-
ist" point of view, the very nature oflyric poetry is inherently incompatible with the nature
SECTION 9 or essence of femaleness. Remarks by other "masculinist" readers and critics elaborate on
LYRIC AND SEXUAL the point. In the midst of favorably reviewing the work of his friend Louise Bogan, for in-
DIFFERENCE stance, Theodore Roethke detailed the various "charges most frequently leveled against
poetry by women." Though his statement begins by pretending objectivity, it soon be-
comes clear that he himself is making such accusations:

Two of the [most frequent] charges ... are lack of range-in subject matter, in emotional
tone-and lack of a sense of humor. And one could, in individual instances among writers
of real talent, add other aesthetic and moral shortcomings: the spinning out; the embroi-
dering of trivial themes; a concern with the mere surfaces of life-that special province of
the feminine talent in prose-hiding from the real agonies of the spirit; refusing to face up
to what existence is; lyric or religious posturing; running between the boudoir and the
altar; stamping a tiny foot against God or lapsing into a sententiousness that implies the
author has re-invented integrity; carrying on excessively about Fate, about time; lament-
ing the lot of the woman; caterwauling; writing the same poem about fifty times, and
10
so on ....

Even a cursory reading of this passage reveals its inconsistency: women are taxed for both
triviality and sententiousness, for both silly superficiality and melodramatic "carrying
on" about profound subjects. More significantly, however, is the fact that Roethke attacks
female poets for doing just what male poets do-that is, for writing about God, fate, time,
and integrity; for writing obsessively on the same themes or subjects, and so forth. But his
language suggests that it is precisely the sex of these literary women that subverts their
art. Shaking a Promethean male fist "against God" is one perfectly reasonable aesthetic
strategy, apparently, but stamping a "tiny" feminine foot is quite another.
Along similar lines, John Crowe Ransom noted without disapproval in a 1956 essay
about Emily Dickinson that "it is a common belief among readers (among men readers
at least) that the woman poet as a type ... makes flights into nature rather too easily
and upon errands which do not have metaphysical importance enough to justify so
radical a strategy." 11 Elsewhere in the same essay, describing Dickinson as "a little
home-keeping person" he speculated that "hardly ... more" than "one out of seven-
teen" of her 1,775 poems are destined to become "public property," and observed that
her life "was a humdrum affair of little distinction," although "in her Protestant com-
munity the gentle spinsters had their assured and useful place in the family circle, they
had what was virtually a vocation." 12 (But how, he seemed to wonder, could someone with
so humdrum a social destiny have written great poetry?) Equally concerned with the
problematical relationship between Dickinson's poetry and her femaleness-with, that is,
what seemed to be an irreconcilable conflict between her "gentle" spinsterhood and her
fierce art-R. P. Blackmur decided in 1937 that "she was neither a professional poet nor an
amateur; she was a private poet who wrote indefatigably, as some women cook or knit.
Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of
antimacassars." 13
Even in 1971, male readers of Dickinson brooded upon this apparent dichotomy of
poetry and femininity. John Cody's After Great Pain perceptively analyzes the suffering
that many of Dickinson's critics and biographers have refused to acknowledge. But his
conclusion emphasizes what he too sees as the incompatibility between womanly fulfill-
ment and passionate art.
 Had Mrs. Dickinson been warm and affectionate, more intelligent, effective, and admira- 525
ble, Emily Dickinson early in life would probably have identified with her, become domes-
tic, and adopted the conventional woman's role. She would then have become a church 9.2
member, active in community affairs, married, and had children. The creative potentiality SANDRA M. GiLBERT
would of course still have been there, but would she have discovered it? What motivation to AND SUSAN GUBAR

write could have replaced the incentive given by suffering and loneliness? If in spite of her
wifely and motherly duties, she had still felt the need to express herself in verse, what would
her subject matter have been? Would art have sprung from fulfillment, gratification, and
completeness as abundantly as it did from longing, frustration, and deprivation? 14

Interestingly, these questions restate an apparently very different position taken by Ransom
fifteen years earlier: "Most probably [Dickinson's] poem's would not have amounted to
much if the author had not finally had her own romance, enabling her to fulfill herself like
any other woman." Though Ransom speaks of the presence and "fulfillment" of"romance,"
while Cody discusses its tormenting absence, neither imagines that poetry itself could pos-
sibly constitute a woman's fulfillment. On the contrary, both assume that the art of a woman
poet must in some sense arise from "romantic" feelings (in the popular, sentimental sense),
arise either in response to a real romance or as compensation for a missing one.
In view of this critical obsession with womanly "fulfillment"-clearly a nineteenth-
century notion redefined by twentieth-century thinkers for their own purposes-it is not
surprising to find out that when poetry by women has been praised it has usually been
praised for being "feminine," just as it has been blamed for being deficient in "feminin-
ity." Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for instance, the most frequently analyzed, criticized,
praised, and blamed woman poet of her day, was typically admired "because of her un-
derstanding of the depth, tenderness, and humility of the love which is given by women," 15
and because "she was a poet in every fibre of her but adorably feminine ...."16 As the
"Shakespeare of her sex," 17 moreover, she was especially respected for being "pure and
lovely" in her "private life," since "the lives of women of genius have been so frequently
sullied by sin ... that their intellectual gifts are [usually] a curse rather than a blessing." 18
Significantly, however, when Barrett Browning attempted unromantic, "unfeminine" po-
litical verse in Poems before Congress, her collection of 1860, at least one critic decided that
she had been "seized with a ... fit of insanity," explaining that "to bless and not to curse is a
woman's function ...."19
As this capsule review of ad feminam criticism suggests, there is evidently something
about lyric poetry by women that invites meditations on female fulfillment or, alterna-
tively, on female insanity. In devising a story for "Judith Shakespeare," Woolfherselfwas
after all driven to construct a violent plot that ends with her suicidal heroine's burial be-
neath a bus-stop near the Elephant and Castle. Symbolically speaking, Woolf suggests,
modern London, with its technological fumes and its patriarchal roar, grows from the
grim crossroads where this mythic woman poet lies dead. And as if to reinforce the mor-
bid ferocity of such imagery, Woolf adds that whenever, reading history or listening to
gossip, we hear of witches and magical wise women, "I think we are on the track of ... a
suppressed poet ... who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about
the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to." For though "the origi-
nal [literary] impulse was to poetry," and "the 'supreme head of song' was a poetess," lit-
erary women in England and America have almost universally elected to write novels
rather than poems for fear of precisely the madness Woolf attributes to Judith Shake-
speare. "Sure the poore woman is a little distracted," she quotes a contemporary of Mar-
 526 garet Cavendish's as remarking: "Shee could never be soe rediculous else as to venture at
writeing books and in verse too, if I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to
SECTION 9 that." 20 In other words, while the woman novelist, safely shut in prose, may fantasize
LYRIC AND SEXUAL about freedom with a certain impunity (since she constructs purely fictional alternatives
DIFFERENCE to the difficult reality she inhabits), it appears that the woman poet must in some sense
become her own heroine, and that in enacting the diabolical role of witch or wise woman
she literary or figuratively risks a melodramatic death at the crossroads of tradition and
genre, society and art.

Without pretending to exhaust a profoundly controversial subject, we should note here

that there are a number of generic differences between novel-writing and verse-writing
which do support the kinds of distinctions Woolf's story implies. For one thing, as we
noted earlier, novel-writing is a useful (because lucrative) occupation, while poetry, except
perhaps for the narrative poetry of Byron and Scott, has traditionally had little monetary
value. That novel-writing was and is conceivably an occupation to live by has always, how-
ever, caused it to seem less intellectually or spiritually valuable than verse-writing, of all
possible literary occupations the one to which European culture has traditionally assigned
the highest status. Certainly when Walter Pater in 1868 defined the disinterested ecstasy of
art for his contemporaries by noting that "art comes to you proposing frankly to give noth-
ing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments'
sake," he was speaking of what he earlier called "the poetic passion," alluding to works like
the Odes of Keats rather than the novels of Thackeray or George Eliot. Verse-writing-the
product of mysterious "inspiration," divine afflatus, bardic ritual-has historically been a
holy vocation. 21 Before the nineteenth century the poet had a nearly priestly role, and "he"
had a wholly priestly role after Romantic thinkers had appropriated the vocabulary of
theology for the realm of aesthetics. But if in Western culture women cannot be priests,
then how-since poets are priests-can they be poets? The question may sound sophistic,
but there is a good deal of evidence that it was and has been consciously or unconsciously
asked, by men and women alike, as often as women suffering from "the poetic passion"
have appeared in the antechambers of literature.
As Woolf shows, though, novel-writing is not just a "lesser" and therefore more suit-
ably female occupation because it is commercial rather than aesthetic, practical rather
than priestly. Where novel-writing depends upon reportorial observation, verse-writing
has traditionally required aristocratic education. "Learn ... for ancient rules a just es-
teem; I To copy Nature is to copy them," Alexander Pope admonished aspiring critics and
(by implication) poets in 1709, noting that "Nature and Homer" are "the same." 22 As if duti-
fully acquiescing, even the fiery iconoclast Percy Bysshe Shelley assiduously translated Ae-
schylus and other Greek "masters." As Western society defines "him," the lyric poet must
have aesthetic models, must in a sense speak the esoteric language of literary forms. She or
he cannot simply record or describe the phenomena of nature and society, for literary
theorists have long believed that, in poetry, nature must be mediated through tradition-
that is, through an education in "ancient rules." But of course, as so many women writers
learned with dismay, the traditional classics of Greek and Latin-meaning the distilled
Platonic essence of Western literature, history, philosophy-constituted what George
Eliot called "spheres of masculine learning" inalterably closed to women except under the
most extraordinary circumstances. Interestingly, only Barrett Browning, of all the major
women poets, was enabled-by her invalid seclusion, her sacrifice of ordinary pleasures-
seriously to study "the ancients." Like Shelley, she translated Aeschylus' Prometheus
Bound, and she went even further, producing an unusually learned study of the little-
known Greek Christian poets. What is most interesting about Barrett Browning's skill as 527
a classicist, however, is the fact that it was barely noticed in her own day and has been al-
most completely forgotten in ours. 9.2
Suzanne Juhasz has recently and persuasively spoken of the "double bind" of the SANDRA M. GILBERT

woman poet, 23 but it seems almost as if there is a sort of triple bind here. On the one hand, AND SusAN GusAR

the woman poet who learns a "just esteem" for Homer is ignored or even mocked-as, say,
the eighteenth century "Blue Stockings" were. On the other hand, the woman poet who
does not (because she is not allowed to) study Homer is held in contempt. On the third
hand, however, whatever alternative tradition the woman poet attempts to substitute for
"ancient rules" is subtly devalued. Ransom, for instance, asserts that Dickinson's meters,
learned from "her father's hymnbook," are all based upon "Folk Line, the popular form of
verse and the oldest in our language," adding that "the great classics of this meter are the
English ballads and Mother Goose." Our instinctive sense that this is a backhanded com-
pliment is confirmed when he remarks that "Folk Line is disadvantageous ... if it denies
to the poet the use of English Pentameter," which is "the staple of what we may call the
studied or 'university' poetry, and ... is capable of containing and formalizing many
kinds of substantive content which would be too complex for Folk Line. Emily Dickinson
appears never to have tried it." 24 If we read "pentameter" here as a substitute for "ancient
rules," then we can see that once again "woman" and "poet" are being defined as contradic-
tory terms.
Finally, and perhaps most crucially, where the novel allows-even encourages-just
the self-effacing withdrawal society has traditionally fostered in women, the lyric poem is
in some sense the utterance of a strong and assertive "I." Artists from Shakespeare to Dick-
inson, Yeats, and T. S. Eliot have of course qualified this "I," emphasizing, as Eliot does, the
"extinction of personality" involved in a poet's construction of an artful, masklike per-
sona, or insisting, as Dickinson did, that the speaker of poems is a "supposed person." 25
But, nevertheless, the central self that speaks or sings a poem must be forcefully defined,
whether "she"I" he" is real or imaginary. If the novelist, therefore, inevitably sees herself
from the outside, as an object, a character, a small figure in a large pattern, the lyric poet
must be continually aware of herself from the inside, as a subject, a speaker: she must be,
that is, assertive, authoritative, radiant with powerful feelings while at the same time ab-
sorbed in her own consciousness-and hence, by definition, profoundly "unwomanly,"
even freakish. For the woman poet, in other words, the contradictions between her voca-
tion and her gender might well become insupportable, impelling her to deny one or the
other, even (as in the case of "Judith Shakespeare") driving her to suicide. For, as Woolf
puts it, "who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and
tangled in a woman's body?"

In 1935 Louise Bogan wrote to John Hall Wheelock, her editor, to report that
Malcolm Cowley, a month or so ago asked me to edit an anthology of female verse, to be
used in the pages of the New Republic. They have as you know, already published groups
of Middle-Western verse, and what not. They are now about to divide mankind horizon-
tally rather than vertically, sexually rather than geographically. As you might have ex-
pected, I turned this pretty job down; the thought of corresponding with a lot of female
songbirds made me acutely ill. It is hard enough to bear with my own lyric side. 26

Obviously, as Gloria Bowles has pointed out, Bogan had internalized just those patriarchal
interdictions that have historically caused women poets from Finch to Plath anxiety and
guilt about attempting the pen. In a sense, then, using Bogan's problem as a paradigm, we
 528 might say that at its most painful the history of women's poetry is a story of struggle
against the sort of self-loathing her letter represents, while at its most victorious this
SECTION 9 literary history is a chronicle of the evolutionary processes through which "Judith Shake-
LYRIC AND SEXUAL speare" learned over and over again that, in Plath's words, "II Have a self to recover, a
DIFFERENCE queen." 27
Until quite recently most criticism of poetry by women has failed to transcend the
misogyny implicit both in Bogan's letter and in the sexist definitions her letter incorpo-
rates, just as it has failed to explore in any but the most superficial ways the crucial rela-
tionship between sexual identity and art. When not relegated to oblivion, women poets are
often still sentimentally pictured as "disappointed in love," as the neurotic old maids or
romantic schoolgirls of literature. That the themes, structures, and images of their art may
have been at least in part necessitated either by the special constrictions of their sexual role
or by their uncertain relationship to an overwhelmingly "masculinist" literary tradition is
a matter that feminist critics have just begun to explore.

NOTES

1. Anne Finch, "The Introduction," in The Poems 10. Theodore Roethke, "The Poetry of Louise
of Anne Countess ofWinchilsea, ed. Myra Reynolds Bogan," Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke, ed.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), pp. 4-5. Ralph). Mills, jr. (Seattle: University of Washing-
2. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New ton Press, 1965), pp. 133-34.
York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1929), pp. 48-52. 11. "Emily Dickinson: A Poet Restored," in
3· Letter to Charlotte Bronte, March 1837, quoted Sewall, p. 92.
in Winifred Gerin, Charlotte Bronte (Oxford, 12. Ibid., p. 89.
London, and New York: Oxford University Press, 13. Quoted in Reeves, p. 119.
1967), p. 110. 14. john Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner
4. See, for instance, Elaine Showalter, A Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass.: The
Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971),
University Press, 1977), Ellen Moers, Literary p. 495·
Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975), 15. Gardner B. Taplin, The Life of Elizabeth
Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination Barrett Browning (New Haven: Yale University
(New York: Knopf, 1974), and Arlyn Diamond and Press, 1957), p. 417.
Lee Edwards, eds., The Authority of Experience 16. The Edinburgh Review, vo!. 189 (1899),
(Amherst: University of Massachu[etts Press, 420-39·
1977). J7. Samuel B. Holcombe, "Death of Mrs.
5. Showalter, p. 73. Browning," The Southern Literary Messenger, 33
6. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. (1861), 412-J7.
Frederick G. Kenyon (2 vols. in 1, New York: 18. The Christian Examiner, vo!. 72 (1862), 65-88.
Macmillan, 1899), I, 230-32. Compare Woolf's "For 19. "Poetic Aberrations," Blackwood's, vo!. 87
we think back through our mothers if we are (r86o), 490-94.
women. It is useless to go to the great men writers 20. A Room, p. 65.
for help, however much one may go to them for 21. See Pater, "Conclusion" to The Renaissance,
pleasure" (A Room, p. 79). and, for a general discussion of the poet as priest,
7. Thomas johnson, The Complete Poems of M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New
Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), #613. York: Norton, 1971).
8. See especially "Aurora Leigh" and "! am 22. See Pope, "An Essay on Criticism," Part I, II.
Christina Rossetti" in The Second Common Reader 135-40.
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), pp. 182-92 and 23. Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms:
214-21. Modern American Poetry by Women, a New
9· Reprinted in Richard B. Sewell, ed., Emily Tradition (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), "The
Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays Double Bind of the Woman Poet," pp. 1-6.
(Englewood Cliffs, N.j.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 120. 24. Ransom, ibid.; Sewall, pp. 99-100.
In fairness to Reeves, we should note that he quotes 25. See T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual
this statement in order to dispute it. Talent," and Emily Dickinson, letter toT. W.
Higginson, july 1892, in The Letters of Emily Bogan, 1920-1970, ed. Ruth Limmer (New York: 529
Dickinson, Thomas johnson, ed. (Cambridge, Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1973), p. 86. For more
:viass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University detailed commentary, see Gloria Bowles, "Louise
press, 1958), vol. II, p. 412. Bogan," forthcoming in Women's Studies.
26. Letter to john Wheelock, july 1, 1935, in 27. Plath, "Stings," in Ariel (New York: Harper &
\Vhat the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Row, 1966), p. 62.

Apostrophe, Animation, 9.3

and Abortion (r987)
BARBARA JoHNSON

The abortion issue is as alive and controversial in the body politic as it is in the academy
and the courtroom.
Jay L. Garfield, Abortion: Moral and Legal Perspectives

1.

Although rhetoric can be defined as something politicians often accuse each other of, the
political dimensions of the scholarly study of rhetoric have gone largely unexplored by lit-
erary critics. What, indeed, could seem more dry and apolitical than a rhetorical treatise?
What could seem farther away from budgets and guerrilla warfare than a discussion of
anaphora, antithesis, prolepsis, and preterition? Yet the notorious CIA manual on psycho-
logical operations in guerrilla warfare ends with just such a rhetorical treatise: an appendix
on techniques of oratory which lists definitions and examples for these and many other
rhetorical figures.' The manual is designed to set up a Machiavellian campaign of propa-
ganda, indoctrination, and infiltration in Nicaragua, underwritten by the visible display
and selective use of weapons. Shoot softly, it implies, and carry a big schtick. If rhetoric is
defined as language that says one thing and means another, then the manual is in effect at-
tempting to maximize the collusion between deviousness in language and accuracy in vio-
lence, again and again implying that targets are most effectively hit when most indirectly
aimed at. Rhetoric, clearly, has everything to do with covert operations. But are the politics
of violence already encoded in rhetorical figures as such? In other words, can the very es-
sence of a political issue-an issue like, say, abortion-hinge on the structure of a figure? Is
there any inherent connection between figurative language and questions of life and death,
of who will wield and who will receive violence in a given human society?
As a way of approaching this question, I will begin in a much more traditional way by
discussing a rhetorical device that has come to seem almost synonymous with the lyric
voice: the figure of apostrophe. In an essay in The Pursuit of Signs, Jonathan Culler indeed
sees apostrophe as an embarrassingly explicit emblem of procedures inherent, but usually
better hidden, in lyric poetry as such. 2 Apostrophe in the sense in which I will be using it
involves the direct address of an absent, dead, or inanimate being by a first-person speaker:
 530 "0 wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being." Apostrophe is thus both direct and
indirect: based etymologically on the notion of turning aside, of digressing from straight
SECTION 9 speech, it manipulates the I/thou structure of direct address in an indirect, fictionalized way.
LYRIC AND SEXUAL The absent, dead, or inanimate entity addressed is thereby made present, animate, and an-
DIFFERENCE thropomorphic. Apostrophe is a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws
voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness.
Baudelaire's poem "Moesta et Errabunda," 3 whose Latin title means "sad and vaga-
bond," raises questions of rhetorical animation through several different grades of apos-
trophe. Inanimate objects like trains and ships or abstract entities like perfumed paradises
find themselves called upon to attend to the needs of a plaintive and restless lyric speaker.
Even the poem's title poses questions of life and death in linguistic terms: the fact that
Baudelaire here temporarily resuscitates a dead language prefigures the poem's attempts to
function as a finder of lost loves. But in the opening lines of the poem, the direct -address
structure seems straightforwardly unfigurative: "Tell me, Agatha." This could be called a
minimally fictionalized apostrophe, although that is of course its fiction. Nothing at first
indicates that Agatha is any more dead, absent, or inanimate than the poet himself.
The poem's opening makes explicit the relation between direct address and the desire
for the other's voice: "Tell me: you talk." But something strange soon happens to the face-to-
face humanness of this conversation. What Agatha is supposed to talk about starts a process
of dismemberment that might have something to do with a kind of reverse anthropomor-
phism: "Does your heart sometimes take flight?" Instead of conferring a human shape, this
question starts to undo one. Then, too, why the name Agatha? Baudelaire scholars have
searched in vain for a biographical referent, never identifying one, but always presuming
that one exists. In the Pleiade edition of Baudelaire's complete works, a footnote sends the
reader to the only other place in Baudelaire's oeuvre where the name Agathe appears-a
page in his Carnets where he is listing debts and appointments. This would seem to indicate
that Agathe was indeed a real person. What do we know about her? A footnote to the Car-
nets tells us she was probably a prostitute. Why? "See the poem 'Moesta et Errabunda.'" This
is a particularly stark example of the inevitable circularity of biographical criticism.
If Agathe is finally only a proper name written on two different pages in Baudelaire,
then the name itself must have a function as a name. The name is a homonym for the
word agate, a semiprecious stone. Is Agathe really a stone? Does the poem express the
Orphic hope of getting a stone to talk?
In a poem about wandering, taking flight, getting away from "here," it is surprising to
find that, structurally, each stanza acts out, not a departure, but a return to its starting
point, a repetition of its first line. The poem's structure is at odds with its apparent theme.
But we soon see that the object of the voyage is precisely to return-to return to a prior
state, planted in the first stanza as virginity, in the second as motherhood (through the
image of the nurse and the pun on mer/mere), and finally as childhood love and furtive
pleasure. The voyage outward in space is a figure for the voyage backward in time. The
poem's structure of address backs up, too, most explicitly in the third stanza. The cry
apostrophizing train and ship to carry the speaker off leads to a seeming reprise of the
opening line, but by this point the inanimate has entirely taken over: instead of address-
ing Agatha directly, the poem asks whether Agatha's heart ever speaks the line the poet
himself has spoken four lines earlier. Agatha is replaced by one of her parts, which itself
replaces the speaker. Agatha herself now drops out of the poem, and direct address is
temporarily lost too in the grammar of the sentence ("Est-il vrai que ... ").The poem is
as if emptying itself of all its human characters and voices. It seems to be acting out a loss
of animation-which is in fact its subject: the loss of childhood aliveness brought about
by the passage of time. The poem thus enacts in its own temporality the loss of animation 531
it situates in the temporality of the speaker's life.
At this point it launches into a new apostrophe, a new direct address to an abstract, lost 9.3
state: "Comme vous etes loin, paradis parfume." The poem reanimates, addresses an im- BARBARA joHNSON

age of fullness and wholeness and perfect correspondence ("Ou tout ce que l'on aime est
digne d'etre aime"). This height ofliveliness, however, culminates strangely in an image of
death. The heart that formerly kept trying to fly away now drowns in the moment of reach-
ing its destination ("Ou dans la volupte pure le coeur se noie!"). There may be something
to gain, therefore, by deferring arrival, as the poem next seems to do by interrupting itself
before grammatically completing the fifth stanza. The poem again ceases to employ direct
address and ends by asking two drawn-out, self-interrupting questions. Is that paradise now
farther away than India or China? Can one call it back and animate it with a silvery voice?
This last question-"Peut-on le rappeler avec des cris plaintifsl Et l'animer encore d'une voix
argentine?"-is a perfect description of apostrophe itself: a trope which, by means of the sil-
very voice of rhetoric, calls up and animates the absent, the lost, and the dead. Apostrophe
itself, then, has become not just the poem's mode but also the poem's theme. In other words,
what the poem ends up wanting to know is not how far away childhood is, but whether its
own rhetorical strategies can be effective. The final question becomes: Can this gap be
bridged? Can this loss be healed, through language alone?

2.
Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," which is perhaps the ultimate apostrophaic poem, makes
even more explicit the relation between apostrophe and animation. Shelley spends the first
three sections demonstrating that the west wind is a figure for the power to animate: it is
described as the breath of being, moving everywhere, blowing movement and energy
through the world, waking it from its summer dream, parting the waters of the Atlantic,
uncontrollable. Yet the wind animates by bringing death, winter, destruction. How do the
rhetorical strategies of the poem carry out this program of animation through the giving
of death?
The apostrophe structure is immediately foregrounded by the interjections, four times
spelled "0" and four times spelled "oh." One of the bridges this poem attempts to build is
the bridge between the "0" of the pure vocative, Jakobson's conative function, or the pure
presencing of the second person, and the "oh" of pure subjectivity, Jakobson's emotive func-
tion, or the pure presencing of the first person.
The first three sections are grammatical amplifications of the sentence "0 thou, hear,
oh, hear!" All the vivid imagery, all the picture painting, comes in clauses subordinate to
this obsessive direct address. But the poet addresses, gives animation, gives the capacity
of responsiveness, to the wind, not in order to make it speak but in order to make it listen
to him-in order to make it listen to him doing nothing but address it. It takes him three
long sections to break out of this intense near-tautology. As the fourth section begins, the
"I" starts to inscribe itself grammatically (but not thematically) where the "thou" has
been. A power struggle starts up for control over the poem's grammar, a struggle which
mirrors the rivalry named in such lines as "If even I I were as in my boyhood ... I ... I
would ne'er have striven I As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need." This rivalry is ex-
pressed as a comparison: "less free than thou," but then, "one too like thee." What does it
mean to be "too like"? Time has created a loss of similarity, a loss of animation that has
made the sense of similarity even more hyperbolic. In other words, the poet, in becoming
less than, less like the wind, somehow becomes more like the wind in his rebellion against
the loss of likeness.
 532 In the final section the speaker both inscribes and reverses the structure of apostro-
phe. In saying "be thou me," he is attempting to restore metaphorical exchange and equal-
SECTION 9 ity. If apostrophe is the giving of voice, the throwing of voice, the giving of animation, then
LYRIC AND SEXUAL a poet using it is always in a sense saying to the addressee, "Be thou me." But this implies
DIFFERENCE that a poet has animation to give. And that is what this poem is saying is not, or no longer,
the case. Shelley's speaker's own sense of animation is precisely what is in doubt, so that
he is in effect saying to the wind, "I will animate you so that you will animate, or reani-
mate, me." "Make me thy lyre ..."
Yet the wind, which is to give animation, is also the giver of death. The opposition
between life and death has to undergo another reversal, another transvaluation. If death
could somehow become a positive force for animation, then the poet would thereby create
hope for his own "dead thoughts." The animator that will blow his words around the
world will also instate the power of their deadness, their deadness as power, the place of
maximum potential for renewal. This is the burden of the final rhetorical question. Does
death necessarily entail rebirth? If winter comes, can spring be far behind? The poem is
attempting to appropriate the authority of natural logic-in which spring always does
follow winter-in order to claim the authority of cyclic reversibility for its own prophetic
powers. Yet because this clincher is expressed in the form of a rhetorical question, it ex-
presses natural certainty by means of a linguistic device that mimics no natural structure
and has no stable one-to-one correspondence with a meaning. The rhetorical question, in
a sense, leaves the poem in a state of suspended animation. But that, according to the
poem, is the state of maximum potential.
Both the Baudelaire and the Shelley, then, end with a rhetorical question that both
raises and begs the question of rhetoric. It is as though the apostrophe is ultimately di-
rected toward the reader, to whom the poem is addressing Mayor Koch's question: "How'm
I doing?" What is at stake in both poems is, as we have seen, the fate of a lost child-the
speaker's own former self-and the possibility of a new birth or reanimation. In the poems
that I will discuss next, these structures of apostrophe, animation, and lost life will take
on a very different cast through the foregrounding of the question of motherhood and the
premise that the life that is lost may be someone else's.

3·
In Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "The Mother," the structures of address are shifting and
complex. In the first line ("Abortions will not let you forget"), there is a "you" but there is
no "I." Instead, the subject of the sentence is the word "abortions," which thus assumes a
position of grammatical control over the poem. As entities that disallow forgetting, the
abortions are not only controlling but animate and anthropomorphic, capable of treating
persons as objects. While Baudelaire and Shelley addressed the anthropomorphized other
in order to repossess their lost selves, Brooks is representing the self as eternally addressed
and possessed by the lost, anthropomorphized other. Yet the self that is possessed here is
itself already a "you," not an ''I.'' The "you" in the opening lines can be seen as an 'T' that
has become alienated, distanced from itself, and combined with a generalized other, which
includes and feminizes the reader of the poem. The grammatical I!thou starting point of
traditional apostrophe has been replaced by a structure in which the speaker is simultane-
ously eclipsed, alienated, and confused with the addressee. It is already clear that some-
thing has happened to the possibility of establishing a clear-cut distinction in this poem
between subject and object, agent and victim.
The second section of the poem opens with a change in the structure of address. 'T'
takes up the positional place of "abortions," and there is temporarily no second person.
The first sentence narrates: "I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim 533
killed children." What is interesting about this line is that the speaker situates the chil-
dren's voices firmly in a traditional romantic locus of lyric apostrophe-the voices of the 9.3
wind, Shelley's west wind, say, or Wordsworth's "gentle breeze." 4 Gwendolyn Brooks, in BARBARA joHNSON

other words, is here rewriting the male lyric tradition, textually placing aborted children
in the spot formerly occupied by all the dead, inanimate, or absent entities previously ad-
dressed by the lyric. And the question of animation and anthropomorphism is thereby
given a new and disturbing twist. For if apostrophe is said to involve language's capacity
to give life and human form to something dead or inanimate, what happens when those
questions are literalized? What happens when the lyric speaker assumes responsibility for
producing the death in the first place, but without being sure of the precise degree of hu-
man animation that existed in the entity killed? What is the debate over abortion about,
indeed, if not the question of when, precisely, a being assumes a human form?
It is not until line 14 that Brooks' speaker actually addresses the dim killed children.
And she does so not directly, but in the form of a self-quotation: "I have said, Sweets, if I
sinned ..."This embedding of the apostrophe appears to serve two functions here, just as
it did in Baudelaire: a self-distancing function, and a foregrounding of the question of the
adequacy oflanguage. But whereas in Baudelaire the distance between the speaker and the
lost childhood is what is being lamented, and a restoration of vividness and contact is what
is desired, in Brooks the vividness of the contact is precisely the source of the pain. While
Baudelaire suffers from the dimming of memory, Brooks suffers from an inability to for-
get. And while Baudelaire's speaker actively seeks a fusion between present self and lost
child, Brooks' speaker is attempting to fight her way out of a state of confusion between self
and other. This confusion is indicated by the shifts in the poem's structures of address. It is
never clear whether the speaker sees herself as an 'T' or a "you," an addressor or an ad-
dressee. The voices in the wind are not created by the lyric apostrophe; they rather initiate
the need for one. The initiative of speech seems always to lie in the other. The poem con-
tinues to struggle to clarify the relation between 'T' and "you," but in the end it succeeds
only in expressing the inability of its language to do so. By not closing the quotation in its
final line, the poem, which began by confusing the reader with the aborter, ends by implic-
itly including the reader among those aborted-and loved. The poem can no more distin-
guish between 'T' and "you" than it can come up with a proper definition of life.
In line 28, the poem explicitly asks, "Oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?"
Surrounding this question are attempts to make impossible distinctions: got/ did not get,
deliberate I not deliberate, dead I never made. The uncertainty of the speaker's control as a
subject mirrors the uncertainty of the children's status as an object. It is interesting that
the status of the human subject here hinges on the word "deliberate." The association of
deliberateness with human agency has a long (and very American) history. It is deliber-
ateness, for instance, that underlies that epic of separation and self-reliant autonomy,
Thoreau's Walden. "I went to the woods," writes Thoreau, "because I wished to live delib-
erately, to front only the essential facts of life." 5 Clearly, for Thoreau, pregnancy was not
an essential fact of life. Yet for him as well as for every human being that has yet existed"
someone else's pregnancy is the very first fact of life. How might the plot of human sub-
jectivity be reconceived (so to speak) if pregnancy rather than autonomy is what raises
the question of deliberateness?
Much recent feminist work has been devoted to the task of rethinking the relations be-
tween subjectivity, autonomy, interconnectedness, responsibility, and gender. Carol Gilli-
gan's book In a Different Voice (and this focus on "voice" is not irrelevant here) studies
gender differences in patterns of ethical thinking. The central ethical question analyzed by
 534 Gilligan is precisely the decision whether to have, or not to have, an abortion. The first
time I read the book, this struck me as strange. Why, I wondered, would an investigation
SECTION 9 of gender differences focus on one of the questions about which an even-handed compari-
LYRIC AND SEXUAL son of the male and the female points of view is impossible? Yet this, clearly, turns out to
DIFFERENCE be the point: there is difference because it is not always possible to make symmetrical op-
positions. As long as there is symmetry, one is not dealing with difference but rather with
versions of the same. Gilligan's difference arises out of the impossibility of maintaining a
rigorously logical binary model for ethical choices. Female logic, as she defines it, is a way
of rethinking the logic of choice in a situation in which none of the choices are good.
"Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate": believe that the agent is not
entirely autonomous, believe that I can be subject and object of violence at the same time,
believe that I have not chosen the conditions under which I must choose. As Gilligan
writes of the abortion decision, "The occurrence of the dilemma itself precludes nonvio-
lent resolution." 6 The choice is not between violence and nonviolence, but between simple
violence to a fetus and complex, less determinate violence to an involuntary mother and/
or an unwanted child.
Readers of Brooks' poem have often read it as an argument against abortion. And it is
certainly clear that the poem is not saying that abortion is a good thing. But to see it as mak-
ing a simple case for the embryo's right to life is to assume that a woman who has chosen
abortion does not have the right to mourn. It is to assume that no case for abortion can take
the woman's feelings of guilt and loss into consideration, that to take those feelings into ac-
count is to deny the right to choose the act that produced them. Yet the poem makes no such
claim: it attempts the impossible task of humanizing both the mother and the aborted chil-
dren while presenting the inadequacy of language to resolve the dilemma without violence.
What I would like to emphasize is the way in which the poem suggests that the argu-
ments for and against abortion are structured through and through by the rhetorical lim-
its and possibilities of something akin to apostrophe. The fact that apostrophe allows one
to animate the inanimate, the dead, or the absent implies that whenever a being is apostro-
phized, it is thereby automatically animated, anthropomorphized, "person-ified." (By the
same token, the rhetoric of calling makes it difficult to tell the difference between the ani-
mate and the inanimate, as anyone with a telephone answering machine can attest.) Be-
cause of the ineradicable tendency of language to animate whatever it addresses, rhetoric
itself can always have already answered "yes" to the question of whether a fetus is a human
being. It is no accident that the antiabortion film most often shown in the United States
should be entitled The Silent Scream. By activating the imagination to believe in the anthro-
pomorphized embryo's mute responsiveness in exactly the same way that apostrophe does,
the film (which is of course itself a highly rhetorical entity) is playing on rhetorical possibili-
ties that are inherent in all linguistically based modes of representation.
Yet the function of apostrophe in the Brooks poem is far from simple. If the fact that
the speaker addresses the children at all makes them human, then she must pronounce
herself guilty of murder-but only if she discontinues her apostrophe. As long as she ad-
dresses the children, she can keep them alive, can keep from finishing with the act of kill-
ing them. The speaker's attempt to absolve herself of guilt depends on never forgetting,
never breaking the ventriloquism of an apostrophe through which she cannot define her
identity otherwise than as the mother eaten alive by the children she has never fed. Who,
in the final analysis, exists by addressing whom? The children are a rhetorical extension of
the mother, but she, as the poem's title indicates, has no existence apart from her relation
to them. It begins to be clear that the speaker has written herself into a poem that she can-
not get out of without violence. The violence she commits in the end is to her own ian- 535
guage: as the poem ends, the vocabulary shrinks away, words are repeated, nothing but
"all" rhymes with "all." The speaker has written herself into silence. Yet hers is not the only 9.3
silence in the poem: earlier she has said, "You will never ... silence or buy with a sweet." If BARBARA ]oH•
sweets are for silencing, then by beginning her apostrophe, "Sweets, if I sinned ... ," the
speaker is already saying that the poem, which exists to memorialize those whose lack of
life makes them eternally alive, is also attempting to silence once and for all the voices of
the children in the wind. It becomes impossible to tell whether language is what gives life
or what kills.

4·
Women have said again and again "This is my body!" and they have reason to feel angry,
reason to feel that it has been like shouting into the wind.
Judith Jarvis Thompson, "A Defense of Abortion"

It is interesting to note the ways in which legal and moral discussions of abortion tend to
employ the same terms as those we have been using to describe the figure of apostrophe.
Thus, Justice Blackmun, in Roe v. Wade: "These disciplines [philosophy, theology, and
civil and canon law] variously approached the question in terms of the point at which the
embryo or fetus became 'formed' or recognizably human, or in terms of when a 'person'
came into being, that is, infused with a 'soul' or 'animated."' 7 The issue of "fetal person-
hood" (Garfield and Hennessey, p. 55) is of course a way of bringing to a state of explicit
uncertainty the fundamental difficulty of defining personhood in general. 8 Even if the
question of defining the nature of"persons" is restricted to the question of understanding
what is meant by the word "person" in the United States Constitution (since the Bill of
Rights guarantees the rights only of"persons"), there is not at present, and probably will
never be, a stable legal definition. Existing discussions of the legality and morality of
abortion almost invariably confront, leave unresolved, and detour around the question of
the nature and boundaries of human life. As Justice Blackmun puts it in Roe v. Wade: "We
need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the re-
spective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any
consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a
position to speculate as to the answer" (Garfield and Hennessey, p. 27).
In the case of Roe v. Wade, the legality of abortion is derived from the right to privacy-
an argument which, as Catherine MacKinnon argues in "Roe vs. Wade: A Study in Male
Ideology" (Garfield and Hennessey, pp. 45-54), is itself problematic for women, since by
protecting "privacy" the courts also protect the injustices of patriarchal sexual arrange-
ments. When the issue is an unwanted pregnancy, some sort of privacy has already, in a
sense, been invaded. In order for the personal to avoid being reduced once again to the
nonpolitical, privacy, like deliberateness, needs to be rethought in terms of sexual politics.
Yet even the attempt tore-gender the issues surrounding abortion is not simple. As Kristin
Luker convincingly demonstrates, the debate turns around the claims not only of woman
versus fetus or woman versus patriarchal state, but also of woman versus woman:

Pro-choice and pro-life activists live in different worlds, and the scope of their lives, as
both adults and children, fortifies them in their belief that their views on abortion are the
more correct, more moral and more reasonable. When added to this is the fact that should
"the other side" win, one group of women will see the very real devaluation of their lives
 536 and life resources, it is not surprising that the abortion debate has generated so much heat
and so little light ....
SECTION 9 . . . Are pro-life activists, as they claim, actually reaching their cherished goal of "edu-
LYRIC AND SEXUAL cating the public to the humanity of the unborn child"? As we begin to seek an answer, we
DIFFERENCE should recall that motherhood is a topic about which people have very complicated feel-
ings, and because abortion has become the battleground for different definitions of moth-
erhood, neither the pro-life nor the pro-choice movement has ever been "representative" of
how most Americans feel about abortion. More to the point, all our data suggest that nei-
ther of these groups will ever be able to be representative. (Pp. 215, 224)

It is often said, in literary-theoretical circles, that to focus on undecidability is to be apo-

litical. Everything I have read about the abortion controversy in its present form in the
United States leads me to suspect that, on the contrary, the undecidable is the political.
There is politics precisely because there is undecidability.
And there is also poetry. There are striking and suggestive parallels between the "dif-
ferent voices" involved in the abortion debate and the shifting address-structures of po-
ems like Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Mother." A glance at several other poems suggests that
there tends indeed to be an overdetermined relation between the theme of abortion and
the problematization of structures of address. In Anne Sexton's "The Abortion," six 3-line
stanzas narrate, in the first person, a trip to Pennsylvania where the "I" has obtained an
abortion. Three times the poem is interrupted by the italicized lines:

Somebody who should have been born

is gone.

Like a voice-over narrator taking superegoistic control of the moral bottom line, this re-
frain (or "burden," to use the archaic term for both "refrain" and "child in the womb") puts
the first-person narrator's authority in question without necessarily constituting the voice
of a separate entity. Then, in the seventh and final stanza, the poem extends and intensifies
this split:

Yes, woman, such logic will lead

to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward ... this baby that I bleed.

Self-accusing, self-interrupting, the narrating 'T' turns on herself (or is it someone else?) as
"you," as "woman." The poem's speaker becomes as split as the two senses of the word
"bleed." Once again, "saying what one means" can be done only by ellipsis, violence, illogic,
transgression, silence. The question of who is addressing whom is once again unresolved.
As we have seen, the question of "when life begins" is complicated partly because of the
way in which language blurs the boundary between life and death. In "Menstruation at
Forty," Sexton sees menstruation itself as the loss of a child ("two days gone in blood")-a
child that exists because it can be called:

I was thinking of a son ...

You! ...
Will you be the David or the Susan?

my carrot, my cabbage,
I would have possessed you before all women,
calling your name,
calling you mine.
 The political consequences and complexities of addressing-of "calling"-are made 537
even more explicit in a poem by Lucille Clifton entitled "The Lost Baby Poem." By choosing
the word "dropped" ("i dropped your almost body down"), Clifton renders it unclear 9.3
whether the child has been lost through abortion or through miscarriage. What is clear, BARBARA joHNSON

however, is that that loss is both mourned and rationalized. The rationalization occurs
through the description of a life of hardship, flight, and loss: the image of a child born into
winter, slipping like ice into the hands of strangers in Canada, conflates the scene of Eliza's
escape in Uncle Tom's Cabin with the exile of draft resisters during the Vietnam War. The
guilt and mourning occur in the form of an imperative in which the notion of "stranger"
returns in the following lines:

if i am ever less than a mountain

for your definite brothers and sisters

... let black men call me stranger

always for your never named sake.

The act of"calling" here correlates a lack of name with a loss of membership. For the sake
of the one that cannot be called, the speaker invites an apostrophe that would expel her into
otherness. The consequences of the death of a child ramify beyond the mother-child dyad
to encompass the fate of an entire community. The world that has created conditions under
which the loss of a baby becomes desirable must be resisted, not joined. For a black woman,
the loss of a baby can always be perceived as a complicity with genocide. The black mother
sees her own choice as one of being either a stranger or a rock. The humanization of the
lost baby addressed by the poem is thus carried out at the cost of dehumanizing, even ren-
dering inanimate, the calling mother.
Yet each of these poems exists, finally, because a child does not. 9 In Adrienne Rich's
poem "To a Poet," the rivalry between poems and children is made quite explicit. The
"you" in the poem is again aborted, but here it is the mother herself who could be called
"dim and killed" by the fact not of abortion but of the institution of motherhood. And
again, the structures of address are complex and unstable. The deadness of the "you" can-
not be named: not suicide, not murder. The question of the life or death of the addressee
is raised in an interesting way through Rich's rewriting of Keats' sonnet on his mortality.
While Keats writes, "When I have fears that I will cease to be," Rich writes, "and I have
fears that you will cease to be." If poetry is at stake in both intimations of mortality, what
is the significance of this shift from 'T' to "you"? On the one hand, the very existence of
the Keats poem indicates that the pen has succeeded in gleaning something before the
brain has ceased to be. No such grammatical guarantee exists for the "you." Death in the
Keats poem is as much a source as it is a threat to writing. Hence death, for Keats, could
be called the mother of poetry, while motherhood, for Rich, is precisely the death of po-
etry. The Western myth of the conjunction of word and flesh implied by the word "incar-
nate" is undone by images of language floating and vanishing in the bowl of the toilet of
real fleshly needs. The word is not made flesh; rather, flesh unmakes the mother-poet's
word. The difficulty of retrieving the "you" as poet is enacted by the structures of address
in the following lines:

I write this not for you

who fight to write your own
words fighting up the falls
but for another woman dumb
 538 In saying "I write this not for you," Rich seems almost to be excluding as addressee any-
one who could conceivably be reading this poem. The poem is setting aside both the I and
SECTION 9 the you-the pronouns Benveniste associates with personhood-and reaches instead to-
LYRIC AND SEXUAL ward a "she," which belongs in the category of"nonperson." The poem is thus attempting
DIFFERENCE the impossible task of directly addressing not a second person but a third person-a person
who, if she is reading the poem, cannot be the reader the poem has in mind. The poem is
trying to include what is by its own grammar excluded from it, to animate through lan-
guage the nonperson, the "other woman." This poem, too, therefore, is bursting the limits
of its own language, inscribing a logic that it itself reveals to be impossible-but necessary.
Even the divorce between writing and childbearing is less absolute than it appears: in com-
paring the writing of words to the spawning of fish, Rich's poem reveals itself to be
trapped between the inability to combine and the inability to separate the woman's vari-
ous roles.
In each of these poems, then, a kind of competition is implicitly instated between the
bearing of children and the writing of poems. Something unsettling has happened to the
analogy often drawn by male poets between artistic creation and procreation. For it is
not true that literature contains no examples of male pregnancy. Sir Philip Sidney, in the
first sonnet from Astrophel and Stella, describes himself as "great with child to speak,"
but the poem is ultimately produced at the expense of no literalized child. Sidney's labor
pains are smoothed away by a midwifely apostrophe ("'Fool,' said my Muse to me, 'look
in thy heart, and write!'"), and by a sort of poetic Caesarian section, out springs the poem
we have, in fact, already finished reading. 10 Mallarme, in "Don du poeme," describes him-
self as an enemy father seeking nourishment for his monstrous poetic child from the
woman within apostrophe-shot who is busy nursing a literalized daughter. 11 But since the
woman presumably has two breasts, there seems to be enough to go around. As Shake-
speare assures the fair young man, "But were some child of yours alive that time, I You
should live twice in it and in my rhyme" (sonnet 17). Apollinaire, in his play Les Mamelles
de Tiresias, depicts woman as a de-maternalized neo-Malthusian leaving the task of
childbearing to a surrealistically fertile husband. But again, nothing more disturbing
than Tiresian cross-dressing seems to occur. Children are alive and well, and far more
numerous than ever. Indeed, in one of the dedicatory poems, Apollinaire indicates that
his drama represents a return to health from the literary reign of the poete maudit:

La feconde raison a jailli de rna fable,

Plus de femme sterile et non plus d'avortons ... .'2

[Fertile reason springs out of my fable,

No more sterile women, no aborted children]

This dig at Baudelaire, among others, reminds us that in the opening poem to Les Fleurs
du mal ("Benediction"), Baudelaire represents the poet himself as an abortion manque,
cursed by the poisonous words of a rejecting mother. The question of the unnatural
seems more closely allied with the bad mother than with the pregnant father.
Even in the seemingly more obvious parallel provided by poems written to dead chil-
dren by male poets, it is not really surprising to find that the substitution of poem for child
lacks the sinister undertones and disturbed address exhibited by the abortion poems we
have been discussing. Jonson, in "On My First Son,'' calls his dead child "his best piece of
poetry," while Mallarme, in an only semiguilty Aufhebung, transfuses the dead Anatole to
the level of an idea. More recently, Jon Silkin has written movingly of the death of a handi-
capped child ("something like a person") as a change of silence, not a splitting of voice.
And Michael Harper, in "Nightmare Begins Responsibility," stresses the powerlessness 539
and distrust of a black father leaving his dying son to the care of a "white-doctor-who-
breathed-for-him-all-night."13 But again, whatever the complexity of the voices in that 9.3
poem, the speaker does not split self-accusingly or infra-symbiotically in the ways we have BARBARA joHNSON

noted in the abortion/motherhood poems. While one could undoubtedly find counterex-
amples on both sides, it is not surprising that the substitution of art for children should
not be inherently transgressive for the male poet. Men have in a sense always had no
choice but to substitute something for the literal process of birth. That, at least, is the be-
lief that has long been encoded into male poetic conventions. It is as though male writing
were by nature procreative, while female writing is somehow by nature infanticidal.
It is, of course, as problematic as it is tempting to draw general conclusions about differ-
ences between male and female writing on the basis of these somewhat random examples.
Yet it is clear that a great many poetic effects may be colored according to expectations ar-
ticulated through the gender of the poetic speaker. Whether or not men and women would
"naturally" write differently about dead children, there is something about the connection
between motherhood and death that refuses to remain comfortably and conventionally
figurative. When a woman speaks about the death of children in any sense other than
that of pure loss, a powerful taboo is being violated. The indistinguishability of miscar-
riage and abortion in the Clifton poem indeed points to the notion that any death of a
child is perceived as a crime committed by the mother, something a mother ought by
definition to be able to prevent. That these questions should be inextricably connected to
the figure of apostrophe, however, deserves further comment. For there may be a deeper
link between motherhood and apostrophe than we have hitherto suspected.
The verbal development of the infant, according to Lacan, begins as a demand ad-
dressed to the mother, out of which the entire verbal universe is spun. Yet the mother ad-
dressed is somehow a personification, not a person-a personification of presence or ab-
sence, of Otherness itself.

Demand in itself bears on something other than the satisfactions it calls for. It is demand
of a presence or of an absence-which is what is manifested in the primordial relation to
the mother, pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy....
Insofar as [man's] needs are subjected to demand, they return to him alienated. This is not
the effect of his real dependence ... , but rather the turning into signifying form as such,
from the fact that it is from the locus of the Other that its message is emitted. 14

If demand is the originary vocative, which assures life even as it inaugurates alienation,
then it is not surprising that questions of animation inhere in the rhetorical figure of apos-
trophe. The reversal of apostrophe we noted in the Shelley poem ("animate me") would be
no reversal at all, but a reinstatement of the primal apostrophe in which, despite Lacan's
disclaimer, there is precisely a link between demand and animation, between apostrophe
and life-and-death dependency. 15 If apostrophe is structured like demand, and if demand
articulates the primal relation to the mother as a relation to the Other, then lyric poetry
itself-summed up in the figure of apostrophe-comes to look like the fantastically intri-
cate history of endless elaborations and displacements of the single cry, "Mama!" The ques-
tion these poems are asking, then, is what happens when the poet is speaking as a mother, a
mother whose cry arises out of-and is addressed to-a dead child?
It is no wonder that the distinction between addressor and addressee should become so
problematic in poems about abortion. It is also no wonder that the debate about abortion
should refuse to settle into a single voice. Whether or not one has ever been a mother, every-
one participating in the debate has once been a child. Psychoanalysis, too, is a theory of
 540 development from the child's point of view. Rhetorical, psychoanalytical, and political
structures are profoundly implicated in one another. The difficulty in all three would
SEcnoN 9 seem to reside in the attempt to achieve a full elaboration of any discursive position other
lYRIC AND SEXUAL than that of child.
DIFFERENCE
NOTES

1. I would like to thank Tom Keenan of Yale as a sign of the much-discussed waning of
University for bringing this text to my attention. Wordsworth's poetic inspiration, or whether it is,
The present essay has in fact benefitted greatly rather, one of a number of strictly rhetorical shifts
from the suggestions of others, among whom I that give the impression of a wane.
would like particularly to thank Marge Garber, 5. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York:
Rachel Jacoff, Carolyn Williams, Helen Vendler, Signet, 1960), p. 66.
Steven Melville, Ted Morris, Stamos Metzidakis, 6. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cam-
Steven Ungar, and Richard Yarborough. bridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 94·
2. Jonathan Culler, "Apostrophe," in The Pursuit 7· Quoted in Jay L. Garfield and Patricia
of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. Hennessey, eds. Abortion: Moral and Legal
135-154. Cf. also Paul de Man: "Now it is certainly Perspectives (Amherst: University of Massachu-
beyond question that the figure of address is setts Press, 1984), p. 15.
recurrent in lyric poetry, to the point of constitut- 8. Cf. Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of
ing the generic definition of, at the very least, the Motherhood (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
ode (which can, in turn, be seen as paradigmatic of California Press, 1984), p. 6.
for poetry in general." Paul de Man, "Lyrical Voice 9· For additional poems dealing with the loss of
in Contemporary Theory," in Lyric Poetry: Beyond babies, see the anthology The Limits of Miracles
New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia collected by Marion Deutsche Cohen (South
Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1985). Sharon
3· For complete texts of the poems under Dunn, editor of the Agni Review, told me recently
discussion, see the Appendix to Chapter 16. The that she has in fact noticed that such poems have
texts cited are taken from the following sources: begun to form almost a new genre.
Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes (Paris: 10. Poems cited here and on the following pages

Pleiade, 1976); The Norton Anthology of Poetry from Sidney, Jonson, and Silk in may be found in
(New York: Norton, 1975), for Shelley; Anne The Norton Anthology of Poetry (New York:
Sexton, The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton Norton, 1975).
Mifflin, 1981); Lucille Clifton, Good News about the 11. Mallarme, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Pleiade,
Earth (New York: Random House, 1972); and 1945), p. 40.
Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language 12. Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Mamelles de
(New York: Norton, 1978). The translation of Tiresias, in L'Enchanteur pourrissant (Paris:
Baudelaire's "Moesta et Errabunda" is my own. Gallimard, 1972), p. 101.
Gwendolyn Brooks refused permission to reprint 13. Michael Harper, title poem in Nightmare
"The Mother," which can be found in Gwendolyn Begins Responsibility (Urbana: University of
Brooks, Selected Poems (New York: Harper & Row, Illinois Press, 1975).
1963), or in The Norton Anthology of Literature by 14. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan
Women (New York: Norton, 1985), or in The Black (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 286.
Poets (New York: Bantam, 1971). 15. An interesting example of a poem in which an
4. It is interesting to note that the "gentle apostrophe confers upon the totally Other the
breeze," apostrophized as "Messenger" and authority to animate the self is Randall Jarrell's "A
"Friend" in the 1805-6 Prelude (book I, line 5), is Sick Child," which ends: "All that I've never thought
significantly not directly addressed in the 1850 of-think of me!" In The Voice That Is Great within
version. One might ask whether this change stands Us, ed. Hayden Carruth (Bantam, 1970), p. 402.
The Homosexual Lyric (r990) 9.4
THOMAS E. YINGLING

Only in lyric poetry do these direct, sudden flashes of the substance become like lost origi-
nal manuscripts suddenly made legible; only in lyric poetry is the subject, the vehicle of
such experiences, transformed into the sole carrier of meaning, the only true reality.
Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel

This chapter will examine in more detail how homosexuality invested itself as the prob-
lem of language for Crane [ ... ] through an inquiry into how homosexuality and the
difficult navigations it announced for the subject affected Crane's imagination of the lyric
form as a genre of self-presentation. If former critical theory imagined the lyric as the
poetry of a single, unified voice, and imagined the task of criticism as elaboration and
reproduction of that voice (somehow without the heresy of paraphrase, where the voice of
the critic intervened), more recent critical theory suggests that the lyric interest in voice is
itself a trope. As Jonathan Culler writes, "The fundamental aspect oflyric writing" is "to
produce an apparently phenomenal world through the figure of voice" ("Changes in the
Study of the Lyric," 50). To think of poetry in this manner is to make an irrevocable
break with that older model of poetic and psychological realism cited by M. H. Abrams
as the meta-physical pattern of the Romantic lyric. Those lyrics, Abrams suggests,

present a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually a localized, outdoor setting,

whom we overhear as he carries on, in a fluent vernacular which rises easily to a more
formal speech, a sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer scene, but
more frequently with a silent human auditor, present or absent. ... In the course of this
meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral
decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end
where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding
which is the result of the intervening meditation. ("Structure of the Greater Romantic
Lyric," 201)

Clearly we can rearticulate Abrams's notions to accommodate a great deal of modern and
postmodern poetry that is not at all concerned with localized, outdoor settings nor al-
ways turning upon forms of personal crisis ("alienation, dejection, the loss of a 'celestial
light' or 'glory' in experiencing the created world" [Abrams, 227]). But Crane's poetry of-
ten refuses these categories. His more difficult, "mature" verse in particular (that written
in the years 1923-26) breaks the conventions of Romantic lyric, as Allen Grossman has
shown, by situating the reader internal to the process of the poem rather than construct-
ing him or her as the imagined auditor. As Grossman suggests, Crane does not figure au-
thenticity of voice by staging the speaker of the poem dramatically at a distance from some
more originary voice or presence; that is, his poems do not present their subject(s) in rela-
tion to the unrepeatable, as Wordsworth recalls the leech gatherer's speech, Stevens over-
hears the woman by the sea, or Keats hears the nightingale. Crane's poems, according to
 542 Grossman, are attempts to record the unmediated speech, sea, song, presence of poetry it-
self ("Hart Crane and Poetry," 240-45). We recognize the impossible agenda of this, of
SECTION 9 course, but, as such, we must think of Crane's as abstract poems-abstract in the same
LYRIC AND SExuAL sense as Stein's prose or Arthur Dove's landscapes. And what their abstraction foregrounds
DIFFERENCE most strongly as the problem of the lyric-and as the problem of the modern as well-is
the textuality of subjectivity.
We might think of Crane's lyrics from this period as constituting one of the most inter-
esting records of homosexual autobiography in the history of literature. From relatively
early homosexual poems such as "Possessions" and "Recitative" (1923) through more ad-
vanced inquiries into the problematic of homosexual intersubjectivity such as "Voyages"
(written in 1924 and 1925) to later and more symbolic autobiographical texts such as "Pas-
sage" (late summer 1925) and "Repose of Rivers" (1926), Crane's lyrics test the structures of
identity in a way that makes them theoretical investigations of the subject and not simple
exercises in recall and interpretation. Certainly we do not want to posit an evolution into an
appropriate or ideologically correct attitude toward homosexuality in Crane's record of
lyric autobiography, but there is an arc of development in it that moves from an early, al-
most intuitive or pre-ideological thinking about subjective homosexual experience toward
an insight into the ways in which that experience was mediated by forces and terms bent on
constructing it as an unacceptable cultural practice. At this latter point, Crane understands
homosexuality not as a subjective experience but as a subjectivity, as part of what Althusser
calls "the ideological recognition function" ("Ideology," 172); we see this, for instance, in the
letter to Winters, and we will see it as well in a number of the poems. According to Althusser,
the individual recognizes and mis-recognizes himself as "really" or "not really" constituted
in certain ways according to the interpellations of ideology:

all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the function-
ing of the category of the subject. ... Ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 're-
cruits' subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or 'transforms' the individuals
into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called
interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most common-
place everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!' ("Ideology," 173-74)

We have seen in the last chapter how Crane was interpellated or hailed by the subjectivity
of homosexuality, how he argued against the dominant ideological assertions about that
subjectivity, and how his reimagination of it, at the close of "Voyages," for instance, was
nevertheless always already written within its confines-to imagine meaningful and last-
ing union was already to imagine heterosexually. In this chapter we will see how the tra-
ditional lyric interest in persona, individuality, and voice is concretely realized in Crane's
homosexual lyrics as interpellation into ideology-specifically, the ideological contest
between homosexuality and poetic authority.
The material in the previous chapter helps to explain some of the avoidances of homo-
sexuality in Crane's text, such as the discursive instability that assured that homosexuality
would appear in culture only through other, "legitimate" discourses, or the prejudices of
his literary friends against the ethical or cultural effectivity of the homosexual. There is
evidence to suggest, however, that even beyond these intellectual issues, Crane feared cen-
sorship and so may have suppressed the homosexual elements in his published work. Writ-
ing to Munson as early as March 1923, Crane concedes,

I discover that I have been all-too-easy all along in letting out announcements of my sex-
ual predilections. Not that anything unpleasant has happened or is imminent. But it does
 put me into obligatory relations to a certain extent with "those who know," and this irks 543
me to think of sometimes .... I find the ordinary business of earning a living entirely too
stringent to want to add any prejudices against me of that nature [italics in original]. 9.4
(Letters, 129-30) THOMAS E.
YINGLING
This does not refer specifically to the intricacies of publishing, but Crane certainly found
that business too stringent to want to add any prejudices against him of any nature. And as
he became more public a figure, his need to be more discreet about his sexuality increased.
In this, he is not unlike Willa Cather, who (in Sharon O'Brien's words):

could never declare her lesbianism publicly.... And in her fiction she never wrote directly
of the attachments between women that were the emotional center of her life. However
"natural" they may finally have seemed to her, Cather knew she could not name them to a
twentieth-century audience. (Willa Cather, 137)

Arnold Rampersad's biography of Langston Hughes, on the other hand, makes it clear
that the very existence of periodicals such as Crisis and Opportunity called forth from
Hughes more consciously radical verse than he otherwise produced, helping him con-
struct a persona as spokesman for black experience in America.
We can see Crane's impatience with the publishing industry in his brief interactions
with Marianne Moore. Moore, who returned "Passage" to Crane because of its "lack of
simplicity and cumulative force," completely altered "The Wine Menagerie" and pub-
lished it in The Dial under the title "Again." In accepting it, she removed the first two
stanzas of the poem entirely and made other changes that Crane did not take well. It
may seem of little consequence to have this happen to a single poem, but in a corpus
such as Crane's it is equivalent to deleting or rewriting one-fourth of a novel by Faulkner,
let us say, before publishing it. Crane allowed Moore this liberty because he was in des-
perate need of both cash (he received twenty dollars on publication of"Again") and some
kind of literary validation. When Moore accepted a later poem without change, Crane
voiced his displeasure at her earlier editing: "This time she didn't even suggest running
the last line backward" (Letters, 255). But Moore was not the only literary authority Crane
seemed unable to please; one of his famous prose statements (where he outlines his poet-
ics as a "logic of metaphor") was written to Harriet Monroe in an attempt to explain to
her that his poetry was not nonsense, that it was in fact grounded in an explicable theory
oflanguage. But it seems he feared offending more than the standards of style: writing to
Tate in the early months of 1927, he complained about the strict morality of current edito-
rial practices:

I've had to submit ["The Dance"] to Marianne Moore recently, as my only present hope of
a little cash. But she probably will object to the word "breasts," or some such detail. It's re-
ally ghastly. I wonder how much longer our market will be in the grip of two such hysteri-
cal virgins as The Dial and Poetry!
what strange people these ... [editorial elision] are. Always in a flutter for fear bowels
will be mentioned, forever carrying on a tradition that both Poe and Whitman spent half
their lives railing against-and calling themselves "liberals." (Letters, 289, 290)

If this seems merely the complaint of someone on the outside looking in, we should re-
member that Crane's paranoia about literary censorship was a reality he and other writers
of his day lived with. In a world that seized The Well of Loneliness because of its lesbian
content, in a nation that prosecuted The Little Review for its publication of Ulysses (this
incident came home to him especially strongly because Margaret Anderson's "defense" of
 544 Joyce appeared in the same issue of The Little Review as Crane's first publication in that
journal) and that closed New York theaters where lesbian and gay plays appeared, 1 Crane
SECTION 9 perhaps had justification for his fears. His letters from Ohio refer several times to the
LvRrc AND SEXUAL "Ulysses situation"-"terrible to think on" (Letters, 72). "It is my opinion that some fanatic
DIFFERENCE will kill Joyce sometime soon for the wonderful things said in Ulysses" (Letters, 95). His
friend Gorham Munson had had to sneak Crane's presubscribed copy of the book into the
United States in the bottom of a trunk, and Crane clearly sees the suppression of Joyce's
work as symptomatic of a more generalized threat to freedom of expression: "De Gaur-
mont's Une Coeur Virginal has just been published here (trans. Aldous Huxley), and I
have snatched it up against its imminent suppression along with ]urgen and other master-
pieces .... I cannot see his Physique d'Amour, translated by Pound and to be published by
Boni and Liveright, will ever get beyond the printer's hands" (Letters, 73). Thus we should
see that when Crane writes to Munson in February 1923 about "these American restric-
tions [on homosexuality ... where one cannot whisper a word" (Letters, 122), he refers
perhaps to written as well as spoken forms of communication.
Despite this, Crane's early work includes a number of poems in which he makes ho-
mosexuality visible and important to the text, suggesting that his later literary suppression
of overt references to homosexuality was a choice conditioned in part by his need to ap-
pear literarily respectable. As Tate recalled, "Hart had a sort of megalomania: he wanted to
be The Great American Poet" (quoted in Unterecker, Voyager, 431), and the only way he
could fulfill that ambition was by conforming to the overwhelmingly heterosexual con-
ventions and expectations of the literary. Aesthetic experimentation, of course, was a sign
of his seriousness as a modern artist, but homosexuality needed to remain obscure-a
"private," "personal" issue of no relevance to art-if one were to be taken seriously by those
with the power to evaluate and promote one's work. I would like to compare these early
texts ("C 33," "Episode of Hands," and "Modern Craft") with those written in New York
during the high period of Crane's mature and difficult verse ("Possessions," "Passage,"
"The Wine Menagerie") to suggest how the development of a stylistic density that marks
his most ambitious work balances an effacement of homosexuality as the central subject of
his lyric concern. My claim is not that homosexuality disappears from his work (we have
already seen its powerful presence in "Voyages" and "Recitative," both written in the later
period), but that it becomes textually obscure, hidden in a multitude of oblique references
that encode it as the authorizing secret of the text.
"C 33" was Crane's first published poem, a tribute to Oscar Wilde, whom he describes
as having "woven rose-vines/ About the empty heart of night." The inheritance Crane
claims through Wilde is one of homosexual betrayal, personal suffering, and aesthetic
posturing, but the title itself, which refers to the number on Wilde's cell in Reading Gaoi,2
suggests as well the oblique nature of homosexual reference in Crane's literary work even
at this early point. Only those in the know-and there could not have been many-would
take the title's meaning and therefore identify the poem as a homosexual text. "C 33" is
what it describes Wilde's verse to be, "song of minor, broken strain," and it is most impor-
tant for us as an index of Crane's response to Wilde's trial as a critical moment in the
history of homosexuality. We see in it the ideological lesson Wilde offered a young man
like Crane-that "searing sophistry" is no defense against suffering, implying that the
arch pose is vanity and that one ought to account de profundis rather than from the sur-
face. The need to "forget all blight" at the poem's close is clearly the need to forget that
one is homosexual, too, and Crane accomplishes that in "C 33" through appeal to a ma-
donna figure whose "gold head I And wavering shoulders" are meant to establish an
economy of sympathy. Although he does not condemn Wilde, as did Willa Cather,
Crane's poem clearly suggests that he felt (as did Wilde himself) some need for salvation 545
from artistic and homosexual alienation at this point in his life and that the central figure
through which he understood his historical link to Wilde was that of imprisonment. 9.4
"Episode of Hands," another early poem of Crane's, is atypical of this early work, for it THoMAs E.
depicts in a naturalistic fashion-more like Sandburg or Masters than Wilde or Rimbaud-a YINGLING

simple narrative of male bonding and its effect on the poet. "Episode of Hands" depicts the
brief moment when a "factory owner's son" bandages the hand of a worker bleeding from
an accident in the factory (Crane was, of course, a factory owner's son), and the poem be-
gins with the embarrassment the two feel in being thrown into this atypical masculine rela-
tion: "The un-expected interest made him flush." It ends, however, in a warm and gentle
union between the two men: "And as the bandage knot was tightened/The two men smiled
into each other's eyes." Crane uses the smile as a sign of union and interpersonal knowledge
throughout his career, and it is important to see that he implies a healing of both men in
this smile, for the owner's son is allowed a reprieve from his alienating position as the
owner's son. The "knot" brings the two together in a new relation: the "factory sounds
and factory thoughts I Were banished from him [the son] by that larger, quieter hand I That
lay in his." Crane offers this assessment of the worker's hand, making the trace of its labor
an inspiration rather than an alienation:
The knots and notches,-many in the wide
Deep hand that lay in his,-seemed beautiful.
They were like the marks of wild ponies' play,-
Bunches of new green breaking the hard turf.

The central stanza depicting the actual moment of bandaging is the most interesting,
however; here the owner's son is made aware of the beauty of his own hands through his
connection to the worker's:

And as the fingers of the factory owner's son,

That knew a grip for books and tennis
As well as one for iron and leather,-
As his taut, spare fingers wound the gauze
Around the thick bed of the wound,
His own hands seemed to him
Like wings of butterflies
Flickering in sunlight over summer fields.
(Poems, 141)

The simile of the wings almost certainly borrows from the character Wings Biddlebaum
in Sherwood Anderson's short story "Hands," for Anderson was one of Crane's preferred
American writers, and "Hands," the opening story of Winesburg, Ohio, is one of the most
visible statements on American attitudes toward homosexuality before the twenties.
In the story, as in Crane's poem, it is touch, the supposed escape from language, that sig-
nals the escape from conventional gender expectations: "By the caress that was in his
fingers he expressed himself.... Under the caress of his hands, doubt and disbelief went
out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream" (Winesburg, 32). The change
that occurs through this touch is appropriately imaged in both texts through the most
standard figure for metamorphosis-the butterfly.
This is the first instance in Crane's work of the rhetoric of homosexual transforma-
tion, and the poem is constructed entirely of simile arid metonymy except for one mo-
ment. That moment, the metaphor in the central line of the text-"the thick bed of the
 546 wound"-is all the more important for its singularity. The word "bed" suggests that the
union between these two men has an erotic component, and it is only after this meta-
SECTION 9 phorical and sublimated appearance of the homoerotic that the hands are transformed, the
LYRIC AND SEXUAL owner's son's becoming "Like wings of butterflies," and the worker's "like the marks of wild
DIFFERENCE ponies' play." Although only obliquely acknowledged, homosexuality is not only that which
ties the healing knot between worker and son but also the origin of metaphor in the poem.
If one reads the wound in "Episode of Hands" as structurally linked to homosexual-
ity, as others of Crane's poems would invite us to do, that wound is also healed in the
poem's closure, for the close makes homosexuality the positive center of an affectionate
and literally healing exchange (and a healing that is neither a "cure" or repression, as is
implied in the madonna figure of"C 33"). It represents instead the worker's acceptance of
the son's "unexpected interest." The knot of solidarity between them comes from their
not being defined any longer in the hierarchical relations of partriarchal masculinity and
capitalist economy; rather, the poem ends with the sign of homosexual recognition: a
knowing, smiling gaze. It is not surprising that Crane investigates homosexuality through
this trope of wounding. In the discourse of psychoanalysis, it is structurally linked to
castration, to lack or wounding, 3 and it was no doubt often a condition of suffering for
Crane and others of his generation, making the metaphor appear natural in its appeal.
But if we understand two further things about pain, it becomes clear that there are other
possible links between wounding and homosexuality in Crane's text. In The Body in Pain,
Elaine Scarry suggests that pain places us at the limits oflanguage, at a level of experience
that knows no object except the body (we do not experience pain "of," "about," or "for"
something as we hunger for or fear a, b, or c), and it places us as well at a level of experi-
ence that can produce no signifier (according to Scarry, pain literally destroys language).
Both of these structural readings of pain make its connection to homosexuality more
significant for Crane, for homosexuality, like pain, had a troubled, almost nonexistent
relation to referential language; it was both unmediated and unnamable. And it is possi-
ble as well that in Crane's case homosexuality was a matter of masochistic pleasure, of
knowing the body as the site on which self-empowerment was written as pain.
The rhetoric of pain appears quite frequently in his late, fragmentary work, but in none
of his early poems is it as clear as in the last line of "Modern Craft." There he makes the
rather startling confession, "My modern love were I Charred at a stake in younger times
than ours" (Poems, 132)-a line whose power of surprise derives from its frankness and
from its break with the earlier subjects of the poem. This rather feeble protest about the
burning of homosexuals in former historical periods occurs in the final lines of a poem
largely taken up with a description of an indifferent and sexually jaded female muse who
seems to possess a power and authority the poet does not. In fact, she seems to invert the
conventions of musology, writing him rather than being written by him, and she exposes
him (to himself, at least) as a poseur, a Hamlet who is unable to act and unable to affect
her despite his knowledge of her:
Though I have touched her flesh of moons,
Still she sits gestureless and mute,
Drowning cool pearls in alcohol.
0 blameless shyness;-innocence dissolute!

She hazards jet; wears tiger-lilies;-

And bolts herself within a jewelled belt.
Too many palms have grazed her shoulders:
Surely she must have felt.
 Ophelia had such eyes; but she 547
Even, sank in love and choked with flowers.
This burns and is not burnt ... 9.4
(Poems, 132) THOMAS E.
YINGLING
Sherman Paul has suggested that this represents "an encounter with a prostitute," and
then amends that to say that she is "less an object of the poet's interest than an object for
the play of his own feelings" (Hart's Bridge, 20). But what the poet seems in fact to recog-
nize here is her utter conventionality: not only may she function (within one old script of
homosexual etiology) as the rejecting female, the powerful woman who is uninterested in
(or contemptuous of) the male, but it may in fact prove more powerfully and certainly more
historically accurate to read her as a figure of cross-dressing, a series of contradictions, a
female muse only in her ability to masquerade as one. And this reading is bolstered not only
by the poem's immediate turn to the question of past homosexual persecutions (implying
that this "modern craft," while alienating, is better than burning at the stake) but also by
John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman's suggestion that, in addition to the location of
meeting places in "sites of moral ambiguity" or "transient relationships" (such as water-
fronts, theaters, etc.), there was one prominent feature to the "inchoate subculture" of pre-
1920 homosexuality: transvestism (Intimate Matters, 227-28). 4
When we turn from these early works to Crane's more mature poems we find a re-
markable difference in style, and since form is always in a determinate relation to ideol-
ogy, this difference should not be seen as coincidental. The works in question were writ-
ten during the period when Crane wrote both "Voyages" and "Recitative," a time during
which mentors arid editors alike wrestled with Crane's work and tried (sometimes unsuc-
cessfully) to understand its significance. This was also the period (1923-26) during which
homosexuality was an integrative factor in Crane's intellectual life-not merely one facet
of his personality, but the center of a dense, incarnational metaphysics where the Word
became Flesh. Of the celebrated difficulty of the poems of this period, R. W. B. Lewis has
written,

the lyrics of 1923-26 contain some of the most notoriously difficult verses of modern times.
To some readers, Crane's lyrics have seemed so impenetrable as to arouse suspicion of
fraudulence .... [I] t is still possible for perfectly honest critics to come up with radically dif-
ferent interpretations of particular stanzas or even entire poems .... But I am sure that when
the poems (that is, the post-"Faustus and Helen" poems) are read as a group, as the product
of a single large phase of Crane's creative career, many (not all) of their difficulties evapo-
rate. (The Poetry of Hart Crane, 124-25)

Lewis is not exactly correct. The difficulties of these poems remain entrenched, their
meanings indeterminate, shifting radically as one reads. As the second chapter of this
study suggested, that is in part due to a homosexual semiotic that is determined to refuse
closure. But all the difficulties of these poems cannot be attributed to homosexuality, for
their semiotic density is often directly related to Crane's other interests in modern art and
literature.
Crane's indebtedness to the discourses of modernism has been documented elsewhere,
and includes subjects as well as styles: his interest in machinery and technology, for in-
stance, an interest shared by a large number of artists, photographers, and writers; his lin-
guistic density, which is his verbal equivalent of montage or cubist effect-the attempt to
create simultaneity of reference and perspective in one synchronic structure. But perhaps the
most "modern" development in Crane's work was his refiguration of mimesis. Crane does
 548 not represent external objects or even internalized processes and meditations in the man-
ner Abrams suggests is conventional for Romantic poetry and that we find as the first as-
SECTION 9 sumption of Eliot's poetry. It is true that the city or the machine might enter Crane's work,
LYRIC AND SEXUAL but they enter it as objects enter the visual field in Stieglitz's photographs, for instance, as
DIFFERENCE structure, idea, abstraction. 5 Crane differs from Williams, Eliot, and Moore (and most of
the writers who have taught us to read modernist texts) in that his work is not dependent
upon representation in the same way as theirs. I will not take the time here to quibble
about Williams's or Stevens's many variations on the abstract and the concrete (such as
Kora in Hell, which seems experimental and antimimetic in ways analogous to Crane's
antimimetic work). 6 We should perhaps think of Crane's work as having most in common
with Constructivist or conceptual art, for it is often more presentational than representa-
tional in its effect, breaking the planes and contours of illusion and making one aware of
the fact that it is written work-not an imitation of a "real" interior monologue nor a de-
scription of a "real" world but a piece of language that foregrounds its textuality. As Su-
zanne Clarke Doeren has suggested, Crane's poetry is one where "a language system takes
over the subject" ("Hart Crane," 159), where there is no illusion that language functions
transparently to signify the internal state of mind of a speaker or writer. Crane's is perhaps
the first lyric poetry in English (and perhaps the only poetry in English until Charles Ol-
son's or John Ashbery's) that is designed to be read as a constructed verbal artifact rather
than as mimetic of any natural discourse? The lyric focus in Crane seems, finally, to be
neither the minimal unit of the image, as in Imagist work, nor the maximal unit of the
poem conceived as organic whole, as in Romantic lyrics or dramatic monologues that
trace psychologized themes. Lyricality in Crane is that point where language breaks its
transparency and forces the reader to authorize his relation to it, and for Crane this char-
acteristically occurs on intermediate levels of meaning: in syntax and semantics. Doeren
writes that "Crane's poems seem to come into existence at the point where ... a subject
becomes some other form oflanguage: a verb, an object, a preposition" (83), and it is pre-
cisely in this use of language as a thick, palpable medium for construction that Crane's
texts take their place beside other modernist experiments with aesthetic media.
The standard reading of Crane's deviation from poetic norms draws on prose state-
ments such as the following, written for a proposed symposium in Broom: "It is as though
a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible
to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader's consciousness
henceforward" (Poems, 221). Crane's poems are explicitly tied to this search for the "new
word," for what he terms in "The Wine Menagerie" "new anatomies" of the "new thresh-
olds" on which humanity stands. But it is important to see that if Crane's poems are ini-
tiatory and almost literally liminal, they are not unconstructed moments. Just as the si-
lences of homosexuality are not unstructured but are a set of conditions that mark the
relation of homosexuality to other cultural practices, the antistructural quality of Crane's
difficult poems nevertheless maps a set of differential relations for the production of
meaning. Crane's characteristic poems seem interested neither in a literally transcribed
homosexual reality nor in an imaginary realm completely interiorized and private (the
assumption behind dismissals by Moore and others that the poems were no doubt mean-
ingful but too obscure to be read); rather, Crane's most characteristic texts are interested
in linguistic meaning and subjectivity as they occur through the difficulty of textuality.
"Chaplinesque" (1921) is an interim text that provides useful contrast to the early ho-
mosexual poems discussed above and the difficult, prophetic poems of 1923-26 that come
after it. It seems to have been particularly pleasing to Crane, and he was confounded by
his friends' confused responses to it. Stylistically it is a step toward the dense semiosis 549
that attends Crane's full development; thematically it is a rather sentimental and even
maudlin poem that suggests the poignancy of innocence in a world that crushes it (the 9.4
Chaplin thematic). On its surface, the poem would appear to have nothing to do with ho- THoMAs E.
mosexuality, 8 but it marks the beginning of Crane's disintegration of the speaking subject YINGLING

(although that subject appears here as "we"), and it is on this point of pronominal identifica-
tion that we can begin to see the discursive outcomes of Crane's poetic response to homo-
sexuality. The poem opens:

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.
(Poems, 11)

So much depends in this case not on chickens, rain, and wheelbarrows, but on who steps
in to define and fill the vacuum of that "we." Who makes meek adjustment to the world?
Who, later in the poem, will defy the law and "Dally the doom of that inevitable
thumb/That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us"? Who "can still love the world,
who find I A famished kitten on the step, and know I Recesses for it from the fury of the
street"? For whom does Chaplin speak? For whom does the poem speak?
In discussing this poem, R. W. B. Lewis acknowledges that the text is (in its own
words) "evasive," but Lewis does not imagine that one of the things evaded here is a more
direct address to the social condition of the homosexual subject. This is not to suggest
that "Chaplinesque" is intentionally "about" that subject but is, rather, to suggest that
one of the strongest referents of subjectivity for Crane in 1921 was his experience as a
homosexual-that the "we" of "Chaplinesque" is constructed in sight of the practice of
homosexuality, its alienations and consequent, compensatory nostalgias. The poem is,
that is, and perhaps despite its intentions, an allegory of homosexual desire and its articula-
tion within the "American restrictions" of the Midwest ca. 1921. The next to last stanza
tries to find virtue in the meek adjustment and "smirk" or "dull squint" of"innocence"
and "surprise" with which this subject meets the "inevitable thumb" of the law (patriar-
chal repressions), and it suggests that a subjectivity grounded in desire always exceeds
those social mechanisms and technologies that seek to control or euphemize it-the heart
lives on:

And yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.
(Poems, 11)

The "fine collapses" of obsequy, euphemism, and poetry are not lies, Crane claims, and he
locates the authority for their "truth" in the heart-signifying here both a center of con-
sciousness and the center of desire. It is social pressure ("enterprise" picks up here on a
whole discourse of antimaterialist writing in the period) which forces the lie: the "victim"
of that pressure remains blameless in his own heart.
Crane has not by any means made a full transition into the advanced poetry of a de-
centered subjectivity in "Chaplinesque." The poem ends with a rather trite assertion of
 550 transformation that seems a restatement of Emerson's claim that he was everywhere de-
feated yet born to victory:
SECTION 9
The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
LYRIC AND SEXUAL
The moon in lonely alleys make
DIFFERENCE
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.
(Poems, n)

In some sense the preposterousness of the final image marks a limit to Crane's natural-
ized Romanticism (how far from "The Tyger!"); two years later, when composing "Posses-
sions," his rhetoric of transformation will be truly apocalyptic. But the closure marked
here is also part of the poem's homosexual textuality, for the homosexual's heart needs to
be defended as blameless, and the reality of its consolations asserted: loneliness in cruisey
alleyways can become laughter; a genuine tenderness can be located amid the hubbub "of
gaiety and quest." The tenor of this final stanza is clearly of a piece with the more optimistic
moments in Crane's letters from Cleveland, and it provides in its reconstruction of a homo-
sexual "we" something Crane felt sorely lacking at this time: a community in which he
could discuss the contours of his existence, the "fine collapses" of his life, as if they were not
inherently illegitimate as subjects for poetry.
Crane's investigation of homosexuality as cognate to the textual indeterminacy of
subjectivity is nowhere as openly displayed as in the 1923 poem "Possessions." Of those
poems written in this period, "Possessions" is the one that most makes a critical consid-
eration of its homosexual referents unavoidable. Robert Martin has called it "the first
poem of the modern urban homosexual in search of sex, his hesitations the result of fear
and self-oppression" (The Homosexual Tradition, 128). But it is important to our under-
standing of both Crane and his construction of homosexuality as a possibility and an
impossibility of meaning to see that "Possessions" does not dramatize that search in a
straightforward fashion. It does not present an individual confronting or ruminating on
this as a psychic or social problem. "Possessions" employs the first-person pronoun, and
there is some attempt to locate that person within a landscape that produces him as
meaningful, but it is not by any means a dramatic monologue. Crane employs the "I" here
not so much to relate an individual's experience as to provide a field for those emotional
and intellectual conflicts that do battle through him. Thus, Martin's claim that this is
"the first poem of the modern urban homosexual in search of sex" is only partially cor-
rect. The problematic nature of the search for sex is only part of the poem's concern, and
this is how Crane's text differs from Whitman's Calamus, for instance, or from a John
Ashbery poem about cruising, "The Ongoing Story," both of which see homosexuality as
transparent to the individual and not as a system in which the individual's meaning and
desire are already written for him. In "City of Orgies," for instance, Whitman claims it is
the "frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love" that "repay me" (Leaves of Grass,
126), and while there are poems in Calamus such as "Of the Terrible Doubt of Appear-
ances" and "Earth, My Likeness" that suggest some difficulty in the expression of homo-
sexual desire, Whitman's more typical texts on homosexuality locate it internal to the
subject and transparent to his real self. Ashbery's "The Ongoing Story," which is not per-
haps representative of his most skeptical interrogations of identity, locates the act of
cruising as one stable field in a life otherwise uninterpretable and unstable: "It's as though
I'd been left with the empty street I A few seconds after the bus pulled out." Personal and
poetic closure are achieved in the following:
 you, 551
In your deliberate distinctness, whom I love and gladly
Agree to walk into the night with, 9.4
Your realness is real to me though I would never take any of it THOMAS E.
just to see how it grows. A knowledge that people live close by is, YINGLING

I think, enough. And even if only first names are ever exchanged
The people who own them seem rock-true and marvelously self-sufficient.
(A Wave, n)

In the context of the poem-and in the context of Ashbery's entire oeuvre-there is per-
haps some irony in this comfort which defines reality as the realness of others. Certainly
the marvelous self-sufficiency of others offered at the close of the poem is proven to be an
illusion by the knowledge elsewhere evident in it that one's own self-sufficiency is a fiction.
But the poem does not destabilize the reading subject as does Crane's "Possessions."9
Crane's investigation of homosexuality, which occurs historically somewhere between the
mystical naivete of Whitman discovering the homoeroticism that is identical to his "self'
and the inside joke of Ashbery's New York, where everything-including homosexuality-
has always been known all along, is settled on a historical threshold where desire is no
longer a secret excitement securely anchored within a Romantic self but is not yet a cul-
tural cliche enabling only parody. "Possessions" presents homosexuality as a text but it
understands the subject as lost within that text.
A closer inspection of the poem suggests that what is rejected from the outset in "Pos-
sessions" is less the practice of homosexuality than the constricting representations of it
available to the homosexual and to the homosexual poet. In an almost polemical fashion,
"Possessions" rejects the rhetorical construction of homosexuality as a "fixed stone of
lust" and replaces it at the poem's close with a more idealized vision of "bright stones
wherein our smiling plays." The poem is an attempt to depict homosexual existence as
more than a "Record of rage and partial appetites," this last phrase nicely balanced to
suggest that desire is both determined (one always favors or is partial to something) and
fragmentary (desire is also partial and never whole; it never makes one whole, especially
if it is taboo). But if homosexuality inscribes one as the field of rage and partial appetite,
dividing the subject from proper knowledge of himself in his possession of sexual object
after sexual object, the poem insists that this is preparatory to an "inclusive" moment
when a "pure possession ... /Whose heart is fire" will-as in the golden halo effect of
Crane's letters-transform possessor and possessed into a single being.
A diachronic reading of the poem does not neatly display what I have here suggested
is the poem's impact; the poem seems alternately to come into and go out of focus, to hesi-
tate, as Martin suggests, and part of that hesitation or indeterminacy is due to its skewed
syntax. If Crane claimed this text to be an example of how he "work[ ed] hard for a more
perfect lucidity" (Letters, 176), it is not immediately possible to grant that this poem ex-
emplifies that work. Although the poem is brief and its major outlines are clear, there is
considerable obscurity in specific passages and in the relation of details to the larger struc-
ture. Without intending it, Robert Combs suggests that the poem is an allegory of homo-
sexual desire: "The difficulty of this poem lies chiefly in the way Crane delays interpreta-
tional clues which serve gradually to orient the reader... .'Trust,' 'rain,' and 'key' in the
first stanza are like elements in a mysterious allegory that seem to need interpretation by
the last word 'lust.'" (65). 10 It would seem to be Crane's strategy to keep syntactic relations,
as homosexual desire itself remains, indeterminate in the opening of the poem. We can see
only textual units, possible events, attitudes, and locations that exist in juxtaposition but
 552 without any continuity or englobing frame of reference. It is a world of contiguous and
accidental relations:
SECTION 9
Witness now this trust! The rain
LYRIC AND SEXUAL
That steals softly direction
DIFFERENCE
And the key, ready to hand-sifting
One moment in sacrifice (the direst)
Through a thousand nights the flesh
Assaults outright for bolts that linger
Hidden,-0 undirected as the sky
That through its black foam has no eyes
For this fixed stone oflust. ...
(Poems, r8)

We see here only an act of implied entry; "the key, ready to hand," is a phallic object em-
ployed to cross some threshold, but that threshold remains undefined (although this act
of unlocking certainly bristles with sexual innuendoes and is linked figuratively to the
erotic "bolts that linger I Hidden"). The desire in this opening is overwhelming in its se-
quential duration ("a thousand nights") and in the intensity of its passion ("the flesh/ As-
saults outright"), and it occurs under a vacuous yet menacing sky that certainly draws its
significance from religious injunctions that traditionally have "[had] no eyes" for homo-
sexuality. If one accepts the pun on "eyes," this "black foam" of heaven at once names and
negates homosexual identity, it robs one of one's "I," and its rain (reign) "steals softly direc-
tion" until one does not know which way one is going. This moment, "sift[ed]" from a thou-
sand, occurs within the context of cosmic alienation, and one of its meanings as a "moment
in sacrifice" would appear to he that the homosexual sacrifices himself on a "fixed stone,"
a pagan altar of lust.
If the first stanza articulates homosexuality as a broken syntax, the second stanza
asks the reader to contemplate the magnitude of such displaced meaning when it is cast
across the course of a lifetime (signified here as the accumulation of"an hour").

Accumulate such moments to an hour:

Account the total of this trembling tabulation.
I know the screen, the distant flying taps
And stabbing medley that sways-
And the mercy, feminine, that stays
As though prepared.
(Poems, r8)

There is in this stanza little referential clarity; although it is possible to say that some-
thing in the last four lines seems to assuage the emptiness of the "trembling tabulation,"
it is not possible to say what exactly that is. It is a "screen," "distant flying taps," a "stab-
bing medley that sways," and "mercy, feminine, that stays/ As though prepared." We see in
the vocabulary of distance a vague outline perhaps of longing or romance, in the stabbing
medley that sways a sense perhaps of poignancy and seduction. And if mercy is feminine,
that suggestion is perhaps less surprising than its appearance here, an appearance that
makes the alienation of the first stanza even more overtly masculine in retrospect. How that
mercy stays and for what or how it is prepared seem indecipherable; "stays" can mean both
"remains" and "supports," and "prepared" could mean, to follow out the religious imagery
of the preceding stanza, "preordained," prepared from before. In any case, this second
stanza suggests alternatives to the opening of the poem: intersubjectivity and mercy are
presented as being "real" qualities of homosexuality meant to counter its representation 553
as nothing more than predatory lust.
The third stanza accepts the heavy burden of interpretation in the phrases "fixed 9.4
stone of lust" and "take up the stone." But it does so without speech, "As quiet as you can THoMAs E.
make a man," and assigns that burden to an individual "Wounded by apprehensions out of YINGLING

speech."

And I, entering, take up the stone

As quiet as you can make a man ...
In Bleecker Street, still trenchant in a void,
Wounded by apprehensions out of speech,
I hold it up against a disk oflight-
I turning, turning on smoked forking spires,
The city's stubborn lives, desires.
(Poems, 18)

The difficult, unspeakable quality of homosexuality stands clearly behind this construc-
tion. Nevertheless, the poet "hold[s] ... up against a disk of light" this stone that repre-
sents the "city's stubborn lives, desires." If the "turning, turning on smoked forking spires"
seems to suggest a demonic skewering appropriate to Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights
(and thus to be a continuation of the vocabulary of punishment and wounding that sur-
rounds homosexuality), we need to see as well that this refers to the poet's textual produc-
tion. The "forking spires" (both phallic and religious aspirations) are the double-pronged
instrument of writing he uses to hold this topic up for inspection. Crane's "General Aims
and Theories," which postdates this poem by two years but is nonetheless relevant to this
text, may serve as a gloss on how Crane conceives the poet's civic function:

It seems to me that a poet will accidentally define his time well enough simply by reacting
honestly and to the full extent of his sensibilities to the states of passion, experience, and
rumination that fate forces on him, first hand. He must, of course, have a sufficiently uni-
versal basis of experience to make his imagination selective and valuable. His picture of
the "period," then, will simply be a by-product of his curiosity and the relation of his expe-
rience to a postulated "eternity." (Poems, 218)

What we see in this image of the stone of lust held up to the light makes a claim for the
poet's relevance similar to that offered in "General Aims and Theories": "Possessions"
examines homosexuality (the "stubborn lives, desires" of the city that are at stake here as
the "passion" and "experience" fate forced on Crane) against the background of"a postu-
lated 'eternity' "-in order to define it for this time. No longer an unshakable paradigm or
"fixed stone" of lust, homosexuality begins here to be figured contiguously-in the syn-
tagmatic placing of one term against another. Thus, Crane reverses not only the meaning
of homosexuality as a "fixed stone oflust" but (perhaps more significantly) the location of
meaning in the fixity of metaphor and paradigm, that possibility of unshakable meaning
out of which the poem's initial sense of alienation arose.
The opening lines of the last stanza quite clearly locate the dilemma of homosexu-
ality (on the "horns" of which one is tossed) within a problematic of language and
representation.

Tossed on these horns, who bleeding dies,

Lacks all but piteous admissions to be spilt
Upon the page whose blind sum finally burns
 554 Record of rage and partial appetites.
The pure possession, the inclusive cloud
SECTION 9 Whose heart is fire shall come,-the white wind rase
LYRIC AND SEXUAL All but bright stones wherein our smiling plays.
DIFFERENCE (Poems, 18)

If homosexuality as a "fixed stone of lust" is traditionally figured as a wound or lack

(both of which tropes appear in the poem), what it seems most crucially to lack are "pite-
ous admissions ... spilt I Upon the page." Although these admissions are "piteous," and
the homosexual still cloaked in the rhetoric of guilt, more open textual representations
would allow some challenge to negative paradigms of the private and public implica-
tions of the homosexual life. Such representations, when themselves tabulated, would
(unlike the trembling moments at the beginning of the poem) "finally [burn]" the "Re-
cord of rage and partial appetites" that are the legacy of the paradigm oflust. This image of
burning transforms the demonic language of the text; the "pure possession" or "inclusive
cloud/ Whose heart is fire shall come" and possess or repossess the now dispossessed ho-
mosexual man. The figure of the "bright stones wherein our smiling plays" also reverses
the punishing god (and the altar of sacrifice) from the opening stanza and replaces it with
a vision that can only be called, according to the poem's terms, "feminine." In the poem's
final lines we see on a cosmic scale the "mercy, feminine, that stays/ As though prepared"
that has been the homosexual's internalized source of comfort and trust up to this point,
that longed-for inclusive cloud that sanctions homosexual desire. What "Possessions"
finds in "trust" is neither transcendence of the body nor foreclosure of homosexual desire
but their positive integration into myth. What the poem seeks is a visionary love that can
accommodate the homosexual and no longer isolate him as an example of lust.

[ ... ]

The experimental lyrics written from 1923 to 1926 constitute a record of the development of
homosexual subjectivity unlike any other in modern letters; with an increasing urgency,
from "Possessions" through "Voyages" and "Legend" to "Passage" and "The Wine Menag-
erie," they present the search for an authentic voice and an ideological recognition of homo-
sexual speech and writing, and-with an increasing clarity-the frustrations and barriers to
that project. They record the dialectical unfolding of Crane's thought about the homosexual
subject and poetry, and they articulate a number of important points about the ideology
under which that thought took shape. First, these poems announce that homosexuality may
not appear in autobiography "in person," as it were: we see this in its literal disappearance
from "Passage," for instance, and in the highly coded discourses through which it appears as
the universal problem of lust in "The Wine Menagerie" and as the universal problem of
identity development in "Repose of Rivers." Secondly, a diachronic reading of these poems,
which I have conducted here with only a few omissions, traces the disintegration of a con-
sciousness such as Crane's, a disintegration not made necessary by enforced homophobia
but one certainly encouraged by it. Especially when we understand that Crane inhabited
flatly contradictory sites of culture as both a homosexual and a poet, we must read the disin-
tegration of the speaking/writing subject in "The Wine Menagerie" as fully produced within
an ideology that made the homosexual poet's subjectivity a bizarre dialectic of anguish and
ecstasy. But the final poem in this progression, "Repose of Rivers," marks Crane's refusal to
surrender the homosexual subject in the lyric; if it asserts a poise he never actually sustained
in his life, and if his life had by the summer of 1926 already become a plague from which he
would not escape (the nasty details of which one may gather from almost all his biographers 555
and from the memoirs of countless friends), the poem nevertheless bravely signals Crane's
refusal to surrender his project for homosexual centrality. As Adorno suggests, "The great- 9.4
ness of works of art lies solely in their power to let those things be heard which ideology THoMAS E.
conceals" ("Lyric Poetry and Society," 57), and the greatness of Crane's lyrics, written, it is YJNCLJNc

not hyperbolic to say, at the cost of his life, is that they allow homosexual subjectivity to be
heard as an authentic experience, as "wind flaking sapphire."

NOTES

1. George Chauncey, Jr., writes that "early in 1927 But as stunning as is the turn of the poem's close
municipal authorities raided the theater where the and its reversal of the terms that come before,
American version of The Captive, a French play Stevens's poem suggests only an old American
about lesbianism, was premiering," and also cliche of domesticity avoided, paradise lost and
prevented The Drag, a play in which Mae West then regained through the repossession of
appeared, from opening on Broadway. "In an effort individual vision and the exotic within the self.
to protect 'immature' audiences from exposure to "Modern Craft" examines the image that remains
such 'corrupting influences,'" Chauncey writes, absent in "Disillusionment ofTen O'Clock" (the
"the state legislature passed a law later that year strange muse with "socks oflace I And beaded
which banned 'the subject of sexual degeneracy or ceintures") precisely because Crane would make
sex perversion' from the stage" (34). See Gay New sexuality rather than its sublimation central to his
York (Basic Books, 1994). text. it is not a mythic imagination ("Catch[ing]
2. Robert Martin points this out in The tigers/ In red weather") that Crane glosses in his
Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979). work but a historically situated subject who speaks
3. Naomi Schor has recently developed a theory of a fractured, difficult text.
female textual practices that includes the wound as Williams, of course, refuses to consider the
one figure of bodily fetishization that provide female exotic or erotic except as it exists in the concrete
readers resistance to male totalizing (Reading in and the mundane, and "The Young Housewife"
Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine [Routledge, 1987]). traces one instance of Williams's encounter with
4. "Modern Craft" was written in 1918, and if we his muse. Neither crafty convention nor ghostly
compare two other searches for a modern muse presence, his muse is a young housewife who
from the same period, Stevens's "Disillusionment of "moves about in negligee behind/the wooden
Ten O'Clock" (1915) and Williams's "The Young walls of her husband's house":
Housewife" (1917), we can see how glaring is Crane's
Then again she comes to the curb
discovery of representational lack in "Modern
to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands
Craft." Stevens's poem suggests something awry in
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
the modern world, and also begins with a sense of
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
inadequate muses and inadequate representational
to a fallen leaf.
strategies: it is easier for Stevens to depict what will
not occur in this landscape than it is for him to say The noiseless wheels of my car
what will. rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
The houses are haunted
(Collected Early Poems, 136)
By white night gowns.
None are green, Williams's self-proclaimed comfort with female
Or purple with green rings, sexuality allows him to reverse a long tradition of
Or green with yellow rings, stylized portraits of the muse and to find beauty,
Or yellow with blue rings. inspiration, etc., in a "real" rather than "ideal-
ized" woman. But we certainly cannot overlook
People are not going the voyeuristic, even sadistic possibilities in this
To dream of baboons and periwinkles. text-after authorizing his act of metaphor ("I
Only, here and there, an old sailor, compare her I to a fallen leaf") the young housewife
Drunk and asleep in his boots, is metaphorically crushed in the last stanza;
Catches tigers regardless of the debatable tone of this ending, the
In red weather. movement here must be seen as evidence of
(Collected Poems, 16) patriarchy's and poetry's appropriation of the
 556 female body through gaze, description, and in On the Margins of Discourse (U. of Chicago
possession. Thus, Williams's poem is doubly Press, 1983). Crane's work is not mimetic of any
SECTION 9 conventional; for all its refusal of idealization, it speech act or verbal behavior-i.e., it is neither a
quite assuredly depicts the muse in a manner that conversation poem, a confession, a hymn, or a
LYRIC AND SEXUAL
is conventional and unproblematic. And as in meditation. If Crane's poetry is mimetic of
DIFFERENCE
Williams, so in Amy Lowell's "Madonna of the anything, it is mimetic of poetry.
Evening Flowers" (1919): when the modern poet 8. We cannot ignore, of course, the marvelous
goes in search of a muse, that muse is usually suspension of gender that occurs in Chaplin's
found: films. If not gay, their main character often
exhibits behaviors that make his gender
Suddenly I am lonely: identification ambiguous (he sews, he flutters
Where are you? his eyelashes, he blushes, is shy and practically
I go about searching. defenseless); the list could go on, but it is clear,
Then I see you, as james D. Baker pointed out to me, that a
Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur, homosexual reading of the character is not
With a basket of roses on your arm. impossible and may in fact have been part of its
(Complete Poetical Works, 210) attraction to Crane and to generations of viewers.
The Crane poem seems to have been a response
We might recognize the rejection of heterosexual to the Cleveland screening of The Kid.
poetic strategies in "Modern Craft" as a signal of 9. There are other Ashbery poems that do not
aesthetic exhaustion, not unlike the strategies of present any hint of a naive assertion of stable
Edna St. Vincent Millay, about whom Debra Fried identity. But perhaps it is Ashbery's radical
writes, in tropes echoing those of Crane's poem, maneuver here to present homosexual cruising as a
"By identifying the sonnet's scanty ground with an locus of stability in the face of his own canonical
erotic grove of excess, turning the chastity belt of exploitation of decentered subjectivity. "The
poetic form into a token of sexual indulgence, Ongoing Story" is an uncharacteristically
Millay invades the sanctuary of male poetic Whitman ian moment in Ashbery, for the other
control" ("Andromeda Unbound," q). typical objects of his parody are in evidence
5· H. H. Smith's Aaron Siskind: Photographer (Sydney Carton "mounting the guillotine," "a
(Horizon Press, 1965) describes the parallel course/Called Background of the Great Ideas") but
between Crane and Stieglitz as the way in which the moment of interaction between the two figures
objects in their respective texts are used not only to at the poem's close seems the only genuine
express inner states of emotion (as in Eliot) but experience in the poem.
also to suggest harmonies among them that allude 10. It would be one thing-and an accurate

to more transcendental laws or insights. one-to say that homosexuality is denied its object
6. Pound's attraction to the ideogram, which of desire and hence its poetic correlatives; it is
would seem to be the point in modernism furthest another-and suggests an altogether different
from mimesis and closest to abstraction, is in fact notion of desire and its dissemination through
based on the mimetic qualities of the ideogram and cultural fields of knowledge-to suggest that
its ability to suggest relations in the real world homosexuality needs to be apprehended as
without the mediating, antimimetic qualities of allegory. I draw here on Paul De Man's comment
language. The ideogram becomes, in a purely on Benjamin, that "allegory names the rhetorical
linguistic sense, the "answer" to the search for a process by which the literary text moves from a
direct representation of the world. In another sense, phenomenal, world-oriented to a grammatical,
it is without history in Western poetry and therefore language-oriented direction" ("Lyrical Voice in
also becomes a representation that has no mediating Contemporary Theory," 69). What we see in
historical associations to block its transparency. "Possessions" is the grammar of homosexuality
7. I draw here on Barbara Smith's helpful and Crane's battle to align its paradigmatic and
distinction between fictive and natural discourses syntagmatic axes.
Introduction to American Women 9.5
Poets in the 2Ist Century: Where Lyric
Meets Language (2002)
JuLIANA SPAHR

Lyric is not and never has been a simplistic genre, despite its seeming innocence. It is only
recently, after modernism, that it has gotten its bad name for being traditional, for being
romantic, in the derisive sense. 1 And while much ink has been spilt on defining lyric, 2
there is no consensus on its value. Some argue that the lyric's intimate and interior space
of retreat is its sin. This is essentially Adorno's argument, which leads to his famous decla-
ration that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." 3 Some argue that because lyric is
retreat, it resists. Maria Rosa Menocal, for instance, writes, "When the world all around is
calling for clear distinctions, loyalties to Self and hatred of others, and, most of all, belief in
the public and legal discourses of single languages and single states-smooth narratives-
what greater threat exists than that voice which rejects such easy orthodoxies with their
readily understood rhetoric and urges, instead, the most difficult readings, those that em-
brace the painfully impossible in the human heart?" 4 (1994, 89). 5
This debate about retreat is one that the poets included here [in American Women Poets
in the 21st Century] often enact and discuss. Brock-Broido, for instance, echoes Adorno but
without his judgment when she writes, "My logic of Lyric does not permit me to assign a
Politic to language ... The I is the Alpha, not 'Witness."' 6 And on this topic, Brenda Hill-
man notes simply that "lyric has its limits" (277). She is right to admit this. The lyric has not
transcended the limits of aesthetics much recently. Even this collection, which makes room
within lyric for language writing's more politicized claims, focuses mainly on formal and
aesthetic issues. Most of the poets and critics in this collection use the word "lyric" to refer to
interiority and/or intimate speech that avoids confession, clear speech, or common sense.
Many poets here speak oflyric as the genre of and about impossibility and difficulty. In short,
when they talk of innovation, they often talk of lyric. Brock-Broido, for instance, aligns with
lyric's difficulty when she declares, "I want a poetry which is inorganic, an artifact or artifice,
riddle with truth." And so does Graham when she ends "Philosopher's Stone" with
sensation of beauty unseen; an owlet's
cry;
a cry from something closer to the ground that's uttered
twice and which I cannot name-although it
seems bright yellow in its pitch.

Likewise, Lauterbach writes of her interest in a poetics of "a whole fragment," one where
"meaning abides or arises exactly at the place where 'use' appears." This desire to articu-
late those moments where meaning is slipping away is lyric's great tradition.
 558 But what is exciting about this collection is how the social and the cultural keep intro-
ducing and developing an aesthetic frame whether the poets admit it or not. In part these
SECTION 9 concerns intrude because of the collection's frame of women and their relation to innova-
LvRIC AND SExuAL tion. Lyric has often had a troubled history of relation with women. Many blame the Pe-
DIFFERENCE trarchian tradition with its male lover and female beloved. Yet it is not that women avoid
or have avoided writing lyrics. Sappho is the obvious otherwise. Many critics also point
out how women have been busy reclaiming the lyric from the centuries of mythically gen-
dered male tradition? But because this collection emphasizes innovation, the poems pre-
sented here have little resemblance to this tradition and the small space women have
claimed for themselves. As Howe puts it, "I write to break out into perfect primeval Con-
sent" (328). Innovation is a word that is as hard to define as lyric, but for the most part here
it means the use of agrammatical modernist techniques such as fragmentation, parataxis,
run-ons, interruption, and disjunction, and at the same time the avoidance oflinear nar-
rative development, of meditative confessionalism, and of singular voice. Many of these
writers have taken to heart Kathleen Fraser's and Rachel Blau Du Plessis's suggestion that
modernist innovation is a feminist space,8 even though much of this work does not appear
conventionally feminist at first glance. There is in this collection little attention to how
women, or these poets themselves, are oppressed or marginal-little attention to gender
asymmetry. Few of the poets here present a poetry of uplift with positive images of re-
vised femininity. Instead, much of this work investigates representation itself to suggest
alternatives to lyric's troubled and limiting history for women. It moves away from too
easily separated and too easily declarative identities.
Because of its alphabetical organization, the concerns of the poets and critics in Ameri-
can Women Poets in the 21st Century loop around and into each other. The collection begins
with Rae Armantrout's up-front statement about her association with language poetry even
as she quickly moves to earlier, and more lyrical, influences such as William Carlos Wil-
liams and Emily Dickinson. Armantrout's work is distinctive in this volume for how di-
rectly it documents the various power struggles between and within genders. In "A Story,"
a wonderfully telling revision of lyric intimacy, she replaces the lyric's lover and beloved
with a "good mother" who tells the child:

"I love you, but I don't

like the way you lie there
pinching your nipples
while I'm trying to read you a story."

This poem points to the value of the lyric in exposing how our intimacies are watched by
others and thus, with this stare, also restricted. In "Lyricism of the Swerve: The Poetry of
Rae Armantrout," Hank Lazer calls this the "swerve" of Armantrout's poetry, a quality
that he defines as "peculiarly teasing, humorous, thoughtful (and thought-provoking) en-
gagement at those junctures, joints, and sites of adjacency" (31). This swerve, Armantrout
notes in "Cheshire Poetics," has feminist roots in what Pound called the slither of H.D.
And while Lazer mentions that Armantrout's work is often seen as "less" political in com-
parison to her fellow language writers, his essay importantly points to "the inherently po-
litical nature of her calculated subversion of comfortable and comforting assumptions"
(38). His essay, as it places Armantrout's work in the context of lyric written by women,
clearly points out how Armantrout uses lyric's intimacy and language writing's politics to
suggest a feminist, engaged lyric, or what he calls "an ethics of writing."
While Armantrout can declare her allegiance to language writing simply and easily at
the beginning of her essay, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's work has always existed in between
the many social formations that define contemporary poetry. She clearly has alliances 559
with language writing; in "By Correspondence," she mentions conversations with James
Sherry as an influence. And she just as clearly has alliances with Asian-American groups 9.5
such as the Basement Workshop and the Morita Dance Company, which produced a per- juLIANA SPAHR

formance of "Fog," and also the Hawai'i-based Bamboo Ridge. She also clearly has alli-
ances with the arts scene, as her collaborations with Kiki Smith and her husband Richard
Tuttle demonstrate. All of these alliances combine to make her work distinctly exploratory
of the internal but not the confessional or the intimate. The excerpt included here from
Four Year Old Girl, for instance, begins inside the body with detail:
The genotype is her genetic constitution.
The phenotype is the observable expression of the genotype as structural
and biochemical traits.

This looking inside at the complicated ways in which human emotion becomes con-
structed is Berssenbrugge's innovative contribution to lyric's tendency to concentrate on
interior emotion. 9 Linda Voris in "A Sensitive Empiricism: Berssenbrugge's Phenomenolo-
gical Investigations" argues that Berssenbrugge's work "is compositional in method, accreting
observations, contingent possibilities, and contradictions that seem to materialize by stretch-
ing ever outwards, much like Tatlin's compositions built out from the corners of the room"
(69). While Voris, who concentrates more on the form and aesthetics of Berssenbrugge's
work, does not much address it, there is an interesting dialogue between feminism and the
lyric in this work. In "By Correspondence," Berssenbrugge writes, "I also identify with my
mother's and my grandmother's feminism, which seemed immediate to me, perhaps because
of matriarchal character that is part of Chinese culture" (66). This feminism is clearly evident
within Berssenbrugge's attention to how bodies, mainly female ones, are represented in writ-
ing and art. Four Year Old Girl, for instance, avoids conventional representation and looks at
genotype and phenotype to observe that "Between her and the displaced gene is another
relation, the effect of meaning" (53).
While this book brings together a number of women writers who define themselves as
innovative, many are innovative in different ways and for different reasons. Further,
many of these poets do not feel at all aligned with each other. Some of this division is merely
about who breaks bread with whom. But one strong difference in this collection is between
those who turn to modernist techniques for political reasons and those who do so for aes-
thetic reasons. Lucie Brock-Broido, for instance, begins her essay "Myself a Kangaroo
among the Beauties" by stating, "My logic of Lyric does not permit me to assign a Politic to
Language" (wo). Later in the essay she explicitly separates her work from language writing:
"A poem which the world longs to call a Language Poem is too open for my taste" (101) and
"After I had been the recipient of a particularly thrashing review, Charles Wright, in a letter
of solidarity & sympathy, wrote to me regarding LANGUAGE (?) Poetry. He wrote: 'What
have we been doing all this time anyway, Barking?'" (101). Instead Brock-Broido claims that
she aspires to be "a New Elliptical." 10 In terms of the formal devices used in poems such as
"Carrowmore" and "Am More"-fragments, phrases, run-ons, and ambiguity-Brock-
Broido's work does not differ that much from poets who assign a politics to language (and
one cannot help but hear Howe's pivotal My Emily Dickinson in Brock-Broido's The Mas-
ter Letters) and are heavily influenced by language writing such as that by Norma Cole,
Fraser, or Cole Swensen. Yet her work avoids the politics of empowerment of these poets.
Brock-Broido's poems, for instance, draw from feminism's tendency to represent female
subjects and their voices, yet her work avoids conventional uplift. As Stephen Burt notes
in '"Subject, Subjugate, Inthralled': The Selves of Lucie Brock-Broido," "The Selves
 560 Brock-Broido invokes are almost always victims; many are, or imagine they are, impris-
oned, wounded, helpless" (112). And as he writes ofBrock-Broido's The Master Letters, "The
SEcnoN 9 Poems depict divided, troubled speakers and writers who appeal, implore, or submit to
LYRIC AND SEXUAL others-to 'masters,' to readers-to complete them and resolve their divisions" (107). Burt's
DIFFERENCE negotiation is to see Brock-Broido's poems as "masochistic" in the feminist sense that Jes-
sica Benjamin gave that word. When Burt places Brock-Broido's work in the context of po-
etry, he turns mainly to master canonical figures such as John Berryman, Robert Brown-
ing, John Donne, T. S. Eliot, Richard Howard, Stanley Kunitz, and Alexander Pope,
rooting her work more in lyric's dramatic monologue than in feminist issues of represen-
tation (even those complicated by masochism).
While the works of Jorie Graham and Brock-Broido travel very different paths, both
reflect similar concerns. Graham also explores issues of speech and the difficult unruliness
of language that has been the lyric's territory since its origins. As much as Dickinson's
work has influenced Brock-Broido, so it influences Graham's work, as Thomas Gardner
argues in "Jorie Graham and Emily Dickinson: Singing to Use the Waiting." Gardner lo-
cates Dickinson in Graham in "the poet's broken speech to the absent beloved" (151), in
similar approaches to silence. Graham uses innovation for individual and free expression:
"I believe most signature styles are born as much out of temperament-and its rare origi-
nal idiosyncrasies-as anything else." In "Philosopher's Stone,'' Graham expands on this:
.... the hole
filling back in on itself-as the self fills in on itself-a
collectivity-a
god making of himself many
creatures [in the cage there is food] [outside only the great
circle called freedom] [an empire which begins
with a set table] and I should like, now that the last washes of my gaze
let loose over the field, to say, if this peering,
it is the self-there-out to the outer reaches of
my hand

The emerging phenomenon of the aesthetically focused female poet who turns to more
modernist/innovative forms reaches its apex in Graham's work. That this phenomenon
has been limited to mainly women poets seems to suggest that Fraser's and DuPlessis's
theorizing on innovation and gender still resonates. Graham's work is often the most
disjunctive published by established journals and presses, yet in the overall picture of
contemporary poetry, Graham celebrates, as Helen Vendler notes and as Gardner quotes
in his article, "middleness."
Instead of the poem as an act of individual expression, Barbara Guest emphasizes the
poem's reach in "The Forces of the Imagination": "This position of'subjectivity' or 'open-
ness' is what the poem desires to obtain, free to be molded by forces that shall condition
the imagination of the poet" (190). Just as Graham's work does not fit easily into conven-
tional categories, neither does Guest's. But while Graham sees poetry as idiosyncrasy,
Guest sees it as connective intimacy. How Guest is always reaching out and putting
things together is the focus of Sara Lundquist's "Implacable Poet, Purple Birds: The Work
of Barbara Guest." As Lundquist notes, "Guest eludes because her scope and range are so
variable and large, and because she so elegantly presents so many seemingly contradic-
tory qualities" (193). This variable largeness is just one of many characteristics that makes
Guest such an important figure in the New York School. But also, socially, Guest is a
wonderfully complicated figure. As Lundquist notes, Guest was at the Barnard confer-
cnce as "modernism's representative, yet [she] reached quite effortlessly across the genera- 561
tions to the youngest poets there" (201). This connective intent defines Guest's "Mysteri-
ously Defining the Mysterious: Byzantine Proposals of Poetry," which is full of names and 9.5
places and travels. Lundquist's essay demonstrates the largeness of Guest's work when she juLIANA SPAHR

describes her own experiences reading and teaching Guest. She ends her essay by describ-
ing a much marked-up copy of Guest's Rocks on a Platter and the way "the words consort,
their mixing-it-up on the page, their intercourse, their dance, their oxymoronic tussle,
their sighs and hiccups and jokes and caresses" (215).
Like Guest, Lyn Hejinian's emphasis is on relation. Her "Some Notes toward a Poetics"
begins, "Poetics is not personal. A poetics gets formed in and as a relationship with the
world" (235). As she quotes from her own teaching notebook:

Language is one of the principal forms our curiosity takes.

The language of poetry is a language of inquiry.
Poetry takes as its premise that language (all language) is a medium for experiencing expe-
rience. It provides us with the consciousness of consciousness. (240)

Here poetry is again about thinking. With Armantrout, Hejinian has been social and
aesthetically a part oflanguage writing in the Bay Area since the 1970s. Her excerpt from
Happily deeply explores inquiry or, as she writes, "The dilemmas in sentences form tables
::>f discovery of things created to create the ever better dilemma which is to make sense to
::>thers" (234). The poem is written, new sentence-style, I! as a nonpersonal mix of confes-
;ion and observation. Juxtaposition guides more than narrative. Consider, for instance,
:he avoidance of the linear development of narrative's progress in these lines:

Nostalgia is another name for one's sense ofloss at the thought that one has sadly gone
along happily overlooking something, who knows what
Perhaps there were three things, no one of which made sense of the other two
A sandwich, a wallet, and a giraffe
Logic tends to force similarities but that's not what we mean by "sharing existence"

This project of inquiry defines much of Hejinian's work. She is perhaps best known for
My Life, a formally shaped autobiography. 12 And of all the writers included here, Hejini-
an's work is the farthest from lyric conventions. It is rarely intimate, and almost always
explores larger, more communal relations in long, inquiring sentences. Craig Dworkin's
"Parting with Description" concentrates mainly on Hejinian's Writing Is an Aid to Mem-
ory (a early work that is more lyrical than most). His essay is a wonderfully "paranoid"
(his term) reading of connection in this work. As he notes, "Like many of her colleagues,
she was interested in 'putting things together in such a way as to enable them to coincide'
and thus 'make a way of seeing connections see writing'" (251).
Brenda Hillman in "Twelve Writings toward a Poetics of Alchemy, Dread, Inconsis-
tency, Betweenness, and California Geological Syntax" writes, "It doesn't matter where
you begin because you'll just have to do it again" (276). She then locates a similar philoso-
phy of change in mercury, chaos, and the feminine. In this essay she also describes how
her writing moved from meditative realism to a feminism that has been influenced by the
formal techniques of language writing. In the poem "A Geology," change is exemplified
by an attention to verbs, the shifting teutonic plates of California, and drug addiction:

There are six major faults, there are skipped

verbs, there are more little
thoughts in California. The piece of coast
 562 slides on the arrow; down is
reverse. Subduction means the coast
SECTION 9 goes underneath the continent, which is
lYRIC AND SEXUAL rather light. It was my friend. I needed it.
DIFFERENCE The break in the rock shows forward; the flash
hurts. Granite is composed of quartz, hornblende
and other former fire. When a drug
is trying to quit it has to stretch. Narrow comes
from the same place as glamour.

Lisa Sewell's "Needing Syntax to Love: Expressive Experimentalism in the Work of Brenda
Hillman" also charts these changes in Hillman's style. She points to how "Hillman is both
an innovator and a traditionalist who seems to question but also take for granted the ex-
pressive, communicative powers oflanguage" and notes that Hillman's "experimental ap-
proach grows out of her life experiences" (283). In her biographically influenced essay,
Sewell argues that Hillman's disenchantment with meditative realism is the result of life
experiences. This relation between form and autobiography is a provocative one in Hill-
man's work.
Susan Howe often turns to history, especially U. S. history, to write a poetry oflyric and
recovery. Her by now famous statement "I wish I could tenderly lift from the dark side of
history, voices that are anonymous, slighted-inarticulate" (328) from "There Are Not
Leaves Enough to Crown to Cover to Crown to Cover" reflects her revisionary and feminist
uses of the lyric. Her essay begins with autobiography: "I was born in Boston Massachusetts
on June 1oth, 1937'' (325). Yet the autobiography turns to history in the next paragraph.
Howe's work is singular for its attention to the uses and abuses of history. In "Articulating the
Inarticulate: Singularities and the Counter-method in Susan Howe," Ming-Qian Ma points
out that "to articulate the inarticulate, Howe's poetic praxis pivots on a lyric consciousness
upon which impinges a double mission of rescuing and breaking free: rescuing the 'stutter'
that Howe hears in American literature" (331). This attention defines Howe's unique style as
have a politics, not just an aesthetics. As she notes in "C H A I R":

Art has filled my days

Strange and familiar not
for embellishment but
object as it is in itself (310)

As Ma notices, Howe often writes from and through a source text. Because the "inarticu-
late," another word for what is called innovative in this collection, often comes from his-
tory, her project is less about making new or breaking down the conventions of contem-
porary languages and more about giving voice to what is often overlooked by history's
master narratives.
Lauterbach turns to "chance and change" in her "As (It) Is: Toward a Poetics of the
Whole Fragment." Chance and change, she points out, revise the modernist fragment so
that it "eschews totalizing concepts of origin, unity, closure, and completion" (363) In her
poem "In the Museum of the Word (Henri Matisse)," this attention to revising the mod-
ernist fragment is phrased as such:

impermanent oracular trace so that

not any fragment will do counting my steps
from margin to margin/scenic on foot
turning a page. (356)
Lauterbach's work has a longer history than most of the work emerging now that is poised 563
between meditative attention and language writing. Her use of ekphrasis has meant that the
subject of much of her work has been about aesthetics, and with her interest in modernism 9.5
and her social association with language writing, her work has greatly expanded the concerns juLIANA SPAHR

of ekphrasis. As Christine Hume in" 'Enlarging the Last Lexicon of Perception' in Ann Laut-
erbach's Framed Fragments" writes, "If we recognize a defining condition of the lyric, from
Sappho to C. D. Wright, as authorial control and singular heroic expression, then, Lauterbach
fractures and implodes this tradition with wildly generous lyric capacities, large enough to
contain competing demands of sensual and analytic intelligences" (385).
An alphabetical accident places Mullen's work at the end of this collection, which is
fortunate because her work also points to an emerging use of lyric intimacy for reasons
beyond aesthetics. Mullen's work is especially attentive to how lyric can be an exploratory
genre with which to negotiate the debate about whether identity is stasis or flux. Her work
combines numerous influences. One can hear the identity-inflected lyric of writers such
as Lucille Clifton and Jayne Cortez, the identity-resistant lyric of writers such as Myung
Mi Kim, movements and poetics groupings as diverse as Black Arts, Umbra, and language
writing. Mullen's work disrespects none of these influences and yet takes them all some-
where else. What emerges is a discussion of gender and race that moves between essential-
ism and constructivism to suggest that what is essential about identity is its flux, the "di-
vergent universification" that she locates in Cortez's brain in "Fancy Cortex." It is this
inclusiveness that Elisabeth A. Frost notes when she writes, "Mullen's poetry critiques the
enforcement of difference, of'apartheid,' both on and off the page" (406). Mullen's work, as
much of the work in this collection, provides a telling reply to those who would argue that
lyric innovation should be, or just is, an inappropriate genre for examining the political,
the social, or the cultural.

This collection only presents ten poets. It makes no claim to comprehensiveness. One
sleepless night I made a list of the influences and alliances and friendships that I felt
resonating here among these writers: Gwendolyn Brooks, Marilyn Chin, Cortez, Clifton,
Cole, Du Plessis, Carolyn Forche, Fraser, Joy Harjo, Erica Hunt, Claudia Keelan, Kim,
Bernadette Mayer, Tracie Morris, Thylias Moss, Cathy Song, Swensen, Ann Waldman,
Rosemarie Waldrop, Susan Wheeler, C. D. Wright, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka. And in the
morning I realized how incomplete this list was and made a note to begin another.
Reading these essays all together has shown me that while there is a clear difference in
intent between a poem written for investigating the self and one written for investigating
language or community, it is more and more the case that the techniques might be simi-
lar. In other words, form is no longer the clear marker of intention or meaning that it was
thirty years ago.
This essay is a rewrite of a much shorter introduction that I originally submitted to
begin this book. In this earlier draft I wrote, "in this collection, poets who only on rare
moments find themselves in the same room are here together." And also, "The divergent
work included within this collection suggests that women's poetry in America is thriving
not through its samenesses but through its mixture of diversity and collectivity." My feel-
ing was that it was important not to see this book as yet another attempt to stake a bound-
aried territory or to suggest a new movement. I felt that the poems and essays here were
gathered less with an attention to coverage and more to suggest new possibilities for dia-
logue, new pedagogical opportunities, and that there were significant disagreements and
differences among the poets and critics collected here (even if they rarely erupt on the
page except in Brock-Broido's "Myself a Kangaroo among the Beauties").
 564 An anonymous reader's report contained this response: "Reservation: what keeps
nagging at me is that the anthology coheres not because it dramatizes competing poetries
SecnoN 9 (as Ms. Spahr claims in the introduction) but rather consistently makes a persuasive case
LYRIC AND SEXUAL for varieties of innovative poetries."
DIFFERENCE I think the reader is right-that this collection does not dramatize competing poetries
(such a collection might feature a boxing match between Gerald Stern and Bruce Andrews).
Its attention is to the contemporary poetries that are attentive to modernism's forms. Yet I
would not want to suggest that innovation is a value in itself or that all these poets use in-
novation with the same intent. What matters is what innovation does, in what Hejinian
calls "inquiry." And I would add the word "expansive" to that inquiry. I find value in lyrics
that retreat from individualism and idiosyncrasy to pointing to heady and unexpected yet
intimate pluralisms. And lyrics that help me to place myself as part of a larger, connective
culture. Lyrics that, in other words, are not at all ignorant about structures. Lyrics that, as
Menocal points out, are "constantly engaged in the onerous but exhilarating struggle
with the myriad institutions that surround it." (58). Lyrics that comment on community
and that move lyric away from individualism to shared, connective spaces. Lyrics that
reveal how our private intimacies have public obligations and ramifications, how inti-
macy has a social bond with shared meaning. It thus matters to me that lyric not be given
up to aesthetics only or even aesthetics mainly, that its retreat not be from argument but
from overly clear arguments, to use Menocal's language again, from single languages and
single states and smooth narratives.
I think the anonymous reader is right that there are varieties of innovative poetries.
This collection begins a dialogue between the two often falsely separated poetries of lan-
guage and lyric. The unevenness of these two terms, one a social grouping and the other
a genre, remains a sign of some dissonance even as critics often pit language and lyric
against each other with straw-man models. Yet there is a conversation about form among
these poets even as there not one about poetry's intentions.
This collection does not even begin to attempt to represent the varieties of innovative
poetries in the United States right now. With the exception of Mullen, poets who directly
and variously explore racial identity are missing. Instead, the collection presents a variety
of ways that modernist techniques are being used within lyric contexts. That this sort of
innovation is so rarely used to address race deserves more attention. While some might
say that modernist techniques are inadequate to the discussion, these techniques are in-
adequate to the discussion, these techniques have often and successfully been used to in-
vestigate gender and to suggest more collective, connective models of intimacy beyond a
lover and a beloved. My feeling, and that is as assertive as it gets, is that these forms have
been perceived by many as elitist or privileged spaces. 13 I think that this perception is a
misreading and that the work of many of the poets included here proves otherwise. But I
worry that this feeling in the air, even unsubstantiated, has limited the sorts of inquiry that
writing in modernist, innovative forms might explore-that it has both directed writers
who identify as other than white or privileged by class away from them and suggested that
these forms might be less than ideal for critique of certain subjects.
One valuable aspect of the writers associated with language writing has been their
attention to the variety of critiques that modernist innovation makes possible. Yet this
group of writers has, with the exception of Bruce Andrews, often avoided addressing racial
politics. That Mullen is now taking these same techniques and their attention to critique to
examine race makes her work so valuable. In an interview with Farah Griffin, Michael
Magee, and Kristen Gallagher, Mullen says that
 -· ..1' .110 --

one reason I wrote Muse and Drudge is because having written Tree Tall Woman, when I 565
went around reading from that book there were a lot of black people in my audience. There
would be white people and brown people and maybe other people of color as well. Sud- 9.5
denly, when I went around to do readings of Trimmings and "Sperm kit," I would be the one jULIANA SPAHR

black person in the room, reading my poetry.... I felt, "Well, this is interesting. This tells
me something about the way that I'm writing now," although I didn't think I was any less
black in those two books or any more black in Tree Tall Woman. But I think that the way
that these things get defined in the public domain is that, yeah, people saw "Sperm kit" as
being not a black book but an innovative book. And this idea that you can be black or in-
novative, you know, is what I was really trying to struggle against. And Muse and Drudge
was my attempt to show that I can do both at the same time. 14

In this anecdote, Mullen points to how she finds lyric as a place for an intimate, self-
aware investigation of her own relationship to race, class, and gender, to dominant and
subordinate cultures, to her role as spokesperson for "minority experience." Yet at the
same time she points to how the form of the work can change the construction of a
segregated social space. Similarly, in "Poetics Statement" Mullen points to the possi-
bilities of writing in a world of expanding illiteracy (she means both the illiteracy of
not being able to read and the growing nominally educated who cannot read criti-
cally). Here, while acknowledging the limitations of her work-its limited distribution
and its nonstandard forms-she states that her future (ideal?) reader is "the offspring
of an illiterate woman" and that she writes (echoing Stein) "for myself and others." My
hope is that through Mullen's example, other writers, especially those with dominant
(white and also middle- and upper-class) identities, will continue to use lyric as a place
for resistance of racial separation. While contemporary lyric often avoids discussing cat-
egories of identity, Mullen's work turns lyric's establishing subjectivity into communal
opportunity. 15
Much has been made of the transition from lyric to narrative, from metaphor to alle-
gory, from seduction to possession, from incantation to realism. Yet despite the constant
intrusion of new genres and new media, lyric persists. Is it possible to have a culture with-
out it? "The poem and you need each other" is how Guest expresses this. From reading the
works presented here, I have learned much about how lyric might be an ideal genre for
certain sorts of critique, and how the lyric space of intimacy has the potential to be an ex-
emplary space for examining political intimacies, race and gender intimacies, and com-
munity intimacies in addition to its relentless attention to more personal intimacy. Bers-
senbrugge writes of a "collaborative space that is larger and more fertile for me than
writing alone" (63). And Mullen writes that her poetry "explores the reciprocity of lan-
guage and culture" and "is informed by my interaction with readers, writers, scholars, and
critics, as well as my interest in the various possibilities for poetry in written and spoken
American English" (403). Although I find comparisons between contemporary poets and
old masters to be often silly, I cannot help but think of Dante's use of the colloquial in lyric
in this context. What I mean is not that Mullen is the new Dante, but that the emphasis on
innovation in this collection is a return to what made lyric so valuable centuries ago. Lyric
is by definition innovative. When it stops being innovative it is on longer lyric. This col-
lection points not only to how women writers are using innovation attentively, but also to
how women are major contributors to innovation. Here, where the "you" and the 'T' are no
longer clear, there is much to be hopeful about the lyric in the beginnings of the twenty-
first century.
 566 NOTES

1. As Marjorie Perloff points out when she public importance and private reflection," it "is
SECTION 9 discusses the collection, New Definitions of Lyric: always somewhat subversive. It separates the
LYRIC AND SEXUAL Theory, Technology. and Culture, ed. Jeffrey Walker individual from his or her communal ties and
DIFFERENCE (New York: Garland, 1998): "For Walker, as for the responsibilities, and examines his or her most
other essayists, romantic lyric thus becomes a intimate thoughts and feelings. in the process
derogatory term; it connotes inwardness, subjectiv- lifting a corner of that veil of socially useful
ity, monovocality, and transparency-all of these repression which allows us to interact with one
politically suspect in the age of multiculturalism. another in a reasonably civilized manner" (124,
But in making these claims, Walker, McGuirk, and 127). For more on lyric's resistant possibilities, see
the others seem to be conflating two things: the Charles Altieri, "Responsiveness to Lyric and the
attenuated, neo-romantic lyric of the later Critic's Responsibilities," Contemporary Literature
twentieth century, as that lyric has been promoted 32 (1991): 580-87; Hank Lazer, "The Lyric
by such leading critics as Harold Bloom, and the Valuables: Soundings, Questions, and Examples,"
actual English lyric of the Romantic period" Modern Language Studies 27.2 (1997): 25-50; Kevin
(245-46). McGuirk, "All Wi Doin': Toni Harrison, Linton
2. See, for instance, Northrop Frye, "Approach- Kwesi Johnson, and the Cultural Work of Lyric in
ing the Lyric," in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Postwar Britain," in New Definitions of Lyric,
Criticism, ed. Hosek and Parker (Ithaca, N.Y.: 48-76; Susan Schultz, '"Called Null or Called
Cornell University Press, 1985), 31-37; Gerard Vocative': A Fate of the Contemporary Lyric,"
Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, trans. Talisman 14 (1995): 70-8o; Mark Wallace, "On the
Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley: University of California Lyric as Experimental Possibility," July 1996: http://
Press, 1992); John Hollander, Vision and wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/wallace!lyric.html,
Resonance: Two Semes of Poetic Form (New and the introduction to the first three issues of the
Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and W. R. journal Apex of theM.
Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient 6. Lucie Brock-Broido, American Women Poets
and Modern Poetry (Berkeley: University of in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language,
California Press, 1982) for the never-ending 100. Page references to poets and essays in this
discussion of what lyric might be. An interesting collection will be cited in main text.
recent article on the subject is Jeffrey Walker, "The 7· This criticism concentrates on women's
View from Halicarnassus: Aristotelian ism and the subversion within accepted forms. Women, these
Rhetoric of the Epideictic Song," in New critics often argue, take the form and move within
Definitions of Lyric, 17-48. its box to make room for themselves. Studies of
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel women's subversion of the sonnet have tended to
and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), look at how women do not leave the box of form
34· Steve Evans, a critic of contemporary poetry, nor its alliances to the court of courtly love.
recently pointed out to me that Adorno revises this Instead, they move into the box in order to claim
statement in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. it, in order to establish what gets called lyric
Ashton (New York: Continuum International subjectivity, for themselves. Ann Rosalind Jones,
Publishing Group, 1990), 363. The assumption that for instance, in The Currency of Eros: Women's
lyric is apolitical is often perpetuated by contem- Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington:
porary poets who define themselves as "lyric Indiana University Press, 1990) argues that women
poets." See also Victor Li, "Narcissism and the poets of 1540-1620 act as negotiators who "accept
Limits of the Self," in Tropic Crucible: Self and the dominant ideology encoded into a text but
Theory in Language and Literature, ed. Ranjit particularize and transform it in the service of a
Chatterjee and Colin Nicholson (Singapore: different group" (4). The argument remains similar
Singapore University Press, 1984), 3-23. about more contemporary work. In Desiring
4· Maria Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile Women: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism
and the Origins of Lyric (Durham, NC: Duke (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
University Press, 1994), 89. 2000), Mary B. Moore notes that "Victorian and
5. Paul Allen Miller in Lyric Texts and Lyric modernist women could write the Petrarchan
Consciousness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic sonnet because its apparent focus on the heart
Greek to Augustan Rome (New York: Routledge, allowed them to veil their sometimes subversive
1994) notes similarly that despite lyric being "an ideas about gender and eroticism, even as they
ambiguous voice, straddling the line between claimed Petrarchan complexity, and hence
subjectivity through the mode" (n). In Making "The Elliptical Poets" and "About Ellipticism 567
Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of~ew (Round Two)" in American Letters and Commen-
York's Literary Women (New York: Oxford J tary 11 (1991): 45-55 and 72-76.
9.5
University Press, 1998}, Nina Miller points o1 t that 11. See Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (New
jULIANA SPAHR
Edna St. Vincent Millay "used traditional verse to York: Roof Books, 1987).
turn her (inescapable) female sexuality to artistic 12. Lyn Hejinian, My Life (Los Angeles: Sun &
authority" (39). In" 'A Splintery Box': Race and Moon Press, 1980). See Lisa Samuels for a
Gender in the Sonnets of Gwendolyn Brooks," discussion of the canonical status of My Life in
Genre 25.1 (1992}: 47-64, Stacy Carson Hubbard "Eight Justifications for Canonizing My Life,"
points to an appropriative practice in Brooks's Modern Language Studies 27. 2 (1997}: 103-19.
sonnets that work in a highly traditional form even 13. See, for instance, Bob Perelman, The Trouble
as they articulate a nontraditional voice. Maureen with Genius: Language Writing and Literary
Honey argues similarly about women poets of the History (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
Harlem Renaissance in Shadowed Dreams: 1994).
Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (New 14. Farah Griffin, Michael Magee, and Kristen
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989}, 1-41, Gallagher. Combo 1 (1997}: http://wings.buffalo.edu
and Lynn Keller about Marilyn Hacker's sonnets in /epc/authors/mullen/interview-new.html.
"Measured Feet 'in Gender Bender shoes': The 15. For more on lyric subjectivity see Paul Allen
Politics of Form in Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death, Miller, Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness and Joel
and the Changing of the Seasons," in Feminist Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The
Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, edited Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets
by Lynn Keller and Crista nne Miller (Ann Arbor: (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
University of Michigan Press, 1994), 260-86. Miller notes that lyric "is the re-presentation not
8. See Kathleen Fraser's Translating the Unspeak- simply of a 'strong personality,' but of a particular
able: Poetry and Innovative Necessity (Tuscaloosa: mode of being a subject, in which the self exists not
University of Alabama Press, 2000}, especially the as part of a continuum with the community and its
essay "The Tradition of Marginality ... and the ideological commitments, but is folded back
Emergence of HOW(ever)," and Rachel Blau du against itself, and only from this space of
Plessis, The Pink Guitar (New York: Routledge, interiority does it relate to 'the world' at large" (5).
1990). For the larger discussion of modernist In "Romanticism and the Death of the Lyric
techniques and feminism, see the work of French Consciousness,'' Tillotama Raj an also notes that
feminists such as Julia Kristeva, especially "pure lyric is a monological form, where narrative
Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret and drama alike are set in the space of difference.
Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, The latter present the self in interaction with other
1984) and Helene Cixous, especially The Exile of characters and events. But lyric, as a purely
James Joyce, trans. Sally A. J. Purcell (New York: D. subjective form, is marked by the exclusion of the
Lewis, 1972). other through which we become aware of the
9· See Charles Altieri, "Intimacy and Experi- difference of the self from itself. Lyric conscious-
ment in Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's Empathy," in We ness, in other words, comes as close as possible to
Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women's approximating what Sartre calls a 'shut imaginary
Writing and Performance Poetics, ed. Laura Hinton consciousness,' a consciousness without the
and Cynthia Hogue (Tuscaloosa: University of dimension of being-in-the-world" (Lyric Poetry:
Alabama Press, 2002}, 54-68, for a more detailed Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and
reading. Patricia Parker [Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
10. See Stephen Burt's essays on ellipticisim, 1985], 196).
SECTION 10

Comparative Lyric

Reading lyric comparatively pulls us in contrary directions, since comparative work tends
to emphasize linguistic, historical, and cultural differences at the same time that it tends to
abstract these differences into a paradigm that allows for comparison. The consolidation of
modern lyric reading has therefore served to open up the possibility for comparative analy-
sis that makes both diversifying and unifying claims about lyric. In this respect, the es-
says collected in this final section return us to some of the basic questions raised in sec-
tion 1 about lyric as a genre: the more we try to differentiate lyric through cross-cultural
comparison, the more it appears to be a universal phenomenon. In the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries, critics have used various ways of thinking about universality as a concept,
and about what that concept is (or does) in the study of lyric. Some hearken back to a uni-
versallyric impulse in primal song (be it the song and dance of primitive cultures, or the
first songs of childhood) while others imagine "lyric time" realized in the universal pres-
ent (the "here" and "now" of the poem, or its poetic performance) or projected into futu-
rity (the continual evolution of lyric, or its eternal becoming). When a critic like Theodor
Adorno takes up the specifically modern ideal of lyric poetry, in which "immersion in
what has taken individual form elevates the lyric to the status of something universal," he
does so in order to conclude that "the universality of the lyric's substance is social in na-
ture." Adorno's universalism may have supposed a social utopian horizon not all versions
of comparative lyric share, but wherever we find ourselves in the universe oflyric reading,
the identification or differentiation of "something universal" in lyric depends on finding
exemplary lyrics through, and for, comparison.
The idea that poetry originates in musical expression has a long history from antiq-
uity to the present, resonating already before Rousseau's essay on the origin of languages
in music but further developed in Romantic theories oflanguage and early ethnographic
studies of folklore, ballads, and popular song. By the early twentieth century, it was a
critical commonplace to invoke the origins of all lyric in song; whatever circulated as
"song" in previous centuries came to be called "lyric" after the late nineteenth century,
and today we still refer to the words of a song as its "lyrics." J. W. Johnson's entry on
"Lyric" (reprinted as late as 1993 in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,
extending nineteenth-century ideas about folksong and modern ethnography into mod- 569
ern literary criticism) begins with the general claim that "lyric poetry may be said to re-
tain most prominently the elements which evidence its origins in musical expression- SECTION 10
singing, chanting, and recitation to musical accompaniment (see SONG)." 1To demonstrate CoMPARATIVE LYRic

how "the irreducible denominator of all lyric poetry must, therefore, comprise those ele-
ments which it shares with the musical forms that produced it," Johnson dedicates a section
on "historical developments" to a litany of lyric forms across many cultures (subdivided
into Middle Eastern and Western traditions, as well as Russian and Eastern European,
African, and Asian). This cross-cultural and transhistorical survey leads Johnson to the
conclusion that "from its primordial form, the song as embodiment of emotion, the lyric
has been expanded and altered through the centuries." Or to put this view another way,
the continual expansion and alteration of lyric proves its intrinsic musical quality across
historical and geographical differences and so (at least for encyclopedic readers) necessi-
tates comparative reading.
The primacy of lyric for the creation of a literary culture that transcends many cul-
tures is the answer to the question posed by Earl Miner in his essay, "Why Lyric?" In
claiming that "the historical and ethnographic evidence has shown us that literature first
comes into existence as lyric," Miner draws on the same critical tradition Johnson articu-
lated in his encyclopedia entry, but he goes one step further to proclaim the role oflyric as
"the originative or foundation genre for the poetics or poetic systems of all literary cul-
tures." Starting from the hypothesis that "for all purposes it must be clear what we mean
by lyric," Miner extends ethnographic accounts of the origins of lyric ("all are moved to
song") into an aesthetic argument that he works out through a series of examples, ranging
from Bowra's Primitive Song to selections from Chinese and Japanese poetry. What these
examples demonstrate is "the special nature of lyric," as Miner defines it: "the distinguish-
ing features oflyric are a presence and intensity that make it, in a double sense, literature of
moment." For Miner, lyric is momentous not only because of this intensified immediacy-
what he calls its "now-ness"-but also because of its continuous presence in literary history.
Without lyric, the ongoing life of literature is at risk: "when the lyric of a given national
culture is assaulted, literature is attacked at its very heart and soul." Theorizing both the
particularity and the universality of lyric, Miner asserts its critical importance not only for
the definition of"any given national culture" but also for the definition of comparative po-
etics as the systematic study of poetry across cultures. In this respect, the agenda of Miner's
essay is to define a lyric theory that will serve to defend the historical practice of compara-
tive literature: "Histories and theories join in two roles oflyric: we shall observe its function
in the devising of systematic poetics and its priority in the emergence of literature itself."
Of course we do not need to posit lyric as a transcendent genre in order to devise a
comparative poetics, as we have already seen in the work of Jonathan Culler (see section
1). His ongoing project to define a "theory of the lyric" offers a more pragmatic answer to
the question "Why Lyric?" than that proposed by Miner. In a comparative essay on "The
Modern Lyric" not included here, Culler defends the practical necessity of generic conti-
nuity for critical practice: "If one is to bring any clarity to this domain, one finds that one
must in effect ask what have been the important and effective concepts of the lyric." 2 By
reading modern poets like Baudelaire and Frost, Culler identifies an implicit generic
model for modern lyric, and although he is willing to interrogate that norm, he retains
the need for a normative concept oflyric; comparative lyric reading would not be possible
without an idea of"the" lyric as its object. Thus while Culler acknowledges that "there are
discontinuities in modern lyric poetry," he argues for the "investigation of continuities,
especially continuities that play a central role in critical notions of modern poetry and
 570 the lyric genre." He concludes, "The comparative perspective here should enable one to
investigate genres as models of reading and to explore the complicated relations between
SECTioN 10 historical claims about changes in poetry itself and structural models that determine the
CoMPARATIVE LYRic interpretation of poems and suffuse our pedagogy" (299). Here again comparative poetics
emerges as the necessary condition for mediating between "historical claims" and "struc-
tural models" for lyric, although for Culler comparative literature is a way to justify
the study of the lyric, rather than (as in Miner) the other way around: "The comparatist's
task in this case would be to pursue critical analysis of the model of the lyric implicit in
interpretations of individual poets, and to assess that model in the larger comparative
perspective" (285).
The second part of that task is of special interest to Jahan Ramazani in his essay on
"Traveling Poetry." Baudelaire is a recurring touchstone for developing a modern model
of the lyric (not only for Culler but for a wide range of critics such as Benjamin, Adorno,
Jameson, Riffaterre, de Man, Agamben and many others not included in The Lyric The-
ory Reader), and Ramazani takes up that model in order to trace its perpetual displace-
ment within the larger comparative perspective of a broader range of poets, poems, and
poetry traveling east and west, north and south. As defined by Ramazani, "the traveling
poem illuminates the differential structure through which the globalized subject enunci-
ates and understands itself." In this Iyricized vision of a global poetics, Ramazani retains
the lyric subject as an "all-encompassing, cross-civilizational, lyric 'I,' the poet's first-
person meditative utterance as omnium gatherum: translocal, binding disparities, forg-
ing new and surprising connections in its travel across the globe." Throughout his essay,
Ramazani simultaneously emphasizes the compression oflyric poems and the expansion
of poetry beyond the limits and limitations of Western lyric: "The metaphorical, lineal,
and lyric expansiveness of traveling poetry-readily affording cross-cultural engage-
ment, contact, and contamination-puts into question the adequacy of such limited and
limiting models, which are identitarian even when represented as postcolonial, postmod-
ern, or planetary." Here the very possibility of expanding lyric is predicated on the critical
practice of modern lyric reading, demonstrated by Ramazani in his analysis of Langston
Hughes's adoption of a self-enlarging "Whitmanian I" in a global context, or in his analy-
sis of"In the Waiting Room" by Elizabeth Bishop as an "initiation into becoming a global
subject," juxtaposed with a poem by the Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek. Discovering both
similarity and difference in the reinvention of a now globalized lyric subject, Ramazani
summarizes his critical agenda for comparative poetics: "An adequate defense of time-
and-space travel by lyric poetry needs to take account of both its connective (Hughes)
and differential (Bishop) tendencies in relation to cultural others, since lyrics of cross-
cultural sameness and those of cross-cultural difference are equally open to critique."
Thus a universal model of lyric remains in place even as it moves around.
Ramazani elaborates the concept of"traveling poetry"-or what he later comes to call
"a transnational poetics"-primarily through twentieth-century poems written in or
translated into English during a new age of globalization. However, he also claims a lon-
ger history for the transnational circulation of lyric: "Consider, for example, the Japanese
haiku, famously Anglicized by the imagists, or the Arabic ghazal, adapted for over a
thousand years into Persian (taking its canonical form in that language), Turkish, Urdu,
German, and English, mostly recently by the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali."
Through multiple translations and modern imitations of these poetic forms, the haiku
and the ghazal have been transformed into exemplary lyrics for Anglo-American readers,
and indeed (ever since Ali's publication of the first anthology of English ghazals in 2000),
the ghazal in particular is emerging as a site for new work in comparative poetics. 3 For
some critics, the ghazal is an example of transnational poetry that circulates in, and for, 571
translation; for others, the long and varied history of the ghazal provides examples for
reading "world poetry" in different languages; for still others, the ghazal exemplifies an SECTION 10
idea oflyric either translated into or out of other literary traditions. CoMPARATIVE LYRIC

The lyricization of the ghazal by modern critics serves to move lyric reading in more
than one direction, as we see in Aamir Mufti's work on the ghazals of Faiz Ahmed Faiz,
the most significant Urdu poet of the postcolonial period. In contrast to Ramazani, who
subsumes the ghazal into an argument about Anglophone transnational poetics, Mufti
frames his reading of Faiz as a different kind of comparative project:

In treating Faiz as a modern lyric poet, however, I am not suggesting that we engage in a
search for qualities in modern Urdu verse that are characteristic of the lyric in modern
Western poetry. On the contrary, the purpose of my analysis of a number of Faiz's poems
is precisely to make it possible to explore the specificities of modern lyric in a colonial and
postcolonial society. Above all, what the concept of lyric makes possible is the translation,
the passage, of Faiz's poetry from a literary history that is specifically Urdu into a critical
space for the discussion of Indian literary modernity as a whole.

In his essay "Toward a Lyric History of India," Mufti strategically adopts "the concept of
lyric" in order to think about literary history and cultural politics not only within the con-
text of postcolonial studies but also between ethnic and national discourses and in relation
to critical theories of modernity. That tradition of critical thinking is for Mufti primarily
associated with the Frankfurt school, and more specifically with Adorno's essay "On Lyric
Poetry and Society." Drawing on Adorno's argument about lyric poetry as an exemplary
site for the inscription of social meaning in its apparent distance from the social, Mufti's
reading of Faiz argues that "the central drama of his poetry is the dialectic of a collective
selfhood at the disjunctures of language, culture, nation, and community" and that it is
precisely in those poems that are "closest to being pure 'lyric,' that is, ones in which the
inward turn is most complete" that Faiz can give expression to "a self in partition." Mufti
projects Adorno's account of lyric subjectivity into the problematic ''I" of Urdu writing in
order to "elucidate the place oflyric in Faiz's work and its relationship to the social horizon
that is brought to crisis in partition." According to Mufti, the historical partition of India
in 1947 is already delineated in the lines of ghazals by Faiz, in whose writing Mufti discov-
ers a radically split subjectivity: "In Faiz's poetry, both the degradation of human life in
colonial and postcolonial modernity-exploitation-and the withholding of a collective
selfhood at peace with itself-what I am calling partition-find common expression in the
suffering of the lyric subject." r
t
What is assumed by Mufti's lyric reading of Faiz-and surely one reason for taking
up a critical conversation with Adorno-is the philosophical tradition of German ideal-
ism and a German poetic tradition, revolving around the question of subjectivity and the
immediacy of subjective experience within a larger version of the collective. As we saw in
section 6, at the end of his essay "On Lyric Poetry and Society," Adorno revisits these
questions in the example of two poems written by two German poets at different phases
of modernity: Eduard Morike (whose poem registers "the signs of an immediate life that
promised fulfillment precisely at the time when they were already condemned by the di-
rection history was taking" and thus "shares in the paradox of lyric poetry in the as-
cending industrial age") and Stefan George (who exemplifies "a much later phase in this
development," in a poem where "it is not real things and not sounds that are evoked but
rather a vanished condition of the soul" that "raises the song above the hopeless fiction
it nonetheless offers"). But whereas Adorno adds a utopian note to that melancholy song,
 572 paradoxically confirming the work of lyric subjectivity in its vanishing, in Mufti's essay
there is a continuous undertone of pathos in turning to the ghazals of Faiz for the subjec-
SEcnoN 10 tive expression of "Muslim" experience in Indian modernity. In writing "towards a lyric
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC history of India," Mufti ends his essay with a ghazal composed in 1953 as "a comment on
India's partition from this side of the cataclysmic event, full of infinite sadness at what In-
dian Muslim 'nationhood' has finally been revealed, in the cold light of statehood and 'sov-
ereignty,' to mean." According to Mufti, "Faiz distills that historical pathos into the subjec-
tive language of the ghazal, giving it the form of the lover's sadness at the impossibility of
saying, when face-to-face with the beloved, what exactly one means." The impossibility of
saying what one means, or saying what no longer has meaning, or saying anything at all,
is the question raised by Adorno about poetry after Auschwitz, transposed by Mufti into
poetry (always already) after partition.
Acknowledging that Faiz is "certainly not an 'Adornian' poet," Mufti nevertheless fol-
lows "the constellations of Adorno's thought" in order to think about Faiz as "the poet of
late postcolonial modernity, a poet who directs the energies of negative thinking at the
congealed cultural and social forms that constitute the postcolonial present." One of the
interesting effects of the powerful negative thinking that Mufti attributes to the ghazals of
Faiz is another, comparative frame for the modern idea of the lyric. In many ways, that
modern idea informs Mufti's essay, and he uses it to characterize the sort of historical work
he argues Faiz's poetry does. Yet this modern lyric model also does historical work, as
Mufti's reading of Faiz assumes a question about the lyric subject that has its own critical
genealogy, via Adorno and Benjamin back to Heidegger and Hegel. In Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe's post-Heideggerian reading of Celan (see section 7) we encounter another varia-
tion on the evacuation of a lyric subject that nevertheless preserves the lyric as an idealized
genre for emptied-out experience in late modernity. But in contrast to Lacoue-Labarthe's
phenomenological account of"poetry as experience," Mufti's reading moves toward artic-
ulating another kind of experience, and thus toward another kind of lyric history, as he
concludes, "In his lyric poetry, Faiz pushes the terms of identity and selfhood to their
limits, to the point where they turn upon themselves and reveal the partial nature of post-
colonial 'national' experience."
While Ramazani approaches comparative lyric studies by reading many poets, and
while Mufti extends a comparative framework for the concept of lyric by reading one
poet, the essay we include by Roland Greene juxtaposes two poets for another perspective
on comparative lyric reading. In "Inter-American Obversals: Allen Ginsberg and Har-
oldo de Campos circa 1960," Greene announces that his project is "to disclose how the
poetries of the Americas converse with one another across the registers of the political
and the personal; how what is common and what is different between hemispheric poet-
ries may be accounted for; and especially how we may identify the points of contact-of
concepts, inlaid cultural patterns, motifs, charged words-that put the subjective and the
public dimensions of such poems into relation." But the poets that Greene brings into
relation-with Ginsberg representing the North American "Beats" and Campos the Bra-
zilian "Concretes"-did not and do not in fact "converse with one another." Precisely be-
cause these poets were oblivious to each other, they can be read in an "obverse" relation,
as Greene goes on to explain: "On these terms two poets who built alternative versions of
a post modern poetics move closer to each other, and the poems of these moments some-
times dissolve into voices that make Ginsberg sound like Campos and vice versa. And in
their transitions, Ginsberg and Campos produce poems that might be treated as obverses,
or alternative engagements with problems of history and knowledge." Reading poets as
the "obverse" of one another-not quite parallel, not quite intersecting-Greene proposes
an alternative to traditional modes of comparison based on genetic, generic or theoretical 573
claims.
Yet in Greene's "obversive" history of inter-American verse, or what he calls a hemi- SEcTioN 10
spheric poetics, poems are read according to a lyric model that has been sufficiently in- CoMPARATIVE LYRIC

ternalized to produce "alternative versions" for comparative analysis. For example, al-
though this experiment in "obversal reading" emphasizes "a difference in what each kind
of poem knows," Greene reads lyric as a form for (and of) the experience of knowing in
the present tense: "Campos' compressed poems perceive and think by collapsing eras,
cultures, and languages together for the sake of historical continuity, while Ginsberg's
intuitive lyrics find an alternative sort of diversity-of social identities, voices,
politics-by expanding the present." Indeed it is only in the space of comparison-"the
inter-american setting, where two considerably different premises for poetry came to
discover a common space adjacent to both of them" -that Greene can discover his own
critically comparative lyric imaginary: "The modes of the Beats and the Noigandres po-
ets still do not touch one another, but in Ginsberg and Campos circa 1960 they have an
imaginable relation."
The idea of a comparative lyric imaginary also plays a central role in shaping the
larger idea of World Literature, both historically and in its contemporary revised disci-
plinary formation. In 1827 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously wrote, "I am more
and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself
everywhere and at all times." 4 Inspired by his reading of Persian and Serbian poetry,
Goethe anticipated "the new epoch of world literature" ( Weltliteratur) that would cross
national boundaries both within and beyond Western Europe. Revealing itself "every-
where and at all times," the omnipresence of poetry could thus be projected into the
past and the future of world history. This world historical vision of poetry served in the
nineteenth century to define the national literatures that it also aspired to transcend
their national or ethnic limitations, and it culminated (in the case of Goethe) in the ideal
of German literary culture, or (in the case of Longfellow, taking up an American varia-
tion on the new epoch of Weltliteratur) in poetry for a new nation. Through his transla-
tions in The Poetry and Poets of Europe (1845) and in his "global" anthologies of Poems
of Places (published in thirty-one volumes between 1876 and 1879), Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow collected world poetry for the invention of, and by, American literary culture.
As translator and as author of many popular poems that themselves thematize the merg-
ing of cultures, as Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard and as precursor to
the formation of comparative literature as an academic discipline in America, Longfellow
is more formative than we may currently allow ourselves to believe in creating a concept
of comparative poetics. 5 But one thing that has changed between the nineteenth-century
ideal of "universal poetry" proclaimed by the likes of Goethe and Longfellow and the
concept of"world poetry" circulating among contemporary critics of comparative litera-
ture in an age of globalization is the idea of lyric as a genre: no matter how far and wide
we travel around the globe looking for poems to compare, this model oflyric reading has
already arrived ahead of us to predetermine not only when and where we will read them,
but how.
In the last essay in this section, David Damrosch returns to ancient Egypt to excavate
a poem that turns out to be the mummy of the modern lyric. "Love in the Necropolis"
begins with a detailed description of a papyrus inscribed with hieroglyphics that include
what appears to be a love song. "One of the oldest lyrics to have survived anywhere in the
world, this poem addresses us with a powerful immediacy," writes Damrosch, who goes
on to demonstrate how this long-lost text was rediscovered, edited, and translated by
 574 twentieth-century Egyptologists (beginning with A. H. Gardiner). According to Dam-
rosch, the poem is "unencumbered by any transmission history whatever from the twelfth
SEcTioN 10 century B.C.E. to the early twentieth century C.E., when the lyrics in this papyrus were
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC quickly seen, as Gardiner says in his introduction, to be 'of inestimable value, not merely
for archaeology, but still more for the world-history of poetry and of lyric expression."'
Of course this reclamation of the poem for "lyric expression" is predicated on another
kind of historical transmission, namely the critical history of modern discourses about
lyric as a genre that The Lyric Theory Reader has framed: from this vantage point, the
questions that Damrosch poses about translating the poem (is it spoken in the first person?
is it a dialogue? who is speaking? a man? a woman?) might be posed differently as ques-
tions about genre (why assume a speaker at all, unless we have already assumed the proto-
col oflyric reading?). Although Damrosch alludes to other Egyptian poems "whose speak-
ers are trees" (suggesting at least the possibility of reading this poem otherwise), he argues
that "such contextual evidence as we have at least favors the idea of a single speaker, or
rather, a single singer, as these poems were composed as song lyrics." While systematically
working through the problems of translation-leaving various possibilities for translating
the Eygptian word for "tunic" (mss) in suspense-Damrosch has already settled the prob-
lem of genre: "as long as the translation doesn't impose a wholesale modernization, we
won't assimilate the mss directly to our contemporary experience; we will remain aware
that we're reading an ancient poem." Here the poem, no matter how ancient, is brought to
life by the generic experience of reading modern lyric, as Damrosch concludes: "All the
same, we can never hold the poem entirely away from our own experience, nor should we.
As we read, we triangulate not only between ancient and modern worlds but also between
general and personal meanings: however mss is translated, different readers will visualize
it very differently, and this variability helps the poem to resonate with memories from the
reader's own life."
To answer the title of his book, What Is World Literature?, Damrosch thus translates
the Egyptian text into an example of world literature, using it to exemplify his central
thesis about world literature as a mode of circulation and reception, especially by means
of translation. In learning to read world literature, Damrosch argues, we must learn how
to read translations in a new way: "Works of world literature take on a new life as they
move into the world at large, and to understand this new life we need to look closely at the
ways the work becomes reframed in its translations and in its new cultural contexts" (24).
It is more than coincidence that this idea of a "new life," or what Walter Benjamin would
call the "afterlife" of translation, is exemplified by the resuscitation of an ancient Egyp-
tian text that seems to resonate "with memories of the reader's own life." In imagining
how to translate these hieroglyphics, Damrosch offers the following caveat: "I don't at all
mean that a translation should wrench the poem outright into our own world and our
own terms; rather, I mean that the original context should not be made to overpower us,
interfering with our engagement with the fictive world the poem creates for us to enter."
But to invite the reader to enter into the poem in this way is already a generic choice that
allows Damrosch (or "us") to imagine the past and future of literary transmission in the
present tense oflyric reading. When he sets the stage for various translations of the Egyp-
tian papyrus, Damrosch collapses the scene of reception into the scene of composition,
and vice versa: "Whereas many works of world literature come to us already shaped by
complex dynamics of transmission, often involving vexed relations between the originat-
ing culture and our own, this text has almost no history at all intervening between us and
the moment of its inscription in 1160 B.C.E." Of course, at this point in history, it is ge-
nerically overdetermined that the history of literary transmission would appear to have
"almost no history at all"; that is precisely why the Egyptian hieroglyphs seem to look, or 575
speak, to us as if they were a lyric poem.
Damrosch advocates for a wide-ranging approach to the study of world literatures, SECTION 10
both geographically and historically, by drawing examples from many languages, cui- CoMPARATIVE LYRic

tures, genres, and periods. But (perhaps not so far after all from Longfellow, his prede-
cessor at Harvard) he turns to poetry at key moments in defining, reading, and teaching
the concept of world literature. In How to Read World Literature, "lyric poetry" again
emerges as the answer to the basic question posed by the first chapter: "What is 'Litera-
ture'?'' He appeals to a generalized idea of"Western lyric" not only to define an essential
quality ofliterariness (a variation on the claim we saw in Miner's essay, that lyric is at the
origin of literary expression across all cultures) but also to rethink a simple binary be-
tween Western and non-Western literatures. Starting from the modern idea that that
"Western lyrics have long taken the form of an individual thinking out loud," Damrosch
cites "Western wind, when wilt thou blow" to illustrate how a sixteenth-century English
lyric may be productively juxtaposed with a Chilean poem, written four centuries later,
or a poem in Sanskrit dating from the year 8oo. Emphasizing in each example that "once
again we are overhearing a single speaker," he leads toward the conclusion that "the con-
trasts between the English lyric and the Sanskrit poem are differences of degree rather
than reflections of some absolute, unbridgeable gulf between East and West" (9-11).
Thus it would seem that the winds of lyric reading can blow in all directions around the
world, from the present into the past and the future. Our contemporary world historical
versions of lyric reading leave many questions unanswered, including whether we can
find poetic genres that no longer resemble the normative model of the modern lyric
that twentieth-century literary criticism has bequeathed to us. Since that norm contin-
ues to allow so many critics to read across cultures, across periods, across disciplinary
divides, and across so many other critical points of departure, it is unlikely that we will
give it up anytime soon, though perhaps precisely because so many critics have begun
to develop variations on that model, another wind is blowing, and with it the small rain
down shall rain.

NOTES

1. j. W. johnson, "Lyric," in The New Princeton 4· j. W. von Goethe, Conversations with

Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, Nj: Eckermann, trans. john Oxenford (San Francisco:
Princeton University Press, 1993), 713. In narrating North Point Press, 1984), 132.
the history oflyric as a story of diverse forms arising 5· Seemingly displaced by the theoretical work
from song and dance, johnson follows earlier of mid-twentieth-century European comparatists
Anglo-American critics like Gummere (1901) and who arrived in America as expatriates during
Drinkwater (1915), although their critical agenda World War II (such as Rene Wellek, whose Theory
was different: through a comparative reading of of Literature published in 1949 marked a new era
lyric, they developed a universal idea about poetry for Comparative Literature departments in
that could then serve to define and defend the postwar America), Longfellow nevertheless
national traditions of English or American verse. occupies an important place in the longer history
2. Culler (1988), 291; see also Culler (2008). of comparative literature in the American
3· See, e.g., Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in academy, and especially in the recent (re)turn to
English, ed. Agha Shahid Ali (Middletown, CT: the study of world literatures; see, e.g., Christo-
Wesleyan University Press, 20oo); The Ghazal as pher Prendergast, ed., Debating World Literature
World Literature: Transformations of a Literary (New York: Verso, 2004); john Pizer, The Idea of
Genre, ed. Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth World Literature: History and Pedagogical
(Beirut: Ergon Verlag, 2005); and The Ghazal: A Practice (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
World Anthology, ed. Paul Smith (Victoria, Press, 2006); David Damrosch et al., eds., The
Australia: New Humanity Books, 2008). Longman Anthology of World Literature, 2nd ed.
 576 (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2009); David York: MLA, 2009); and d'Haen, Damrosch, and
Damrosch, Teaching World Literature (New Kadir (2012).
SECTION 10
FURTHER READING
COMPARATIVE LYRIC
Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Fokkema, D. W., Elrud Kunne-Ibsch, and A. j. A.
Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. van Zoest, eds. Comparative Poetics. Amster-
Bauer, Thomas, and Angelika Neuwirth, eds. The dam: Rodopi, 1975.
Ghazal as World Literature: Transformations of a Guillen, Claudio, and Peggy Escher, eds.
Literary Genre. Beirut: Ergon Verlang, 2005. Comparative Poetics. New York: Garland, 1985.
Cai, Zong-qi. Configurations of Comparative Gummere, Francis B. The Beginnings of Poetry.
Poetics: Three Perspectives on Western and New York: Macmillan, 1901.
Chinese Literary Criticism. Honolulu: University Huang, Yunte. Transpacific Imaginations: History,
of Hawaii Press, 2002. Literature, Counterpoetics. Cambridge, MA:
Cavanagh, Claire. Lyric Poetry and Modern Harvard University Press, 2008.
Politics: Russia, Poland, the West. New Haven, Huk, Romana, ed. Assembling Alternatives: Reading
CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. Middle-
Clayton, Michelle. Poetry in Pieces: Cesar Vallejo town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
and Lyric Modernity. Berkeley: University of Menocal, Maria Rose. Shards of Love: Exile and the
California Press, 2011. Origins of the Lyric. Durham, NC: Duke
Culler, jonathan. "The Modern Lyric: Generic University Press, 1994.
Continuity and Critical Practice." In The Miner, Earl. Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural
Comparative Perspective on Literature, edited by Essay on Theories of Literature. Princeton, Nj:
C. Koelb and S. Noakes, 284-99. Ithaca, NY: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Cornell University Press, 1988. Moretti, Franco. "Conjectures on World Litera-
--."Why Lyric?" PMLA 123.1 (2oo8): 201-6. ture." New Left Review 1 (2ooo): 54-68.
Damrosch, David. How to Read World Literature. Owen, Alfred Aldrich. The Reemergence of World
Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2009. Literature: A Study of Asia and the West.
D'haen, Thea, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986.
eds. The Routledge Companion to World Owen, Stephen. "Stepping Forward and Back:
Literature. New York: Routledge, 2012. Issues and Possibilities for 'World' Poetry,"
Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: Modern Philology 100.4 (2003): 532-48.
American Literature across Deep Time. Ramazani, jahan. The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial
Princeton, Nj: Princeton University Press, 2008. Poetry in English. Chicago: University of
Drinkwater, john. The Lyric: An Essay. London: Chicago Press, 2001.
M. Seeker, 1915. - - . A Transnational Poetics. Chicago:
Edmond, jacob. A Common Strangeness: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Rothenberg, jerome, ed. Technicians of the Sacred:
Comparative Literature. New York: Fordham A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia,
University Press, 2012. Europe, and Oceania. Berkeley: University of
Edwards, Brent Hayes. "Langston Hughes and the California Press, 1985.
Futures of Diaspora." American Literary History Saussy, Haun. The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic.
19.3 (Fall2007): 689-711. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.
--."The Spectre oflnterdisciplinarity." PMLA Viswanatham, Kalive. Essays in Criticism and
123.1 (2008): !88-94· Comparative Poetics. Waltair, Visakhapatnam:
Eo yang, Eugene Chen. The Transparent Eye: Andhra University Press, 1977-
Reflection on Translation, Chinese Literature, Yu, Pauline. "The Poetics of Discontinuity:
and Comparative Poetics. Honolulu: University East-West Correspondences in Lyric Poetry."
of Hawaii Press, 1993. PMLA 94.2 (March 1970): 251-74.
Why Lyric? (2ooo) 10.1
EARL MINER

We often underestimate impact and confuse it with reception.

Amiya Dev

Influence is more an affair of complicity than one-sided imposition.

Kim Uchang

Complete transformations in this genre cannot be effected to the extent in other genres in
spite of marked changes in society.
Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

[ ... ] Not surprisingly, critics aware of what goes on outside the European and North
American parishes have taken offence at the imposition of"western" literary culture on that
variously termed "eastern" or "oriental." Some of us who take offence are from the offend-
ing "west" and perhaps desire to affix guilt so that we need not share in it. Others write from
"eastern" inheritance in anger over cultural imperialism. Particular offence has been taken
over what Edward Said has termed "Oriental ism," the treatment of non-western literatures
as aberrant varieties in inferior cultures. 1 One sees what they mean. But it was just at this
point a few years ago that Amiya Dev saw and meant more. Before it dawned on some oth-
ers, he saw in full blaze of noon that restriction of attention to guilty imperialism, euro-
centrism, and Orientalism still makes the west the subject. Also, we have heard much
about the novel and very little about narrative poems, about drama, and particularly about
lyric. If it is protested that contemporary literary theory and comparative study have, after
all, been preoccupied with the novel, that is no small part of the point. The attention and
the talk have continued to have western concerns as their subjects.
A shift is required from the melodrama of Europeans and Americans as actors, from
the novel and western theory. It is time to attend to other writers, other languages, other
canons, and other conceptions of literature. To amplify Amiya Dev's initial remark, we
need to relocate the centre of interest to the scene of offence and to know the pre-colonial
literatures ruptured by European incursion. Fundamental problems include those of the
damage done to ruptured traditions, those of absorption of the alien, and those of means
of recuperation or renovation. Such turning about of the game board deals with what was
wrong in the first place. Without a victim, concern with crime turns on abstract wrongs.
The Dev thesis of the primacy of the victimized also raises a number of otherwise too
easily ignored comparative, historical, and conceptual issues. These may be posed, if not
fully discussed, in terms of comparative methods. From that posing we can turn to the
place oflyric, to some complexities and perplexities, and to features of the wider problem
ofliterary change. The relation between these topics will become increasingly clear.
The Dev principle obviously involves conceptions and practices of literary history, as
the preceding remarks have implied. But certain theoretical issues are also crucial. For all
 578 purposes it must be clear what we mean by lyric. 2 Histories and theories join in two roles
oflyric: we shall observe its function in the devising of systematic poetics and its priority
SECTION 10 in the emergence of literature itself. The former relates to various literatures and so bears
CoMPARATIVE LYRic on each literature. The latter appears to be true of all literatures and therefore is a charac-
teristic of literature historically and theoretically considered.
Literary relations are commonly conceived in terms of influence. 3 The model is passive
in the sense that it presumes that influence acts upon a poet, a form, or a literature. That is
the smaller part of the matter. Some critics have sought to right matters by discussing re-
ception, a definite improvement.4 The distinction has value for separating two elements.
Influence involves moving upon another literature (form, writer) in an act of claim or
seizure. Reception involves choice of what is taken, and at times resistance or rival emula-
tion. There may be such a thing as mandated influence but an imposed reception is a
contradiction in terms. Imposed influence is another matter, one for which there are all
too many examples. Among them are pre-modern Chinese insistence that even the "bar-
barians" on its four sides write Chinese poetry if they would be construed to write poetry
at all; British imposition of English education and literature on India; and attempted
wholesale replacement of Korean literature by Japanese. Certain kinds of exploitation of
the riches of other cultures are not crimes. Artistic seizure may be largely positive. That is
true of Pound's and Yeats's use of Japanese (or Chinese) literature as models for their
work, seizing what they found in Japan or China, whether it was there or not. And volun-
tary, rival reception is represented by Japanese taking over of the western novel on their
own distinct terms.
The kinds of rupture that Amiya Dev has in mind involve imposed influence and en-
dured reception. One underlying principle is that power in its cultural guise will be mis-
used, as it is in its other guises. Another principle is that benefits may accrue to the culture
imposed on, not because they had been intended by the imposer, but because the practical
response to the imposition is to make the best of the situation encountered.
The Dev thesis presumes literary maturities. We are presently considering developed
practices in language cultures that are come of age. For the moment, we defer concern
with origins. The presumption allows us to consider issues not only historically and con-
ceptually but also-because the issues seriously matter-ethically. This is evident in Said's
looking with hostile eye on Orientalists and in Dev's concern with damaged literary tradi-
tions and their renovations. It is difficult to imagine disagreement on the general ethical
features, much as we may dispute the details. We agree that change has taken place under
duress at once literary, political and cultural. In a subsequent renovation or recuperation,
what had existed before the rupture is reverted to, now with a difference measurable by
the kind and degree of the rupture. Of course, there are many complexities and shadings:
the fallacy of the single explanation holds here as elsewhere. There may be varieties of
collusion, some gain (for the foreign) amid loss (of the native or intrinsic), and renewals
that are variously reactionary, comic, fearful, or creative. Above all, the power of the na-
tive current is always great, and its changes, of course, always involve distinctive features
intrinsic to it and never exterior intrusions alone. The sum of the factors is often more
readily identified than the individual factors themselves. 5
That said, we must add that concern with lyric necessarily raises issues that drama
and narrative do not. 6 As will be evident from what has been said and from what follows,
for this discussion "lyric" designates a literary kind or radical-a genre-on a par with
drama and narrative. To be sure, all our literary terms have their histories and bear theo-
retical meaning on a scale much beyond that of this account, and numerous things can-
not be understood from lyric alone. But the historical and theoretical implications of lyric
can also be shown to differ in nature and significance from many issues involving narra- 579
tive and drama.
It is not that all claims entail lyric. Literary rupture and recovery involve drama 10.1
and narrative as well. For a given issue, drama or narrative may be more appropriate EARL MINER

than lyric. For that matter, rupture and renovation really involve critical moments in a
whole culture rather than solely one kind of knowledge like the literary. Yet literature
generally and lyric in particular have special claims by virtue of their historical and in-
trinsic features. That which to hindsight is prototypical of literature is involved in the
first special uses of language: unlike Moliere's bourgeois gentleman, M. Jourdain, our
ancestors could take pleasure in discovering that their most valued utterances were po-
etic. And as we shall now see, the explicit acknowledgment of the discovery entails lyric
in a major way.
Lyric has priority by virtue of its role in the explicit definition of the nature of litera-
ture. Rather than narrative or drama, lyric is the foundation genre for the poetics or sys-
tematic literary assumptions of cultures throughout the world. Only western poetics differs.
Even the major civilizations that have not shown a need to develop an explicit poetics (the
Islamic, for example), have demonstrably based their ideas of literature on lyric assump-
tions. Of course, lyric can be written in literatures conceived in mimetic terms and drama
in literatures conceived in affective-expressive terms. Not surprisingly, the greater the his-
torical development after the definition of a basic poetics, the more complex critical un-
derstanding becomes.
The first thing to be said of lyric poetic systems is that they are not mimetic. Imitation
and representation are simply not the grounds considered, as examples will show. Since
western mimesis emerges from the exceptional use by Aristotle of drama as the foundation
genre, Japanese conceptions of drama are particularly revealing. They are not mimetic.
Noh is a theatrical, dramatic kind that draws on lyric and narrative to unusual de-
grees. One of the central terms of Noh dramaturgy is monomane, which is made up of two
words-"things" and "imitating." Imitating things certainly seems natural to the stage,
and to a westerner like myself, it at once recalls Plato, Aristotle and mimesis. But students
of Noh agree that monomane does not mean imitation or representation. Standard ac-
counts render the term as "performance" or as "artifice." 7 It refers to stage business, to
shimai or dance: to the active part of Noh as opposed to utai, singing, the words recited.
Some people may doubt that drama can be understood apart from imitation or without
representation.
Any doubts about this are put to rest by a very significant set of remarks by the seven-
teenth century Japanese dramaturgist, Chikamatsu Monzaemon. He was pre-eminent
not only as a playwright for kabuki or the actors but also the johruri or the puppet forms
of popular drama. His words should be known by anyone concerned with the nature of
theatre:

Art is that which occupies the narrow margin between the true and the false ... It partici-
pates in the false and yet is not false; it participates in the true and yet is not true; our plea-
sure is located between the two. As an example, there was a certain lady serving at the
palace who developed a passionate relation with a certain lord. The lady's chamber was in
the depths of a splendid apartment, and since he was unable to enter there, she had only a
look at him from time to time through a gap in the blinds. So great was her yearning that
she had a wooden image of him carved. The countenance and other features differed from
usual images in resembling the lord to the last detail. The colouring of the complexion was
indescribably exact, each hair was in place, the ears and nose and the teeth in their very
 580 number were faultlessly made. Such was the work that if you placed the man and the image
side by side, the only distinction was which had a soul. But when she regarded it closely,
SECTION 10 the sight of a living person exactly reproduced so chilled the lady's ardour that she felt
COMPARATIVE LYRIC distaste at once. In spite of herself, she found that her love was gone, and so unpleasant
was it to have the model by her side that before long she got rid of it. As this shows, if we
copy a living thing exactly as it is, for example even [the legendary Chinese beauty] Yang
Guifei herself, there would be something arousing disgust. For this reason, in any artis-
tic version, whether the image be drawn or carved in wood, along with the exact resem-
blance of the shape there will be some stylizing, and after all that is why people like it. It
is the same for the design of a play-within recognizable likeness there will be points of
deviance ... and since that is after all the nature of art, it is what constitutes the pleasure
people take in it.R

Aristotle thought an imitation (mimesis) even of cadavers would give pleasure. Like
the gods in the proverb, the Noh critic Zeami and Chikamatsu thought otherwise.
Clearly, it is necessary to put away representation and mimesis to understand the
world's many poetic systems founded on lyric. 9 The "Great Preface" to the Chinese Clas-
sic of Poetry characterizes literature altogether on the basis of its few hundred lyrics, since
at its composition (about two millennia ago), China had no drama or fictional prose nar-
rative and for centuries after it had them did not believe them worth serious consider-
ation. Here is the opening of that "Great Preface":

Poetry is where the intent of the heart goes. What in the heart is intent is poetry when
emitted in words. And emotion moves within and takes form in words. 10

Or we may take the Japanese version founded to an extent on the Chinese. This is the
Japanese preface to the first of the twenty-one royal collections, the Kokinshu (ca. 910).

The poetry of) apan has its seed [also, cause] in the human heart and flourishes in the count-
less leaves of words. Because human beings possess interests of so many kinds, it is in poetry
that they give expression to the meditations of their hearts in terms of the sights appearing
before their eyes and the sounds coming to their ears. Hearing the warbler sing among the
plum blossoms and the frog that lives in the waters-is there any living thing not given to
song? It is poetry that, without exertion, moves heaven and earth, stirs the feelings of gods
and spirits invisible to the eye, softens the relations between men and women, calms the
hearts of fierce warriors. 11

All are moved to song. It is in our nature, in the nature of us living things, to be af-
fected by what we experience and to express ourselves about the experience. In other
words, this is an affective-expressive poetics, a lyric understanding ofliterature that char-
acterizes the various poetics of the whole world, apart from the European outpostY
The development of a systematic poetics is too sophisticated a matter to be the point
at which literature itself begins. Identifying that point of emergence is a matter fraught
with difficulties both of logic and of evidence. Until some features, at least, of implicit
poetics, have been conceived, literature is not distinguished from other forms of expres-
sion. One of the themes developed by Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind is that the "pensee
sauvage" includes the different kinds of thought that we associate more readily with peo-
ples in literate and complex societies.U If we turn his point about, we see that he also im-
plies that the various kinds of thinking later distinguished are undifferentiated in his
"pensee sauvage." The bounds of that pensee do not, however, circumscribe all our needs
and thought. We may, for example, assign literary status to that which had not been so
conceived, so thinking thoughts unknown to earlier people. That ex post facto defining is
not restricted to literary matters. We also consider it just to speak, for example of religion, 581
law and economics in times before the different kinds were distinguished as separate
e~H~. WJ
For primal literary origins, the problem of evidence has been solved as well as it is EARL MINER

likely to be by C. M. Bowra in his Primitive Song. Using evidence from ethnographers re-
cording "songs" from present-day pre-literate peoples, he was able to set forth a reasonable,
convincing pattern of development. In this process, the first step is assembly of meaning-
less sounds. Of course, total meaninglessness is just noise. But certain peoples like the
Yamana have songs without lexical or grammatical meaning, as for example this song of
friendly welcome accompanied by jumping up and down:

Ha mala ha rna Ia ha rna Ia ha rna Ia

0 Ia Ia Ia Ia Ia Ia Ia Ia 14

The use of a single vowel may suggest the simplest imaginable mentality or, as I suppose
instead, an incantatory significance, a kind of word spell or charm. 15 The necessary memo-
rizing for communal performance seems to imply as much. The Selk'nam, neighbours of
the Yamana, have medicine men with lexically meaningful songs but also others of com-
munal performance that are purely incantatory. In the mornings they sing:

ha-ra-xe-u-ka ha-ra-xe-u-ka ha-ra-ze-u

and in the evenings:

Hai-ce-rai-ya hai-ce-rai-ya hai-ce-hai-ce-rai-ya 16

This is surely a kind of word spell, and in its more complex use of repetition and in its
parallelism growing from morning/evening performance, we move closer to meaning
and therefore to what we can recognize.
As a further step, Bowra mentions the "striking way in which the Vedas use two for-
mulaic lines"-

Tan tandinanan tandinane

Tanan tandina tandinan

"which are unintelligible but used in intelligible contexts, often at the beginning or end of a
song." 17 We, too, have our "Hey, nonny nannies" and "fa Ia las." These "emotive sounds"
have, at whatever remove, lexically intelligible songs that are really otherwise indistinguish-
able from what we have been seeing. Bowra comments on an example:

The Bushmen have what they call the jackal's song.

Canter for me, little jackal, 0 little jackal,

little jackal.

In [this] there is still some lingering element of magic, but they show how the song
moves from an immediately useful purpose to an element of art and pleasure. Though
these single lines are made more emphatic by repetition ... they show how verse begins.
The single line is the first, indispensable beginning of real song. 18

Another song by a Bushman on the theft of his tobacco by a dog appears to take us,
however simply, from the ceremoniously spiritual to the secular:

Famine it is,
Famine it is,
Famine it is here. 19
 582 From this point, various developments are feasible. One is the making of longer songs
with patterns of repetition, parallelism, and variance. For example, the Aranda have a song
SECTION 10 for the season when two kinds of parrots come to pick the flowers of the bloodwood trees.
COMPARATIVE LYRIC
The ringneck-parrots in scattered flocks-
The ringneck-parrots are screaming in their upward flight.

The ringneck-parrots are a cloud of wings:

The shell-parrots are a cloud of wings.

Let the shell-parrots come down to rest-

Let them come down to rest on the ground.

Let the caps fly off the scented blossoms!

Let the caps fly off the blood wood blossoms!

Let the caps fly off the scented blossoms!

Let the blossoms fall to the ground in a shower.

The clustering bloodwood blossoms are falling down-

The clustering blood wood blossoms, nipped by birds.

The clustering bloodwood blossoms are falling down

The clustering bloodwood blossoms, one by one. 20

We probably do well to suspect some degree of spirituality and ritual here, but we have
reached, or are on the verge of reaching, songs that might be memorized by someone who
learned them with the purpose of collection and preservation in writing.
There are often great difficulties in interpreting even brief songs. In fact, a translator
is stymied without an assured interpretation. Here is a brief Japanese song of uncertain
date but recorded in the people's oldest history, The Record of Ancient Matters. 21

Among the rice stalks,

Among the rice stalks of the fields
Lying side by side,
They twine and crawl about-
The creeping vines.

But some scholars have said that the words were sung by peasants as they weeded
vines from rice fields in order to harvest. If so, the translation must be altered.

Through the rice stalks,

Through the rice stalks of the field
Where we work side by side,
They twine and crawl about-
The detested vines.

Yet another interpretation holds it is a love song telling of the lover's exertions in get-
ting to his beloved.

Through the rice stalks.

Through the rice stalks of the fields,
Lying side by side,
I twine and crawl to you
Like the creeping vine.
 More recently, archaeological and other evidence has shown that the song was in fact 583
part of ritual mourning in which the bereaved survivors crawled about the body of the
dead. So that the meaning of this brief song is rather more like this: 10.1
EARL MINER
As through the rice stalks,
As through the rice stalks of the field,
We move side by side,
We twine and crawl about you
Like the creeping vine.

Songs like this suggest that even the Yamana's lexically meaningless songs had a rit-
ual significance referred to earlier as incantatory.
In whatever interpretation, that song is quite simple. Another rather more complex
song poses issues because of its special status. It is collected and preserved in writing and
is now regarded as a poem. In fact it is probably the best known Chinese poem, by virtue
of being the first in the Classic of Poetry.

Guan guan cry the ospreys

On the islet of the river.
The beautiful and good young lady
Is a fine mate for the lord.

Varied in length are the water plants;

Left and right we catch them.
The beautiful and good young lady-
Waking and sleeping he wished for her.

He wished for her without getting her.

Waking and sleeping he thought of her:
Longingly, longingly,
He tossed from side to side.

Varied in length are the water plants;

Left and right we gather them.
The beautiful and good young lady-
Zithers and flutes greet her as a friend.

Varied in length are the water plants-

Left and right we cull them.
The beautiful and good young lady-
Bells and drums delight her.

Many things about the poem are uncertain, including its date and meaning. Pauline
Yu's study, from which it is taken, deals with the inevitable Confucian moralizings of it
and the likelihood that it was a wooing or bridal song. 22 Whatever it means, its repetitions
and its incantatory nature show that it is in the line-if farther on, so to speak-of the
songs recovered by Bowra.
In The Record of Ancient Matters (no. 90) there is another early Japanese song whose
title, "In Longing for His Wife," suggests a somewhat greater secular purpose. 23

In the river
OfHatsuse the hidden land
They tamp sacred poles
 584 Within the upper shallow reaches;
They tamp true poles
SECTION 10 Within the lower shallow reaches;
COMPARATIVE lYRIC They hang a mirror
Upon a pounded sacred pole;
They hang true jewels
Upon a pounded true pole-
Like the true jewels
Is she I love so dearly;
And like a mirror,
Is the wife I deeply love-
If only someone
Could assure me she is there.
I would leave for her home,
I would long for that land!

The ritual actions of the major portion of the poem bar any easy assumption that this
is wholly worldly. But those who included it in The Record of Ancient Matters appear to
have thought that it uses older rites to the secular end of conveying a husband's wish to be
with the wife he had to leave behind, given the matrilineal inheritance of individual
property and uxorilocal marriage in that age.
Bowra's evidence so amplified demonstrates a matter of first importance. It is the lyric,
not drama or narrative, that first emerges. (My fellow editor may think differently.) Bowra
knew his Homer and his tragedians, and he knew he was writing about "primitive song."
In any verbal plurality, we may discover the possibility of narrative. Presentation of a sin-
gle word may offer a dramatic moment. Before long we shall glance at a poem by George
Herbert that has recognizable dramatic and narrative properties. But intense brevities are
taken to be lyric. Lyric may readily absorb, incorporate, and even generate narrative and
drama. Sappho may write about soldiers and Horace may "act" many "roles" in his odes,
but the one is not Homer or the other Plautus. The statuses of these kinds was a chief con-
cern in China, where the yet greater wall is the lyric.
Literature begins, then, in lexically meaningless sounds and comes into being as lyric.
The Greeks have idealized Homeric epic from early times. But there must have been yet
earlier times. Diegesis and mimesis yield lengthy works complex on a scale and length be-
yond our conceiving that they preceded lyric. The observation is not new. Nietzsche claimed
in The Birth of Tragedy that Greek tragedy originated in lyric. (One could read Aristotle's
Poetics and doubt that he knew lyric existed.) Obscure as it may be, the derivation of tragedy
from "male goat" + "song" must mean that the choral odes-sung in celebrating Athens'
Dionysian religious festival-led to dramatic dialogue rather than the reverse.
The historical and ethnographic evidence has shown us that literature first comes
into existence as lyric. In the pensee sauvage, literature may not have been separable from
religion and social concerns. But the track from the Yamana's lexically meaningless syl-
lables to the lonely husband shows that a single path is followed between those two points.
Drama and narrative do not offer any such clear, continuous, and decisive route as that
from seemingly meaningless syllables to lyric to a poetics.
The primacy oflyric in the emergence ofliterature confirms its role as the originative
or foundation genre for the poetics or poetic systems of all literary cultures except the one
western holdout. (Let it be said again that, thereafter, the longer the period of literary
practice and critical reflection, the more multifaceted both become.) In all its versions,
the lyric-based poetics is affective and expressive in nature. It will have occurred to some 585
readers following the present argument that to Plato and Aristotle alike literature was cer-
tainly affective. Plato shows this clearly in his Ion, Phaedrus, and notoriously in Republic. 10.1
Aristotle shows it in his concern with fear and pity as also no doubt his "katharsis," a!- EARL MINER

though its meaning is not known. (It appears but once in the Poetics.) For neither philoso-
pher could affectivism be a differentia of literature, however, since the works named show
that they held philosophy and rhetoric to be no less affective. It was not until Horace rede-
fined the ars poetica without regard for philosophy or rhetoric but instead out of his prac-
tice (odes, satires, and epistles, many of which are satiric), that affectivism, and expressiv-
ism, entered the western poetic system.
This attention to the primacy of lyric explains why that genre is especially important
to considerations of literary rupture, endurance, and renovation. When the lyric of a
given national culture is assaulted, literature is attacked at its very heart and soul.
None of this is to say that we are ignorant of the origins and many implications of
drama and narrative. Greek tragedy may have originated in song and English tragedy in
the medieval elaborations on the Quem quaeritis trope. 24 Even that simple an example
shows how easy it is to distinguish drama from both narrative and lyric. Unlike those,
drama is an art performed by players or puppets or shadows that represent. In that perfor-
mative nature and its necessary consequence, fictionality, drama differs from lyric and
narrative, which are not played and need not be dominantly fictive at all. It is more difficult
by far to define the distinction between lyric and narrative. In my view, the distinguishing
features of lyric are a presence and intensity that make it, in a double sense, literature of
moment. 25 By contrast, narrative is distinguished by its fulfilled continuity. No brief dis-
cussion can deal with such complex matters adequately, but there are certain distinctions
in practice. These practical considerations testify to the special nature oflyric.
It has grown common to speak of metadrama and metanarrative: as with a play within
a play, or a narrative inset within a narrative. The latter is epidemic in longer romances
and will be found in Dickens. Dramatic doubling is familiar from such plays within plays
as the Pyramus and Thisbe woefully presented by Bottom and the other "mechanicals" in
A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet's "mousetrap" to catch the conscience of King
Claudius. In narrative and drama alike, the second stage necessarily interrupts the first. In
similar fashion, drama is interrupted by narrative interludes like a messenger's narration
or by Othello's relation of his wooing of Desdemona. In like fashion, the account of a play
like that of Dickens', of Mr. Wopsle's playing of Hamlet in Great Expectations, interrupts
the narrative. It is also the case that a song in a play or a narrative interrupts what may be
termed the host genre.
With lyric, the situation greatly differs. For one thing, lyric is not self-interruptive, as
are narrative and drama. For another, although it may seem the most fragile genre, lyric
is not interrupted by drama or narrative: the presence of one or the other imparts inten-
sification or amplification. For that matter, both drama and narrative may be made to
serve lyric in a single poem, as is shown by the opening and closing lines (1-5, 33-36) of
George Herbert's poem of momentary spiritual rebellion, "The Collar."

I struck the board, and cry'd, No more,

I will abroad.
What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
Loose as the winde, as large as store ...
But as I rav' d and grew more fierce and wilde
 586 At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child!
SECTION 10 And I reply'd, My Lord.
COMPARATIVE LYRIC
As we see, the lyric absorbs narrative and drama alike: they become attributive rather
than constituent, independent genres. The narrative past tense re-presents a moment by
extending it, and the dramatic outburst intensifies the now-ness. Lyric may function in
similar ways, not only interruptively. It may enter drama attributively as in Noh and cer-
tain other dramatic forms. And it combines yet more readily, or at least more variously,
with narrative. There are also rarer examples, Japanese linked poetry being one of them,
for which some people might wish to hold that lyric and narrative are co-generic.
When these various cases are put, we reach the same conclusion: lyric is primary,
whether we consider the origins of literature, the origins of a systematic poetics, or the
prime, uninterruptible genre. As the simplest, or at least briefest, the purest, and the most
resistant to interference of the three genres, lyric is special. For this triple reason, the rup-
ture of a lyric practice, of a lyric tradition within a national or regional culture, is the
gravest literary assault of all. The most grievous damage is done.
That is not to say that the rupture of dramatic or narrative practice is not serious.
But if we think of degrees of seriousness, the damage to narrative is the least serious. Its
messiness-Henry James famously called the novel a loose, baggy monster-contrasts
with the assiduous care of lyric. External damage to narrative finds quicker recovery,
as is shown by the relatively easy adaptation of features of the western novel by other
literatures. This relative ease of repair seems to hold more fully for narrative in prose
than in verse. That may perhaps reflect the fact that only the finest great verse narra-
tive is tolerable and that greatness is by definition rare. But there may be another fac-
tor. The constant rhythmic character of verse narrative makes it closer to lyric than is
prose narrative.
Because these matters are so seldom observed, the assumptions they require and the
consequences they entail have not been discussed. But since they obviously relate to the
nature of lyric (and therefore also its species, literature), we simply cannot avoid saying
something about the nature of lyric, offering some idea if not a strict definition. 26 There
does not seem to be much enthusiasm for the now hoary idea of lyric as that which is
overheard. And small wonder. That description applies far better to drama. It is more
useful to consider the central point made by Paul de Man, who turned his attention to
lyric poetry after a critical career devoted largely to varieties of narrative prose. 27 With
his close attention to what he often called rhetoric, it is not surprising that he should have
characterized lyric in terms of apostrophe. This serves to describe some lyrics, especially
a number by the English Romantic poets, but it is not helpful for much of the world's po-
etry. Some context offers assistance at this point. The method De Man had employed for
prose narrative was a very patient version of the close reading appropriate to lyric fine-
ness, and in this he was the heir of the Anglo-American old New Critics, who had taken
as their gold standard the poetry of Donne and other early seventeenth century lyric po-
ets. Yet their criticism also had flawed lyric presumptions, as we see in their dismissal of
the author as a genetic fallacy and of the reader as an affective fallacy (Wimsatt and
Beardsley). In a fully realized lyricism like that of the Chinese, a central feature is the
poet's expressive purpose (zhi), a version of intention charged by affective stimulus. This
is of course a Confucian emphasis, although it may go back to the yet more distant past
and is discussed with explicit emphasis by Mencius. 28 One summary of the implications
of what zhi has been taken to mean has been provided by James J-Y Liu:
 those critics who understood it as "heart's work" or "emotional purport" [developed] ex- 587
pressive theories and those who understood it as "mind's intent" or "moral purpose" often
combined the expressive concept with the pragmatic. 29 10.1
EARL MINER
In this major version of an affective-expressive poetics, mimesis does not exist. In addi-
tion, the assumption is not that the addressee is mute or absent as with apostrophe but rather
is ready to be moved in turn. Much in this is, of course, conventional, as when a Chinese poet
writes on a wall words telling what the sight of the nearby scene has prompted, or when a
friend addressed replies to one's poem using the same rhymes for the same number of
lines.
If we can place lyric with the other genres that make up literature, there is still the
issue of placing literature. Because literature is one of the things we can learn, remember,
recall, and discuss, it must be a kind of knowledge. And lyric must therefore be one of
that kind. To clarify what is involved, it may be useful to remind ourselves of the two
distinct senses that we assign to "history." We use the word at times to mean the course of
events that occurred at some times and in some places, and one way of distinguishing
among a number of those histories is to ascertain whether and in what fashion people are
involved. The other principal sense of "history" is that of accounts of the course of events
that occurred at various times and places. But our knowledge consists of many things
other than events-various kinds of logic and symbols, values and numbers, etc. And no
kind of thought with any degree of importance is of a single, uncombined nature. Yet
some kinds of knowledge use other kinds sparingly while being eminently useful to others,
whereas others are able to use different kinds of knowledge readily but are of restricted
use to other kinds. Simply put, mathematics is used, and literature uses. On the other
hand, the more complex, specialized, or restricted knowledge becomes, the less accessible
it grows and the more it is prized for its own sake.
With literature, there is an issue important to some minds, and trivialized by most of
us, of the presence and relation of fact and fiction. The Chinese critic who pronounced The
Romance of the Three Kingdoms "seven parts fact and three parts fiction" presumably was
making a point rather than using a calculator. 30 It is more important by far that the part of
a history that is most important to authors and readers alike is not factual, although it may
be based on carefully ascertained facts. That part is, of course, motivation, intent, purpose,
and causal movements involving larger numbers of people. That part will utterly fail to
carry conviction, and large structures of fact will collapse, unless they are fictionally con-
ceived. Or if fiction seems dubious, we may take recourse to the imaginary. 31
It is difficult to draw a list of things important to our shared human lives that litera-
ture does not draw upon, put to use, make over so that it can be known. That being so, we
must enquire into the nature of what may justly be termed lyric knowledge. We must
grant to some and insist to others that this kind is, like all others, mixed or impure. But
insofar as it is a distinct kind, lyric knowledge can be characterized by the terms of the
poetics for which it accounts. It is affective and expressive. Or, to use the terms from the
Chinese and Japanese prefaces quoted earlier, lyric knowledge is first of all subjective: in
both tongues the terms are translatable in context as mind, heart, or spirit. But that is, as
the Japanese version puts it, the seed or cause. The growth from the causal seed, the nec-
essary realization is words, language. There is no single linguistic emphasis that holds for
all writers in all places at all times. To some poets syntax matters more than vocabulary,
and to others the reverse-so corresponding to the functions of the two chief portions of
our brains most important for linguistic knowledge. To some poets, precedented lan-
guage has highest claim, and to others neologisms. To some the resemblance to actual
 588 speech is the touchstone, and to others it is the departures from the ordinary. But the
general importance of language to literature reaches its high point in lyric poetry. The
SECTION 10 affective also varies. It may or may not have the moralizing of the Chinese and Horatian
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC versions. But it is the same force of mind-heart-spirit that leads us to act, to say what we
have done, to remember it, and to tell others. It is the combination of these two features that
creates the intensified presence oflyric. 32 On reflection, that leaves us a sense of awe that is
captured in the Chinese preface: "in regulating success and failure, moving heaven and
earth, and causing spirits and gods to respond, nothing comes closer than poetry." 33
These considerations enable us to understand that it is inevitably true that the rupture
of lyric practice is a change whose true gravity is not understandable merely in terms of
change. Of course this is true for narrative and drama as well. But as this brief review has
shown, lyric is the most crucial. The demonstrable reasons for this are the origins oflitera-
ture in lyric, the dominance of lyric or affective-expressive poetics in the world's poetic
systems, and the special integrity oflyric among the genres. That integrity rests upon lyric's
extraordinary resistance to interruption by drama, by narrative, and even by itself. To
rupture a lyric tradition, very powerful measures of assault are necessary, and the crime is
greatest. Yeats envisioned the possibility that the great song would return no more ("The
Nineteenth Century and After"). And we are familiar with the legend of the swan's death
song. The damage involved in disruption of a lyric tradition can scarcely be exaggerated.
Our hopes for redress lie in the recognition of that importance. One can only feel awe in
contemplating the mysterious power of this simple, brief, and primal genre.

NOTES

1. See Edward Said, Orienta/ism (New York: (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 97.
Pantheon, 1978). 8. Miner, Comparative Poetics, 45.
2. Earl Miner, Comparative Poetics: An 9. For a complementary discussion featuring
Intercultural Essay of Theories of Literature hermeneutics rather than poetics, as here, see
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Longxi Zhang, The Tao and the Logos (Durham:
23-29. Duke University Press, 1992).
3. Claudio Guillen, Literature as System: Essays 10. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the

towards the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Chinese Poetic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton
Princeton University Press, 1971); Subha Dasgupta, University Press, 1987), 31-32. Important critical
"The French School of Comparative Literature," in conceptions involve words that seldom move
Amiya Dev and Sisir Kumar Das (ed.), Compara- unscathed between languages. The crucial word
tive Literature: Theory and Practice (Shimla: 'zhi' ('chih') is sometimes rendered to mean will;
Indian Institute of Adanced Study, 1989). similarly, 'xing' ('shing') has features of English
4. Dionyz Durisin, Sources and Systematics of conceptions of heart, mind, and spirit.
Comparative Literature (Bratislava: Univerzita 11. Miner, Comparative Poetics, 84.
Komaskeho, 1974) and Theory of Inter/iterary 12. On the complex example oflndia see Earl
Process (Bratislava: Slovak Academy of Sciences, Miner, "On the Genesis and Development of
1989); Hans Robert jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Literary Systems II: The Case oflndia," Revue de /a
Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Litterature Comparee, no. 65 (1991): 143-52.
Press, 1981). 13. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind
5· The rest of this chapter deals with conceptual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
and historical issues involving lyric. For the topics 14. C. M. Bowra, Primitive Song (Cleveland and
of the other chapters, see the preface. New York: World Publishing Company, 1962), 57.
6. See chapters 2-4 in Miner, Comparative 15. Andrew Welsh, The Roots of Lyric (Princeton:
Poetics. Princeton University Press, 1978), 133.
7. jin'ichi Konishi, Zeami Shu (Tokyo: Chi kuma 16. Bowra, Primitive Song, 59·
Shobo, 1974), 215, 216, 220; On the Art of Noh 17. Bowra, Primitive Song, 59-60.
Drama: The Major Treatises ofZeami, ed. 18. Bowra, Primitive Song, 63.
Yamazaki Masakazu, trans. j. Thomas Rimer 19. Bowra, Primitive Song, 63.
 20. Bowra, Primitive Song, 78. and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University 589
21. Kojiki, camp. ca. 672; see Robert H. Brower Press, I985), 55-72.
and Earl Miner, japanese Court Poetry (Stanford: 28. jin'ichi Konishi, A History of Japanese 10.1
Stanford University Press, I96I), 45-46. Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
EARL MINER
22. Yu, The Reading of Imagery, 47-55. I984), val. I; )ames J-Y Liu, Chinese Theories of
23. Brower and Miner, japanese Court Poetry, 66. Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
24. See john 20:I5. In the Authorized Version, 1975), 69-70, 76; james j-Y Liu, Language Paradox
the risen jesus asks his mother, "Whom seekest Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
thou?" ("Quem quaeritis" in the Vulgate). As this I988), 96-97·
incident became elaborated beyond a certain point, 29. Liu, Chinese Theories of Language, 69-70.
it was moved out of the churches and, with further 30. jin'ichi Konishi, A History of japanese
elaboration, contributed to the development of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
English drama. 1991), val. 3, 509.
25. Miner, Comparative Poetics. 31. Wolfgang Iser, The Fictional and the
26. See also Welsh, The Roots of Lyric. Imaginary (Baltimore: johns Hopkins University
27. Paul de Man, "Lyrical Voice in Contempo- Press, 1993).
rary Theory: Riffaterre and jauss," in Lyric Poetry: 32. Miner, Comparative Poetics.
Beyond New Criticism, edited by Chaviva H. Hosek 33· Yu, The Reading of Imagery, 32.

Traveling Poetry (2007) 10.2

JAHAN RAMAZANI

Rapid, multidirectional, unexplained-such are the geographic displacements in the fa-

mous opening of Ezra Pound's canto 81, written while the poet was incarcerated in the U.S.
Army Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa:
Zeus lies in Ceres' bosom
Taishan is attended of loves
under Cythera, before sunrise
and he said: "Hay aqui mucho catolicismo-(sounded catolithismo)
y muy poco reliHion" 1

With the help of allusions repeated and elaborated elsewhere in The Cantos, we infer that
the predawn sun nestling behind mountains near Pisa is being refigured as a Greek sun
god lying in the bosom of the fertility goddess Ceres. The cone-shaped mountain that
Pound could see from his detention cage is also troped as a sacred mountain in China
before the next line returns to Greece-an Ionian island sacred to Aphrodite-and the
ensuing passage moves on to personal memories of Spain. Not all poetry travels at such
velocity; some poetry dwells in a specific, intricately detailed location. But in the spirit of
Edward W. Said's exploration of "traveling theory" and James Clifford's of "traveling
culture," I consider what enables traveling poetry by Pound and many other modern and
contemporary poets to leap across national and cultural boundaries. 2 Recognizing the "in-
extinguishable taint" of the term travel-its recreational, bourgeois, European, gendered
associations-Clifford nevertheless reclaims the word, using it expansively to describe
 590 different "practices of crossing and interaction," "the ways people leave home and return,
enacting differently centered worlds, interconnected cosmopolitanisms" (39, 3, 27-28). How
SECTION 10 does poetry leave home and return? What makes possible poetry's differently centered cos-
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC mopolitanisms? How does poetic travel differ from global transport by other means?
Poetry travels partly, of course, by means of traveling poets. Pound's incarceration in
Italy reminds us that various expatriates, migrants, and emigres famously transformed
poetry in the first part of the twentieth century. Modern and contemporary poets have
been changing places and have been changed by places, from Euromodernists such as
W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Mina Loy and Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston
Hughes and Claude McKay, to the postwar American poets Elizabeth Bishop, John Ash-
bery, and James Merrill (analyzed by Robert von Hallberg and Jeffrey Gray as tourists and
travelers), to postcolonial and immigrant poets such as Okot p'Biket, Lorna Goodison, and
Charles Simic. 3 Along with literal movement, modern and contemporary poetry written
in English is also inevitably shaped by the circulation of images and ideas by radio, televi-
sion, the Internet, and other fleet forms of global mediation.
Poetry also travels because poems travel. During his confinement Pound is elated to
find The Pocket Book of Verse, edited by Morris Edmund Speare, on a toilet seat-a sur-
prising juxtaposition of the humble commode and poetic transport:

That from the gates of death,

that from the gates of death: Whitman or Lovelace
found on the jo-house seat at that
in a cheap edition! [and thanks to Professor Speare] (513)

Modern printing and more recent technologies of dissemination help poems by Whitman,
Lovelace, and Pound travel via back pockets, iPods, and Web sites, particularly because of
poetry's trademark compression. Having only Speare's poetry anthology, a Bible, and an
edition of Confucius with him, Pound conjures other poems from memory, and indeed
another reason that poems travel is their mnemonic structure: the rhythmic, sonic, rhe-
torical, and syntactic patterning that led Auden to define poetry as "memorable speech." 4
Poetry is especially well suited to traveling in yet another sense-that is, the imagina-
tive enactment of geographic movement, as in the rapid-fire transnational displacements
in Pound's Pisan canto, and it is this dimension of poetry's travel, albeit interconnected
with the others I have mentioned, that is the focus of this essay. Poetry is but one among
many kinds of cross-national transit, alongside the people, technology, money, images,
and ideas that, as Arjun Appadurai shows, flow across modern national boundaries. 5 Nor
does poetic travel always outstrip travel by other genres and discourses. To the extent that
poetry is what is lost in translation, travel writing, fiction, music, cinema, and the visual
arts may travel more easily across cultural boundaries. Poetry is stitched and hitched to the
peculiarities of the language in which it is written. Moreover, because of its reliance on the
line and the stanza as units of organization, poetry may be a less effective means of ethno-
graphic transport than, say, a chapter of a realist novel or an act of a naturalist play. The de-
tailed description of a wrestling match in chapter 6 of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart-
unlike fellow Ibo writer Christopher Okigbo's intensely self-reflexive lyric sequences-firmly
situates the non-Ibo reader in the lifeworld of a Nigerian village at the turn of the twentieth
century. Because of its formal patterning and energetic verbal self-consciousness, poetry
typically offers less transparent access to other cultural worlds. Similarly, whereas travel
writing, the Odyssean tale, or, for that matter, the travel poem (minus the participial suf-
fix) involves "the territorial passage from one zone to another" 6 -that is, a macro-level
transition, a mimetically plotted border crossing from home to foreign land-the travel 591
in traveling lyric often occurs at the micro level: swift territorial shifts by line, trope,
sound, or stanza that result in flickering movements, oscillations, and juxtapositions. 10.2
What poetry loses as a traveling medium that frequently eschews density of social )AHAN RAMAZANJ

detail, resists translation, and interrupts mimesis, that mediates on its linguistic surface
and fractures the spatiotemporal passage from one zone to another, it gains through
structural efficiency and compression. Because the line is fundamental as a unit of mean-
ing in poetry, each of the first four lines of the opening of Pound's canto 81 can turn to a
different geocultural space: Greek myth, Chinese mountain, Greek island, memories of
Spain. Frank O'Hara's poem "The Day Lady Died" grounds itself in specificities of space
and time-"It is 12:20 in New York a Friday I three days after Bastille day, yes/ it is 1959"-
yet, as first intimated by the seemingly throwaway "Bastille day," which superimposes
Paris on New York, the jumps across national boundaries, from one line to the next, could
hardly be more quick and nimble: from musings about "what the poets I in Ghana are do-
ing these days" to Paul Verlaine and Pierre Bonnard to Richmond Lattimore's translation
of Hesiod, and so forth, before winding up with Billie Holiday at the 5 Spot-a headlong
associative movement that, by its elegant fluidity, gives the prosaic details their "poetic"
quality_? Such a poem is itself a kind of"contact zone," in Mary Louise Pratt's term, a site of
migrating and mingling tropes, geographies, and cultural signifiers.8 Lyric's intercultural
"contact" tends to diverge, however, from that of travel writing, a genre satirized by Ash-
bery in "The Instruction Manual" for exoticizing foreign places and fetishistically dwell-
ing on their particulars, such as those of a dreamily wondrous Guadalajara, conjured up
by a worker bored by having to write about the uses of new metal. As indicated by O'Hara's
and Ashbery's work, traveling poetry proceeds more quickly and abruptly, through trans-
locational juxtapositions, which by their rapidity and lyric compression typically prevent
us from believing that we are entering an alternative space and foreground instead the
negotiations and fabrications of imaginative travel.
For other poets, the stanza is a mapping tool that helps efficiently establish location
and translocation. The transnational dislocations in Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli" occur in the
gaps between stanzas sited in the British Isles, then Greece, then China. In one stanza of
"Vacillation" the Duke of Chou, author of the I Ching, looks out on a Chinese field, and in
the next a conqueror in Babylon or Nineveh draws rein, both Chinaman and Middle East-
erner crying out, "'Let all things pass away.' "9 By the logic of stanza as geographic room,
the white space in between functions like a doorway between cultural worlds, also linked
in this instance by a shared refrain, stanzaic pattern, and use of the contemptus mundi to-
pos. Even when not strictly bounding regions by stanza, the stepwise abab structure of
Archibald MacLeish's quatrains in "You, Andrew Marvell" helps track nightfall's west-
ward sweep from Persia to Baghdad and Arabia, to Palmyra, Lebanon, and Crete, to Sicily,
Spain, and Africa. Also moving westward, from Brooklyn to California, Hart Crane's
Bridge enacts geopoetic migration through sectional divisions that, by shifting among free
verse, blank verse, ballad, and other forms, poetically accentuate and propel dislocation.
In these and other examples, the traveling reader never fully inhabits any of these spaces
but is brought up short by the formal framing and rapid multiple transitions. Deploying
sound, structure, and self-reflection, the poet enunciates and plays on the construction of,
and movement through, multiple worlds.
Rhyme, rhythm, and poetry's many other forms of sonic patterning also enable imag-
inative travel. When Melvin B. Tolson sonically links the Christian god ("Great God
A'mighty!"), the Greek god of fortune ("the whim I ofTyche"), and an American folk hero
 592 ("The Birth of John Henry!"), the connective force of rhyme helps his verse cross enormous
distances. 10 "Rhyme," Derek Walcott declares in Omeros, "is the language's! desire to en-
SECTION 10 close the loved world in its arms," and in this long poem the rhymes of Walcott's zigzagging
CoMPARATIVE LYRic terza rima stitch sonic patterns that traverse much of the world's surface, from the Carib-
bean to the United States, Ireland, and Africa. II Like such lyricized epics, lyrics per se make
use of a globe-traversing weave. The sound patterns echoing across one of the humorously
overloaded short poems of the last century, Wallace Stevens's "Bantams in Pine-Woods,"
may not move across literal geographies, but the poem's first lines, mocking the chief who
turns out to be the solipsistically inflated "ten-foot poet," unmistakably evoke distinct and
widely separated places: "Chieftan Iffucan of Azcan in caftan I Of tan with henna hackles,
halt!" 12 With the help of the repeated phoneme -an, a pre-Columbian chief-perhaps Az-
tec, Mayan, or a conflation of the two-is dressed (from the Persian khaftahn) and dyed
(from the Arabic hinna) like a Middle Easterner. At poem's end the phoneme -an of"portly
Azcan's" pseudo-place-name helps stretch poetic topography all the way to the Appala-
chian Mountains. Riding the back of such caravans of sound, poetry traverses real and
semireallandscapes-perhaps more nimbly than less sonically rich, more prosaically refer-
ential forms. Its self-signaling textures foreground the linguistic and imaginative construc-
tion of poetic travel. Thomas Hardy's Drummer Hodge has voyaged from a North Atlantic
home to a southern African grave, and the rhymes, assonances, syntactic parallels, and al-
ternating four- and three-beat lines both connect and ironically disconnect these vastly
discrepant spaces:
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternallyY

Unlike Rupert Brooke's notorious World War I poem "The Soldier," which imperially ex-
tends national territory wherever the soldier dies ("there's some corner of a foreign field/ That
is forever England"), Hardy's poem, while acknowledging some cross-hemispheric fusion,
emphasizes the unhomeliness of the deterritorialized English body thrown into a landscape
that will remain forever "strange" and "unknown." 14
Sometimes rhythm serves as a way of intertwining disparate cultural spaces, as when
Louise Bennett plays with and against the ballad meter she creolizes with Jamaican
rhythms or when Gwendolyn Brooks merges the syncopations of African American
speech with the norms of a Petrarchan sonnet in "The Rites for Cousin Vit": "Kicked back
the casket-stand. But it can't hold her /That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her." 15 In "A
Song in the Front Yard" Brooks entwines her iambs with vernacular triple rhythms and
subtly inflected African American phrasing: "That George'[[ be taken to Jail soon or
late I (On account of last winter he sold our back gate)" (6). Whether imposed or willingly
adapted, meter, rhythm, stanza, and other prosodic elements have always traveled across
cultural and territorial boundaries. Consider, for example, the Japanese haiku, famously
anglicized by the imagists, or the Arabic ghazal, adapted for over a thousand years into
Persian (taking its canonical form in that language), Turkish, Urdu, German, and English,
mostly recently by the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali. Despite William Carlos
Williams's nativist fulminations against European prosodic strictures, the "quintessen-
tially American" poet can write a poem that employs a rolling, waltzlike triple rhythm to
evoke the dancing of the Dutch peasants in Brueghel's painting The Kermess:
 the dancers go round, they go round and 593
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles 10.2
tipping their bellies. 16 jAHAN RAMAZANI

Sometimes the allure of a rhythm, a formal structure, or a "foreign" aesthetic is stronger

than ideological fortifications against cross-cultural contact and contamination.
A figuratively rich discourse, poetry enables travel in part by its characteristically
high proportion of figures of thought, as well as figures of speech. Since metaphor derives
from the Greek "transfer" or "carry across," it should come as little surprise that poet's figu-
rative language enacts geographic and other kinds of movement. "Moving on or going back
to where you came from,/bad news is what you mainly travel with," begins Amy Clampitt's
elegy for her mother, "A Procession at Candlemas." 17 The mourning daughter associates the
vehicles moving westward with her on the highway with examples of "transhumance," or
seasonal migration, in the Pyrenees, the Andes ("red-tasseled pack llamas"), and the Kurdish
mountains (22); her tropes for travel travel across three continents in three lines. As Bonnie
Costello writes, "Clampitt reveals how poetry might become a guide in developing this no-
madic imagination: searching out and crossing boundaries, scavenging, finding value in
what has been ignored, setting up formal patterns which she then works to defeat." 18
Clampitt's nomadic embroideries might well seem to have little in common with Sylvia
Plath's emotionally eruptive work. But the rapid rush of substitutions in Plath's "Cut" enacts
intercontinental, among other forms of, displacement. Having seen her thumb as a pilgrim
scalped by an American Indian, the speaker addresses it as a
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man-

The stain on your

Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
19
Darkens and tarnishes ....

In these few words the poem's pain-exhilarated metaphorical substitutions arc across vast
cultural distances, from the Allied saboteur (French) to the Axis kamikaze (Japanese),
from the Klansman's hood to a Russian head kerchief. Plath's figurative leaps, especially
from herself to Jews in Nazi concentration camps and Japanese victims of nuclear bombs,
have been criticized as too free and indiscriminate; even the sympathetic Seamus Heaney
worries about her "rampaging so permissively in the history of other people's sorrows." 20
Yet Heaney's poetry, too, shuttle back and forth across divergent spaces-especially, in his
early work, across the North Sea to connect the present-day victims of Northern Ireland's
atrocities with the sacrificial victims deposited in Jutland's bogs.
Indeed, geopoetic oscillation, as we might term such imaginative movement back and
forth between discrepant topographies, is prominent in, though not exclusive to, much
modern and contemporary verse. In Ted Hughes's "Out," the lived reality of the York-
shire farmland is continually sucked under by his father's searing memories of the car-
nage in Gallipoli: "jawbones and blown-off boots, tree-stumps, shellcases and craters." 21
In "The Glass Essay" Anne Carson slides between a wintry Canadian landscape and the
English moors of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights; in "The Great Palaces of Versailles"
Rita Dove's Beulah reimagines the white women who come to Charlotte's Dress Shoppe
as variants of the French court ladies of Versailles; and in "Memphis Blues" Sterling A.
Brown's bluesman sees little difference between the flood-ravaged Memphis along the
 594 Mississippi and "de other Memphis in/History." 22 Lyric highlights how lines of thought,
analogy, and cross-cultural reading-whether strong ligaments or tenuous filaments-
SECTION 10 connect disparate human experiences. If sometimes the oscillating poem merges land-
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC scapes, at other times it plays ironically on the differences between the terrains it shoves
together. Walcott's poem "The Sea Is History," for example, wryly juxtaposes biblical and
Caribbean historical geographies, and Sherman Alexie's "Crow Testament" sardonically
superimposes Bible-scapes on American Indian history and myth:

Cain lifts Crow, that heavy black bird

and strikes down Abel.

Damn, says Crow, I guess

this is just the beginningY

Instead of situating themselves imaginatively in the interstices between two geogra-

phies, poems by Pound, Tolson, Paul Muldoon, Kamau Brathwaite, Susan Howe, and other
poets rapidly spawn and skip amid a multitude oflocations. Howe's "Ruckenfigur," for ex-
ample, seems to plant its first line unambiguously in Cornwall: "Iseult stands at Tintagel." 24
But within a few stanzas the name Tristan is morphing across cultural landscapes,

Tristran Tristan Tristrant

Tristram Trystan Trystram
Tristrem Tristanz Drust
Drystan ... (131)

while Iseult becomes "Iseut Isolde Ysolt Essyllt/bride of March Marc Mark" (131). The
seeming stability of a proper name fractures into the improprieties of its variants in a
multitude of texts from different times and places, sometimes by means of the shift of a
single letter (e.g., "Marc Mark"). Orthographic differences are shown to signify and min-
iaturize geocultural migrations of names and legends. In poetry, travel-instead of being
the plot-driven excursus into a foreign land-may occur at the level of a substituted letter,
a varied rhythm, or a pivoting line.
This ease of movement by lines and stanzas, sounds and tropes, juxtapositions and
morphologies, may not always seem a winning aspect of poetry. Such cross-cultural con-
flations, forays, and leaps may appear to ride roughshod over significant differences.
Alexie's humorous juxtapositions, for example, may risk the very insensitivity to differ-
ences between biblical and American Indian narratives that have been catastrophic for
native peoples in the Americas-except that he highlights the jarring discrepancies as
much as the similarities. Plath may seem irresponsible for linking the Allied saboteur to
the Axis kamikaze, the Ku Klux Klan hood to the Russian babushka, and for eliding their
political and historical differences-except that her metaphorical connections also un-
derscore the cross-regional and global violence registered and compressed in the poetic
unconscious at midcentury. Does Stevens's sonic yoking of the pre-Columbian with the
Middle Eastern and in turn the Appalachian repress the regions' historical and geocul-
tural dissimilarities? Perhaps, although part of the burden of his poem is the bantam's
rebuke to the grandiose poet for his reductive and idealist insensitivity to specifics, such
as those riotously played on by Stevens. Does Clampitt's association of her mournful
journey with seasonal migrations in the Pyrenees, the Andes, and the Kurdish moun-
tains trip too easily across inequalities and erase cultural specificities? Maybe, but surely
we would not wish to crimp the cross-geographic reach of the twentieth- and twenty-
first-century globalized imagination, forcing a poet like Clampitt to ignore connections
among migrant mountain populations and limit the range of her associations to the 595
United States. Does Pound's syncretic verse too easily appropriate Chinese, Greek, and
Spanish locales and myths and place-names for his self-elegiac purposes? Surely the risk, 10.2
as in these other poetic examples, is there-a risk that arises in each instance partly from )AHAN RAMAZANI

the velocity of the traveling poem, partly from the relative freedom of the aesthetic realm.
But such criticisms may assume a too rigid model of identity.
To wag one's finger at these poems' metaphorical, sonic, and structural connections is
to presuppose the discreteness and stability of each cultural unit, when each culture is
always already thoroughly enmeshed in a multitude of others. It is to impose an ethical
and quasi-legal notion of cultural ownership that is inimical to poetry's radial connec-
tions, imaginative leaps, and boundary-crossing ventures. And it is to box creative ex-
pression within identitarian preconceptions resisted by poetry's hybridizing, associative
force. Surely some poetic maneuvers may be harder to defend, such as William Stafford's
foray into Wounded Knee in "Report to Crazy Horse," Robert Duncan's into the primi-
tive and primal Africa of"An African Elegy," and June Jordan's to the same continent in
"Poem about My Rights"-poems that may less skillfully and self-consciously traverse
uneven cultural terrain. But these risks are inextricably bound up with the characteristic
strengths of poetry, as seen in traveling poems by Hardy, Stevens, Pound, Plath, Heaney,
Okigbo, Walcott, Howe, and others. Cross-cultural contamination and leakage may well
be more congenial to poetry than boundary-drawing orthodoxies of the pure, the differ-
ent, and the native. Traveling poetry helps foreground how, through imaginative as well as
literal mingling and merging, new coinages, new intergeographic spaces, even new com-
pound identities come into being. 25

Although examples could be spun out ad infinitum, closer travelogical analysis of poems
by an early-twentieth-century African American poet, a midcentury Euro-American ex-
patriate, and a late-century Latino poet may shed light on how, why, and to what effect
poetry travels and what the implications are for a poetics of transnational identity. Langs-
ton Hughes recounts being inspired to compose "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" while he
crossed the Mississippi, a recent high school graduate, en route to see his father in Mexico. 26
In a mere four lines his poem crosses four rivers, one in Southwest Asian, two in Africa, one
in North America:

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went
down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all
golden in the sunset. 27

What makes it possible for the poem to cross such distances? By the logic of poetic linea-
tion, each of these end-stopped lines locates itself in a different place, and the gap between
one line and the next marks a distance that can be thousands of miles. The disjunctive
logic of poetic lineation instructs us not to expect geographic continuity. Each line is a dif-
ferent scene, a different chapter, a different cultural world. Still, the poem's countervailing
connections span these dislocations and moderate their effect. The gelatinous, Whitma-
nian 'T' binds together globally disparate experiences. A figure of speech, anaphora also
functions as a figure of thought, a trope for the repetitions and replications of diverse
human experiences in different times and places. All the rivers are seen as resembling one
another, and all figuratively fuse with the poet's blood flow and all-knowing soul.
 596 Although Hughes's poem is often read as an example of what Walter Benn Michaels
calls "a commitment to a poetry of identity," 28 specifically an African American or African
SECTION 10 diaspora identity, the poem's affirmation of a new "Negro" identity is paradoxically en-
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC meshed in, and dependent on, a declaration of a transracial, planetary identity: "the flow of
human blood in human veins" (Collected Poems, 23). The poem's naming of rivers in par-
ticular is often described as evidencing the speaker's racial identity, yet two of the four
rivers, the Euphrates and the Mississippi, are hardly African, and only one of the remain-
ing rivers is mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. The poem "maps a truly global geography of
rivers," as Jeff Westover notes. 29 Hughes wrote the poem in 1920 and published it in 1921,
when another writer was conceiving and composing a poem that juxtaposes rivers on
separate continents-the Thames, the Rhine, the Ganges, and perhaps subliminally the
Mississippi. Both Eliot's and Hughes's poems assert knowledge of rivers represented as
distant sites of human origin: the ancient Ganges for Eliot and the civilization-cradling
Euphrates for Hughes. The epistemological claims in these poems-to have "known riv-
ers" far and wide, even at the dawn of civilization-brashly overstep the bounds of each
writer's lived experience. But Eliot's poem seems overburdened with the knowledge gar-
nered by global imaginative travel, while Hughes's speaker emphatically and exuberantly
claims the authority to know. Instead of representing himself as being at the end of an en-
ervated civilization, looking elsewhere for moral and spiritual guidance, Hughes looks
backward to look forward, to summon a boldly affirmed power to speak as a "Negro"-a
new "Negro," whose knowledge is both racial (the Congo and the Nile) and extra racial (the
Euphrates), both African and transcivilizational. 30 Like the trope of the river, the blood in
the poem functions paradoxically as a signifier of the speaker's racial specificity and his
shared humanity. The lyric instantiates its dual emphasis on racial and transracial identity
in its hybridization of African American and Euro-American cultural forms. Written in a
free-versifying and multitude-encompassing Whitman ian voice, the poem also summons
the rhetoric and imagery of spirituals, in which to go "down by the riverside" is to seek a
site where conflict can be reconciled: "Ain't gonna study war no more."
Although racial identity is often conceived in terms of roots, this poem takes multiple
routes leading in different directions. Its allusions to slavery-the building of the pyra-
mids in Egypt and Lincoln's trip to New Orleans-suggest that the poem energetically
displaces one kind of travel, the horror of slaves bought and sold down rivers against their
will, with the New Negro's imaginative and literal travel across continents at will. The
lyric's rapid, voluntary, nonsequential movements are thus the reverse of the terrifying
constraints of enslavement. Although the poem tracks the sun's diurnal course, the lyric's
global river travel cannot be mapped as a linear trajectory across historical time: it turns
from what was then considered the original site of human civilization, the Euphrates; to
the Congo, where the Kongo kingdom was in place from the fourteenth through the six-
teenth centuries; to the ancient civilization of the Nile; to the nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Mississippi. Nor is a linear spatial mapping possible from east to west, because,
again, of the middle lines about the Congo and then the Nile. This zig-zag movement across
time and space emphasizes that the verse turns where the speaker wants to turn it (vertere),
asserting the authority of an unfettered and globe-traversing poetic "I." From a narrowly
identitarian perspective, Hughes may seem to travel too freely and quickly, eliding impor-
tant geocultural differences among ancient Babylonians and Egyptians, Africans of the
Kongo kingdom, and nineteenth-century Americans. Yet his freewheeling poetic travel
looks different when seen in the contexts that inform it: the haunting transgenerational
memory of forced travel down the river; the claiming of a common humanity historically
denied to African Americans; and an understanding of poetry as a discursive space that-by
means of place-leaping lineation, cross-cultural symbols, and aesthetic hybridization- 597
affords a remarkable freedom of movement and affiliative connection.
Fifty years later another American poet explores questions of travel, once again stag- 10.2
ing poetic self-discovery in a global context. Like Hughes's lyric "I," the 'T' in Elizabeth )AHAN RAMAZANI

Bishop's "In the Waiting Room" (1971) defines itself in relation to other cultures in distant
parts of the world. But whereas Hughes's poem traverses continents to embrace continu-
ities between distant civilizations and the poem's "Negro" speaker, whose soul contains
cross-cultural multitudes in a display of newfound traveling freedom and a newly affirmed
(cross-)cultural identity, Bishop's almost-seven-year-old "Elizabeth" shrinks from the shock-
ing difference-in-sameness she sees in the indigenous peoples pictured in the National
Geographic. Instead of stabilizing, authorizing, and enlarging the lyric "I," as in Hughes's
poem, imaginative travel puts the subject in Bishop's poem at risk-risk that, paradoxically,
affords the enunciation of lyric self-consciousness. Recounting, in Mutlu Konuk Blasing's
Wordsworthian phrase, the "growth of a poet's mind," the poem explores how the media's
global circulation of images impinges on an individual's emerging subjectivity. 31 The young
"Elizabeth," Lee Edelman observes in an astute reading, discovers that sexuality is hardly
natural but artificially fashioned and constrained. 32 But the girl's revelation about her
common condition as a female human being-akin to both the naked women in the pic-
tures and the heavily clad women in the dentist's office, including her aunt-is not less a
revelation about cultural difference:

A dead man slung on a pole

-"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying. 33

In Worcester, Massachusetts, in February 1918, the young girl suddenly finds herself trav-
eling imaginatively to a place visited and photographed by the explorers Osa and Martin
Johnson. The mass media present to the imagination, as Appadurai writes, "a rich, ever-
changing store of possible lives" (53). Elizabeth's encounter with alien bodies and cultural
practices shocks her into the recognition not only of sameness but also of difference, de-
stabilizing the naturalness of her own cultural world, which suddenly shrinks into one
among an indefinite array of contingent possibilities. Her vertiginous

sensation of falling off

the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space

is in part due to her initiation into becoming a global subject, once anchored to part of the
world by the illusion of its completeness but now unmoored and floating free among cul-
tural and racial differences.
Falling into the knowledge of her apart ness and isolation, the girl confronts a terrify-
ing continuity with the alien other, figured especially as "those awful hanging breasts,"
which would normally signify primal connection but here also signify a dialectically con-
stitutive difference. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak observes of the protagonist of fane
Eyre, the "'subject-constitution' of the female individualist" takes place through the con-
trast with the '"native female."' 34 First World subjectivity, the child's sense of apartness
 598 and her emergence into self-recognition, depends her on the Third World, on both a rec-
ognition of continuity with these women and an exoticizing, primitivizing warding off of
SecTION 10 the cultural other as different from her own, discrete, insular self-identity. The metropoli-
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC tan female subject is shocked into a differential self-understanding as nonnative, as other
than the horrifying other in the magazine. Emphatically defined as a reader-"(! could
read)"-Elizabeth is represented in terms of what Spivak calls a "self-marginalized unique-
ness" (246), as a reader of images and texts ("Long Pig," "the date"), in contrast to the sheer
visuality of the Third World bodies she sees. As Elizabeth "articulates herself in shifting
relationship to what is at stake, the 'native female' as such (within discourse, as a signifier)
is excluded from any share in this emerging norm" (244-45). As for the mature poet, she,
like the National Geographic and like the Johnsons, reproduces and circulates images of
Third World bodies and practices for First World consumption. The extent to which these
images represent undifferentiated otherness is indicated by Bishop's later confusion over
their origin, which she referred to as "African" in an interview, claiming that they derived
from what has proved a nonexistent issue of the National Geographic. 35 But Bishop most
likely echoes the phrase "Long Pig" and the description of infants' heads wound with
coconut string, as Edelman notes (191), from Osa Johnson's book I Married Adventure,
and the Johnsons encountered these cultural phenomena not in Africa but during what
Osa Johnson describes as an early adventure in the Melanesian islands of Malekula and
Vao, in what was then the New Hebrides and is now Vanatu, among a chain of Pacific is-
lands west of Fiji and east of Australia. 36 The encircled heads and necks are cast in a sym-
metrical relation to each other, an imagistic repetition given sonic emphasis ("wound round
and round"), but Bishop's echoic imagery and language traverse large distances; the John-
sons photographed women with multiple brass and horsehair necklaces in British East
Africa, while the bare-breasted women pictured in I Married Adventure are Pacific Island-
ers and so-called Pygmies of the Belgian Congo. Bishop's simile for ornamented necks-
"wound round and round with wire I like the necks oflight bulbs"-jarringly yokes together
the primitive and the modern, and indeed the First World girl's lightbulb moment of self-
recognition depends on the primitivity against which she defines herself. Bishop's language
of shock and estrangement, "horrifying," "awful," recalls the similar affective vocabulary-
"horrible looking" (n7), "frightful" (120), "terror" (121, 122, 132), "terrifying" (123), "horrible"
(131), "horror" (145, 156), "awful" (153)-in Osa Johnson's descriptions of her encounters with
Malekulans.
One way to reconsider the poem's cross-civilizational shock is to juxtapose the young
American girl's horror of the "awful hanging breasts" with the reverse ethnography of an
indigenous village woman in a poem published just five years earlier, the Ugandan Okot
p'Bitek's Song of Lawino (1966). For Lawino, it is the breasts of white women and their non-
European mimics that are horrifying. She cries out about her would-be white rival, Tina:

Her breasts are completely shrivelled up

They are all folded dry skins,
They have made nests of cotton wool
And she folds the bits of cow-hide
In the nests
And call[s] them breasts! 37

The poetry of this passage's hyperbole ("completely shrivelled up") and circumlocution
("nests of cotton wool") mirrors the speaker's estrangement from a cultural practice-
wearing bras-that has traveled from the "developed" to the "developing world." Just as
Bishop's Elizabeth cannot fathom the binding of heads or necks, as formally signaled by
the perplexed repetitions and the troping of ornamented necks as the necks of lightbulbs, 599
so too Lawino is dumbfounded by the strange cultural practices of white women:
10.2
They mould the tips of the cotton nests
jAHAN RAMAZANI
So that they are sharp
And with these they prick
The chests of their men! (39)

Whereas the nakedness of the hanging black breasts frightens the young Elizabeth,
La wino proclaims the virtue of the Acoli dancing without hiding anything:

Small breasts that have just emerged,

And large ones full of boiling milk,
Are clearly seen in the arena .... (43)

For Lawino, the object of revulsion is the customary behavior of white women, who cover
up their bodies and hold their mates in stultifying proximity, who

prick the chests of their men

With the cotton nests
On their chests. (44)

Elizabeth associates native women with violence to the body-cannibalism, head elonga-
tion, neck binding-whereas Lawino's language links such violence with white women
("sharp," "prick") and the bizarre ways that they treat their bodies and the bodies of men.
For all their differences, in both Okot's poem and Bishop's, the breast-seemingly the
primal locus of mammalian connection-is the bodily site around which the traveling
female subject establishes her distinctiveness vis-a-vis the cultural other. For these writ-
ers of widely divergent backgrounds, poetry enables the exploration of modernity's inten-
sified circulation of images and practices, in part because poetic figures can richly evoke
the defamiliarization of alienating encounters with cultural others (whether clothed
women with "cotton nests I On their chests" or naked women with necks "like the necks
of light bulbs"), in part because the emergence, articulation, and delineation of personal
and communal subjectivities have been hallmarks of poetic forms.
In Bishop's poem Elizabeth's First World othering of native women is unmistakable,
so if Hughes's traveling poem can easily be attacked for eliding geocultural differences,
Bishop's can be accused of exaggerating differences. Yet what distinguishes the encounter
with otherness in "In the Waiting Room" from the Johnsons' exoticist language and un-
selfconsciously triumphalist photographs is the poet's foregrounding the precarious act
of self-fashioning in a differential relation to the cultural other (as Okot does in Song of
Lawino). In Spivak's account the subject's civilizational self-construction entails the uncon-
scious suppression of the Third World other, but in Bishop's poem the poetics of self-
definition, including the girl's fragile dependence on the other to become herself, is front
and center. The speaker's grown-up consciousness frames and drolly ironizes the young
Elizabeth's self-discovery: "I scarcely dared to look/ to see what it was I was." In the crisis
moment in which the girl feels on the brink of oblivion, in danger of falling "into cold, blue-
black space," the heightened self-consciousness that has long been a staple oflyric comes to
the fore, particularly in Elizabeth's self-address and self-nomination:

... you are an I,

you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
 600 In Rimbaud's famous declaration, "JE est un autre," the subject is split, represented as
both self and other, as indicated by the doubling of pronouns. 38 In Bishop's quintessen-
SECTION 10 tially "lyric" moment of emerging self-consciousness, the vulnerable subject turns to ad-
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC dress itself. It individuates itself by seizing on the first-person pronoun and bestowing on
that self its proper name, yet it also deindividuates the self, employing indefinite articles that
plunge the objectified self-as-other into a pool of resemblances ("an I," "an Elizabeth"). The
girl thinks to herself, "How 'unlikely"' it is to be "like them," and the poem's play on like-
ness and unlikeness underscores the figurative comparisons between self and other on
which self-understanding depends: the "similarities" that "held us all together I or made us
all just one." By virtue of lyric's heightening of figuration, its self-reflexive framing, and its
sharp attention to how trope and image fashion selves, cultures, worlds, the traveling poem
illuminates the differential structure through which the globalized subject enunciates
and understands itself.
An adequate defense of time-and-space travel by lyric poetry needs to take account of
both its connective (Hughes) and differential (Bishop) tendencies in relation to cultural
others, since lyrics of cross-cultural sameness and those of cross-cultural difference are
equally open to critique. Should a poem, like Hughes's, travel along vectors of poetic
commonality, it may be suspected of eliding differences, colonizing and cannibalizing
cultural others, appropriating alterity for self-interested projects cast in universalist guise.
Should a poem, like Bishop's, emphasize difference (cultural) within sameness (gender), it
is exposed to the reverse criticism of exoticizing and stereotyping others, of overemphasiz-
ing and even manufacturing differences for the sake of propping up First World civiliza-
tional identities. Yet the parallels between these critiques-damned if you claim sameness,
damned if you claim difference-indicate the dangers of a too stringent cross-cultural
policing of literary identities. The metaphorical, lineal, and lyric expansiveness of travel-
ing poetry-readily affording cross-cultural engagement, contact, and contamination-
puts into question the adequacy of such limited and limiting models, which are identitar-
ian even when represented as postcolonial, postmodern, or planetary, at least insofar as
their logic appears to favor the foot-bound over the fleet-footed poem. Lyric's nuanced at-
tention to self-enunciation and self-construction in dialogic relation to the other should
also give one pause before assimilating the genre to more blindly manipulative forms of
global mediation.
While traveling poetry clearly has much in common with other globe-skipping
forms, commodities, and discourses, some such poems, though glancing at their com-
plicities with global market circulation, are at pains also to highlight the distinctiveness
of poetry. Like Bishop's and Hughes's lyrics, a later traveling poem explores points of in-
tersection among widely disparate and globally scattered images, helping reveal further
what enables poetry to travel, particularly as this travel has accelerated in the contempo-
rary world and in contemporary poetry. What do Carl Sandburg's face, a plastic surgeon
on TV, an American newspaper, signs forbidding laughter in Tiananmen Square, and the
poem that records them all have in common?-so asks "Hysteria," by the Cuban-born
poet Dionisio D. Martfnez. 39 Riding the rails of multiple resonances of the figure of the
line, this poem moves rapidly and unexpectedly among these disparate sites: the lines on
Sandburg's face, the wrinkles that the plastic surgeon claims are caused by all facial ex-
pressions, the folds of an American newspaper, the signs in Tiananmen Square, and im-
plicitly the lines crossed and recrossed in writing and "reading the lines" of verse. Yet
despite all these similarities, the poem implicitly contrasts its idiosyncratic and nonvio-
lent global shuttlings with a coercive form of epistemological globalism, troped as how
each section of an American newspaper" is folded independently and believes it owns I the
world." A humorous enjambment that fractures the politically loaded word "inter-/Ina- 601
tiona!" figures the poem's travel across topographic, stanzaic, and lineal gaps:
10.2
There's this brief item in the inter-
jAHAN RAMAZANI

national pages: the Chinese government has posted

signs in Tiananmen Square, forbidding laughter.
I'm sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he'd say

the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces

unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although
no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter

bursting inside them.

Newspapers, governments, and doctors try to hold and even reinforce lines, whereas the
poet uses lines to cross, rupture, and question what political and other kinds of norma-
tive lines would hold back ("laughter I bursting inside them"). The lyric 'T' enables the
poet to weave chiastically together both Sandburg's windy Chicago and the prohibitions
in Tiananmen Square, both China and North America:

I think of wind in Tiananmen Square, how a country

deprived of laughter ages invisibly; I think
of the Great Walls of North America ....

We are back to Hughes's Whitmanian all-encompassing, cross-civilizational, lyric "I," the

poet's first-person meditative utterance as omnium gatherum: translocal, binding dispari-
ties, forging new and surprising connections in its travel across the globe. We are also back
to the tropological exploration of sameness-in-difference in Bishop's poem, the poem as site
of cross-cultural global comparison, contrast, and self-definition. Of course, Bishop's and
Hughes's poems were already, in their own ways, mediating between these poles, turning
between home and elsewhere, between what distinguishes our locational identities and
what holds us "all together" or makes us "all just one." As in their poems, in Martinez's lyric
and Pound's canto, Plath's "Cut" and Stevens's "Bantams in Pine-Woods," Okot's Song of
Lawino and Howe's "Riickenfigur," the nimble leaps of cross-cultural figuration and
rhythm, the nation-straddling juxtapositions of image and sound, compress, vivify, and il-
luminate the globe- and identity-traversing force of the traveling imagination.

NOTES

1. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New "Transnational Citizenship and the Humanities,"
Directions, 1972), 517· ed. Wai Chee Dimock, special issue, American
2. Edward W. Said, "Traveling Theory," in The Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 332-59; and in
World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: "Black British Poetry and the Translocal," in The
Harvard University Press, 1983), 226-47; )ames Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century
Clifford, "Traveling Cultures," in Routes: Travel and English Poetry, ed. Neil Corcoran (Cambridge:
Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cam- Cambridge University Press, 2007).
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 17-46. 4· W. H. Auden, introduction to The Poet's
3· Robert von Hallberg, "Tourists," in American Tongue, ed. W. H. Auden and John Garrett
Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980 (Cambridge, MA: (London: Bell, 1935), v-x.
Harvard University Press, 1985), 62-92; Jeffrey 5. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large:
Gray, Mastery's End: Travel and Postwar American Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapo-
Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 37.
I explore issues of poetry, transnationalism, and 6. Brian Musgrove, "Travel and Unsettlement:
migration in "A Transnational Poetics," in Freud on Vacation," in Travel Writing and Empire:
 602 Postcolonial Theory in Transit, ed. Steve Clark 21. Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul
(London: Zed, 1999), 31. On the travel in travel Keegan (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
SECTION 10 writing see the other essays in Clark's collection 2003). 165.
and in The Cambridge Companion to Travel 22. The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, ed.
COMPARATIVE LYRIC
Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs MichaelS. Harper (Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 1996), 60.
7. The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, ed. 23. Sherman A Iexie, One Stick Song (Brooklyn,
Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California NY: Hanging Loose, 2000), 26.
Press, 1995), 325. 24. Susan Howe, Pierce-Arrow (New York: New
8. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Directions, 1999), 129.
Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 25. Among the theoretical works informing this
1992), 6-7· general view of cross-cultural globalism are
9. W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Richard). Salman Rushdie, "In Good Faith," in Imaginary
Finneran, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of W B. Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991
Yeats, ed. Richard ). Finneran and George Mills (London: Granta, 1991), 393-414; Edouard Glissant,
Harper (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 249-53. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans.
10. Harlem Gallery, and Other Poems of Melvin ). Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press
B. Tolson, ed. Raymond Nelson (Charlottesville: of Virginia, 1989), 120-57; Paul Gilroy, The Black
University Press of Virginia, 1999), 279. Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
11. Derek Walcott, Om eros (New York: Farrar, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993),
Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 75· 1-40; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture
12. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New (London: Routledge, 1994); Clifford, Routes, 1-46;
York: Vintage, 1982), 75-76. See Ann Mikkelson, Michael F. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture?
"'Fat! Fat! Fat!'-Wallace Steven's Figurations of (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003),
Masculinity," journal of Modern Literature 27 43-68; and Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopoli-
(2003): 106-13; and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Genders, tanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York:
Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern Norton, 2006), 101-35.
American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge: 26. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiog-
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 95-97, which raphy (New York: Knopf, 1940), 55; Arnold
adds another intercultural subtext by arguing Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols.
that the poem responds to the threat of Vachel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986-88),
Lindsay's racial impersonation in "The Congo." 1:39-40.
13. The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas 27. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed.
Hardy, ed. Samuel Hynes, 5 vols. (Oxford: Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel (New York:
Clarendon, 1982-95), 1:122. Knopf, 1997), 23.
14. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, ed. 28. Walter Benn Michaels, "American Modern-
George Edward Woodberry (New York: Lane, ism and the Poetics of Identity," Modernism/
1918), 111. Modernity 1 (1994): 51.
15. Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems (New 29. )effWestover, "Africa/America: Fragmenta-
York: Harper and Row, 1963), 58. tion and Diaspora in the Work of Langston
16. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Hughes," Callaloo 25 (2002): 1221. On Hughes's
Williams, ed. A Walton Litz and Christopher black internationalism see Brent Hayes Edwards,
MacGowan, 2 vols. (New York: New Directions, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation,
1986-88), 1:58. and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge,
17· Amy Clampitt, The Kingfisher (New York: MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 59-68.
Knopf, 1985), 22. 30. On the poem's going back to a "pre-'racial'
18. Bonnie Costello, "Amy Clampitt: Nomad dawn" and its avoidance of"racial essentialism"
Exquisite," in Shifting Ground: Reinventing see George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance
Landscape in Modern American Poetry (Cambridge, in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 118-19. Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 415.
19. Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, ed. Ted 31. Mutlu Konuk Blasing, American Poetry-The
Hughes (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 235-56. Rhetoric of Its Forms (New Haven, CT: Yale
20. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the University Press, 1987), 114.
Tongue: Selected Prose, 1978-1987 (New York: 32. Lee Edelman, "The Geography of Gender:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989), 165. Elizabeth Bishop's 'In the Waiting Room,'"
Contemporary Literature 26 (1985): 179-96. For a 36. Osa johnson, I Married Adventure: The 603
wide-ranging discussion of imaginative travel in Lives and Adventures of Martin and Osa
Bishop's work see Bonnie Costello, "Excursive Sight," johnson (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1940), 151. 10.2
in Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (Cam- See also the photographs of heavily necklaced
jAHAN RAMAZANI
bridge, MA: Harvard, University Press, 1991), 127-74. women in Osa johnson, Four Years in Paradise
33· Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems (New (London: Hutchinson, 1941), plates after pp. 16
York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983), 159-61. and 128.
34. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Three 37. Okot p'Bitek, "Song of La wino" and "Song of
Women's Texts and a Critique oflmperialism," Oco/" (London: Heinemann, 1984), 39.
Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 245. 38. Arthur Rimbaud to Georges lzambard, May
35· George Starbuck, "'The Work!' A Conversa- 13, 1871, in Oeuvres, ed. Suzanne Bernard (Paris,
tion with Elizabeth Bishop," in Elizabeth Bishop and Garnier, 1960), 344·
Her Art, ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (Ann 39. Dionisio D. Martinez, Bad Alchemy (New
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 318. York: Norton, 1995), 26-27.

Towards a Lyric History of India (2004) 10.3

AAMIR R. MuFTI

The whole cannot be put together by adding the separated halves, but in both there appear,
however distantly, the changes of the whole, which only moves in contradiction.

Theodor Adorno 1

At its best, the Urdu lyric verse of Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) can make available to the
reader a disconcerting form of ecstasy, a sense of elation at the self being put in question,
giving even the thoroughly secular reader the taste of an affective utopia not entirely dis-
tinguishable from religious feeling. It is, at the very least, a paradoxical structure of feel-
ing, given the explicitly Marxist and anticlerical affiliations of his poetry, which displays
a marked interest in the secularization of culture and language. Faiz is widely regarded as
the most significant Urdu poet of the postcolonial period. His poetry exemplifies some of
the central dilemmas of Urdu writing in the aftermath of the partition ofindia at the mo-
ment of independence from British rule. It represents a profound attempt to unhitch liter-
ary production from the cultural projects of either postcolonial state in order to make
visible meanings that have still not been entirely reified and subsumed within the cul-
tural logic of the nation-state system. Despite his stature as the uncrowned poet laureate
of Pakistan during the first several decades of its existence, his is notoriously an oeuvre
with vast audiences across what was once North India-the map of its reception seem-
ingly erasing the national boundaries that are the territorial legacy of partition. Against
much of Faiz criticism, I argue here that the foremost theme of Faiz's poetry, its defining
theme as a body of writing, is the meaning and legacy of partition. I have argued else-
where that the problematic of minoritization inscribes itself in Urdu narrative at the level
of genre in a foregrounding of the short story as the primary genre of narrative fiction. 2 In
poetry, it translates into debates about the meaning and nature, the very possibility, of
 604 lyric verse in modernity. In the decades following the 1857 Rebellion, for instance, the
classical tradition of lyric poetry, and in particular the ghazal form, became the site of
SEcTION 10 fierce contention about the prospects of a distinct "Muslim" experience in Indian moder-
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC nity. The poetry of Faiz exemplifies the unique relationship of Urdu literary production
to the crisis of Indian national culture that is marked by the figure of the Muslim.
The lyric element in Faiz's poetry-its intensely personal contemplation of love and of
the sensuous-poses a notorious problem of interpretation: he is a self-avowedly political
poet-laureled in the Soviet Union, repeatedly persecuted by reactionary postcolonial
regimes-whose most intense poetic accomplishments are examinations of subjective
states. The orthodox solution-shared by critics of many different political persuasions-
has been to argue that Faiz merely turns a "traditional" poetic vocabulary to radical po-
litical ends, that we should read the figure of the distant beloved, for instance, as a figur-
ing of the hoped-for revolution. 3 I suggest a somewhat different direction here and argue
that, first, the political element in Faiz's work cannot be read without the mediation of the
social. Faiz's exploration of the affects of separation and union with the beloved makes
possible an examination of the subject, the "I," of Urdu writing. It would be incorrect to
assume that Faiz's "Progressiveness"-his association with the literary culture that car-
ries the imprimatur of the All-India Progressive Writers Association (AIPWA)-implies
a dismissing of the question of identity. The central drama of his poetry is the dialectic of
a collective selfhood at the disjunctures oflanguage, culture, nation, and community. In
his well-known argument about the relationship of lyric poetry to society, Theodor
Adorno suggests that it is precisely lyric's apparent distance from social determinations
that constitutes its social meaning. He holds out the paradoxical possibility that its dis-
tance from the social in fact made of lyric poetry an exemplary site for the inscription of
social meanings. The more the lyric reduces itself to the pure subjectivity of the "I,"
Adorno argues, the more complete the precipitation of the social within its content will be.
The more it immerses itself in what takes individual form, the more it is elevated to the
level of universality, but a universality that is "social in nature." 4 In this essay, I shall eluci-
date the place of lyric in Faiz's work and its relationship to the social horizon that is
brought to crisis in partition. It is precisely in those poems that are closest to being "pure"
lyric, that is, ones in which the inward turn is most complete, rather than in such explicitly
"partition" poems as "Freedom's Dawn," that we may glimpse these social meanings in
their fullest elaboration.
I would like to explore the possibility that what Faiz's love lyrics give expression to is
a self in partition, that what they make visible is a dialectic of self and other in which the
subject and object of desire not so much become one as simultaneously come near and
become distant, exchange places, are rendered uncertain. The desire for wisal, or union,
takes the form of this dialectic itself. In the years following the partition of India, the prob-
lematic of national fragmentation comes to imbue the lyric world of Faiz's verse in pro-
found and explicit ways. But the broader problematic of a partitioned self is already pres-
ent in the poems of the pre-partition years, at least as potential, something that these
poems point to and anticipate. The social truth embodied in Faiz's lyric poetry is that the
emergence of the (modern) self is also its self-division. The truth of the self is its contra-
dictory, tense, and antagonistic reality. Faiz makes it possible to think about identity in
post-partition South Asia in terms other than those normalized within the shared vo-
cabulary of the postcolonial states. The purportedly autonomous national selves that
emerged from partition are revealed to be what they are-moments within the dialectic
of Indian modernity. And partition comes to acquire meanings very different from its
usual significations, now referring not merely to the events of 1947 (or even of 1946-48)
but to a history of social ("communal") identifications coextensive with the history of the 605
Indian modern itself. The immense popularity of Faiz's poetry in the Urdu-Hindi re-
gions, its almost iconic status as a pan-South Asian oeuvre, is a vague but nevertheless 10.3
conclusive measure of its success in making available an experience of self that is Indian AAMIR R. Mum
in the encompassing sense, across the boundaries of the "communal" and nation-state
divides. But this is a staging of selfhood that takes division seriously, refusing to treat it as
merely epiphenomenal, as in the unity-in-diversity formula of Indian nationalism. In
fact, it suggests that division, the indefinitely extended separation from the beloved, con-
stitutes the very ground from which union can be contemplated. It is commonplace in
Faiz criticism to invoke love of country or nation as an essential feature of his poetry. 5
Faiz himself thematizes this on several occasions, as in the early poem "Two Loves" ("Do
ishq"): "In the same fashion I have loved my darling country, I In the same manner my
heart has throbbed with devotion to her." 6 But it is not accidental that neither the criticism
nor the poetry itself is unequivocal about what the term country (watan) signifies. It might
even be said that to speak of watan and qaum (nation/people) in the context of Faiz is to
remain meaningfully silent about the objects toward which they point: does the hubb-ul-
watani (love of country or nation, patriotism) of Faiz's poetry attach itself to any one of the
postcolonial states of South Asia? Does it represent a hope for dissolution of these states?
What is its stance on partition, their moment of coming into being? Does it imply a "civi-
lizational" referent? If so, which civilization-Indic, Indo-Persian, or Islamic? Where ex-
actly, in other words, is the poet's home?
The symbolic vocabulary of Faiz's poetry draws on the stock of traditional Persia-
Arabic images available to the classical Urdu ghazal-barbat o nai (lyre and flute), lauh o
qalam (tablet and pen), tauq o salasil (neck-irons and chain), kakul o lab (lock of hair and
lip), dasht o gulzar (wilderness and garden)-resisting the "plain" language that had al-
ready become more common with some of his contemporaries and is more so with the
generation of poets who have followed in his wake. In this sense, Faiz's poetry is a living
rebuke to the ideal of a neutral "Hindustani" idiom from which both Arabo-Persian and
Sanskritic influences have been excised, an ideal to which the secularist, "anticommunal-
ist" imagination in South Asia has been repeatedly drawn. Victor Kiernan, his translator
and lifelong friend, notes that Faiz "was repelled by the prospect held up by Gandhi of a
united 'Hindostani' language, a nondescript neither Hindi nor Urdu." 7 The mythopoetic
universe of his work is replete with references to Persian, Arabic, and "Islamic" sources,
although, as Kiernan has noted, "a fondness for allusion to things Hindu, even religious,
has not left him," an important question to which I shall return. 8 My contention here is
that the question of collective selfhood-the meaning of "nation," "people," "culture,"
"community"-is at the heart of Faiz's poetry, and not merely in the sense of his political
devotion to "the people" and contempt for their exploitation by neofeudalism and colonial
and postcolonial capital. Faiz problematizes the very notion of nation or people, raising
fundamental questions about identity and subjectivity and their historical determinations.
To put it more precisely, in Faiz's poetry, both the degradation of human life in colonial and
postcolonial modernity-exploitation-and the withholding of a collective selfhood at
peace with itself-what I am calling partition-find common expression in the suffering of
the lyric subject.

Love and Its Discontents: The Lyric Poet in the World

In a small number of early poems, one or two of which have something like a program-
matic status in his oeuvre, Faiz stages the aesthetic dilemmas of the modern poet. They
are meta poetic texts, for in them Faiz turns to exploring the nature and meaning of lyric
 606 poetry in modern life. In such poems from the late 1930s as "The Subject of Poetry"
("Mauzu-e sukhan") and "My Fellow, My Friend" ("Mire hamdam, mire dost"), but above
SEcTION 10 all in "Love Do Not Ask for That Old Love Again" ("Mujh se pahli si mahabbat meri mah-
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC bub na mang"), we find the poetic persona torn between the exquisite demands of unre-
quited love, on the one hand, and those of the larger world and its oppressions, on the
other. Faiz himself has spoken of these poems as turning points in his aesthetic develop-
ment, marking a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the dominant, "romantic" literary
ethos of the times. 9 Thus, in the latter poem, the dominant mood is set by the speaker's ask-
ing the beloved not to ask for the kind oflove formerly given-"pahli si mahabbat"-a singu-
lar love, alert to nothing but the beloved's charms and cruelties. The speaker lists the effica-
cies of this love in which it had formerly believed and concludes the first section of the poem
with the confession, "It was not true all this but only wishing." After noting the cruelties of
the outer world-its injustice, inequality, and alienation-with which the beloved must com-
pete for the speaker/lover's attention, the poem ends on the note on which it began. In "The
Subject of Poetry," the same tension between the alternative demands on the speaker's senses
is maintained, but this tension is approached, as it were, from the other direction. Alternat-
ing between the mysteries of the beloved and those of the larger world, the poem ends by af-
firming that the poet cannot expect to overcome the former as his true theme:

-These too are subjects; more there are;-but oh,

Those limbs that curve so fatally ravishingly!
Oh that sweet wretch, those lips parting so slow-
Tell me where else such witchery could be!
No other theme [lit., subject] will ever fit my rhyme;
Nowhere but here is poetry's native clime [lit., homeland].

[Ye bhi hain aise kai aur bhi mazmun honge

Lekin us shokh ke ahista se khulte hue hont
Hae us jism ke kambakht dil-avez khutut
Ap hi kahiye kahin aise bhi afsun honge?
Apna mauzu-e sukhan inke siva aur nahin
Tab-e shair ka vatan inke siva aur nahin.]l 0

These early poems have most often been read as signs of a young poet's political awaken-
ing, a politicization that does not lead to an abandonment of concern with the integrity of
literary language. Faiz himself has contributed to the authority of this reading." While I
do not take this to be an incorrect interpretation, I read the apparent dualism of these
poems-interiority and affect versus the external world, lyric poetry versus society-
somewhat differently, as demonstrating an interest in the relationship between the lyric
self of Urdu poetry and the "wider" world of contradiction and conflict over the meaning
of nation and community. I shall argue that these poems enact, in a literary-historical
register, the dilemmas and complexities of a "Muslim" selfuood in Indian modernity. The
phrase pahli si mahabbat points to the problematic of love in the classical Urdu lyric, and
the poem comments on the relationship of the modern poet, located in the national-
cultural space that is (late colonial) India, to that classical tradition. In Pakistan, Faiz has
long been spoken of as a "national" poet, as the national poet during the first forty years
of the country's life. It is my contention that this cannot mean what it is usually thought
to mean, that, in part, the accomplishment, the grandeur and ambition, of his work is
precisely that it raises serious doubts about whether the nation-state form can account for
the complexities of culture and identity in modern South Asia.
 Born early in the second decade of this century in the now-Pakistani city of Sialkot, 607
Faiz received an education that was becoming increasingly typical for young men of his
regional, religious, and class background-the rudiments ofQuranic instruction, Persian 10.3
and Arabic with the local maulvi, modern schooling of the colonial (in his case, mission- AAMIR R. MuFTI
ary) sort, and degrees in (in his case, English and Arabic) literatureY According to his
own account, Faiz's early reading consisted of a diet of Urdu poetry of the classical pe-
riod, in particular Muhammad Taqi Mir (1723?-1810) and Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1795?-
1869), and the major nineteenth-century works of Urdu narrative. After finishing his
studies at the Government and Oriental Colleges, Lahore-those bastions of modern
higher learning for northwestern colonial India-Faiz took up a teaching position at Am-
ritsar, where he was first exposed to Indian Marxism and to nationalist political culture
generally. Faiz's first collection of poetry appeared in 1941, and the last to be published in
his lifetime, in 1981.U From time to time, he also published widely read volumes of critical
essays, letters, and memoirs. In Amritsar, Faiz was drawn into the literary circles that
proved to be the core group in the establishment of the AIPWA in 1936, and he subse-
quently came to be identified as the leading "Progressive" voice in Urdu poetry while also
maintaining his autonomy from that organization and from the Communist Party, never
becoming a spokesman for either in quite the same way as a number of his contemporaries,
such as Sajjad Zaheer and Ali Sardar Jafry. Jafry even accused Faiz once of equivocating
about the goals of Progressive poetry and of "drawing such curtains of metaphor [istiari-
yat]" around one of his poems-"Freedom's Dawn"-that "one cannot tell who is sitting be-
hind them." 14 He joined the colonial Indian Army after the collapse of the Hitler-Stalin Pact,
at a time when the official policy of the Indian National Congress was noncooperation with
the war effort, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and returned to civilian life in 1946
with a Member of the British Empire (M.B.E.). A few years after independence, during
which he rose to prominence in Pakistan as a newspaper editor and labor unionist, he was
arrested in 1951 with a number of other radical writers, political activists, and military
officers-including Zaheer, who was the leading founder of the AIPWA and after partition
became general secretary of the newly founded Communist Party of Pakistan-charged
with conspiring against the state. The arrests, part of a general crackdown on the Paki-
stani Left, had a chilling effect on political and cultural life, and marked the beginnings
of Pakistan's realignment as a frontline U.S. satellite in the Cold War and as a reliable re-
gional client after the rise of Mossadegh in Iran, a role whose price the country continues
to pay to this day. After a trial, during which the shadow of a death sentence hung over
him, Faiz was sentenced to imprisonment and was finally released after spending over
four years in various prisons in Pakistan. In the late 1950s, with the implementation of
martial law in Pakistan, Faiz was again in jail, this time only for a few months. Already by
the late 1950s, Faiz had developed an increasingly international reputation, especially in so-
cialist countries and many parts of the Third World. In 1962, he was awarded the Lenin
Peace Prize and, at the end of his life, in exile from Zia's Pakistan, served for several years as
editor of Lotus, the journal of the Afro-Asian Writers' Association, which he edited from
Beirut, during the years of its devastation, including the months of the Israeli siege and bom-
bardment. There he composed a small body of what is the most exquisite exile poetry in
modern Urdu literature, "an enactment of a homecoming expressed through defiance and
loss," in the words of Edward Said, who met him in Beirut during those exile years. 15 It rep-
resents an attempt to introduce exile and homelessness into the vocabulary of Urdu verse as
a constitutive experience. Read together with the early "metapoetic" poems, this later exile
poetry makes clear that for Faiz, Urdu is, in a strong sense, a homeless literature and culture,
that he sees its entire modern history as a series of uprootings and displacements.
 608 The appropriateness of using the term lyric poetry in anything more than a loose and
descriptive sense with respect to Urdu writing in general and Faiz in particular is not self-
SECTION 10 evident and requires some justification. While Urdu has a number of terms, such as the
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC adjectives bazmiyya and ghinaiyya, that provide very partial equivalents of the English
word, Urdu poetics makes no extensive theoretical use of such an umbrella concept and
proceeds for the most part in generic terms-and in particular in terms of the mutual op-
position of the ghazal and the nazm. It is certainly part of the specificity of Faiz's work
that, unlike some of his contemporaries, he does not turn his back on the "classical" poetic
genres, in particular the ghazal, with its rigid meter and rhyme schemes, and its set themes
centered around the experience of separation from the beloved. He is, in fact, widely cred-
ited with having resuscitated this form after a half century of neglect and disdain. In the
decades following the suppression of the uprisings of 1857-58, with the collapse of the tot-
tering social structure that had been the basis of the Urdu literary culture of the ash raj, or
"noble" elites in northern India, "reform"-religious, social, cultural, political, and educa-
tional reform-became the slogan of what I would call reluctant embourgoisement among
these social groupings. The Aligarh movement of Sayyid Ahmed Khan is only the most
famous and influential of these reform efforts directed at Muslims. 16 In the critical writings
of such Aligarh-related figures as Muhammad Husain Azad and Altaf Husain Hali, the
ghazal came to be singled out as the genre par excellence of Muslim decline and decadence,
as too decorative, subjective, and impervious to nature, incapable of the sober intellectual
effort and didactic purpose called for in the "new" worldP For nationalist writers begin-
ning in the late nineteenth century, it became something like an icon of the vast distances
separating the ashrafMuslim elites from the space of the genuinely popular. Such distrust
of the ghazal has survived into our own century among both the literary movements com-
mitted to the social purposiveness of poetry, including the Marxists of the AIPWA who
were Faiz's contemporaries and comrades, as well as those whose commitment to the intel-
lectual demands of modern poetry is in the name of art for art's sake. 18 The Urdu ghazal and
the constellation that surrounds it-metrical structures, histories of composition and re-
ception, Persia nate vocabulary and thematic conventions, and the image associated with it
of an imperial culture in decline-retain a distinct place in the postcolonial Indian cultural
imaginary, from popular "Hindi" cinema to such a work of Indo-English fiction as Anita
Desai's In Custody, despite the massive effort in recent decades to denaturalize and alienate
Urdu to contemporary Indian culture and society. Perhaps like no other poetic form in
northern India, the history of this lyric genre is inextricably tied up with the emergence
and development of national culture, and in no other form, not even the Hindi git, or "song"
that is sometimes said to be the national-popular poetic genre par excellence, are the con-
tradictions of the social so deeply inscribed.
Even in his practice of the diffuse nazm form-whose only possible definition appears
to be that it is a non narrative poem that is not a ghazal-Faiz bridges the divide between
these varieties of poetic writing and imbues the lyric world of the latter with its charac-
teristic, non-national forms of affectivity. In this essay, I shall look most closely at anum-
ber of poems that are notghazals, strictly speaking, but apply the concept oflyric to Faiz's
oeuvre as a whole, irrespective of genre in the narrow sense. In treating Faiz as a modern
lyric poet, however, I am not suggesting that we engage in a search for qualities in mod-
ern Urdu verse that are characteristic of the lyric in modern Western poetry. On the
contrary, the purpose of my analysis of a number of Faiz's poems is precisely to make it
possible to explore the specificities of modern lyric in a colonial and postcolonial society.
Above all, what the concept oflyric makes possible is the translation, the passage, ofFaiz's
poetry from a literary history that is specifically Urdu into a critical space for the discus-
sion of Indian literary modernity as a whole. To the extent that Faiz's poetry itself pushes 609
in the direction of ending the inwardness of the Urdu poetic tradition, as I shall later ar-
gue, such a critical move is implied and required by his work itself. 10.3
AAMIR R. MUFTI
Remembering Oneself: Lyric Subject and Memory in Faiz
I shall now turn to the theme of separation and union in Faiz's love poetry by working
through its elaboration in one of his best-known lyric poems, ''Yad" (Memory). The poem
appears in the collection Dast-e saba (1952) and has been made hugely popular by the
singer Iqbal Bano as "Dasht-e tanhai":

1. In the desert of solitude, my love, quiver

2. the shadows of your voice, your lips' mirage.
3. In the desert of solitude, under the dust of distance,
4· the flowers of your presence bloom.

s. From somewhere nearby rises the flame of your breathing,

6. burning slowly in its own perfume.
7. Afar, beyond the horizon, glistening, drop by drop,
8. falls the dew from your heart-consoling eyes.

9. So lovingly, 0 my love, has placed

10. your memory its hand this moment on my heart.
11. It seems, though this distance is young,
12. The day of separation is ended, the night of union has arrived.

[1. Dasht-e tanhai men, ai jan-e jahan larzan hain

2. Teri avaz ke sae, tere honton ke sarab
3. Dasht-e tanhai men, duri ke khas o khak tale
4· Khil rahe hain, tere pahlu ke saman aur gulab

s. Uth rahi hai kahin qurbat se teri sans ki anch

6. Apni khushbu men sulagti hui, maddham maddham
7. Dur-ufaq par chamakti hui, qatra qatra
8. Gir rahi hai teri dildar nazar ki shabnam

9. Is qadar pyar se, ai jan-e jahan, rakkha hai

10. Dil ke rukhsar pe is waqt teri yad ne hath
11. Yun guman hota hai, garche hai abhi subh-e firaq
12. Dhal gaya hijr ka din, a bhi gai was! ki rat.]l 9

Dominant in the first stanza is the image of solitude as expanse of desert or wilderness,
expressed in the string "Dasht-e tanhai" (the desert/wilderness of solitude/loneliness),
which opens lines 1 and 3. The metaphor also governs the second stanza, as the spatial
language ofline 5-"From somewhere nearby rises the flame of your breathing" -acquires
a geographical register in line 7: "Afar, beyond the horizon ...." The dominance of this
desert metaphor is sustained in the treatment of the beloved, at least in the first stanza.
There, the solitary subject is confronted with the "mirage" -like presence of the object of its
desire-"the shadows of your voice, your lips' mirage." For the subject, the shadows and
mirage are both signs of the beloved. But while a mirage points to an absent, illusory object,
the shadow of an object, though it is itself immaterial, is a sign of the object's physical pres-
ence. By being placed in combination with each other, however, "shadows" and "mirage"
infuse each other with new meanings. The latter becomes something more than illusion, a
 610 mere projection outward of a desire intensely felt, like a vision of water in a parched land;
and the former becomes something less than the sign of a physical presence. The geo-
SECTION 10 graphical metaphor is fused here with a visual one, and together they come to signify the
CoMPARATIVE LYRic manner of the beloved's becoming-present. What exactly this manner is becomes more
clear in the next two lines (3-4), for here "the flowers [lit., jasmine and rose] of your pres-
ence" are said to bloom "under the dust [lit., the withered bushes and dust] of distance."
In other words, the nearness or presence of the beloved does not cancel out its distance.
And the reverse is also true: the distance of the beloved is also the mode of its coming
near. This theme is developed in the second stanza. In lines s-6, the "flame" (anch) of the
beloved's breathing is said to be rising from somewhere near the speaking subject-
"kahin qurbat se"-and yet, simultaneously, the "consoling eyes" of the beloved are placed
by the speaker "Afar, beyond the horizon."
In the third and final stanza, the geographical metaphor is abandoned, and we are
within an internal, purely subjective space. This intimate space is here signified by "heart"
(dil), or, more precisely, by its "cheek" (rukhsar), which is traditionally a sign of the be-
loved's beauty and of (the lover's) intimacy with it but here comes to express the tender-
ness of the lover's own heart (line w). The inexpressible beauty of this image-a beating
heart gently caressed by a human hand, as a lover's cheek is touched by the beloved-is an
expression of the desire for an end to suffering, for union, for reconciliation of subject and
object. It expresses a desire for the form of reconciliation that Adorno has called "peace":
"Peace is the state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in
each other." 20 The presence of the beloved continues in this stanza to also be its distance.
For the beloved enters this interior realm only as image or yad (memory). In the last two
lines (11-12), the poem turns to the intensity of this caress of memory, to its effect on the
subject: the guman (appearance/feeling/illusion) that "The day of separation has ended,
the night of union has arrived."
Like the first two stanzas, therefore, the third stanza also enacts the dialectic of separa-
tion and union, in which separation is indefinitely extended, and union, intensely desired
and felt, does not cancel out the distance between the subject and object of desire. It ren-
ders uncertain the distinction between them but not in order to appropriate the life of the
object in the interest of the former. The object is also revealed to be a subject and the
(desiring) subject an object of (the other's) desire. The beloved is at the same time distant,
and hence other, and intimately present to the self as itself. In other words, the self that
emerges in the course of"Yad" is a divided one, not at home with itself, desiring reconcilia-
tion and wholeness and yet cognizant that its own distance from itself is the very source of
its movement and life. It is an uncanny interplay of nearness and distance precisely summed
up in a four-line poem titled "Marsia" (Elegy), which appears in Sar-e wadi-e Sina (1971):

Having gone afar you are near to me,

when were you so close to me?
You will not return now, nor leave,
meeting and parting [hijran] are now same to me.

[Dur ja kar qarib ho jitne

Ham se kab tum qarib the itne
Ab na aoge tum na jaoge
Was! o hijran baham hue kitne.]2 1

We may begin to outline the social meanings of this lyric self by noting the reso-
nances of the word hijr (separation) in the final stanza of "Yad" (and of its derivative hi-
jran in "Marsia"). A transformation of the Arabic hajr, the word is the most frequently 611
used term in classical Urdu poetry for "separation," or parting from the beloved. As is well
known, the meanings of this word and those of its paired opposite, wisal (union), consti- 10.3
tute one of the central and most familiar problems in Urdu poetics. These meanings vary AAMIR R. MuFTI
not only from poet to poet or era to era, but also from one poetic genre to another, in the
works of the same poet, and often within the same poem itself. Thus, for instance, depend-
ing on the poemic context, the words may signify the dynamics of romantic or erotic love,
or of religious devotion. In the Sufi traditions of Urdu (and Persian) poetry in particular,
wisal is a sign for mystic union with the divine, for the desire of the self to become extinct
(jana) in a realization of its ishq-e haqiqi or "true" love of God, compared to which the
love of man for man is only ishq-e majazi, inauthentic or "metaphorical" love. Most typi-
cally, a verse may be interpreted at several different levels, in several different registers,
simultaneously. 22 The problematic of "love" is thus constituted around an oscillation or
productive tension between other-worldy and this-worldly significations. In latter times,
this poetic language is very far indeed from any concrete practice of Sufism. In Faiz, para-
doxically, this religious substratum is brought again close to the surface, in order to be
secularized anew.
The secularization of hijr in Faiz's poetry is part of the general secularization of po-
etic language and purpose undertaken by him and his contemporaries. One aspect of this
secularization has been that the Sufistic eroticism of the vocabulary of the traditional
poetic genres, and the ghazal in particular, has acquired political meanings, most explic-
itly in militant poets such as Habib Jalib, who is associated with the world of radical stu-
dent politics, but also in more serious poets such as Faiz himself. Thus, for instance, wafa
(loyalty or devotion) and junun (madness or intoxication) come to mean political stead-
fastness and selfless abandon, the rational and irrational components, respectively, of
commitment. Faiz's most programmatic announcement of the secularizing impulse of
his poetry comes perhaps in "Dua" (Prayer), a poem written in the mid-196os:

Come, let us too lift our hands

We for whom prayer is a custom forgotten,
We who except for love's flame
Remember neither idol nor god-

[Aiye hath uthaen ham bhi

Ham jinhen rasm-e dua yad nahin
Ham jinhen soz-e mahabbat ke siva
Koi but ko khuda yad nahin.]2 3

Prayer may be a "forgotten" custom for the lyric subject, but its very knowledge of this fact
belies a memory of a living connection to it. The secular subject contains within itself traces
of the lifeworld signified here by "idol" and "god." As in so much of Faiz's poetry, secular-
ization is not a mere rejection of religious experience but rather a wrestling with it. This is
not an expression of a positivistic atheism that wants simply to abolish the religious impulse
in a rationalized culture of struggle and action-"love" in the sense of political commit-
ment. What is performed in the poetry of Faiz, instead, is the recognition of the immense
power of religious thought and experience for the modern subject. More specifically, the
unorthodox and transgressive energies that are always at least implicit in the mystical Sufi
tradition are turned in Faiz's verse against religious orthodoxy and its alliance with oppres-
sive worldly authority. A Marxist and internationalist poet, Faiz is nevertheless immersed
in the religious language of mystical Indian Islam, both in its high cultural elaboration in
 612 the Urdu poetic tradition and as a kind of cultural lingua franca in northern India. Faiz's
poetry reveals a deep respect and love for this culture and a recognition of the poet's very
SEcTION 10 complex relationship to it. It represents an agonistic embracing of a particular religious
CoMPARATIVE LYRic tradition-the Indo-Muslim and Urdu poetic elaborations of Sufi expression-in order to
produce out of it the resources for modernity; at the same time, therefore, it also points to the
worldly basis of religious experience itself. At no point, however, is this merely a nostalgic
embracing of a supposedly syncretistic religious life, and (poetic) modernity appears as a
kind of dialectic of the religious and the secular or worldly.
The problematic of hijr in the work of Faiz therefore cannot fail to evoke another
narrative-mythological constellation, designated by the related word hijrat. Originally
referring to the emigration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in AD 622, hijrat was
appropriated in Urdu at partition for the dislocations and emigrations that accompa-
nied that event, in particular from the Hindi-Urdu heartland to the territory of Paki-
stan. It lends to the latter experience an epic quality and seeks to contain partition itself
within a narrative ofleave-taking. Faiz explores (and exploits) this historical density of
hijr as a signifier of relation to place, community, uprooting, and the paradoxes of res-
toration and return. While he was not himself a muhajir, or partition migrant, strictly
speaking-having been born and raised within the territorial limits later claimed for
Pakistan-hijr-hijrat becomes in his poetry a metonym for the displacements of parti-
tion as a whole, the massive fissures it requires of people, language, culture, and mem-
ory coming to be figured as the experience of prolonged separation from the beloved.
The political impulse in Faiz's poetry can therefore be understood only through the
mediation of the social. For the desire for justice, the steadfastness in the face of suffer-
ing and oppression, and the belief in a new dawn are complicated by the "partitioned"
nature of the collective subject. In other words, for me the significance of Faiz's re-
peated use of hijr and of its derivatives is that it imbues the lyric experience of separa-
tion from the beloved with a concrete historical meaning-the parting of ways or leave-
taking that is partition. If, in Sufi traditions, to speak simultaneously of the pain and
joy of hijr is to point to the consummation of love in death or self-extinction, then in
Faiz this prolongation of separation from the beloved is made the modality of collective
selfhood, its very mode of being in history and the world. 24 It is significant in this connec-
tion that within Pakistan critics have sometimes complained about the seeming masoch-
ism of such prolongation of hijr in Faiz's poetry, in marked contrast to the work of his
contemporary Miraji, for instance, where the attempt to project an authentic selfhood not
only takes the form of an actualization of union but often is literalized in sexual release.
This complaint is significant, for from within a framework that affirms the terms of parti-
tion, this refusal to grant to the (collective) self autonomy (from the whims of the be-
loved) can indeed only appear masochistic. The lyric subject in Faiz's poetry is located at
those borderlands of self and world where autonomy and heteronomy lose their distinct-
ness, where the self is confronted with the uncanny presence of an other that is also self.
For Faiz, the end of hijr is not a literal union. The sadness of hijr echoes the finality of
hijrat, ofleaving one's home forever, but it also inverts the implied religious sanction for
partition by reinscribing the self's leave-taking of the (antagonistic) other as a separation
from the beloved.
When Faiz speaks oflost companions and almost-forgotten friendships, as he does in
a number of poems from the 1950s onward, he is echoing an experience that is common
in the entire northern belt that was affected by partition. Take, for instance, the opening
lines of"Paun se lahu ko dho dalo" ("Wash the Blood Off Your Feet"):
 What could I [lit., we] have done, gone where? 613
My feet were bare
and every road was covered with thorns- 10.3
of ruined friendships, of loves left behind, AAMIR R. MUFTI

of eras ofloyalty that finished, one by one.

[Ham kya karte kis rah chalte

Harrah men kante bikhre the
Un rishton ke jo chhut gae
Un sadyon ke yaranon ke
jo ik ik kar ke tut gae.]2 5

I suggest that we read "eras" (lit., centuries) here as a sign of historical time and
"friendships" (lit., relations or connections) and "loves" (lit., friendships, companion-
ships, or loves) as pointing toward the fabric, the text, of culture, difference, and iden-
tity in history. The modes and forms in which memories of the pre-partition past are
popularly kept alive pose questions of immense importance and interest for scholar-
ship and have only begun to be explored. In Pakistani cities such as Lahore, Karachi,
Hyderabad, and Rawalpindi, which were cleared of their large Hindu and Sikh popula-
tions within months of August 1947, the signs of these erstwhile residents are ubiqui-
tously present-in the sight of sealed-off temples, in street and neighborhood names
that continue to be used despite municipal attempts to erase them, in the signs of the
"other's" tongue above doorways in the old quarter of any city. The memories and sto-
ries of older eyewitnesses, the tales travelers tell of revisiting long-abandoned homes,
the enormous font of verbal genres-folk songs, nursery rhymes, proverbs, and popular
tales about characters such as Birbal and Mullah Dopiaza-are among the many every-
day means of unsettling the finality of partition, of disconcerting the self with its own
uncertainty. The paradox at the heart of Faiz reception is that while he writes poetry
that is "difficult" in some obvious ways and true to the subjective demands oflyric, it is
this enormous font of popular memory that it seeks to mobilize. We can say of him, as
Adorno does of Brecht, that in his poetry, "linguistic integrity" does not result in poetic
elitism or "esotericism." 26 The suffering of the subject in Faiz's poetry, or rather its plea-
sure and suffering at being separated from the beloved, echoes in lyric terms what is
already present everywhere in popular experience, even if in ways that are muted, less
than conscious, and fragmentary.
If hijr and its derivatives point us in the direction of dislocations and separations that
are collective, such a historical reading ofFaiz's lyric poems is made possible in other ways
as well. Since Dast-e saba (1952), an increasing number of poems in successive collections
appear dated by month and year or by exact date, and many are also marked by place of
composition, which, in the case of the poems included in Dast-e saba and Zindan nama
(1956), is most often a Pakistani prison. This dating and "placing" of the poems is almost
always significant. I suggest that we read the date (and/or the place-name, where it exists)
as an extrapoemic, historical text requiring interpretation, in interaction with which the
poem reveals its meaning. The date functions with respect to the text of the poem in the
manner of what Gerard Genette has called para texts. "Elegy," for instance, is dated "Au-
gust, 1968," and "Prayer" is underlined with "Independence Day, 14 August 1967." The
month of August, during which Pakistan and India celebrate their independence from co-
lonial rule and Pakistan, its separation from India, in fact appears frequently over the years
as the date of composition of numerous poems. The extrapoemic, "historical" reference
 614 here is to the complex text of national independence -partition, lending to these poems a
quality of national stocktaking. The pronouns ham (we) and tum (you, singular/familiar)
SEcTION 10 acquire in this context a collective resonance, even as the lyric quality of the poems, their
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC uncompromising subjectivity, produces a sense of deep intimacy, of meetings and partings
at the very core of the self, which defines its very existence.

[ ... ]

Towards a Lyric History of India

As we have already seen, the poetic program that Faiz announced early in his career en-
visioned orienting the lyric subject toward the larger world. I have argued that some of his
most ambitious and effective poems are a series of exercises precisely in ending the isola-
tion of the lyric subject, or rather in ending its illusion of isolation. They take the form of
imbuing it with the recognition that what it takes as object, as the larger world of things,
is itself subject and in dialogue with it. This dialectic of inner and outer worlds, I have
further argued, carries collective, historical resonances; it is an enactment of the relation-
ship of "Muslim" culture and identity to the emergence of a wider "Indian" modernity.
The self-absorption of the lyric subject in classical Urdu poetry, so widely and repeatedly
condemned since the nineteenth century, becomes for Faiz a social fact. And if that lyric
subject-and its locus classicus is the ghazal-appea red to be, as Azad and Hali had ar-
gued, addicted to fantasy and impervious to reality and nature, that judgment could itself
be explained in terms of the emergence of the horizon of"nature" and "reality" that we call
the nationY Therein lies the modernity of Azad and Hali's critique of classical lyric: it
seeks to reorient writing within an emerging national experience, with the fatally neces-
sary corollary that it enter the field of contest and conflict over the meaning of community
and nation. In this sense, Faiz is a descendant of the nineteenth-ce ntury reformers-an d
we should recall that his early formation took place in a milieu where the writings of nai
raushni (the New Light) had long acquired canonical status-with the important differ-
ence that for him this project is to be carried out not through didactic poetry, as it is for
Hali, but in terms of the lyric itself.28 What is the nature of the modern (Indian) self?-that
is the question that underlies the reorientation of the Urdu lyric subject in Faiz's poetry.
The enormous paradox of partition, for Faiz, is that it requires a rewriting of the self
in the name of whose preservation it had been demanded. It is a paradox that he some-
times figures as the collision of different, inner and outer languages of self, as in this
couplet from a ghazal that is dated "1953":
The heart as such
had settled its every doubt
when I [lit., we] set out to see her
But on seeing her
the lips spoke love's unrehearsed words
and everything changed everything changed

[dil se to har muamla kar ke chale the safham

Kahne men un ke samne bat badal badal gai]2 9

I suggest that we read the pathos of this couplet, this sense of the impossibility of saying
what you mean, as a response to "public" languages of selfhood and identity. What Faiz
points to here is the excess that cannot be contained within the categorical structure of
the nation-state, within which "Muslim" is placed at the cusp of a fatal dilemma: it can 615
signify either "a separate nation" or "an Indian minority." Faiz's entire lyric oeuvre is a
refusal to accept the terms of this fixing of identity and an attempt to put the self in motion. 10.3
The narrative element in the above couplet-the self setting out with confessional intent AAMIR R. Mum
to encounter an other but finding its own words becoming alien, producing meanings
other than those intended-must be read in a collective and historical register as an inter-
pretation of the history of conflict over the meaning of nation and communal identity,
and, in particular, as an interpretation of the history of Muslim cultural separatism. Faiz is
indeed a descendant of the writers and intellectuals of the New Light, who, a century ear-
lier, postulated for the first time the distinctness of a "Muslim" experience in Indian mo-
dernity. But with historical retrospection, he bathes that assertion itself in the subdued
light of pathos, pointing to the twists and turns, the reroutings and misfirings that mark
the passage from that moment to our own. This ghazal, composed in 1953, is a comment on
India's partition from this side of the cataclysmic event, full of infinite sadness at what In-
dian Muslim "nationhood" has finally been revealed, in the cold light of statehood and
"sovereignty," to mean. Faiz distills that historical pathos into the subjective language of
the ghazal, giving it the form of the lover's sadness at the impossibility of saying, when
face-to-face with the beloved, what exactly one means.
The recurring image in Faiz's poetry of an ever-elusive totality that is no less real for
its elusiveness shares something of the melancholy of Adorno's concept of a contradictory
whole whose "movements" are visible only in the "changes" of the fragments. 30 This con-
cept of the dialectic is an attempt to comprehend totality in late modernity, once "the at-
tempt to change the world," as Adorno put it, has been missed. 31 The "lateness" of the
contemporary world for Adorno thus resides in the fact that it is the aftermath of a disap-
pointment, a kind of denouement once the utopian hopes generated by modern European
history have suffered a catastrophic defeat. Hence the series of questions that Adorno di-
rects at contemporary culture: Is it possible to write poetry after Auschwitz? Is philosophy
possible once the chance to realize it in a transformation of human existence has been
missed? Is it possible, or even desirable, to defend the subject in an age when it is besieged
on all sides by the forces of mass culture and mass destruction? Postcolonial culture is it-
self constituted by an aftermath and marked by the "late" acquisition of the cultural arti-
facts of the European nineteenth century: national sovereignty, the popular will, the de-
mand for democracy. In postcolonial South Asia, this moment is also that which follows
the partitioning of northern Indian society. Frantz Fanon argued a long time ago that in
order to be transplanted to the colonial setting, "Marxist analysis should always be slightly
stretched."32 The "lateness" of postcolonial culture itself requires a stretching of the con-
cept of late modernity, its uncoupling from the narrative of economic overdevelopment
and overconsumption and its opening up instead to a comprehension of the aftermath of
decolonization. Faiz is certainly not an "Adornian" poet in the sense in which Celan,
Beckett, or even Mann might be spoken of as Adornian writersY But it has been my pur-
pose here to rethink and expand what it means to write in and of the vistas of "lateness"
that Said and others have identified in the constellations of Adorno's thought. 34 Faiz is the
poet of a late postcolonial modernity, a poet who directs the energies of negative thinking
at the congealed cultural and social forms that constitute the postcolonial present. For
Adorno, the concept of lyric poetry has a referent that is "completely modern," and "the
manifestations in earlier periods of the specifically lyric spirit familiar to us are only iso-
lated flashes." 35 Faiz, however, turns to the traditional Urdu lyric itself and extracts from it a
vocabulary for the elaboration of the relation of self to world, individual to totality. He
 616 elaborates an experience of modern Indian selfhood that seeks to escape the cultural logic
of the nation-state system inaugurated at partition, that paradoxical moment of realization
SECTION 10 through reinscription, of success through failure. He does this, furthermore, by immersion
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC in the Indo-Islamic poetic tradition, with its deep relationship to Sufi thought and prac-
tice, and its long involvement in the crisis of culture and identity on the subcontinent. This
is the larger meaning ofFaiz as an Urdu poet with an immense audience across the politi-
cal and cultural boundaries implemented by partition. His is not an appropriation of the
fragment from the position of totality, but neither is it an attempt to reconceive the frag-
ment itself as a totality. His is the oeuvre of an aftermath once the chance to achieve India,
to "change the world," as it were, has been missed. He confronts the fragment itself with its
fragmentary nature, making perceptible to it its own objective situation as an element in a
contradictory whole. To put it differently and more explicitly in historical terms, we might
say that Faiz is another name for the perception, shadowy and subterranean for the most
part, but abruptly and momentarily bursting through the surface oflanguage and experi-
ence from time to time, that the disavowal oflndianness is an irreducible feature oflndian-
ness itself. The powerful tradition oflyric poetry in Urdu, long accused of its indifference to
properly Indian realities, is revived and given a new lease on life in Faiz and his contempo-
raries not because they infuse old words with new meanings, as the intentionalist cliche in
Faiz criticism would have it, but because in their practice it becomes a site for the elabora-
tion of a selfhood at odds with the geometry of selves put into place by partition. In his lyric
poetry, Faiz pushes the terms of identity and selfhood to their limits, to the point where they
turn upon themselves and reveal the partial nature of postcolonial "national" experience.

NOTES
1. Theodor W. Adorno, "The Fetish Character in translation, the "literal" one if! am engaging in a
Music and the Regression of Listening," in The line-by-line analysis, as this is closest to the original
Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and in terms of line content, and the "non-literal" where
Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 275- the object is to convey a sense of the whole. Where a
2. See Aamir R. Mufti, "A Greater Story-Writer poem or fragment is not available in a Kiernan
Than God: Genre, Gender, and Minority in Late translation, I either provide my own "literal"
Colonial India," in Subaltern Studies XI: Commu- translation or turn to the more freely translated
nity, Gender, and Violence, ed. Partha Chatterjee versions of Agha Shahid Ali (see note 2) or Naomi
and Pradeep )eganathan (New York: Columbia Lazard-see The True Subject: Selected Poems of
University Press, 2000). Faiz Ahmed Faiz, trans. Naomi Lazard (Princeton,
3- See Agha Shahid Ali, "Introduction: N.j.: Princeton University Press, 1988)-depending,
Translating Faiz Ahmed Faiz," in The Rebel's again, on the specific purpose at hand.
Silhouette: Selected Poems, rev. ed., trans. Agha 7- See Kiernan, introduction to Poems by Faiz, 38.
Shahid Ali (Amherst: University of Massachusetts For a contemporary selection of Gandhi's views on
Press, 1995), xiv; and V. G. Kiernan, introduction the language question, see Mohandas Karamchand
to Poems by Faiz, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, trans. V. G. Gandhi, Our Language Problem, ed. Anand T.
Kiernan (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1971), 40. Hingorani (Karachi: Anand T. Hingorani, 1942).
4- Theodor W. Adorno, "On Lyric Poetry and 8. Kiernan, introduction to Poems by Faiz, 38.
Society," in Notes to Literature: Volume One, ed. Rolf 9- See "Faiz-az Faiz," in Faiz Ahmed Faiz,
Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New Nuskhaha-e wafa (Lahore: Maktaba-e Karvan,
York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 42, 38. 1986), 308-11.
5- See, for instance, Syed Sible Hassan, "Faiz ka 10. See Faiz, Poems by Faiz, 90-95; and Faiz,

adarsh," in Faiz Ahmed Faiz: tanqidi jaiza, ed. Nuskhaha-e wafa, 89-91.
Khaleeq Anjum (New Delhi: Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e 11. See Faiz, Nuskhaha-e wafa, 308-11.
Urdu, 1985), 119, 121. 12. This biographical summary is based on the
6. Faiz, Poems by Faiz, 166-67. In matters of following sources: Kiernan, introduction to Poems
translations, I have set the following principles for by Faiz; Khaleeq Anjum, "Faiz biti," in Faiz Ahmed
myself: wherever it is possible, I cite Kiernan's Faiz: tanqidi jaiza, 14-37; Faiz, "Faiz-az Faiz," in
Nuskhaha-e wafa, 307-14; Faiz, "Ahd-e tifli se literal as possible-with almost no attention to 617
unfuwan-e shabab tak," in Nuskhaha-e wafa, meter or rhyme scheme-and to retain the content
489-97; "Bach pan ki qirat se josh ki buzurgi tak," integrity of the lines, even at the cost of syntactical 10.3
in Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Mata-e lauh o qalam awkwardness, as in lines 9-10. I shall stay in my
AAMIR R. MUFTI
(Karachi: Danyal, 1985), 112-21; and Faiz Ahmed analysis close to the original, with the translation
Faiz, Mah o sal-e ashnai: yadon ka majmua meant as merely a rough guide for readers not
(Karachi: Danyal, 1983), 5-20. familiar with the Urdu.
13. Naqsh-e faryadi (Remonstrance) was 20. Theodor W. Adorno, "Subject and Object,"
published in 1941, to be followed by Dast-e saba in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed.
(Fingers of the Wind [1952]), Zindan-nama (Prison Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York:
Thoughts [1956]), Dast-e tah-e sang (Duress [1965]), Continuum, 1988), 500.
Sar-e wadi-e Sin a (Mount Sinai [1971]), Sham-e 21. See Faiz, Nuskhaha-e wafa, 438. The
shahryaran (Twilight of Kings [1978]), and Mire dil translation is mine, with the literal meaning as the
mire musajir (My Heart, My Traveling Heart immediate goal, with some attention to rhyme
[1981]) during his lifetime. His late and previously scheme.
uncollected poems have since been collected as 22. On the classical ghazal and its symbolic and
Ghubar-e ayyam (Dust of Days [1984]) as part of an thematic universe, see Ralph Russell, The Pursuit
edition of his complete works. The first four of Urdu Literature: A Select History (Delhi: Oxford
translations here are Kiernan's, the rest are mine. University Press, 1992), chap. 2; and Annemarie
14. Quoted in Azmi, Urdu men taraqqi pasand Schimmel, A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of
adabi tahrik (Aligarh: Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu, Persian Poetry (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of
1972), 109. North Carolina Press, 1992), pt. 2; on the erotics of
15. Edward W. Said, "Reflections on Exile," ghazal imagery, see Annemarie Schimmel,
Granta 13 (1984): 160. Faiz makes a brief appear- "Eros-Heavenly and Not So Heavenly-in Sufi
ance in Mahmoud Darwish's memoir of the Israeli Literature and Life," in Society and the Sexes in
siege. See Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Medieval Islam, ed. AfafLutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot
Forgetfulness, translated and with an introduction (Malibu, Calif.: Undena Publications, 1979), 119-41.
by Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley: University of 23. See Faiz, Poems by Faiz, 276-77, for Kiernan's
California Press, 1995). rendition, which I have altered slightly; and Faiz,
16. See, for instance, the brilliant cultural history Nuskhaha-e wafa, 429.
of the early years of the Aligarh movement by 24. See Schimmel, "Eros-Heavenly and Not So
David Lelyveld, Aligarh 's First Generation: Muslim Heavenly-in Sufi Literature and Life," 134-35.
Solidarity in British India (Princeton, N.j.: 25. This evocative, but largely free, translation is
Princeton University Press, 1978); Barbara Daly Agha Shahid Ali's. See Faiz, The Rebel's Silhouette,
Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 85; and Faiz, Nuskhaha-e wafa, 524-25. As has
1860-1900 (Princeton, N.j.: Princeton University often been noted, Faiz's poetry shows a marked
Press, 1982); and an intriguing study of culture and preference for the first-person plural, a sort of royal
space by Faisal Fatehali Devji, "Gender and the "we," over the first-person singular.
Politics of Space: The Movement for Women's 26. Adorno, "Lyric Poetry and Society," 46.
Reform, 1857-1900," in Forging Identities: Gender, 27. See Altaf Husain Hali, Muqaddama-e sher o
Communities, and the State, ed. Zoya Hasan (New shairi, ed. Dr. Waheed Qureishi (Aligarh:
Delhi: Kali for Women, 1994), 22-37. Educational Publishing House, 1993), 116-17,
17. For a full-length account of these debates, see 153-54, 158, and 178-85. Hali makes it very clear
Frances W. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry what he has in mind when he recommends
and Its Critics (Berkeley: University of California "naichral shairi" (natural poetry): "By 'natural
Press, 1994). poetry' is meant that poetry which, in terms of
18. See Gopi Chand Narang, Sakhtiyat, both words and meanings, is in accord with
pas-sakhtiyat, aur mashriqi sheriyat (Delhi: nature and habit ... [in accord with] the everyday
Educational Publishing House, 1994), 9. form of the language, because this everyday
19. Faiz, Nuskhaha-e wafa, 184-85. It is speech carries for the inhabitants of the country
regrettable that Kiernan did not include this very where it is spoken, the weight of nature [nechar] or
beautiful poem among his excellent translations second nature [saikind nechar]" (158).
(see note 2). It is also ignored by Agha Shahid Ali 28. Faiz himself makes the argument that much
(see note 2) and Naomi Lazard (see note 5). This of what Hali is credited with having originated in
translation is my own. I have tried to keep it as poetry-the turn to "nature," the rejection of
 618 "artificial" affect, the rejection of abstraction and trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press,
esotericism-can in fact be traced to Nazir 1973). On Adorno and lateness, see Fredric
SECTION 10 Akbarabadi, who wrote almost a century earlier. jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence
Hali's uniqueness lies in the national (qaumi) of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990); and Edward
COMPARATIVE lYRIC
nature of his poetry and poetics. See his important W. Said, "Adorno as Lateness Itself," in Apocalypse
essay, "Nazir aur Hali," in Faiz, Mizan, 169-70 and Theory and the Ends of the World, ed. Malcolm
179-83. Bull (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 264-81.
29. The English here is a modification of Agha 32. See Frantz Fa non, The Wretched of the Earth,
Shahid Ali's very free but lovely translation. See trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove
Faiz, The Rebel's Silhouette, 30. Press, 1963), 40.
30. See, for instance, Adorno, "The Fetish 33· I am grateful to Stathis Gourgouris and
Character in Music and the Regression of Eduardo Cadava for making clear the need for this
Listening": "The whole can not be put together by clarification.
adding the separated halves, but in both there 34· See, for instance, Said, "Adorno as Lateness
appear, however distantly, the changes of the Itself," 264-81; and Fredric jameson, Late
whole, which only moves in contradiction" (275). Marxism.
31. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 35· Adorno, "On Lyric Poetry and Society," 40.

10.4 Inter-American Obversals: Allen

Ginsberg and Haroldo de Campos
circa 1960 (2oos)
ROLAND GREENE

In the 198os and 1990s, it seemed novel to suggest that a literature of the Americas was
emerging out of the corp uses maintained in distinct national literatures-such as the colo-
nial and baroque literatures of New England, Spanish America, and Brazil, or the modern-
isms of the 1920s in the United States and Latin America. With this transnational canon,
the argument went, we gained new ways of addressing movements, careers, and works in
both national and hemispheric settings. A swath of literary history and criticism explored
this premise, bringing new light to both historical and present-day writers and works.' Still,
poetry often remains oblique to this approach, for reasons that were envisioned by Charles
Bernstein some years ago and revisited recently by Jahan Ramazani: the stubbornness of
the boundary around national poetries, and the difficulty of observing affinities across
cultures without imposing unities, not to mention the ways that particular poems resist
being drawn into such an order. 2
In hemispheric terms, the richest accounts of poetry have often been the most provi-
sional. I admire the essay of 1986 by the historian Richard Morse, in which he sets two
contemporaries, William Carlos Williams and Oswald de Andrade, alongside one an-
other, exposing divergences as much as similarities, and finally arrives at a reading of
"The Red Wheelbarrow" and "A Ro~a" ("The Farm") in which neither of the two farms
indirectly seen in these poems "can we mistake for a European one." 3 This article's
agenda-to address these figures as considerably different from each other, and to explore 619
how they are distinctly American in their aesthetic programs and especially the knowl-
edge their poems contain-tells us more about a poetics of the Americas than a wide- 10.4
ranging or totalizing approach can manage. The present essay aims both to emulate RoLAND GREENE

Morse's approach and to think past it, claiming such a reading as an occasion to speculate
on the future of a hemispheric approach. Bernstein offers one version of such an approach
here when he imagines a "multiplicity" that is not a "comparison." If the sporadic work of
the last two decades has been in a sense preliminary, undertaking a new program for
imagining inter-american poetries, what comes next?
Consider how the protocols of reading and interpretation conduce toward an inter-
pretation of poetry that keeps works apart, or authorizes comparisons that reinforce na-
tional and linguistic rather than other, more provisional categories. In the early 1990s the
comparatist Claudio Guillen articulated three kinds of comparison available to literary
theory and criticism, namely that among works with "genetic contacts or other relations"
across "distinct national spheres" within a single common culture; that among works
with no genetic contacts and from different civilizations but under "common sociohis-
torical conditions"; and that among "genetically independent phenomena" brought to-
gether under a theoretical premise. 4 This orderly division tells us several things about
how to approach inter-american literatures, starting from the observation that they may
have, oddly, too many points of contact. One can imagine groups of works-such as the
aforementioned hemispheric modernist canon, or the Beats of the middle twentieth cen-
tury alongside the contemporaneous Noigandres school of Brazil-for which from cer-
tain angles all of Guillen's conditions of comparison apply, but no one suffices. In contrast
to many of the classic objects of comparison such as the European novel, the baroque, or
the picaresque, a hemispheric body of poetry involves genetic contacts but also comes into
being despite the lack of them; allows for common social and historical conditions, some-
times within a single civilization such as that of Spanish-speaking readers and writers, but
at other times across the boundaries between creole and indigenous societies; and de-
mands the application of theoretical principles that will put these already deeply impli-
cated corp uses into less obvious conjunctions. Where many points of contact are available,
there is perhaps an inclination toward either a totalized approach, a critical narrative that
will gather all these points together into a specious unity, or no synopsis at all. The hemi-
spheric canon presents this particular challenge to a conventional comparative literature: too
many standpoints, with too many strands of relation and zones of difference between them,
make for arguments that struggle to find a balance. In how many ways might we speak of the
contemporaneity, the correspondences, the coincidences, the obliquities, and the insensibili-
ties between such events of the 198os as the Language movement in the United States and
XUL in Argentina?
What is wanted is neither an essential inter-american literature nor a map of irreduc-
ible particularities. The condition of the poetries of the Americas demands, in one of
Bernstein's phrases, a poetics of"inconsolable coexistences."5 We make our way through
such a condition by naming a vivid counterpoise between the knowledges such poetries
contain-how do the poetries, with all their differences, know as American poetries rather
than as something else?-and this proposition must always come down to particular
poems, their dictions, rhythms, and figures. Or to say it otherwise, Morse demonstrates
inductively that we can read from a poem to a society on the basis of social fact in relation
to aesthetic disposition, recovering from this relation some atom of American ness.
The alternative approach, which turns up in many accounts of inter-american literatures,
might be considered fatally deductive. In the mid-198os, a much remarked conversation of a
 620 sort took place between Fredric Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad over the question of how to ac-
count for what some readers think of as the structural differences between works from the
SEcTION 10 developed and developing worlds, or along some like axis. Jameson's argument-Gayatri
CoMPARATIVE LYRic Spivak rightly calls it "notorious"6 -was that "all third-world texts" are necessarily "to be
read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly
when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation,
such as the novel." 7 Unfortunately the deductive and totalizing character ofJameson's argu-
ment, atypical of his late work, is self-negating. As Ahmad deftly observes, no such account
of a "cognitive aesthetics" can or should explain the spheres of cultural production, whether
developed and developing Worlds, hemispheres, or even countries.8 I wonder at the "par-
ticularly" clause of Jameson's statement, as though the novel were merely a good example of
this mode of reading and not the only remotely feasible example-in other words, as though
one could imagine drama, memoir, or poetry supporting such a reading. Whatever ex-
planatory value might be found in comparing metropolitan and emerging novels for their
redactions of the public and the private, one supposes that to approach poetry's "ratio of the
political to the personal" as an allegory for social or geopolitical conditions is not only a
questionable but an unworkable project.9 At the same time, I recognize the urge that under-
lies Jameson's essay, to find a productive way of reading works of different societies along-
side each other, articulating how each one develops an interlocution of the subjective and
the social as well as a fluid relation between these works, without allegorizing or rendering
either one into a reversal or distortion of the other.
Where poetry is concerned, we might adapt Jameson's terms and declare that our
project is to disclose how the poetries of the Americas converse with one another across
the registers of the political and the personal; how what is common and what is different
between hemispheric poetries may be accounted for; and especially how we may identify
the points of contact-of concepts, inlaid cultural patterns, motifs, charged words-that
put the subjective and the public dimensions of such poems into relation. Even laying
aside proposals to read the works of one part of the world according to a unifying logic,
the claims of language, region, history, race, and class, among other factors, seem to
unsettle any possibility of a common literary history. And yet, above the din of such fac-
tors, the elements held in relation still make themselves heard. In idioms, tropes, and
registers, the poetries of the Americas recognize an obversive history rather than a com-
mon outlook, the power of which should be neither exaggerated nor dismissed. Such a
history, refracted in poetry, involves two or more obverses-faces or surfaces, like the
face of a coin-that are not opposites or reversals of each other but alternative versions of
a common question of knowledge. This is what Morse saw in Williams and Andrade: the
problem of seeing an American society in its agriculture, a georgic read askance. This is
perhaps what Jameson gestured after in his overly prescriptive theory of the novel in the
developing world. And this is perhaps also a workable redaction of Guillen's criteria for
comparison into something that makes sense of the poetries of the New World, a mode of
reading that acknowledges that "there is no one America." 10
As an experiment in obversal, consider two sets of poems that are roughly contempo-
raneous but seem to offer little foundation for a cross-reading: these are Allen Ginsberg's
poems of 1959 through 1961, first collected in Kaddish (1961) and later augmented in the
Collected Poems 1947-1980-especially the run from "Lysergic Acid" through "To an Old
Poet in Peru"-and Haroldo de Campos' Galclxias of 1963 and after, especially the incanta-
tory poem known as "circulado de ful6." The Brazilian Campos, along with his brother
Augusto de Campos and their collaborator Decio Pignatari, formed the group Noigan-
dres, named after a stray remark by the scholar of Occitan poetry Emil Levy in Ezra
Pound's Canto XXY Ginsberg and Campos share a precursor in Pound, but otherwise di- 621
verge in their models. Campos treats Pound essentially as a European poet reaching back
first to symbolism and to the troubadours, while Ginsberg augments this tradition with the 10.4
prophetic and hortatory poetics of Walt Whitman and William Blake. Oblivious to one RoLAND GREENE

another, Ginsberg and Campos represent alternative poetries of the Americas at a single
moment. Perhaps their balance of likenesses and differences makes them hard to discuss
together; perhaps even they cannot look at each other too closely. Whitman, rebarbative
and polarizing, is the invisible factor between them. I once asked Campos (even though I
knew the answer) whether Whitman was important to him, and he replied with a curt dis-
missal of the question-a clue, I have always believed, to the poetics of the Noigandres cir-
cle. In fact Whitman is not entirely absent from the cabinet of models and objects associ-
ated with these far-ranging Brazilian poets, translators, and critics. His program for a
prophetic poetry of the greater Americas survives for them, but they attribute it to a poet
fourteen years younger, Joaquim de Sousa Andrade, whom they install in a lineage that in-
cludes nearly everyone except Whitman. 12 The striking exclusion of Whitman from their
explicit program, emphasized by Campos' unequivocal reply, confirms a matter of poetics
but also implies matters of knowledge-and the intersection between these dimensions
offers a way to read the Beats and the concretes against each other.
In part, of course, the rejection of Whitman by the Noigandres poets is a statement of
cultural affinity as well as poetic principles. Whitman's program belongs to the era of cre-
ole self-consciousness across the Americas, beginning with the career of Simon Bolivar in
the early nineteenth century and continuing until the end of the original modernismo in
the early twentieth, for which the capacious voice of Leaves of Grass became a kind of stan-
dard.13 During this era, distinctive elements of a creole outlook were transmuted into state-
ments of an essential American identity: for instance, where the creole desideratum of
American birth (in contrast to colonists from Spain or Portugal) is idealized in the terms
of autocthony, a rootedness in the soil of the Americas held in common by all native-born
citizens. Within a few years of the death of the original modernista poet Ruben Darfo in
1916, a different modernism, more conversant with the contemporaneous European avant-
gardes as well as with a broader specimen of American races and classes, had arisen to
challenge many of the cultural ideals founded on creole experience: thus in Brazil, the
modernist poet and polemicist Oswald de Andrade, Haroldo de Campos' avowed model,
articulated a program for strategic and ironic mimesis of indigenous cultures that explic-
itly countered the fantasy of autocthony with the fact of importation-that what mattered
in this society was what came from elsewhere, to be answered only by a poetry "for ex-
port."14 Seen through the filter of this kind of modernism, the poetics of Whitman and his
refractors among the creole elites come to seem a temporizing maneuver, not to mention a
self-absorbed projection of one segment of society, rather than something radically new.
In strictly poetic terms, the early work of the Noigandres poets depends on a seman-
tic concentration within a morphology of lines and paragraphs that seems the antithesis
of Whitman's approach to these elements. In semantic and formal dispensations, nothing
could resemble "Song of Myself" less than Campos' densely textured poems, where the
first person is often hidden rather than extravagantly unfurled; no poem could be less like
Campos' "Servidao de passagem" ("Transient Servitude") than "The Sleepers," where lines
accumulate not with exactitude but with abandon, and irony is all but absent. And yet
something other than semantics and forms-something better called knowledge, a mode
of coming to terms with the world-is involved in this contrast. Campos' orientation to a
Pound whose antecedents lie in Europe rather than the United States is obviously a highly
motivated redaction. Overlooking Pound's acknowledgment to Whitman that "it was
 622 you that broke the new wood,''IS it aligns Noigandres with the deep past of Propertius and
the troubadours, and speaks to a making of a poetry of the Americas from the outside in.
SECTION 10 For such a program, the knowledge that activates poetic power tends to be bibliophagic
CoMPARATIVE LYRic and historically remote, if not antiquarian. While in certain senses Campos' intellectual
style is very much of its time-his philology is often embedded in information theory of
the 1950s, and the manifesti ofNoigandres such as the "Plano-Piloto para Poesia Concreta"
("Pilot-Plan for Concrete Poetry" [1958]) are stamped by the era of President Juscelino
Kubitschek and the building of Brasilia 16 -the dynamic factor is knowledge: what, and
how, does the poem know? While Campos frames his poetics with reference to "informa-
tion" and "language,"I7 knowledge, or thinking made manifest, inscribes a distinctive pat-
tern in his poems, and enables us to stand apart from his moment, exactly as Morse does
with Williams and Andrade.
In contrast, Ginsberg's embrace of the other Pound-the poet of "I make a pact with
you, Walt Whitman"-represents a poetry that draws on experience of the social and po-
litical world of the present, foreshortening the cultural past in favor of a poetry that starts
from the speaking subject and sprawls outward. His poems devour experience rather than
books; his cultivation of Buddhism ensures a centrifugal, presentist, observational proce-
dure. IS Seen this way, there is a difference in what each kind of poem knows: Campos'
compressed poems perceive and think by collapsing eras, cultures, and languages together
for the sake of historical continuity, while Ginsberg's intuitive lyrics find an alternative
sort of diversity-of social identities, voices, politics-by expanding the present. Of course
this account oversimplifies, but it captures something of Campos' and Ginsberg's two
ways of operating as poets of the Americas circa 1960.
Further, the differences of poetic style between the Beat and Noigandres programs
correspond closely to this contrast of intellectual agendas. From its first appearance in
the early 1950s, the work of the Noigandres group, who were critics as well as poets, came
packaged with its own literary history, its own announced canon of precursors, and its
own style of interpretation. The group's North American (and to some extent, even their
Brazilian) interpreters and acolytes have generally declined to challenge this order of
things with fresh approaches and hard questions, with the result that this work exists in a
kind of critical limbo, in which the poets' own promotional statements still have the status
of interpretations and conclusions. What we recognize as Brazilian concrete poetry of the
1960s might be better seen as a poetic technology that is well adapted to Campos' agency as
cultural filter-a poet who makes his kind of knowledge according to exquisite conjunc-
tions and overlays of several periods and languages, in a poetic idiom where no extraneous
information should draw the mind away from the central conceit. The poetry, the criti-
cism, and the literary history are inseparable elements of a single program, each element
disposed to foreground the relevant aspects of the others. A poetry fashioned for such a
program-unlike a poetry conceived to stand apart from the poet's criticism and other
writings, such as that of Wallace Stevens or Pablo Neruda-must turn out very much like
the concrete poetry ofNoigandres and the early Campos.
Again in contrast, Ginsberg's poetry exhibits a purchase on knowledge that accommo-
dates quotidian experience to several metaphysical outlooks, and abjures the strict filters
that inform concrete poetry in favor of an inclusiveness that depends on spontaneous orga-
nization ("first thought, best thought'').I 9 Perhaps no bodies of poetry of the late 1950s could
resemble each other less than Ginsberg's mercurial, obsessive rants and Campos' finely
wrought logograms. And yet they are strikingly homologous, if not superficially similar:
moving apart but in different directions from the gyres and vortices of modernism, they
come to occupy distinctive but cognate positions. Moreover, the extremity of their positions 623
has encouraged critics and readers to treat them as specimens, making for a kind of tacit
silence around their work. Is there a poem by Campos or Ginsberg that is read very differ- 10.4
ently now from when it first appeared? Is there a poem that is understood in ways other RoLAND GREENE

than how the poet characterizes it? Due to the fairly low energy of the critical enterprise
around their work, I think the answer to such questions is no. The relation between these
two contemporaneous programs, one might observe, is between alternative construals of
the European and American modernist tradition that draw out different agendas for a post-
modernist poetics, each with its own cast of forebears, a particular vantage on past and pres-
ent, and its own approach to knowledge. Campos and Ginsberg, and beyond them the Beat
and Noigandres poets, are not unrelated or irrelevant to each other, but alternatives and
often obverses. They are much more mutually relevant than they would allow, enabling us
to put them into a reciprocal commentary-and not incidentally, to use their alternative
vantages to revive the critical discussion that has stalled over them as singular figures.
I choose the moments of Ginsberg's Kaddish and Campos' Galaxias because they find
both poets at a second stage or transition: expanding the cultural and intellectual re-
sources available to them, getting past the protocols and styles that served for their early
work, and traveling, both literally and figuratively. 20 This phase of Ginsberg's work was
provoked by his travel to Europe and Latin America, where he began to develop what one
biographer has called "a global consciousness"; 21 Campos' turn toward Galaxias was cata-
lyzed by his first trip to Europe, including a return through the Brazilian northeast during
which he "rediscover[ed] Brazil via the world. The hybrid and the ecumenical." 22 In each
case, the second stage is activated by a new awareness of a particular American vantage or
location installed in the world; in each case the transition involves a poetry differently
oriented-speaking within a broader circumscription, addressing the world as a concept
in metaphysical as well as geopolitical terms-and a struggle to produce poems that ac-
knowledge, include, capture the world. On these terms two poets who built alternative
versions of a post modern poetics move closer to each other, and the poems of these mo-
ments sometimes dissolve into voices that make Ginsberg sound like Campos and vice
versa. And in their transitions, Ginsberg and Campos produce poems that might be
treated as obverses, or alternative engagements with problems of history and knowledge.
To me, the most revealing episodes in their work of the late 1950s and early sixties are
those poems in which they seem to reach an impasse within their established poetics, and
to struggle with the impulse toward each other's poetic program. In Ginsberg's case, this
juncture is part of a long search for a visionary poetics that dates back to "Psalm I" (1949)
and continues through "Angkor Wat'' (1963). The late fifties see a deepening sense of the
stakes involved in his writing, and an agitated inventory oflyric and prophetic possibili-
ties. In this set of poems, the deeply moving verbal overcharge of "Kaddish" is followed
by a return to the elegiac concerns of that poem ("o mother I what have I left out/ o
mother I what have I forgotten") and then a struggle to emplace those concerns in a wider
setting of metaphysical speculation:

I cry out where I am in the music, to the room, to whomever near, you, Are you God?
No, do you want me to be God?
Is there no Answer?
Must there always be an Answer? you reply,
and were it up to me to say Yes or No-
Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!
 624 But that I long for a Yes of Harmony to penetrate
to every corner of the universe, under every condition whatsoever
SECTION 10 a Yes there Is ... a Yes I Am ... a Yes You Are ... a We 23
COMPARATIVE LYRIC
It seems that the balance of forces of Ginsberg's early poetry, from "The Green Automo-
bile" through Reality Sandwiches, has been displaced by something more searching and
volatile-an explicit search for God as presence-that makes his usual volatility seem leg-
ible and obvious. The poetic style that Marjorie Perloff, Charles Molesworth, and others
have described authoritatively is firmly in place by the writing of "Kaddish," but this is
something else, a register (as James Scully has it) like Henry Vaughan more than William
Blake. 24 The open questioning of these poems, I think, is an improvised response (and not
always an especially convincing one) to this newly opened prospect
Into this setting, following on the anaphoric and manically idealist "Lysergic Acid,"
comes "I Beg You Come Back & Be Cheerful," an understated and ironic assay at the same
questions:

Radiant clouds, I have heard God's voice in

my sleep, or Blake's awake, or my own or
the dream of a delicatessen of snorting cows
and bellowing pigs-
The chop of a knife
a finger severed in my brain-
a few deaths I know-
0 brothers of the Laurel
Is the world real?
Is the Laurel
a joke or a crown of thorns?

Then appears a quatrain that stands apart from the poem, and from nearly everything
Ginsberg has written from "Howl" (1956) to this point In the first instance its power is in
its unlikeness to his usual mode of perception, in that the quatrain parodies his entire
corpus, including his mode of composition and his sex life, in four short lines:

Fast, pass
up the ass
Down !go
Cometh woe

When Ginsberg's characteristic verbal order is in place-"a swirling, flashing registry of

states of consciousness in which perceptions are constantly disarranged, even deranged" 25 -
there is no room for this kind of unsparing, minimalist observation. For that matter, short
lines stitched together by rhymes instead of anaphora, gathered at their ends rather than
their beginnings, make for a low-key but startling interruption in his outlook. End-rhymed
lines-of which there is none in Ginsberg's poetry since before "Howl"-make a different
thoughtprint than anaphoric lines. More than a stylistic departure, they belie the spontane-
ous ethic of Ginsberg's work and represent a distance from immediate experience, a coming
to conclusions, that he seldom entertains. Later on, this kind of short end-rhymed line will
become the mode of ironic reflection on sex, a post-coital ruefulness. 26 But here, where a fit
of questioning gives way to answers, Ginsberg is trying to change frequencies. This urge
becomes manifest in an especially striking moment After four lines of observation of the
Manhattan cityscape, there follows this calligram:
 What 625

if
10.4
the ROLAND GREENE

worlds

were

series

of steps

What

if

the

steps

joined

back

at

the

Margin

Leaving us flying like birds into Time

-eyes and car headlights-
The shrinkage of emptiness
In the Nebulae
These Galaxies cross like pinwheels & they pass
Like gas-
What forests are born.
Septemberi5,1959

I take it that what matters here is a poet of one well-defined sensibility not only speaking
in an unaccustomed voice but exploding voice altogether to reach after something that
counts as almost inexpressible to his poetics: a metaphysical order that makes his poem into
an epistemological challenge, a sketch of something beyond words, a child's drawing. Where
Ginsberg began this set of poems by posing questions-what and where is God? how can we
conceive of this world within other worlds?-he now arrives at provisional answers in a
hushed tone, about himself and about the world. For a mind accustomed to launching ques-
tions and observations paratactically from the same perch, these conclusions unsettle the
poetry. Changing his vantage on reality and substituting the shape of"worlds," in the impre-
cise form of the calligram, for the shape of his own thinking, Ginsberg's speaker turns his
poem inside out. He suspends the observation of nature as it presents itself, and resorts in-
stead to an end-driven recording of rhythms and patterns. He tries to get the world and what
is beyond the world, rather than the usual subjective self, into his poem. The striking
 626 moment is not the calligram, however, but the concluding lines in which a speaker who
started from a pose of self-absorption ("Tonite I got hi in the window of my apartment")
SECTION 10 gestures toward something infinitely remote: "These Galaxies cross like pinwheels & they
CoMPARATIVE LYRic pass/like gas." The key term "galaxies" reveals the metaphysical object out of reach of this
poet of excess and indiscipline; it names the invisible horizon that has exerted pressure on
this poem since the transitional quatrain, to which these lines return ("they pass like gas"
revisits "fast, pass/ up the ass"), the outer limit of this poem's thinking. It says: this poet can
evoke the world, and worlds beyond the world. He is writing to an enlarged horizon.
"I Beg You Come Back & Be Cheerful" leaves us in a place uncharacteristic of Gins-
berg's early poetry but necessary to the turn his work takes after about 1960, where the as-
pects of his outlook-confessional, political, and metaphysical-are recombined and (in
Joseph Lease's nice phrase) braided together again. 27 The term "galaxies" encodes a sense
of heightened stakes, as if the charter of the poems has come to include the representation
of worlds, and worlds within worlds, around the confessional first person. When we read
in the poem "Aether"
Stop conceiving worlds!

says Philip Whalen

(My Savior!) (oh what snobbery!)2R

we should understand that these poems of 1959 represent a seeking after a new mode of
thinking as well as a new descriptive protocol. On these poems depends the achievement
of Ginsberg's finest poem of the 1960s, "Wichita Vortex Sutra" (1966), in which he speaks
from the vantage of a prophet who straddles worlds ("in Kansas or other universe") and
declares the end of the Vietnam War. 29 The horizon of the galaxy enables us to appre-
hend, within it, the outlines of the world; and our awareness of the poet speaking across
these concentric circles gives force to that poem's declaration of peace, which is obviously
impotent in the here and now of 1966 but speaks to us from somewhere else.
The horizon of the galaxy, of course, is something Ginsberg shares with his Brazilian
contemporary Haroldo de Campos. Other poets of the 1950s and sixties, such as the
American Charles Olson and the Swiss-Bolivian Eugen Gomringer, adopt similar terms:
Olson's "composition by field" owes something to this horizon, as does his important es-
say on the possibilities of knowledge called "Human Universe," while Gomringer's Con-
stellations is one of the formative works of concrete poetry in this era. 30 All of these terms,
which appear in many statements of poetics in this period, respond to a larger intellectual
agenda. In a book published in 1957, Karl Popper remarks on the strictly physical nature
of celestial phenomena in contrast to social life:
Physical structures ... can be explained as mere "constellations" ... or as the mere sum of
their parts, together with their geometrical configuration. Take the solar system, for in-
stance; although it may be interesting to study its history, and although this study may throw
light on its present state, we know that, in a sense, this state is independent of the history of
the system. The structure of the system, its future movements and developments, are fully
determined by the present constitution of its members. Given the relative positions, masses,
and momenta, of its members at any one instant, the future movements of the system are all
fully determined .... The history of the structure, although it may be interesting, contributes
nothing to our understanding of its behaviour, of its mechanism, and of its future develop-
ment. It is obvious that a physical structure differs widely in this respect from any social
structure; the latter cannot be understood, nor its future predicted, without a careful study
of its history, even if we had complete knowledge of its momentary "constellation."31
 For Popper, this is constellation as pure form, free of the pressures of society and his- 627
tory. The notion of a future legible through formal arrangements ("positions, masses, and
momenta"), where the past has no privilege as prologue, perhaps made this sense of"con- 10.4
stellation" seem especially intriguing in the 1950s, as the exhaustion of a world war gave RoLAND GREENE

way to an acceleration of technology, including the exploration of space. Moreover, there

is a complementary lexicon, overseen chiefly by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno,
that sees "constellation" as a term for the kind of thinking that finds a social and histori-
cal dimension in what appears to be the observation of aesthetic forms: this constellative
project-Robert Kaufman has explored it insightfully-remakes the relation between the
social-historical and the aesthetic, finding new construals of the former through an ap-
plication of the latter, often in constructivist fashion. 32 Where Popper's quarrel with his-
toricism leads him to ruminate on the constellation as an ahistorical structure, entirely
unlike history and society, the Frankfurt School critics go further, proposing that such a
structure affords terms for imagining the historical, social, and aesthetic together, unset-
tling the conventional accounts of relations among these forces. From a variety of stand-
points in the 50s, the figure of the constellation is present where these relations were
being reconfigured, particularly where historical materials were engaged anew in aes-
thetic terms or works of art revisited as expressions of history and social life. The figure
itself bears the stamp of a detour from conventional thinking-from the causative, the
linear, the hierarchical.
Where poetry is concerned, Ginsberg and Campos see in "galaxies" and "constella-
tions" an outlet away from the conventions of the period as well as the programs they
have imposed on themselves. Approaching from opposite directions-Ginsberg from a
poetics that has been constituted out of the first person and social observation, Campos
from the exaggeratedly hygienic program of the concrete poems of the collection Fome de
Forma (Hunger of Form) of 1957-59 and its successor Forma de Fome (Form of Hunger),
which contains "Transient Servitude"-these poets, fleetingly and at about the same
time, arrive at a common agenda, a shared space of reflection. Finding our way back from
there, can we account for how this Beat and this concretist cross like pinwheels? How
might an inter-american poetry of galactic horizons engage differently from its contem-
poraries with what Olson calls "the only two universes which count, the two phenomenal
ones, the two a man has need to bear on because they bear so on him: that of himself, as
organism, and that of his environment, the earth and planets"? 33
Where Ginsberg's expansive poetics finds a new density, Campos finds a new expan-
siveness. Galaxias is the pivot in his poetics. Here is the first item in the series:
e comeyo aqui e meyo aqui este comeyo e recomeyo e remeyo e arremesso
e aqui me meyo quando se vive sob a especie da viagem o que importa
nao e a via gem mas o comeyo da por isso meyo por isso comeyo escrever
mil paginas esc rever milumapaginas para acabar com a escritura para
comeyar com a escritura para acabarcomeyar com a escritura por isso
recomeyo por isso arremeyo por isso teyo esc rever sobre esc revere o futuro 34

(and here I commence and measure here I commence and recommence and remeasure
and hurl
and here I measure myself when life is lived as a kind of voyage what matters
is not the voyage but the commence so I commence so I measure I commence to write
a thousand pages write a thousandandone pages to finish writing
to commence with writing to finishcommence with writing so
I recommence so I hurl so I weave to write about writing is the future)
 628 Like Ginsberg's efforts at rhyme and concretism (but with a rush of self-assurance instead of
his deliberate fumbling), this prose poem introduces an unfamiliar voice, a new philosophical
SECTION 10 orientation ("when life is lived as a kind of voyage what matters is not the voyage"), and a re-
CoM PARATIVE LYRic drawn horizon. The short, highly concentrated lines of the concrete poetry and of the seman-
tic variations in Fame de Forma give way to lines that do not end at all but "recommence"
again and again; the stance and tone are like that of a Whitman reached by a back-formation
through modernism, especially Joyce and Stein. And as in Popper's account of constellations,
Campos imagines, as Ginsberg did in his reverie, a poetry whose "fully determined" structure
reflects that of the universe, whose past and future is nothing but its movements. Suppose
there were a poetry that fused the personal and the metaphysical without the mediation
of the social, which would obviate confessionalism; suppose there were a poetry whose
shape traced the shape of the world and the universe.
The program piece of Galaxias is the prose poem "circulad6 de ful6":

circulad6 de ful6 ao deus ao demodad. que deus te guie porque eu nao

posso guia eviva quem ja me deu circulad6 de ful6 e ainda quem falta me
da soando como urn shamisen e feito apenas com urn arametenso urn cabo e
uma lata velha num tim de festafeira no pi no do sol a pi no mas para
outros nao existia aquela musica nao podia porque nao podia popular
aquela musica se nao canta nao e popular se nao a tina nao tintina nao
tarantina e no entanto puxada na tripa da miseria na tripa tensa da rna is
megera miseria fisica e doendo doendo como urn prego na palma da mao urn
ferrugem prego cego na palma espalma da mao cora<;ao exposto como urn nervo
tenso retenso urn renegro prego cego durando na palma polpa da mao ao sol

('rounded by flowers under god's under the devil's mercy god shall guide you for I myself
can't guide godbless those who give me 'rounded by flowers and those who are still
to give sounding like a samisen made of a tensed wire a stick
and an old tin can at the end of the partyfair at highnoonhigh but for
many that music did not exist it could not because it could not popplay
if not sung that music is not popular if not in tune it does not atone nor
tarantina and yet struck in the gut of misery in the tensed gut of the meagerest
physical misery aching aching like a nail in the handpalm a
rusty blind nail in the palm clasping palm of the hand heart exposed as a tensed nerve
retensed a renigrated blind nail everlasting in the palmpulp of the hand in the sun) 35

For readers acquainted with Campos' earlier work, the most arresting dimension of this col-
lection is likely to be its verbal profusion. A poetics of strict economy-with a minimalist
attention to morphemes, phonemes, and lineation-has been replaced by a no less attentive
repetition of indelible words and phrases. "Circulad6 de ful6 "-the phrase is ambiguous, but
means something like "surrounded by flowers" (the translator A. S. Bessa's rendition) or
"circulator of flowers" -adapts language of long derivation in the Brazilian and Portuguese
lyric traditions, but directly evokes the minstrelsy of northeastern Brazil. The opening
phrase, in which "ful6" seems to be "flor" (flower) with a vowel added by epenthesis and the
final consonant elided, is probably an epithet for the minstrel himself: he who makes and is
made by the flowers of rhetoric. What is distinctive to the moment of Galaxias, however, is
the metaphysical perspective of this poem: "under god's under the devil's mercy god shall
guide you for I myself can't guide godbless those who give me" stands out from Campos'
work for its remarkable concatenation of the ethical and the divine. While some of the earlier
poetry implies a similar perspective, as in some of the semantic variations in Forma de Fame,
 homem senhor 629
homem servo
10.4
homem sobre ROLAND GREENE

homem sob36

(man sir
man servant

man over
man under)

little in Campos' program to this point allows him to think his way directly from the ex-
perimental to the divine, from semantics to metaphysics. From the first poem's envision-
ing of a textual space "where the end is the beginning," Galaxias involves a number of such
efforts to explode the boundaries of the earlier poetry-none more thoroughly than "Cir-
culad6 de ful6," with its positing of a modern, provincial trobar clus that claims some of
the wrenching force of a crucifixion and realizes through that power a moral renewal ("if
not in tune it does not atone").
At a threshold for their poetries, then, Ginsberg and Campos cross paths, one tending
toward the gnomic and the concrete, and the other pulling away from these modes-but
both in search of a poetry of greater knowledge. The Ginsberg and Campos suites are ob-
verses in that they represent alternative constructions of a single problem-how to expand
a poetic horizon to galactic dimensions, and how to embed specifically American lan-
guage and experience within that new horizon-delivered contemporaneously, even as
other artists of the Americas were examining a galactic or constellative horizon for what it
could offer them. For Ginsberg this adjustment opened a new galaxy that remained inter-
mittently available, inflecting but not quite transforming his poetics, while for Campos it
represented a decisive shift toward a new kind of writing. While this turn in their work can
be understood as an episode in their particular careers, I think it makes a different sort of
sense in an inter-american setting, where two considerably different premises for poetry
came to discover a common space adjacent to both of them. The modes of the Beats and
the Noigandres poets still do not touch one another, but in Ginsberg and Campos circa
1960 they have an imaginable relation.
Finally, I would like to reflect on the future of a hemispheric approach to poetry by
briefly considering the possible third term in the relation between Ginsberg and Campos:
namely, the poet whom Ginsberg addresses in "To an Old Poet in Peru," the elderly modern-
ist Martin Adan (1908-1985). Adan was one of the leading figures in Peruvian modernism
but almost unknown outside his country; his experiments with sonnets that overturned the
unacknowledged political conventions of the form were celebrated by the political philoso-
pher Jose Carlos Mariategui in a classic essay called "The Anti-Sonnet" (1928). 37
To Ginsberg, Adan is an intriguing but finally unassimilable figure, whose formally
rigorous lyrics seem to have little to say to his own volatile poems. Campos for his part
seems to have had little awareness of Adan, even though La Casa de Carton (The Card-
board House, 1928), Adan's experimental narrative that appeared at the same time as
several modernist works of Brazil, participates (though not by name) in the "cultural can-
nibalism" that Campos ostentatiously adapts from that generation. 38 Adan's relevance is
that, where Ginsberg and Campos seek the capacious voices and access to metaphysics
represented by their poems circa 1960, he had already cultivated such a poetry for about
 630 thirty years when his sequence La Mano Desasida (The Hand Let Go) appeared in 1960.
One might observe that, while the Brazilian and the American poets cross each other, the
SECTION 10 Peruvian poet is between them but illegible to both. Ginsberg's "To an Old Poet in Peru" is
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC about crossed trajectories that yield no illumination. While Adan has explored the potential
of a metaphysical poetry of the Americas, his work hardly matters to Ginsberg, who sees
their encounter as fruitless:

Your indifference! my enthusiasm!

I insist! You cough!
Lost in the wave of Gold that
flows thru the Cosmos.
Agh I'm tired of insisting! Goodbye,
I'm going to Pucallpa
to have Visions.
Your clean sonnets?
I want to read your dirtiest
secret scribblings,
your Hope,
in His most Obscene Magnificence. My God! 39

The poem ends with both poets walking off to their own metaphysical experiments, stuck
in mutual incomprehension.
A parable of the poetries of the Americas, Ginsberg's poem reminds us that the hemi-
spheric canon, if such a thing exists, is held together by misapprehensions and resistances
as much as by affinities and recognitions, and that mutual ignorance-with its reckless
experiments, inadvertent conversations, and obversals-often has more power than un-
derstanding. Quests after knowledge like those of Ginsberg and Campos become all the
more moving, I believe, when they are both compromised and empowered by the versions
of ignorance and insensibility we have seen (Campos toward Whitman; Ginsberg toward
Adan; Campos and Ginsberg toward one another). In answer to Guillen and Jameson,
where is the comparative agenda that will show us how to read for these omissions? How
will we write the history of a hemispheric poetry in these terms? The relation between
obverses that I draft here is only a start toward explaining the poetics of the Americas as
a set of relations and the problems around them. In the inter-american setting, we are
always discovering that the problems are as compelling as the relations.

NOTES

1.For example, to cite only books, overviews 1-23,rpt. in My Way: Speeches and Poems
such as Earl E. Fitz, Rediscovering the New World: (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
Inter-American Literatures in a Comparative 113-37; jahan Ramazani, "A Transnational
Context (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991); Poetics," American Literary History 18 (2006):
monographic books on particular authors like julio 332-59·
Marzan, The Spanish American Roots of William 3. Richard M. Morse, "Triangulating Two
Carlos Williams (Austin: University of Texas Press, Cubists: William Carlos Williams and Oswald de
1994); and outward-looking revisions of the United Andrade," Latin American Literary Review 14, no.
States' literary and cultural history such as Kirsten 27 (1986): So.
Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The 4. Claudio Guillen, The Challenge of
Transamerican Origins of Latino Writi11g (Prince- Comparative Literature, trans. Cola Franzen
ton: Princeton University Press, 2002). (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993),
2. Charles Bernstein, "Poetics of the Ameri- 69-70.
cas," Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 3 (1996): 5. Bernstein, My Way, 114.
6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a 19. Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947-1980 631
Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), xx; Paul
2003). 66. Portuges, "Allen Ginsberg's Paul Cezanne and the 10.4
7. Fredric jameson, "Third-World Literature in Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus," in On the Poetry
ROLAND GREENE
the Era of Multinational Capitalism," Social Text 15 of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Lewis Hyde (Ann Arbor:
(!986): 69. University of Michigan Press, 1984), 151-52.
8. Aijaz Ahmad, "Jameson's Rhetoric of 20. The state of Ginsberg's poetics in 1956 is
Otherness and the 'National Allegory,"' Social Text summarized by Marjorie Perloff, Poetry On and Off
17 (1987): 3· the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (Evanston:
9. Jameson, "Third-World Literature," 69. Northwestern University Press, 1998), 101-04.
10. Bernstein, My Way, 114. 21. Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A
11. On the etymology of noigandres, see the Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg (New York: St.
translator Jacques Donguy's note in Augusto de Martin's Press, 1992), 279. Ginsberg's expanding
Campos, Anthologie despoesia, trans. Donguy consciousness of the world in this period is a
(Paris: Editions Al Dante, 2002), 7· theme in many of the essays collected in Hyde's On
12. Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, ReVisao the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg.
de Sousandrade, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Nova 22. This remark from a biographical sketch of
Fronteira, 1982), 26-43. the 1980s is quoted in A. S. Bessa's introduction
13. Fernando Alegria, Walt Whitman en to Galaxias: http://www.ubu.com/ethno/poems/
Hispanoamerica (Mexico City: n.p., 1954); Gwen decampos_galaxias.html.
Kirkpatrick, The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo: 23. Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 231-32.
Lugones, Herrera y Reissig, and the Voices of 24. )ames Scully, "A Passion in Search of Two
Modern Spanish American Poetry (Berkeley and Boards," in On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, ed.
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989); Hyde, 186-87. Scully refers to "Siesta in Xbalba,"
Cathy L. )rade, Modernismo, Modernity and the one of the earliest poems to adopt this mode.
Development of Spanish American Literature 25. Molesworth, The Fierce Embrace, 38.
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). 26. See the later poems cited by Marjorie Perloff
14. Oswald de Andrade, "Manifesto of in Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and
Paul-Brasil Poetry," trans. Stella M de Sa Rego, Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston: Northwestern
Latin American Literary Review 27 (1986): 185. University Press, 1990), 215.
Andrade's manifesti are collected in Do Pau-Brasil 27. Joseph Lease, "My Allen Ginsberg," Poetry
a Antropofagia e as Utopias, in trod. Benedito Flash 296-97 (Winter-Spring 2006): 12.
Nunes, vol. 6 of Obras completas, 11 vols. (Rio de 28. Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 249.
Janeiro: Civiliza~ao Brasileira, 1970-74). 29. Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 406-07.
15. Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (New York: New 30. Charles Olson, "Projective Verse," Selected
Directions, 1957), 27. Writings, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New
16. Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, and Directions, 1966), 15-26; Human Universe and
Haroldo de Campos, Teo ria da Poesia Con creta: Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: The
Textos Criticos e Manifestos 1950-1960, 3rd ed. (Sao Auerhahn Society, 1965); Eugen Gomringer, Die
Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987), 156-58. See Charles A. Konstellationen I Les Constellations! The constella-
Perrone, Seven Faces: Brazilian Poetry Since tions/ Las constelaciones (Frauenfeld, Switzerland:
Modernism (Durham: Duke University Press, Eugen Gomringer Press, 1962).
1996), 48. Perrone's chapter (25-66) is the definitive 31. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (1957;
account in English of the Noigandres project, as London: Routledge, 2002), 16-17.
Gonzalo Aguilar, Poesia concreta brasi/eiia: Las 32. Robert Kaufman, "Lyric's Constellation,
vanguardias en Ia encrucijada modernista Poetry's Radical Privilege," Modernist Cultures 1
(Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo, 2003) is in (2006): 209-34·
Spanish. 33· Olson, Human Universe, 4.
17. As in "A Temperatura Informacional do 34. Haroldo de Campos, Ga/axias (Sao Paulo:
Texto," in Campos et al., Teo ria da Poesia Editora Ex Libris, 1984), n.p. The translation is
Concreta, 138-49. mine. In the version of"e come~o aqui" published
18. On Ginsberg's poetics, see Charles Moles- in Campos' Xadrez de Estre/as: Percurso Textual
worth, The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contempo- 1949-1974 (Sao Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1976),
rary American Poetry (Columbia: University of 200, this poem like the others in the series is
Missouri Press, 1979), 37-60. printed in roman rather than italic type. In the
 632 edition of Ga/axias from which I quote, "e come~o 36. Campos, Xadrez de Estrelas, 134.
aqui" is the only poem in italic. 37. jose Carlos Marhitegui, "El anti-soneto,"

SECTION 10 35. Campos, Galaxias, n.p. The translation by A. Amauta 17 (September 1928); rpt. in Martin Adan,
S. Bessa appears in Novas: The Writings of Haralda Obra Poetica 1928-1971 (Lima: Instituto Nacional
COMPARATIVE lYRIC
de Campos, ed. and trans. Bessa and Odile de Cultura, 1971), 237-39. I quote from the essay in
Cisneros (Evanston: Northwestern University "New World Studies and the Limits of National
Press, 2006), 124. It also figures in Bessa's Literatures," in Poetry and Pedagogy: The
indispensable essay on Galaxias. Further Challenge of the Contemporary, ed. joan Retallack
scholarship on the collection and the rest of and juliana Spahr (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
Campos' poetry and criticism appears in Haralda 2006), 89-90.
de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete 38. Haroldo de Campos, "The Rule of Anthro-
Poet, ed. K. David jackson (Oxford: Centre for pophagy: Europe Under the Sign of Devoration,"
Brazilian Studies, zoos). In a review of that title, in Latin American Literary Review 14, no. 27 (1986):
the Luso-Brazilian Review 43 (2006): 133-36, 42-60.
Charles Perrone summarizes the plans for several 39. Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 240-41.
volumes in tribute to Campos.

10.5 Love in the Necropolis (2003)

DAVID DAMROSCH

In the second year of the reign of Ramses V, in the third month of the inundation season, a
scribe in Thebes made a collection ofliterary texts: a long, comic story of intrigue among the
gods; some hymns; an encomium to the king. "The Contendings of Horus and Seth," as we
now call the story, took up most of the front side (the recto) of the scribe's papyrus roll; with
a little space left at the end, he decided to include some short love poems, before turning
over to the verso to write the encomium and the hymns. The lyrics appear under the head-
ing "The Sweet Sayings Found in a Scroll Composed by the Scribe of the Necropolis, Nakht-
Sobek." In W. K. Simpson's vivid translation the shortest of these lyrics goes as follows:

Why need you hold converse with your heart?

To embrace her is all my desire.
As Amun lives, I come to you,
my loincloth on my shoulder.

(The Literature of Ancient Egypt, 324)

One of the oldest lyrics to have survived anywhere in the world, this poem addresses us
with a powerful immediacy. In its brevity and simplicity, it stands as a kind of minimum
of literary expression, and I will use it as a testing ground to explore the irreducible prob-
lems that translation always faces, however simple the text in question, however uncompli-
cated the history of its transmission and reception. In this respect too, this poem presents
as simple a case as we could readily find. Whereas many works of world literature come to
us already shaped by complex dynamics of transmission, often involving vexed relations
between the originating culture and our own, this text has almost no history at all inter- 633
vening between us and the moment of its inscription in u6o B.C.E. Produced for private
enjoyment, the papyrus passed into other hands; inspired by the poems on the recto, an- 10.5
other writer added a more extensive collection oflove poems on the verso, under the head- DAVID DAM RoscH

ing "The Songs of Extreme Happiness." Soon, though, the papyrus fell out of the sphere of
literary usage. The demand for papyrus far outstripped supply in the Ramesside period,
and within a few years the blank pages remaining at the end of the verso were being used,
and reused, for business memoranda: recording now the sale of a bull, now the gift of a box
to the general of the War Office. Buried in some cache of administrative records, the papy-
rus vanished for three thousand years. Discovered by one of the peasants who conducted
their own private, for-profit excavations in the Theban necropolis in competition with
government-sanctioned university digs, this papyrus was acquired in the late 1920s by A.
Chester Beatty, a wealthy American mining engineer who had settled in England and was
devoting himself to collecting all sorts of neglected artifacts: Chinese snuff boxes and
rhinoceros-horn cups, medieval woodblock prints, and ancient religious manuscripts from
around the world. He happened upon "Papyrus Chester Beatty," as it became known, while
wintering in Cairo for his health. Beatty underwrote its publication by Oxford University
Press in 1931, in a beautiful folio edition, complete with transcriptions, dozens of photo-
graphic plates, and a detailed analysis by a leading Egyptologist of the day, A. H. Gardiner
(later Sir Alan, himself a man of extensive means), under the title The Library of A. Chester
Beatty: Description of Hieratic Papyrus with Mythological Story, Love-Songs, and Other Mis-
cellaneous Texts, by Alan H. Gardiner, F. B.A.
The poems thus come to us unencumbered by any transmission history whatever from
the twelfth century B.C.E. to the early twentieth century C. E., when the lyrics in this papy-
rus were quickly seen, as Gardiner says in his introduction, to be "of inestimable value, not
merely for archaeology, but still more for the world-history of poetry and of lyric expres-
sion" (27). And yet, as Gardiner and subsequent translators have tried to give the poems
their rightful place in world literature, they have had to struggle with surprisingly intrac-
table problems, even in the case of the simple quatrain quoted above-problems of deci-
pherment, of grammar, of vocabulary, and of cultural framing. Attending to these prob-
lems can show us much about how the choices that have to be made as a work is brought
from its original time and place into our own world.
Gardiner's initial publication itself oscillates between two quite different frames of
reference for the poems: historical and transcendent. With extensive philological notes,
his edition presents the papyrus as a document ofRamesside history and culture ("Where
else have we similar records of the conveyance of foreign news by a system of relays?"
[29]), and he waxes eloquent over orthography: "An astonishing and, so far as I know,
unparalleled ligature found in the Encomium, but not on the recto, is that for J@ (verso B
23.26)" (5). Yet at the same time this lavish edition is an aesthetic object in its own right:
an oversize folio with three-inch margins, amply illustrated, and with elegant transcrip-
tions employing the delicate hieroglyphic font that Gardiner's father had commissioned
for him several years earlier. ("It is to my Father that I owe all my leisure and opportuni-
ties for research," Gardiner gratefully noted in the preface to his great Egyptian Grammar
of 1926, "and it is he who now, more than thirty years later, has defrayed the cost of my
new hieroglyphic font.")
At once a paleographer and aesthete, Gardiner judiciously assesses the scribe's calli-
graphic style: "The hand is neither very regular nor yet very tidy, but it possesses plenty of
character and is not without a certain beauty of its own." He praises "the spirited ll, and
 634 fo with the foremost arm ending in a daring flourish," and urbanely mentions "the mis-
shapen ~" as one of the scribe's characteristic usages (5). He prefers, however, to em-
SecTION 10 phasize the physical at the level of form rather than of content. Discussing the anatomy of
CoMPARATIVE LYRIC the beloved's body in one poem ("Long of neck and radiant of nipple ... I Drooping of
buttocks, firm-girt in her midst"), he comments that "here already we mark how purely
physical was the gentle passion as felt by these ancient Orientals" (28). Turning quickly
from this ancient, oriental physicality, he stresses that "apart from this, the emotions ex-
pressed differ in no wise from those of lovers of all ages and climes." The poems achieve
their inestimable value for world poetry by their universality-a universality that proves
to tally closely with their similarity to modern European verse: one poem closes "with
some verses which are Heine pure and simple" (he now quotes Heine, in German, [28]);
another expresses "a thought not unlike one found upon the lips of Romeo" (whom he
also quotes [29]).
It is not an easy matter, though, to translate the poems safely into the Euro-
universal world where Gardiner wishes to see them enshrined, even though the papy-
rus itself has made it to twentieth-century England almost intact, apart from the tear-
ing off of one or more initial pages "by the rapacious and destructive hands of the
fellaheen" (1). The balance of the papyrus is in good condition, and yet Gardiner still
faces severe challenges in getting from the physical marks on the page to the univer-
sality of an achieved work of art. "The text is evidently corrupt," the first two poems
"are so obscure as to be almost untranslatable," while "Stanza the fifth is Stygian dark-
ness" (29). Even the quatrain I am examining here, free of any lacunae or even of any
unknown words, contains riddles of orthography and grammar that make it difficult
to decide even so basic an issue as who is supposed to be speaking in the poem: A
man? A woman? A man and his friend? The man's friend only? The friend and the
woman? All of these options have been tried by Gardiner and his successors, with no
consensus yet in sight.
Gardiner himself took the speaker to be a woman, translating the poem as follows:
When thou speakest with thy heart,
Prithee after her, that I may embrace her;
By Amun, it is I who come to thee,
My tunic upon by arm.
(37)

He glosses the poem as signifying that "the maiden tells her lover that pursuit is superflu-
ous, she is a willing quarry" (37 n. 3). Gardiner, however, produced this lucid rendering at
the cost of suppressing the grammatical structure of the first two lines. The opening
phrase, ir.n djed-k, is a simple interrogative and would normally be translated "Why do
you speak?" rather than "When you speak." The second line, moreover, is an infinitive
phrase rather than a command: "To embrace her is all my desire," rather than "Prithee
after her." Just how these lines work together is unclear: Egyptian writing was unpunctu-
ated, and the four lines could represent one, two, or three sentences. Further, as hiero-
glyphs record consonants and semivowels but not vowels proper, it can often be difficult
to say just which form of a verb is being used and which are dependent rather than inde-
pendent clauses. Sorting these questions out as best they can, the two most scholarly
translators of more recent years, W. K. Simpson of Yale and Miriam Lichtheim of the
University of California, have both opted for a tripartite rendering, consisting of a ques-
tion, a reply or exhortation, and an announcement of action. In Lichtheim's version, this
becomes:
 Why do you argue with your heart? 635
Go after her, embrace her!
As Amun lives, I come to you, 10.5
My cloak over my arm. DAVID DAM ROSCH

(Ancient Egyptian Literature, 2:188)

Like all translations-like all reading-Lichtheim's version is informed by context. Her

translation recalls other Egyptian poems in which a hesitating young lover is offered ad-
vice by a third party. Papyrus Chester Beatty itself contains several such poems. In one
cycle of three poems, the speaker might be either the man's friend or a go-between sent by
the woman herself:

Please come quick to the lady love

like a king's agent
whose master is impatient
for his letters
and desires to hear them.

Before you have kissed your hand four times,

you shall have reached her hideaway
as you chase the lady love.
For it is the Golden Goddess
Who has set her aside for you, friend.
(Simpson, 321-23)

The set of seven poems that includes our verse begins with two poems that are both spoken
by a friend, in this instance a none-too-scrupulous male confidant of the lover himself:

Supply her with song and dance,

wine and ale are her desire,
confuse her wits,
and gain her this night.
She'll tell you:
put me in your arms;
when day breaks
let's start again.
(Simpson, 323)

Lichtheim extends this context to our quatrain, construing it as a miniature dialogue in

which the friend chides the lover for his hesitation and urges him on; the lover fortifies
himself with a vow to Amun and goes in to the woman.
So far, so good: Lichtheim has solved the grammatical problem of the first line. Yet
she has retained Gardiner's insertion of an imperative mode into the second line, actually
breaking the line into two separate commands ("Go after her, embrace her!") though
there is only one verb in the original. Further, the wider context tends to argue against a
rapid change of speakers in mid verse: no surviving Egyptian poem makes such a change.
Lichtheim may have created a dialogue where none existed to begin with.
Admittedly, a negative argument from context can only be made very tentatively, given
the small number of poems to have survived from ancient Egypt: only four dozen poems
have come down to us more or less intact, and it would only take a further discovery to
extend the range of known possibility in any number of ways. If one particular set of three
 636 poems had never been found, for example, we would have observed that every extant Egyp-
tian poem is spoken by a man, a woman, or both, and we might naturally assume this to
SECTION 10 have always been the case. A papyrus now preserved in Turin, however, has a cycle of three
CoMPARATIVE LYRic poems whose speakers are trees, which testify to the charms of the lovers who meet beneath
their branches (Simpson, 312-15).
Tentative though it is, such contextual evidence as we have at least favors the idea of a
single speaker, or rather, a single singer, as these poems were composed as song lyrics. Par-
ticularly if we remove the implausible imperative introduced by Gardiner and Lichtheim,
our quatrain can readily be translated as involving a single speaker. This is the view taken
by Simpson in the translation with which I began, and he makes his view of the speaker's
gender clear by his choice of garment:

Why need you hold converse with your heart?

To embrace her is all my desire.
As Amun lives, I come to you,
my loincloth on my shoulder.
(324)

Simpson's rendering draws on a wider context-including other love poems but also other
texts-in which a person debates an issue with his heart or spirit before coming to a deci-
sion. The most extended Egyptian use of this theme is found in a haunting twelfth-dynasty
text known as "The Dispute between a Man and his Ba" (Lichtheim, 1:163-69; Simpson,
201-9). "To whom shall I speak today?" the speaker asks. "Faces are blank,/Everyone turns
his face from his brothers." He despairs of life, but his own spirit replies to him ("Are you
not a man? Are you not alive?"), urging him not to commit suicide; internal debate here car-
ries the weight given to Job's argument with his three friends in the Book of Job. A typical
instance of internal dialogue in love poetry occurs in Papyrus Harris 500, from Memphis:

I say to my heart within me a prayer:

if far away from me is my lover tonight,
then I am like someone already in the grave.
Are you not indeed well-being and life?
Joy has come to me through your well-being,
my heart seeks you out.
(Simpson, 304)

Simpson's version of our quatrain is attractive, works grammatically, and fits plausi-
bly within the context of surviving Egyptian poetry. On the other hand, it is perfectly
plausible to build upon Gardiner's original assumption that the speaker is the beloved
woman rather than the man, if we correct his verbs but follow his lead in taking the sec-
ond line as the woman's paraphrase of what she thinks her lover is saying as he hesitates
in coming to her. Several other extant poems have a speaker reporting another's speech,
as in the following example, which is probably the world's oldest surviving aubade, a
poem in which lovers complain at the rising of the sun. Here the woman reports two dif-
ferent speeches in a single verse:

The voice of the dove is calling,

it says: "It's day! Where are you?"
0 bird, stop scolding me!
I found my lover on his bed,
my heart was overjoyed.
 Each said, "I shall not leave you, 637
my hand is your hand;
you and I shall wander 10.5
in all the places fair." DAVID DAMROSCH

He makes the foremost of women,

he does not aggrieve my heart.
(Lichtheim, 2:190-91)

The woman in our quatrain could similarly be quoting another's speech, in her case mocking
her lover's internal debates as she takes direct action and approaches him. This reading allows
us to give, as Gardiner already did, full force to the emphatic phrasing "it is I who come to
you," for which the original employs the independent pronoun inek, a stronger statement than
a simple "I could" would be. Such a reading would assort well with other poems in which a
woman speaker impulsively rushes to her beloved without pausing to finish dressing:

My heart remembers well your love.

One half of my temple was combed,
I came rushing to see you,
and I forgot my hair.
(Simpson, 305)

An example from Papyrus Chester Beatty itself, featuring another conversation with
one's heart:

My heart flutters hastily

when I think of my love of you;
it lets me not act sensibly,
it leaps from its place.
It lets me not put on a dress,
nor wrap my scarf around me;
I put no paint upon my eyes,
I'm not even anointed.
"Don't wait, go there," says it to me,
as often as I think of him.
My heart, don't act so stupidly,
why do you play the fool?
(Lichtheim, 2:183-84)

With such a context in mind, we can render our quatrain entirely within the woman's
voice, using reported speech to avoid violating any grammatical norms:

Why do you dispute with your heart-

"To embrace her is all my desire"?
As Amun lives, it is I who come to you,
my clothing on my arm.

Very well. It appears that two quite different options work grammatically and make sense
within the context of the surviving corpus of Egyptian poetry: the poem records either a
man's internal debate and resolution or a woman's decisive action. Is there any way to
decide between these renderings?
In principle, the question of gender should be readily answered by the text itself, since
the pronouns "I" and "my" are written with the hieroglyph of a seated man or a seated
 638
~=~O--Il 'lc::::.c:::-~~\\.:=>1 ~__.D@~o\\ Oc::- e
ir-m djed-ki r m-ha't ib-k
SECTION 10
why do you speak words in front of your heart
COMPARATIVE LYRIC

1\P~1 Po _'lJ LJ- ~~u ro •

m-sa' st n-i kniw st
satiety it is tome embracing her
Hi ~c=:l- ~ ~oc::-l1 ./';@h-e::-
•
wa'h Imn inek iw n-k
endures Amun it is I who come to you
LJ_.lji_.llol 4 ~ •
iw ta-y mss hr ka'ht-i
there is my tunic on myshoulder/arm

woman, depending on the gender in question. Looking at the text, this proves to be the
case, as can be seen in Gardiner's hieroglyphic transcription: 1
The problem here is that the signs are inconsistent: "It is I who come to you" in the
third line is written with a seated woman as the "I," but then in the next line, "my" tunic
has a man as its determinative. The photographic plate of the original indicates that Gar-
diner correctly transcribed these signs. So how should we resolve this inconsistency?
One way or another, the scribe has made a slip of the brush. Egyptian scribes were
notoriously casual in their uses of pronouns, and furthermore in hieratic scripts the seated
man and the seated woman are often much less distinct than they appear in their full-
dress hieroglyphic form. This scribe, as it happens, draws them almost identically: in each
case the figure is shown as a single oval shape with a curving stroke at the bottom to indi-
cate the leg and foot. A seated woman differs, in his orthography, only by having an added
stroke at the top to indicate her headdress. This stroke is clearly present in the 'T' of line
three, but just as clearly absent in the "my" of "my tunic." In the case of the final "my" of
"my shoulder," there is an ambiguous stroke that may well be the headdress but might also
simply be part of the next sign over.
Ordinarily, the speaker's clothing would resolve this matter, as most Egyptian gar-
ments were worn only by one sex or the other. Unfortunately, it so happens that the mss, a
kind of tunic, is the one garment that was commonly worn by both sexes. 2 This variability
hasn't stopped the poem's translators from making a more specific choice of garment, al-
ways one that reinforces their interpretation of the speaker's gender. Thus Simpson makes
the mss a man's loincloth, while another translator, Barbara Fowler, makes the speaker a
woman and the garment a dress:
While you argued with your heart-
"Take her in your embrace"-
by Amon, I came to you,
My dress still disarranged.
(Love Lyrics of Ancient Egypt, 71)

Our mistake, however, may lie in assuming that we need to make a definite choice. The
scribe's casual alternation of genders may reflect an openness in the poem's original us-
age. The Egyptian lyrics we have appear to have been composed as songs, and the singer's
gender is often left unspecified. Perhaps we need to think of this poem less in a context of
Heine and Shakespeare and more in a context of Willie Nelson and Linda Ronstadt. The 639
understood gender would then change simply according to who is singing the song at a
given time. The best translation could be on that leaves the option open, freeing us to 10.5
envision the scene whichever way our inclinations lead us at a given time. DAVID DAM RoscH

A harder problem is actually posed by the term mss itself, as we have no equivalent
garment. Janssen says that a comparable item is still in use in some Arab countries and
proposes that "the modern word ghalabiyah is the best translation" (Commodity Prices,
260), yet this solution works only for speakers of Arabic and would produce an oddly eth-
nographic effect if used in an English translation. "Tunic" has an all too Roman sound to
it, while a more neutral term like "garment" lacks the vivid specificity of a particular item
of clothing. Lichtheim's "my cloak over my arm" fails even to suggest a state of undress,
giving more the impression of a visit to the dry cleaner. From this point of view, Simpson's
"loincloth," thought strictly speaking inaccurate ("loincloth" is da'iw, not mss), is an effec-
tive choice, giving the line a strong erotic charge while also preserving a sense of cultural
distance.
There are limits to the extent to which a translation can or even should attempt to
convey the full cultural specificity of the original, though one strand of translation the-
ory has always dreamed of a mystical mirroring process that would somehow bring the
original work, in entire, into the translation. This utopian view was eloquently expressed
by Walter Benjamin in "The Task of the Translator":
A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but
allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the
original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the
syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the transla-
tor. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the
arcade. (79)

Benjamin himself was wise enough not to attempt to actually produce such a union of
original and translation, though he ends his essay by invoking interlinear Bible transla-
tions as a radical alternative to always-incomplete adaptive translations. Others, however,
have attempted literalistic translations that convey qualities of the original text so faith-
fully that they are hardly readable at all. At the extreme, this approach leads to Nabokov's
awkwardly phrased and monumentally annotated translation of Pushkin's Eugene One-
gin, which resolutely attempts to reproduce Russian grammatical effects and to convey all
the nuances that each word would have in the original. As he wrote while working on the
project, "I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrap-
ers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between
commentary and eternity" ("Problems of Translation," 83).
In Nabokov's Onegin, the actual poem takes up only one-seventh of the edition's
fourteen hundred pages. It was published in a beautiful two-volume edition in Prince-
ton's Bollingen Series, but even Princeton hesitated to impose the full weight of Nabo-
kov's erudition on the reader; the poem appears in a slender first volume, while Nabokov's
notes (actually the best part of his edition) are relegated to the massive volume 2. Yet
Nabokov himself could translate works very differently when he was thinking in terms of
world literature rather than in terms of re-creating the vanished Russia of his past: in his
wonderfully inventive 1923 Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland, he eschewed foot-
notes and gave himself over to the delights of creating Russian equivalents for Carroll's
seemingly untranslatable chains of puns. Thus, when the Mock Turtle describes his stud-
ies in "reeling and writhing," Nabokov has him study chesat' i pitat' (combing and feed-
 640 in g) instead of chitat' i pisat' (reading and writing). 3 The Mock Turtle himself becomes
"Chepupakha," an elegant combination of chepukha (nonsense) and cherepakha (tor-
SECTION 10 toise). In such puns Nabokov made no effort to have his translation convey the flavor of
CoMPARATIVE LYRic life-or of soup-in Victorian England, but sought instead to see Carroll's uncanny won-
derland through a Russian lens.
Already foreshadowing the fractured universes of novels like Pale Fire and Ada,
Nabokov's translation hovers between Russian and English worlds. Later in this scene, for
instance, he slyly inserts a reference to the text's original language: when the Mock Turtle
regrets not having taken "Laughing and Grief" with the classics instructor, Nabokov bor-
rows a pun from the Venerable Bede, and has him sigh over never having studied Angel'skii
yazik, "the Angels' language," instead of "the English language," Angliiskii yazik (86). A
striking transposition: living in exile in Berlin at the time he made this translation from
his future literary language back into his lost native tongue, Nabokov has the Mock Turtle
unwittingly reflect an exile's anxiety, regretting that he cannot understand the angelic
analog of the language from which he has himself been translated. Neither a mere lin-
guistic compromise nor an arbitrary transposition, this moment in the text can stand as
an emblem for the way in which sensitive readers bring a work variously to life through
personal associations: English and Russian are for Nabokov the true languages of laugh-
ing and grief.
The Egyptian poem can be presented as a document of Ramesside culture, complete
with pyramids of footnotes, as in Gardiner's original edition, and yet for the nonspecial-
ist reader the supplying of the full wealth of relevant information would entail a loss of
primary experience. By this I don't at all mean that a translation should wrench the poem
outright into our own world and our own terms; rather, I mean that the original context
should not be made to overpower us, interfering with our engagement with the fictive
world the poem creates for us to enter. To appreciate the Egyptian poem, it is important
to know that the speaker is undressing, but it doesn't greatly matter just what garment the
speaker is stripping off. The garment: something off-white, made of cotton or linen, its
actual shape and stitching unspecified. It would add little to our appreciation of the poem
to have a pocket insert in our volume with a fabric sample. Indeed, loading us up with
much information of this sort would make it hard to experience the poem as literature,
turning it instead into an object of study: just what we want if we're writing a book on
Ramesside Commodity Prices, but not what we need to enjoy the poem as such.
Our understanding of the poem can, of course, be further enriched by more contex-
tual knowledge, and anyone who falls in love with a body of work from another time or
place will wish to learn more about the works' context. Some literary works, indeed, may
be so closely dependent on detailed, culture-specific knowledge that they can only be
meaningful to members of the originating culture or to specialists in that culture; these
are works that remain within the sphere of national literature and never achieve an effec-
tive life in world literature. Yet many works, like our present quatrain, already begin to
work their magic before all their references are understood and all their cultural assump-
tions are elucidated. Like the quatrain as a whole, its individual elements float between
Nakht-Sobek's world and our own: however mss may be translated, most modern readers
will be unable to visualize the ancient garment in all its authentic particularity. Yet as
long as the translation doesn't impose a wholesale modernization, we won't assimilate the
mss directly to our contemporary experience; we will remain aware that we're reading an
ancient poem. Whatever we think a mss is, we won't envision it as a Gortex windbreaker,
though this might be the modern equivalent of the original item. All the same, we can
never hold the poem entirely away from our own experience, nor should we. As we read,
we triangulate not only between ancient and modern worlds but also between general 641
and personal meanings: however rnss is translated, different readers will visualize it very
differently, and this variability helps the poem to resonate with memories from the read- 10.5
er's OWn life. DAVID DAM ROSCH

NOTES

1. The papyrus is actually written in cursive Brill, 1975). Appropriately for our quatrain,
"hieratic," an abbreviated, rapidly written script that Janssen notes that it was "worn mostly in the
employs many simplifications of characters. Intensive evenings as a protection against the cold."
study of a given scribe's style is needed to make out This would suggest that rather than leaving
many readings in hieratic texts, and Egyptologists home naked, the speaker has entered his/her
usually rely on hieroglyphic transcriptions made by beloved's house at night, undressing while
the person who publishes the text. Gardiner's entering the bedroom. Several poems show the
fascination with our scribe's orthography is based speaker making a surprise visit to the beloved's
on many hours of studying his style. home.
2. A detailed discussion of the mss is found in 3. Lewis Carroll, AHR Bb cTpaHB 'lyD.eco: the
J. J. Janssen, Commodity Prices from the Nabokov Russian translation of Lewis Carroll's
Rammesid Period: An Economic Study of the Alice in Wonderland, Tr. "V. Sirin" (Vladimir
Village of Necropolis Workmen at Thebes (Leiden: Nabokov). 1923. Repr. New York: Dover, 1976.
CONTRIBUTORS

M. H. ABRAMS is known primarily for his work in British Romanticism and for his edi-
tion of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. His books include The Mirror and the
Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953), Natural Supernaturalism: Tradi-
tion and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1973), and The Correspondent Breeze: Essays
on English Romanticism (1984). He is Professor Emeritus at Cornell University.

THEODOR W. ADORNO (1903-1969) was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of

critical theory and author of The Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer, 1944),
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), Notes to Literature (1958), and Aes-
thetic Theory (1970), among many other books and essays.

GIORGIO AGAMBEN is an Italian continental philosopher who teaches at the Universita

IUAV di Venezia, the College Internationale de Philosophie in Paris, and the European
Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. His books include Stanzas: Word and Phantasm
in Western Culture (1992), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), The End of the
Poem: Studies in Poetics (1999), and State of Exception (2005).

CHARLES ALTIERI is the Rachel Stageberg Anderson Chair in the Department of English
at the University of California, Berkeley. His works include Self and Sensibility in Contem-
porary American Poetry (1984), Canons and Consequences (1990), The Particulars of Rap-
ture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (2003), and The Art of Modern American Poetry (2005).

MIKHAIL BAKHTIN (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, and linguist.
His works include The Dialogic Imagination (1930; 1981), Rabelais and His World (1941-
1965; 1993), Problems of Dostoevksy's Poetics (1984), and Speech Genres and Other Late Es-
says (1986).

MONROE BEARDSLEY (1915-1985) is best known for his work in aesthetics. His philo-
sophical works include Aesthetics (1958), Philosophical Thinking (1965), and Thinking
Straight (1975). With W. K. Wimsatt, he published The Verba/Icon (1954).

WALTER BEN JAM IN (1892-1940) was a German literary theorist, philosopher, and social
critic associated with the Frankfurt School. His works include The Origin of German
 644 Tragic Drama (1928), and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility (1936).
His most important work was an unfinished project entitled Passagenwerk, or the Ar-
CoNTRIBUToRs cades Project, a collection of writings on city life in Paris in the nineteenth century.

HAROLD BLOOM is the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. His books on
poetry include Shelley's Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), The Anxiety
of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), Agon: Towards a Theory of Revision (1982),
Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belieffrom the Bible to the Present (1989), and How to
Read and Why (2ooo).

CLEANTH BROOKS (1906-1994) was the Gray Professor of Rhetoric at Yale University
and a central figure in the formation of American New Criticism. His books include Un-
derstanding Poetry (1938), Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), The Well- Wrought Urn:
Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947), and The Language of the American South (1985).

REUBEN BROWER (1908-1970) was an influential late New Critic who taught at Amherst
College, and at Harvard University as Cabot Professor of English Literature. His books in-
clude The Fields of Light: An Experiment in Critical Reading (1951) and The Poetry of Robert
Frost (1963), and he edited Forms of Lyric (1970).

RALPH COHEN is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus at UniversityofVirginia and

currently Provost Distinguished Professor at James Madison University and founding
editor of New Literary History: A journal of Theory and Interpretation. In the field of po-
etics he has published The Art of Discrimination (1964) and numerous essays on genre
theory.

JoNATHAN CULLER succeeded M. H. Abrams as Class of1916 Professor of English and

Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of many books on literary
theory and criticism, including Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the
Study of Literature (1982) and On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structural-
ism (1983). He is completing a book entitled Theory of the Lyric.

DAVID DAM ROSCH is Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and edi-
tor of the Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004), Teaching World Literature (2009),
and the Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009). He is also the author of
What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great
Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2008).

PAUL DE MAN (1919-1983) was Sterling Professor of Humanities in the Department of

Comparative Literature at Yale University. His works include Allegories of Reading (1979),
Blindness and Insight (1983), The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984), and The Resistance to
Theory (1986).

JACQUES DERRIDA (1930-2004) was a French philosopher associated with poststructur-

alism and what came to be known as deconstruction. He was the director of studies at the
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In the United States, he was visiting
professor at several universities and Professor of Humanities at University of California,
Irvine from 1986 to 2004. His books include Of Grammatology (1976), Writing and Differ-
ence (1978), Dissemination (1981), Margins of Philosophy (1982), The Post Card (1987), Acts of
Literature (1992), and many others.

HEATHER DuBROW is John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in the Poetic Imagination at Fordham
University and the author of six scholarly books, most recently The Challenges of Or-
pheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (zooS), an edition of As You Like It, and 645
numerous essays on lyric poetry, pedagogy, and other subjects. A collection of her own
poetry, Forms and Hollows, has been published by Cherry Grove Collections. She is also CoNTRIBUToRs

the director of the Poets Out Loud reading series at Fordham.

CRAIG DwoRKIN is the author of Reading the Illegible (zoo3) and There is No Medium
(z013) and the editor of five volumes, including The Consequence ofInnovation: 21st-Century
Poetics (zooS) and, with Marjorie Perloff, The Sound of Poetry I The Poetry of Sound (zoo9).
He teaches at the University of Utah where he curates the Eclipse archive http://english.utah
.edu/eclipse.

T. S. ELIOT (1SSS-1965) was a poet, literary critic, and playwright. His works of criticism
include The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), The Three Voices of Poetry (1954),
and On Poetry and Poets (1957).

STANLEY FISH is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and Professor

of Law at Florida International University as well as Dean Emeritus of the College of Lib-
eral Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His publications in the field
of poetics include Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost" (1967), Self-Consuming
Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (197z), Is There a Text in this
Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (19So), and most recently, Versions of
Antihumanism: Milton and Others (zo1z).

NORTHROP FRYE (191z-1991) was a Canadian literary critic and influential literary theo-
rist who taught at the University of Toronto. In developing a theory of archetypes as con-
ceptual framework for the study of literature, he published many books, including Anat-
omy of Criticism (1957), Fables of Identity (1963), The Secular Scripture (1976), The Great
Code (19Sz), and Words with Power (1990).

GERARD GENETTE is a French literary theorist and professor of French literature at the
Sorbonne in Paris. He is associated with the structuralist movement, and co-founder with
Tzvetan Todorov of the journal Poetique. Among his works translated into English are
Narrative Discourse (trans. 19So), The Architext (trans. 199z), Mimologics (trans. 1995), Pa-
limpsests (trans. 1997), and Paratexts (trans. 1997).

SANDRA M. GILBERT, Professor Emerita of English at the University of California,

Davis, is an influential critic and poet who has published widely in the fields of feminist
literary criticism and theory. In addition to publishing her own poetry and editing antholo-
gies dedicated to women poets, she is well known for her critical collaboration with Susan
Gubar, with whom she co-authored Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and a critical trilogy, No
Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (19SS-94).

STATHIS GouRGOURIS is Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature

and Society and Director of the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society at Co-
lumbia University. He is the author of Dream Nation (1996) and Does Literature Think?
(zoo3) and editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (zow) and Lessons in Secular Criticism
(zo13). He is currently completing two additional works of secular criticism, The Perils of
the One and Nothing Sacred.

RoLAND GREENE is the author of Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shake-
speare and Cervantes (zo13), Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial
Americas (1999), and Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Se-
quence (1991). He served as editor-in-chief of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclo-
 646 pedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012) and is the founder and co-chair of the Workshop in
Poetics at Stanford University, where he is Mark Pigott OBE Professor in the School of
CoNTRIBUToRs Humanities and Sciences.

ALLEN GROSSMAN is an American poet and critic who taught poetry and poetics as An-
drew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. His publi-
cations include Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats (1969), The Sighted Singer (1992), The
Long Schoolroom (1997), and numerous prize-winning volumes of poetry.

SuSAN GuBAR is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Indiana University. Together with

Sandra Gilbert she published The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and a critical trilogy entitled
No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1988-94) and co-
edited the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Her other publications include
Racechanges (1997), Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (2ooo), and Poetry
after Auschwitz (2003).

MARTIN HEIDEGGER (1889-1976) was a German philosopher who drew on the tradition
of hermeneutics and phenomenology to explore the question of Being. His publications
include Being and Time (1923), Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1927), Identity and
Difference (1955-57), On the Way to Language (1959) and various essays on poetry and
aesthetics.

VIRGINIA JACKSON is UCI Chair in Rhetoric in the Department of English at the Univer-
sity of California, Irvine, where she runs the PoeticslhistoryiTheory@uci series. She is the
author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005) and Before Modernism (2014).

RoMAN JAKOBSON (1896-1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist who taught at
Harvard University after escaping from Prague during World War II. He is a pivotal figure
in the development and dissemination of structuralism. His major publications include
Questions de Poetique (1973), Six Lectures of Sound and Meaning (1978), The Framework of
Language (1980) and Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time (1985).

FREDRIC JAMESON is William A. Lane Professor of Literature at Duke University and an

American literary critic specializing in Marxist political theory. His publications include
Marxism and Form (1971), The Prison-House of Language (1972), The Political Unconscious
(1981), Postmodernism: The Cultural Capital of Late Modernism (1991), and A Singular Mo-
dernity (2002).

SIMON JARVIS is the Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of
Cambridge. His publications include Wordsworth's Philosophic Song (2007), many essays
on the poetics of verse and on philosophical aesthetics, and several volumes of poetry.

BARBARA JOHNSON (1947-2009) was professor of English and Comparative Literature at

Harvard University. Her publications include The Critical Difference (1980), A World of
Difference (1989), The Wake of Deconstruction (1994), Mother Tongues (2003), and Persons
and Things (2008).

W. R. JoHNSON is John Matthews Manly Professor of Classics and Comparative Litera-

ture, University of Chicago, Emeritus. His recent books include Lucretius and the Modern
World (2ooo) and A Latin Lover in Ancient Rome: Readings in Propertius and His Genre.

PHI LIPPE LACOUE-LABARTHE (1940-2007) was a French philosopher and literary critic
also known for his translations of Benjamin, Celan, Heidegger, Holderlin, and Nietzsche.
His books include The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanti-
cism (with Jean-Luc Nancy), The Subject of Philosophy, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, 647
Politics, and Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry.
CONTRIBUTORS
SETH LERER is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Dean of Arts and Humanities
at the University of California at San Diego. He was awarded the Harry Levin Prize of the
American Comparative Literature Association for Error and the Academic Self (2002). His
Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter (2oo8) won the Na-
tional Book Critics Circle Award and the Truman Capote Prize in Literary Criticism.

DREW MILNE is a contemporary British poet and scholar who teaches at Cambridge
University. He has edited Modern Critical Thought (2003) and, with Terry Eagleton,
Marxist Literary Theory (1996) and published several volumes of poetry, as well as essays
on drama, critical theory, and poetics.

EARL MINER (1927-2004) was professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton Univer-

sity. In addition to books on Japanese poetry and early modern English poetry, he pub-
lished Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature (1990).

AAMIR R. MuFTI teaches postcolonial studies and critical theory in the Department of
Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is the author of Enlightenment in the Colony: The
Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture, various essays on secular criticism,
exile, and modern aesthetics, and a forthcoming book on the colonial reinvention of Is-
lamic traditions.

CHRISTOPHER NEALON is Professor of English at The Johns Hopkins University. He is

the author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (2001),
and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (2011). His volumes
of poetry include The Joyous Age (2004), Plummet (2009), and The Dial (2012).

MARJORIE PER LO FF is Professor of English Emerita at Stanford University and Florence

Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is the
author of many books on contemporary poetry and poetics, including The Poetics of In-
determinacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), Radical Artifice Writing Poetry in the Age of Media
(1992), and most recently, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the 21st Century
(2010).

Yo PIE PRINS is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University Michi-
gan, where she teaches lyric theory and nineteenth-century historical poetics as well as
classical reception and translation studies. She is the author of Victorian Sappho (1999),
Ladies' Greek: Translations of Tragedy (2014), and a series of essays on Victorian poetry and
prosody.

JAHAN RAMAZANI is Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Vir-

ginia. He is the author of Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of
Genres (2013), A Transnational Poetics (2009), The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in En-
glish (2001); Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), and Yeats
and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (1990). An associate editor of The
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012), he co-edited the most recent editions
of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and The Twentieth
Century and After in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2oo6, 2012).

I. A. RICHARDS (1893-1979) was an English literary critic who taught at Cambridge Uni-
versity and at Harvard University. He developed the concept of close reading called
 648 "practical criticism" and imagined a controlled language called Basic English. His publi-
cations include The Meaning of Meaning (with C.K. Ogden, 1923), Principles of Literary
CoNTRIBUToRs Criticism (1924), Science and Poetry (1926), and Practical Criticism (1929).

MICHAEL RIFFATERRE (1924-2006) was professor of French at Columbia University and

a literary critic and theorist associated with structuralism. His publications include Semiot-
ics of Poetry (1978), Text Production (trans. 1983), and Fictional Truth (1990).
JuLIANA SPAHR is an American poet, critic, and editor, and professor of English at Mills
College, where she holds the Aurelia Henry Reinhardt Chair. In addition to award-winning
publications in poetry, she is the author of Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and
Collective Identity (2001) and co-editor of A Poetics of Criticism (1993), and Poetry and Peda-
gogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (2oo6).

HERBERT F. TucKER holds the John C. Coleman Chair in English at the University of
Virginia, where he also serves as associate editor for New Literary History. His books on
Robert Browning (1980) and Alfred Tennyson (1988) treat lyric themes, and during his
long affair with epic he has stayed faithful to lyric, in his fashion, with occasional essays
in nineteenth-century poetry and poetics.

HELEN VENDLER is Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.

Her many books include Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ash-
bery (2005), Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (2004), The Art of Shake-
speare's Sonnets (1997), The Odes of John Keats (1983), On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens'
Longer Poems (1969).

NANCY J. VICKERS taught French, Italian, and Comparative Literature before serving as
president of Bryn Mawr College for eleven years. She is co-editor of Rewriting the Renais-
sance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (1986) and A New His-
tory of French Literature (1989).

RoBERT PENN WARREN (1905-1989) was an American poet laureate, novelist, and liter-
ary critic. As one of the founders of American New Criticism, he was co-author with
Cleanth Brooks of an influential textbook, Understanding Poetry (1939).

RENE WELLEK (1903-1995) was active among the Prague school linguists before moving,
during World War II, to teach at the University of Iowa and then at Yale University. As a
founding figure for the modern study of comparative literature in the United States, he
published Theory of Literature together with Austin Warren (1949), and numerous books
on the concepts and histories of modern criticism.

W. K. WIMSATT (1907-1975) was a literary theorist, critic, and professor of English at Yale
University. His major works include The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry
(1954), Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism (1965), and Literary Criticism
(together with Cleanth Brooks, 1957).

THOMAS E. YINGLING (1950-1992) taught American studies at Syracuse University and

was a leading figure in gay and lesbian studies when he died as a consequence of AIDS in
1992. A selection of his writings, entitled AIDS and the National Body and edited by Robyn
Wiegman, was published posthumously in 1997.
SOURCE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M. H. Abrams, "The Lyric as Poetic Norm," in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Criti-
cal Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 84-88, 350-51. Copyright© 1953 Oxford University Press,
Inc. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Theodor W. Adorno, "On Lyric Poetry and Society," in Notes to Literature I, ed. R. Tiedemann, trans.
Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37-54. Copyright© 1991 Columbia
University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
Giorgio Agamben, "The End of the Poem," from The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, translated by
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 109-15. Copyright © 1999 by the
Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stan-
ford University Press, www.sup.org.
Charles Altieri, "What Is Living and What Is Dead in American Postmodernism: Establishing the
Contemporaneity of Some American Poetry," in Critical Inquiry 22.4 (Summer 1996): 775-89. Copyright
© 1996 University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission of the University of Chicago Press and
the author.
Mikhail Bakhtin, "The Problem of Speech Genres," in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern
W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 60-69, 94-
99· Copyright© 1986. By permission of the University of Texas Press.
Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 155-70, 192-94. Copyright© 1955 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a.M.,
English translation by Harry Zohn copyright © 1968 and renewed 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Company, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and
Writer's House LLC.
Harold Bloom, "The Breaking of Form," in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press,
1979), 1-22. Copyright© 1979, 2004. Reprinted by permission of the Continuum International Publishing
Group.
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, introduction to Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for Col-
lege Students (New York: H. Holt, 1938), 1-25. Copyright © 1938, 1976 Heinie/Arts & Sciences, a part of
Cengage Learning, Inc. Reproduced by permission. www.cengage.com/permissions.
Reuben Brower, "The Speaking Voice," in Fields of Light: An Experiment in Critical Reading (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1951), 3-16. Copyright© 1951 Oxford University Press, Inc. By Permission of Ox-
ford University Press, Inc.
Ralph Cohen, "History and Genre," New Literary History J7. 2 (Winter 1986): 203-18. Copyright© 1986 New
Literary History, The University of Virginia. Reprinted with permission of The johns Hopkins University
Press.
 650 jonathan Culler, "Lyric, History, and Genre," New Literary History 40.4 (Autumn 2009): 879-99. Copy-
right © 2010 New Literary History, The University of Virginia. Reprinted with permission of The johns
SOURCE
Hopkins University Press.
David Damrosch, "Love in the Necropolis" in What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
sity Press, 2003), 147-59. © 2003 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton Univer-
sity Press.
Paul de Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984), 239-62, 315. Copyright © 1984 Columbia University Press. Reprinted
with permission of the publisher.
jacques Derrida, "Che cos' e !a poesia?" in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. and trans. Peggy
Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 219-37. Copyright© 1991 Columbia University Press.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
Heather Dubrow, "Lyric Forms," in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500-J6oo, ed.
Arthur F. Kinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178-99. Copyright © 2000 Cambridge
University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Craig Dworkin, "Lyric and the Hazard of Music." Earlier versions of portions first published as part of
The Sound of Poetry I The Poetry of Sound, edited by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2009) and PMLA (May 2008). Reprinted with permission of the copyright owner, The
Modern Language Association of America.
T. S. Eliot, "The Three Voices of Poetry," in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 89-102.
Copyright © 1957 Faber and Faber, Ltd. Reprinted with the permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd. US copy-
right© 1957 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright© renewed by Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, LLC.
Stanley Fish, "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One," in Is There a Text in This Class? The Author-
ity of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 322-37, 389-90. Copy-
right© 1980 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Northrop Frye, "Theory of Genres," in Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N): Princeton University Press,
1957), 246-51, 151-61. Copyright© 1957 Princeton University Press, 1985 renewed PUP, 2000 paperback edi-
tion. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Gerard Genette, "The Architext," in The Architext: An Introduction, trans. jane E. Lewin (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1992), 1-12, 23-36, 60-67. Copyright© 1979 by Editions du Seuil, Paris. Copyright
© 1992 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of the University of Califor-
nia Press.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "Gender, Creativity, and the Woman Poet," in Shakespeare's Sisters:
Feminist Essays on Women Poets, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1979), xv-xxiii. Copyright© 1979 by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Reprinted with permis-
sion of Indiana University Press.
Stathis Gourgouris, "The Lyric in Exile," Qui Parle 14.2 (2004): 145-76. Reprinted by permission of the
University of Nebraska Press, with revisions by author.
Roland Greene, "Inter-American Obversals: Allen Ginsberg and Haroldo de Campos Circa 1960," XUL:
5 + 5 (2oo8), http://www.bc.edu/research/xul/5+5/greene.htm. Printed by permission of author.
Allen Grossman, "Summa Lyrica," Western Humanities Review 44.1 (Spring 1990): 4-27. Copyright ©
1989 University of Utah. Reprinted by permission of the Western Humanities Review.
Martin Heidegger, "Poetically Man Dwells," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 213-29. Copyright© 1971 by Martin Heidegger. Reprinted by permission
of HarperCollins Publishers.
Roman )akobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Se-
beok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 350-69. Copyright© 1960 Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
by permission of The MIT Press.
Fredric jameson, "Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: The Dissolution of the Referent and the
Artificial 'Sublime,'" in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 247-63. Copyright© 1985 by Cornell University. Used by permission of
the publisher, Cornell University Press.
Simon Jarvis, "Why Rhyme Pleases," Thinking Verse 1 (2011): 17-43, http://www.thinkingverse.com/issue
or.html. Reprinted by permission of the author.
 Barbara johnson, "Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law," Yale journal of Law and the Humanities 10.2 651
(1998): 205-28. Reprinted by permission of The Yale journal of Law and the Humanities.
Barbara johnson, "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion," in A World of Difference (Baltimore: johns SOURCE
Hopkins University Press, 1987), 184-99, 221-22. Copyright © 1987 The johns Hopkins University Press.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Reprinted with permission of The johns Hopkins University Press.
W. R. johnson, "On the Absence of Ancient Lyric Theory," in The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and
Modern Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 76-95. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Two Poems by Paul Celan," from Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tar-
nowski. Copyright© 1999 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford jr. University; original© 1968 by
Christian Bourgeois Editions. All right reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press,
www.sup.org.
Seth Lerer, "The Genre of the Grave and the Origins of Middle English Lyric," in Modern Language
Quarterly 58.2 (1997): 127-33, 151-61. Copyright 1997, University of Washington. All rights reserved. Re-
printed by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.
Drew Milne, "In Memory of the Pterodactyl: The Limits of Lyric Humanism," The Paper 2 (September
2001): 16-29. Copyright © 2001 Drew Milne. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Earl Miner, "Why Lyric?" in The Renewal of Song: Renovation in Lyric Conception and Practice, ed. Earl
Miner and Amiya Dev (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000), 1-21. Copyright© 2000 Seagull Books. Reprinted
by permission of Seagull Books.
Aamir R. Mufti, "Towards a Lyric History oflndia," boundary 2 31.2 (2004): 245-63, 270-74. Copyright©
2004, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Christopher Nealon, "The Matter of Capital, or Catastrophe and Textuality," in The Matter of Capital:
Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1-19. Copy-
right© 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Marjorie Perloff, "Can(n)on to the Right of Us, Can(n)on to the Left of Us: A Plea for Difference," New
Literary History 18.3 (1987): 633-56. Copyright © 1987 New Literary History, The University of Virginia.
Reprinted with permission of The johns Hopkins University Press.
jahan Ramazani, "Traveling Poetry," MLQ 68.2 (2007): 332-59. Copyright© 2007, University of Wash-
ington. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.
I. A. Richards, "The Analysis of a Poem" and "The Definition of a Poem," in The Principles of Literary
Criticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1924), 114-33, 223-27. Copyright © 2001 Taylor and Francis
Group. Reprinted by permission of publisher.
Michael Riffaterre, "The Poem's Significance," in Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1978), 1-22. Copyright© 1978 by Michael Riffaterre. Reprinted with permission oflndiana University
Press.
juliana Spahr, introduction to American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 1-17. Copyright© 2002 by Wesleyan University Press.
Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Herbert F. Tucker, "Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric," in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criti-
cism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 226-43. Copyright©
1985 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.
Helen Vendler, introduction to The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1997), 1-4, 14-17, 22-32. Copyright© 1997 by the President and Fellows of Har-
vard College. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Nancy). Vickers, "Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme," Critical Inquiry 8.2 (Win-
ter 1981): 265-79. Copyright© 1981 University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission of the Univer-
sity of Chicago Press and the author.
Rene Wellek, "Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnis," in Festschrift fur Richard Alewyn, ed. Herbert
Singer and Benno von Wiese (Cologne: Bi:ihlau Verlag, 1967), 392-412. Copyright © by Bi:ihlau Verlag
GmbH & Cie, 1967. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," The Sewanee Review 54·3 (Summer 1946):
468-88. Copyright© 1946, 1974 by the University of the South. Reprinted with the pe~mission of the editor.
Thomas E. Yingling, "The Homosexual Lyric," in Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds,
New Anatomies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990),105-24, 143-44. Copyright© 1990 University of
Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission of the University of Chicago Press.
INDEX OF AUTHORS AND WORKS

Abelard, Peter, 109 Amman, Hermann, 41-42

Abrams, M. H., 84, 85, 89-90, 150, 508, 541, 548; Ammons, A. R.: "Aubade," 75
essay by, 140-43; 1he Mirror and the Lamp, 67 Anacreon, 21, 94, 102

Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart, 590 Anderson, Margaret, 543-44

Adams, Henry, 43 Anderson, Sherwood: "Hands," 545; Winesburg,
Adams, Percy, 443 Ohio, 545
Adan, Martin, 629-30; La Casa de Carton (The Andrade, )oaquim de Sousa, 621
Cardboard House)J_Q29; L~ Mana Desasida (The Andrade, Oswald de: "A Ro~a," 618
Hand Let Go), 630 Andrews, Bruce, 460, 564
Addison, joseph, 61-62 An tin, David, 458, 474, 475, 502
Adorno, Theodor, 319, 320-26, 358, 361-62, 364-65, Apollinaire, Guillaume: Les Mamel/es de
377, 378, 380, 384, 388, 403, 406, 407, 455> 457> Tin!sias, 538
468,469,493.496,497.498,555,55h568,6o4, Appadurai, Arjun, 590
610, 615, 618n30, 627; Aesthetic Theory, 438; Arac, jonathan, 467
Dialectic of Enlightenment, 362; "On Lyric Aragon, Louis, 442
Poetry and Society," 339-50, 361-62, 364-65, Archilocus, 21, 101
368-73, 571-72 Arendt, Hannah, 492
Aeschylus, 526 Aristarchus, 21, 282
Agamben, Giorgio, 387-88; essay by, 430-34 Aristophanes of Byzantium, 87, 96-97, 98
Agricola, johannes, 145 Aristotle, 12, 23, 25, 27, 44, 55, 66, 75, 93, 118, 287,
Ahmad, Aijaz, 620 428, 579, 580; Homeric Problems, 19; Poetics,
Akbarabadi, Nazir, 618m8 17-19,20,24,28n14,94-96,584,585
Alcaeus, 21, 101, 102, 341 Armantrout, Rae, 558, 561; "A Story," 558
Alexie, Sherman: "Crow Testament," 594 Arnold, Matthew, 204, 279, 446, 447
Ali, Agha Shahid, 570, 592 Arteaga, Alfred, 479-80, 486n3
Allais, Alphonse, 257, 264m7 Ashbery, John, 457, 464, 477> 492, 548; "As
Alpers, Paul, 125 We Know," 455, 478-79; "The Instruction
Althusser, Louis, 542 Manual," 591; "Litany," 489; "The Ongoing
Altieri, Charles, 454-56, 457, 488; essay by, 477-87; Story," 550-51, 556n9; Self-Portrait in a Convex
Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Mirror, 267-68, 285
Poetry, 493; Self and Sensibility in Contemporary Ashton, jennifer, 452, 453, 454, 456
American Poetry, 490-91 Auden, W. H., 215, 471, 590
American Women Poets in the 21st Century Auerbach, Erich, 44, 496, 497
(Rankine and Spahr), 557-67 Augustine, 423, 497
 654 Austen, jane, 523; Emma, 6o Beatty, A. Chester, 633
Azad, Muhammad Husain, 6o8, 614 Beckett, Samuel, 133, 409
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Becking, Gustav, 46
Baader, Franz, 45 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 36
AND WORKS
Badiou, Alain, 457, 495 Behn, Aphra, 523
Bagehot, Walter, 155n12 Behrens, Irene, 17, 22, 46
Baker, james D., ss6n8 Beissner, Friedrich, 51
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 11, 18, 219, 220-21; essay by, Benjamin, Walter, 269, 270, 274n5, 277, 319, 320-21,
224-34 322-23, 325, 326, 362, 377> 410, 411, 433, 468, 469,
Bal'mont, Konstantin, 437 556mo, 574, 627; essay by, 327-38; "The Task of
Balzac, Honore de, 354-55 the Translator," 639
Banham, Reyner, 360 Benn, Gottfried, 197-200
Bano, Iqbal, 609 Bennett, Louise, 592
Banville, Theodore de, 295 Benson, Arthur: The Phoenix, 37
Baratynsky, Yevgeny, 437, 438 Benson, Steve, 451-52
Barbier, Auguste, 335; "Londres," 338n11; "Mineurs Benveniste, Emile, 25, 219, 421, 538
de Newcastle," 338n11 Bergeijk, Gil ius van, 502
Barfield, Owen, 277, 426 Bergman, David, 154n4
Barkan, Leonard, 514 Bergson, Henri, 321, 330, 411; Matiere et memoire,
Barnes, Barnabe: A Divine Centurie of Spiritual/ 328-29
Sonnets, 122; Parthenophil and Parthenophe, Berlant, Lauren, 504, 510
117, 122 Bernart de Ventadour, 49
Barnes, Thomas, 143n11 Bernstein, Charles, 452, 457, 460, 462, 470, 475, 486,
Barnfield, Richard, 123 618, 619; "Dysraphism," 462-63, 464, 465, 475; A
Barnwel ballad, 60-62, 65 Poetics, 2
Barrell, john, 129, 138-39n2 Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei, 558-59; "Fog," 559; Four
Barthes, Roland, 219, 467; Le plaisir du texte, 444; Year Old Girl, 559
Writing Degree Zero, 353 Bessa, A. S., 628
Bataille, Georges, 493, 494, 495, 498ns Bhabha, Homi K., 486m
Bateson, F. W., 208 Bion, 124
Batiushkov, Konstantin, 438 Bishop, Elizabeth, 509; "In the Waiting Room,"
Batteux, Charles, 19, 21, 23-25, 143m; Les Beaux- 570, 597-600, 601
Arts rt!duits a un meme principe, 18-19, 46 Black, Max, 314
Battista Spagnoli. See Mantuan Blackmun, Harry, 535
Baudelaire, Charles, 68, 257, 282, 320, 322-24, Blackmur, R. P., 4, 159, 465, 471, 524
334-35, 339, 343, 344, 347, 410, 411, 471, so6; Blair, Hugh, 29n23
"Alchimie de Ia douleur," 356-57; "A une Blake, William, 35, 335, 427, 621; "A Poison Tree,"
passante," 335-36; "Benediction," 538; "Chant 467-69; "The Sick Rose," 69-70
d'automne," 351-56, 469-70; "Correspondances," Blanchet, Maurice, 407, 416
270-72, 293-303, 306-9; "Crepuscule du soir," Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, 597
338n11; "De profundis clamavi," 298, 300; Bloch, Ernst, 468
"Elevation," 295; "La Mort des amants," 357-58, Bloom, Harold, 267-68, 270; essay by, 275-87
361, 470; Les Fleurs du mal, 295, 297-98, 302, Bloomfield, Leonard, 233n2, 499
320-21, 327-28, 331, 332-33> 335-36, 350-51, 432-33, Blumenberg, Hans, 366
469-70; "Le Solei!," 332, 333; "Les Petites Vieilles," Boas, Franz, 233n2
335, 344; "Les sept vieillards," 302; "L'Homme et Bogan, Louise, 524, 527-28
!a mer," 298; "Moesta et Errabunda," 530-31, 533; Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas, 140; Art poetique, 21
"Mort des amants," 251; "Obsession," 70, 271-72, Bolivar, Simon, 621
295, 298-303, 307-9; "Perte d'aureole," 336-37; Bannard, Pierre, 591
Spleen de Paris, 304, 317n4, 333 Booth, Stephen, 129, 131, 132, 137, 139-40n6
Bauman, Richard, 424 Bosch, Hieronymus: Garden of Earthly Delights,
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 22 553
Bayley, john, 283 Bossuet, jacques-Benigne, 358
Beardsley, Monroe, 4, 159, 163-64, 241-42, 245; Bouche!, Andre du, 402, 403-4, 405-6
essay by, 201-10 Bovet, Ernest, 17
Bowie, David, 359 Burke, Kenneth, 154n4, 276, 281, 285 655
Bowles, Gloria, 527 Burney, Fanny, 523
Bowra, C. M.: Primitive Song, 569, 581, 584 Burns, Robert, 48, 188-90 INDEX OF AUTHORS
Boynton, Robert W., 152, 156n20 Burroughs, William S., 460
AND WORKS
Brathwaite, Kamau, 594 Burt, Stephen, 559-60
Bray, Rene, 22 Butor, Michel, 43
Brecht, Bertoli, 344; The Good Person of Szechwan, Byrd, William, 119
376; "The Hollywood Elegies," 378-So; Byron, George Gordon, Lord: Don juan, 208
Hollywooder Liederbuch, 326, 368-69, 373-80;
"Ostersonntag" ("Easter Sunday"), 377-78; Caesar, julius, 43
"Dber den Selbstmord" ("On Suicide"), 375-77. Cage, john, 458, 460, 464, 489, 501; "Writing for the
378, 381n14 second time through Howl," 461, 463, 465, 474, 475
Brenkman, john, 465; "The Concrete Utopia of Cairns, Francis, 44, 100-101
Poetry," 467-69 Calli mach us, 21, 95
Brentano, Clemens, 45 Calvin, john, 122
Breton, Andre: Revolver acheveux blancs, 258-59 Cameron, Sharon, 114, 146, 452
Brik, Osip, 244 Campion, Thomas, 35, 119; Observations in the Art
Brion, Friederike, 41 of English Poesie, 119
Brock-Broido, Lucie, 557, 559-60; "Am More," 559; Campos, Augusto de, 620
"Carrowmore," 559; The Master Letters, 559, 560; Campos, Haroldo de, 572-73, 620-23, 626, 627-30;
"Myself a Kangaroo among the Beauties," 559, "circulado de fulo," 620, 628, 629; Fame de
563 Forma (Form of Hunger), 627, 628; Forma de
Broda, Martine, 402, 404, 408 Fame (Form of Hunger), 627, 628-29; Galaxias,
Bromwich, David, 470 620, 623, 627-29; "Servidiio de passagem"
Bronte, Charlotte, 522; jane Eyre, 597 ("Transient Servitude"), 621, 627
Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights, 593 Camus, Albert, 492
Brooke, Rupert: "The Soldier," 592 Carlyle, Thomas, 203-4
Brooks, Cleanth, 4, 159, 160, 466, 471; Literary Carroll, Lewis: Alice in Wonderland, 639-40
Criticism, 71; Understanding Poetry, 5, 159, Carson, Anne: "The Glass Essay," 593; If Not,
!6!-62, !64. 177-92 Winter, 76nn28-29
Brooks, Gwendolyn, 563, 567n7; "The Mother," 507, Cascales, Francisco, 24; Cartas philologicas, 23;
532-35, 536; "The Rites for Cousin Vit," 592 Tab/as poeticas, 23
Brower, Reuben, 2, 4, 88, 159, 164, 266, 271, 272 Cassirer, Ernst, 45
Brown, Carleton, 104-5 Cather, Willa, 543, 544
Brown, john, 48 Catullus, 72, 86
Brown, Sterling A.: "Memphis Blues," 593-94 Cavendish, Margaret, 523, 525-26
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 133, 147, 192-93, 506, Celan, Paul, 384-85, 402-3, 572; "Conversation in
523, 525 the Mountains," 415-16; "The Meridian," 410,
Browning, Robert, 133, 144-50, 151, 154n4, 195-96, 412-13, 415; "Todtnauberg," 400-402, 404-6,
213; "Andrea Del Sarto," 196; "Bishop Blougram's 413-15, 416-17; "Tiibingen, janner," 399-400,
Apology," 152, 196; "Cavalier Tunes," 43; "Cleon,'' 403-4· 406, 408-9. 411-12, 413
149; "Count Gismond," 470; "The Englishman in Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 22
Italy,'' 154n6; "Fra Lippo Lippi," 90, 147-48, 150, Chase, Cynthia, 465, 466
196; "House," 149; "johannes Agricola in Chateaubriand, Vicomte, 294
Meditation, 145-46; "My Last Duchess," 90, Chatman, Seymour, 237, 245
148-49, 470; "One Word More," 147, 192-93; Chauncey, George, Jr., 555n1
Pauline, 144, 150; "Porphyria's Lover," 145-46; Cherry, E. Colin, 243
The Ring and the Book, 30, 145 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 579-80
Brule, Gace, 470 Chin, Marilyn, 563
Bruss, Elizabeth, 58 Chinese literature, 569, 578, 580, 583, 586, 587-88
Biichner, Georg, 415 Chomsky, Noam, 219
Biihler, Karl, 238 Chretien de Troyes, 488
Bufiuel, Luis, 235 Christensen, Jerome, 147
Burckhardt, jacob, 277 Cicero, 91-92
Burke, Edmund, 359-60 Cixous, Helene, 18
 656 Clampitt, Amy: "A Procession at Candlemas," 593, Daniel, Howard, 516, 521n23
594-95 Daniel, Samuel: Complaint of Rosamond, 121;
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Clark, T. )., 457-58 Delia, 117, 123, 124
Clark, Timothy, 268 Dante, 295, 387-88, 432, 433-34, 565; De vulgari
AND WoRKS
Claude!, Paul, 332, 347 eloquentia, 431, 433; The Divine Comedy, 197, 432;
Clavi us, Christopher, 207 Vita nuova, 123
Clifford, james, 589-90 Dario, Ruben, 621
Clifton, Lucille, 507, 563; "The Lost Baby Poem," David, Psalms of, 23, 118, 141, 142
537, 539 Davies, Sir john, 123
Cocteau, jean, 359 Day, john: Parliament of Bees, 208
Cody, john, 524-25 Death 's Wither-Clench, 108, 111-12
Cohen, Ralph, 13-14, 67; "History and Genre," 13, Debord, Guy, 460
53-63, 64-65 Deleuze, Gilles, 359, 457, 460, 495
Cole, Norma, 559, 563 Delvaux, Paul, 295
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 150, 175, 204, 205-6, 277; de Man, Paul, 67, 70, 164, 266-67, 270-74, 274n4,
Biographia Literaria, 206; "Kubla Khan," 177n3, 277, 282, 283-84, 304-6,308-10,311, 314, 316, 320,
206; Lyrical Ballads, 3; The Rime of the Ancient 453, 462, 465, 471, 556n10, 586; essay by, 291-304
Mariner, 206, 208, 383 D'Emilio, john, 547
Colie, Rosalie L., 120, 137 Dennett, Michael, 315
Combs, Robert, 551 Dennis, john, 141
Conrad, joseph: Lord Jim, 57 Derrida, jacques, 54-55, 59, 115, 266, 268-70, 272,
Conte, joseph M.: Unending Design, 490 277, 282, 309, 457, 460; essay by, 287-91; "From
Cook, Eleanor, 466 Restricted to General Economy," 493-95; Glas,
Coolidge, Clark, 460 462,463,464,474.475
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 202 Desai, Anita, 6o8
Copeland, Rita, 487 Desjardins, Paul, 334
Corn-Law Ballads, 3 Desnos, Robert, 258, 259
Cortez, jayne, 563 Deutsch, Babette, 154n4
Costello, Bonnie, 593 Deutsch, Michel, 411
Cowley, Abraham, 141 Dev, Amiya, 577-78
Crane, Hart, 282, 359, 507-9, 541-56; The Bridge, Dickens, Charles, 32; Great Expectations, 585
591; "C 33," 544, 546; "Chaplinesque," 548-so; Dickinson, Emily, 34, 66-67, 95, 506, 524-25, 527,
"The Dance," 543; "Episode of Hands," 544, 558, s6o
545-46; "General Aims and Theories," 553; Dictionary of World Literature (Shipley), 201, 202
"Legend," 554; "Modern Craft," 544, 546-47, Dilthey, Wilhelm, 49, 50, 51, 328
555-56n4; "Passage," 542, 543, 544, 554; Diomedes, 18, 21, 44
"Possessions," 542, 544, 550-54, 556mo; Doeren, Suzanne Clarke, 548
"Recitative," 542, 544, 547; "Repose of Rivers," Domesday Book, The, 108
542, 554-55; "Voyages," 542, 544, 547, 554; "The Donne, john, 116-17, 120, 121, 122, 206-7, 209-10,
Wine Menagerie," 543, 544, 548, 554 360, 586; "An Anatomy of the World: The First
Crates of Mallow, 282 Anniversary," 207; "The Bait," 117, 125; "The
Creeley, Robert, 455, 460, 475, 477 Canonization," 116; "The Ecstasy," 116; "Elegy on
Croce, Benedetto, so, 156n2o, 203; Estetica, 40 Prince Henry," 207; "The Funeral," 117; "Show
Cros, Charles, 263n7 me, deare Christ," 214-15, 216; Songs and
Crump, Geoffrey, 150n2o Sonnets, 42, 123
Culler, jonathan, 4, 14, 467, 471, 506, 529, 541, Dore, Gustave, 321, 342
569-70; essay by, 63-77; Structuralist Poetics, 219, Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 43
221-22 Dove, Rita: "The Great Palaces of Versailles," 593
Cummings, E. E., 38 Dowland, John, 35, 119
Curtius, Ernst Robert, 268, 276, 278, 426, 488, 498n2 Drayton, Michael, 117; Ideas Mirrour, 123
Dronke, Peter, 105
Daive, jean, 402, 404-5 Dryden, john, 22, 46, 276-77; Alexander's Feast, 38
Dallas, Eneas Sweetland, 48, 154n5, 155n12 Du Bellay, Joachim, roo, 121, 124, 512
Damrosch, David, 573-75; essay by, 632-41; How to Dubrow, Heather, 88, 130, 131; essay by, 114-28
Read World Literature, 575 Ducasse, Curt, 204-5
Duchamp, Marcel, 502 Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury, 6o 657
"Dum ludis floribus," 108 Fehrenbacher, Douglas, 313-14
Dunbar, William: Ane Ballat of our Lady, 38; Fekete, John, 160 INDEX OF AUTHORS
Flyting with Kennedy, 38 Felman, Shoshana, 317n17
AND WORKS
Duncan, Robert, 490; "An African Elegy," 595 Feral, Josette, 516
Duncan-jones, Katherine, 137, 140n6 Fichte, johann Gottlieb, 46
Du Plessis, Rachel Blau, 558, 560, 563 Finch, Anne, 506, 522, 523
Durham,11o Fineman, joel, 130, 139n3, 465, 466; Shakespeare's
Dworkin, Craig, 8n3, 451, 452, 454, 457-59, 561; Perjured Eye, 505
essay by, 499-503 First Worcester Fragment, 110
Fish, Stanley, s. 14-15, 59, 465, 471; essay by, 77-85
Eckermann, johann Peter, 49 Flaubert, Gustave, 323, 351, 354, 357
Eco, Umberto, 263n4, 263n8; Open Work, 356 Porche, Carolyn, 563
Edelman, Lee, 509, 597 Foucault, Michel, 54. 115, 219, 266
Edgeworth, Maria, 523 "Foweles in the frith," 107, 108
Egyptian literature, 573-75, 632-41; "The Dispute Fowler, Alistair, 11
between a Man and his Ba," 636; "Papyrus Fowler, Barbara, 638
Chester Beatty," 633, 635, 637; "The Songs of Fowler, Roger, 437
Extreme Happiness," 633 Fox, George, 421, 424
Eichendorff, joseph von, 42, 373 Fraser, Kathleen, 558, 559. 560, 563
Eisler, Hanns: Hollywooder Liederbuch, 326, Freccero, john, 515-16
368-69. 373-80 Freedman, Estelle B., 547
Eliot, George, 526; Middlemarch, 195 Freud, Anna, 282-83
Eliot, T. S., 2, 4, 132, 151, 154n2, 162-63, 207-10, 282, Freud, Sigmund, 37, 38, 277, 278, 280, 284, 285, 309,
438-39, 456,488, 496, 527, 548; "Ash Wednesday," 321, 411, 498n5, 509; Beyond the Pleasure
208; essay by, 192-200; "The Love Song of). Principle, 330-31
Alfred Prufrock," 209-10, 363; Murder in the Fried, Debra, 442, 556n4
Cathedral, 194; The Rock, 193-94; "The Friedrich, Hugo, 274n5
Wasteland," 163-64, 208-9, 363, 596 Frost, Elisabeth A., 563
Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 501-2 Frost, Robert, 151, 211; "The Figure a Poem Makes,"
Eluard, Paul. 250-51, 257, 260, 261 244; "Once by the Pacific," 212-13
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3, 277, 279, 282, 441, 550 Frye, Northrop, 4, 11, 13, 18, 23, 25, 27, 71, 114, 219,
Empedocles, 20 503n25; The Anatomy of Criticism, 12, 56, 58, 63,
Empson, William, 4. 131, 159, 160; Seven Types of 67, 420-21; essay by, 30-39
Ambiguity, 161
Engels, Friedrich: The Condition of the Working Gadamer, Hans Georg, 49
Class in England, 334 Galileo, 207
Engle, Lars, 138m Gallagher, Kristen, 564
Ermatinger, Emil, so. 51 Galt, Alan, 501
Ernst, Max, 235 Garcia Lorca, Federico, 344
Erskine, john, 48 Gardiner, A. H., 574. 633-38, 640
Eschenburg, johann Joachim, 44 Gardner, Thomas, s6o
Evans, G. Blakemore, 129 Gascoigne, George: A Hundred Sundry Flowers,
"Excellent Ballad of George Barnwel," 60-62, 65 116; "Lullaby of a Lover," 116; The Posies, 116
Gautier, Theophile, 332; Espana, 252; "In Deserto,"
Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, 571-72, 603-16; Dast-e saba, 252-57; "Symphonie en blanc majeur," 258
609, 613; "Dua" (Prayer), 611, 613; "Freedom's Genette, Gerard, 11-12, 13, 14, 219, 267, 291-92, 452,
Dawn," 604, 607; "Love Do Not Ask for That Old 613; The Architext, 11, 64; essay by, 17-30
Love Again," 6o6; "Marsia" (Elegy), 610-11, 613; George, Stefan, 322, 338m4, 347-50, 455, 497-98,
"My Fellow, My Friend," 6o6; "Paun se lahu ko 571; The Seventh Ring, 349
dho dalo" (Wash the Blood Off Your Feet), Gesta Stephani, 111
612-13; Sar-e wadi-e Sin a, 610; "The Subject of Ghalib, Asadullah Khan, 607
Poetry," 6o6; "Two Loves," 6os; "Yad" (Mem- Gide, Andre, 333
ory), 609-10; Zindan nama, 613 Gilbert, Sandra, sos-6; essay by, 522-29
Fanon, Frantz, 615 Gilbert, William, 207
 658 Gilligan, Carol: In a Different Voice, 533-34 Harryman, Carla, 451-52
Ginsberg, Allen, 572-73, 620-21, 622-30; "Aether," Harshav, Benjamin, 500-501
INDEX OF AUTHORS
626; "Angkor Wat," 623; Collected Poems Hartman, Geoffrey, 267, 464
1947-1980, 620; "Howl," 463, 624; "I Beg You Harvey, Gabriel, 119
AND WORKS
Come Back & Be Cheerful," 624-26; Kaddish, Hass, Robert, 477
620, 623; "Kaddish," 623-24; "Lysergic Acid," Havelock, Eric, 59-60
620, 624; "Psalm I," 623; "To an Old Poet in Hayes, Curtis, 78
Peru," 620, 629, 630; "Wichita Vortex Sutra," 626 H.D., 558
Ginsburgh, Stephane, 502 Heaney, Seamus, 126
Girard, Rene, 284 Hegel, G.W.F., 3, 26, 49, 294, 299, 319, 320, 321, 322,
Goethe, johann Wolfgang von, 3, 11, 13, 26, 44, 46, 324-25, 334> 342, 346, 363, 364, 366, 371, 373> 383,
47, 49, 50, 63-64, 101, 203, 282, 373, 573; Gotz von 453. 455. 457. 464, 465, 479> 493. 494> 495. 496;
Ber/ichingen, 48; Hermann and Dorothea, 346; Aesthetics (Vorlesungen ilber Asthetik), 48, 364
Maxims and Reflections, 340; "Mit einem Heidegger, Martin, 40, 45, 46, 269, 323, 372, 382,
gemalten Band," 41; "Wanderers Nachtlied," 383-84, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 402, 406, 407, 410,
341-42, 345; Wilhelm Meister, 42 413, 415, 416, 419, 484; essay by, 390-99; "Origins
Goffman, Erving, 429 of the Work of Art," 352-53, 429
Gogo!, Nikolai, 234n9 Heine, Heinrich, 319, 634; Buch der Lieder, 328
Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 207 Hejinian, Lyn, 451-52, 457, 474, 561, 564; The Cell,
Gombrich, Ernst, 428, 429 455-56, 482-85; The Guard, 460, 462-63, 464,
Gomringer, Eugen: Constellations, 626 465, 475; Happily, 561; My Life, 561; "Some Notes
Goodman, Nelson, 422, 428 toward a Poetics," 561; Writing Is an Aid to
Goodyer, Sir Henry, 207 Memory, 561
Gourgouris, Stathis, 325-26; essay by, 368-81 Herbert, George, 101, 584; "The Altar," 35; "The
Gourmont, Remy de, 544 Collar," 133, 585-86; "Dialogue," 133; "Easter
Graham, )orie, 560; "Philosopher's Stone," 557, 560 Wings," 35; "Love," 216-18
Grave, The, no Herder, johann Gottfried, 319, 320
Gravina, Giovanni Vincenzo, 22 Hesiod, 21
Greenberg, joseph, 242 Hieatt, Kent, 137
Greene, Roland, 572-73; essay by, 618-32 Hieron of Syracuse, 284
Grey, Thomas, 317m Hill, Archibald A., 246
Grierson, Herbert J. C., 214 Hillman, Brenda, 557, 561-62; "A Geology," 561-62
Griffin, Farah, 564 Hirsch, E. D., 428
Grossman, Allen, 452, 508, 541-42; Summa Lyrica, Hogarth, William, 35
385-87, 418-30 Holder! in, Friedrich, so, 282, 284, 285, 362, 383, 384,
Guattari, Felix, 359, 460, 495 390-99. 402, 403, 406, 407, 408, 411, 412-13, 415;
Gubar, Susan, 505-6; essay by, 522-29 "In Lovely Blueness," 412; "Mnemosyne," 409,
Guest, Barbara, 560-61, 565; Rocks on a Platter, 561 411; "The Rhine," 410, 411; "Vista," 398-99
Guillen, Claudio, 420, 619, 630 Holiday, Billie, 591
Gundolf, Friedrich, 50 Hollander, john, 280, 285, 421, 440-41, 458, 502
Gurr, Andrew, 137 Hollywooder Liederbuch!Hollywood Songbook
Guys, Constantin, 332 (Eisler and Brecht), 326, 368-69, 373-81, 381n5
Gvozdev, A. N., 234n5 Homer, 19, 20, 45, 94, 197, 203, 435, 527; Odyssey,
362,365
Hali, AltafHusain, 6o8, 614, 617n27, 617-18n28 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 34, 42, 235, 240, 241,
Hallam, Arthur, 150 246-48; "The Handsome Heart," 246; "Thou art
Hamburger, Kate, 13, 27, 48, 51; Logik der Dichtung, indeed just, Lord," 214, 215-16
40-44 Horace, 18, 23, 46, 49, 87, 204, 420, 585; Art of
Hardy, Barbara, 154n2 Poetry, 21, 98-99; Carmen Saeculare, 102;
Hardy, Thomas, 172-73, 202; "Drummer Hodge," Epistles, 101-2; Odes (Carmina), 72-74, 101, 114
592; "The Man He Killed," 181 Horkheimer, Max, 365; Dialectic of Enlightenment,
Harjo, joy, 563 362
Harley Lyrics, 105, 107, 108 Hosek, Chaviva, 465, 466, 469
Harper, Michael: "Nightmare Begins Responsi- Houdar de !a Motte, Antoine, 22
bility," 539 Houssaye, Arsene, 333
Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 116 johnson, Barbara, 270, 272-74, 320, 465, 506-7; 659
Howe, Susan, 475, 558, 562; "C H A I R," 562; My essays by, 304-18, 529-40
Emily Dickinson, 559; "Riickenfigur," 594, 601 johnson, james William, 8m, 452, 458, 502, 568-69, INDEX OF AUTHORS
Hubbard, Stacy Carson, 567n7 575nl AND WORKS
Hudibras (Butler), 37 johnson, Martin, 597, 598, 599
Hughes, Langston, 543, 570; "The Negro Speaks of johnson, Osa, 597, 598, 599
Rivers," 595-97, 599, 6oo, 601 johnson, Ralph, 72
Hughes, Ted: "Out," 593 johnson, Samuel, 141, 281
Hugo, Victor, 26, 282, 295, 328, 333, 335, 415, 471; johnson, W. R., 86-87; essay by, 91-103
"Satyre," 265n27 jones, Ann Rosalind, 566n7
Humboldt, Alexander von, 500 jones, Sir William, 89, 142-43
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 47-48, 228, 233-34n4, Jonson, Ben, 100, 429; "On My First Son," 538
234n8 joos, Martin, 236
Hume, Christine, 563 jordan, june: "Poem about My Rights," 595
Hunt, Erica, 563 joyce, james, 628; Finnegans Wake, 37, 6o; A
Hunter,). Paul, 442 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, q, 32;
Husser!, Edmund, 269 Ulysses, 43, 543-44
Hussey, Margaret, 39 Juhasz, Suzanne, 527
Huyssen, Andreas, 495-96 jung, Carl, 328
Hyne, Daryl, 470
Kafka, Franz: "The Silence of the Sirens," 362
Ibsen, Henrik, 48 Kahlo, Frida, 486n3
Ingram, W. G.,130 Kant, Immanuel, 46, 291, 325, 364, 372; The Critique
Irvine, Martin, 487 of Pure Reason, 493
Isaac the Blind, Rabbi, 279 Kaufman, Robert, 319, 627
Iser, Wolfgang, 59 Keats, john, 67, 114, 179, 211, 239, 270, 291, 304, 305,
Ivins, William M., 427 317n3, 324-25, 537, 541; "La Belle Dame sans
Merci," 275; "Ode on a Grecian Urn," 317n8;
jackson, Virginia, 8m, 14, 453, 456-57; Dickinson's "Ode to a Nightingale," 186, 363, 466; "On the
Misery, 66-67, 488; "Lyrical Studies," 75n2, Sea," 363; "To Autumn," 149
76n10 Keelan, Claudia, 563
jacobi,). G., 50 Keller, Gottfried, 43, 46
jacobs, Roderick, 78 Kenner, Hugh, 439, 442, 445
jacobus, Mary, 465 Kepler, johannes, 207
)a fry, Ali Sardar, 607 Ker, N. R., 110
jakobson, Roman, 25, 220, 221-22, 271, 272, 281, 322, Kermode, Frank, 286, 421
387, 430, 500, 506-7, 531; essay by, 234-48 Kernan, Alvin, 129
jalib, Habib, 611 Kerrigan, John, 129, 139n5
james, Henry, 350, 586 Khan, Sayyid Ahmed, 6o8
jameson, Fredric, 13, 58, 322-24, 325, 465, 620, 630; Khlebnikov, Velimir, 442, 501
"Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist," Kierkegaard, S0ren, 284, 354, 358
350-61, 469-70; The Political Unconscious, 53, Kiernan, Victor, 6os
56-57.63 Kim, Myung Mi, 455, 479, 563; "And Sing We,"
Janssen,).)., 639 480-81; Under Flag, 480-81
japanese literature, 569, 578, 579-80, 582-84, 586 Kircher, Athanasius, 261-62
jarrell, Randall, 159. 465 Klages, Ludwig, 328
)arry. Alfred, 257 Klein, Richard, 315
Jarvis, Simon, 388-89; essay by, 434-48 Kleist, Heinrich von, 45
)auss, Hans Robert, 58-59, 496-97, 498 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 46
jay, Martin, 498n4 Knapp, Steven, 316
jeffers, Robinson, 284 Knox, T. M., 364
Jeffreys, Mark, 160, 452-53 Kojeve, Alexandre, 493, 494
Jespersen, Otto, 244 Kraus, Karl, 329
john of Garland, 21 Krieger, Murray, 160
johns, jasper, 464 Kristeva, julia, 457, 495, 498ns
 660 Kubitschek, )uscelino, 622 Lowell, Amy: "Madonna of the Evening Flowers,"
Kuhn, Thomas, 429 556n4
INDEX OF AUTHORS Kuin, Roger, 130 Lowell, Robert, 5, 482
Lowes, john Livingston: Road to Xanadu, 205-6
AND WORKS
Labe, Louise, 122 Lucilius, 21
Lacan, jacques, 115, 130, 219, 309, 358, 359, 486, 539 Lucretius, 21
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 384-85, 386, 388, 417n5, Lukacs, Georg, 426
572; essay by, 399-418 Luker, Kristin, 535-36
La3amon: Brut, 106, 108, 110 Lundquist, Sara, 560-61
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 69, 320, 328 Lyric Poetry (Parker and Hosek), 465-71
Lamb, Charles, 175
Langbaum, Robert, 43, 76n25 Ma, Ming-Qian, 562
Lasch, Christopher, 359 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 154n2
Latemest Day, The, 108 Macdonald, Helen: "Blackbird/jackdaw," 365;
Latini, Brunetto, 431 "Hyperion to a Satellite," 365; "Poem, for Bill
Lattimore, Richmond, 591 Girden," 366; Shaler's Fish, 365-66; "Taxonomy,"
Laube, Heinrich, 49 365
Lauterbach, Ann, 557, 562-63; "In the Museum of Mack, Maynard, 152, 156n20, 159
the Word (Henri Matisse)," 562-63 MacKinnon, Catherine, 535
Lautreamont, Comte de, 235, 495 Maclean, Norman, 89
Lawes, Henry, 35 MacLeish, Archibald: "You, Andrew Marvell," 591
Lazer, Hank, 558 Macpherson, jay, 470
Lease, joseph, 626 Magee, Michael, 564
Le Corbusier, 360 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 238
Lederer, Katy: "A Nietzschean Revival," 491 Mallarme, Stephane, 259-61, 265n26, 282, 349, 411,
Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 428 431, 471, 494, 495, 538; "Don du poeme," 538; "Le
Leiris, Michel: "Glossaire," 464, 474; "Le Sceptre Pitre chatie," 295
miroitant," 462, 463, 465, 475 Mantuan (Battista Spagnoli), 116, 125
Leithauser, Brad: "In a Bonsai Nursery," 461-62, Marcuse, Herbert 468
463-65 Mari<itegui, jose Carlos, 629
Lejeune, Philippe, 18 Marie de France, 109, 110
Leopardi, Giacomo, 432 Marks, Gregory A., 315-16
Lerer, Seth, 87; essay by, 104-14 Marlowe, Christopher: "The Passionate Shepherd
Lerner, Daniel, 425 to His Love," 125; Tamburlaine, 195
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 50 Marotti, Arthur F., 120, 129
Levin, Samuel, 78 Martin, Christopher, 138m
Levinas, Emmanuel, 407 Martin, Robert, 550, 551
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 219, 580 Martinez, Dionisio D.: "Hysteria," 6oo-601
Levy, Emil, 620-21 Marty, Anton, 232
Lewis, C. S., 133, 201 Marvell, Andrew: "To His Coy Mistress," 209
Lewis, R.W.B., 547, 549 Marx, Karl, 7, 334, 467, 469, 470, 472, 494-95,
Lichtheim, Miriam, 634-35, 636, 637, 639 499n5, 615
Ligeti, Gyorgy, 502 Masson, David 1., 154-55n9
Lillo, George: The London Merchant, 61, 62, 65 Matthew of Paris, 106, 108
Lindley, David, 115 Matthiessen, F. 0., 208, 209
Lindsay, Vachel: The Congo, 38 Mayer, Bernadette, 563
Liu, )ames )-Y, 586-87 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 515, 517
Locke, john, 499 McFarlane, )ames, 489
Lodge, Thomas, 124 McGann, jerome)., 454, 472-74
Lok, Anne, 122 McKellan, Ian, 125
London Merchant, The (Lillo), 61, 62, 65 McKeon, Michael, 7
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 573, 575, 575n5; "A McKeon, Richard, 282
Psalm of Life," 182-84, 185, 187 Mencius, 586
LonginuS,141,203,278 Menocal, Maria Rosa, 107, 557, 564
Lotze, Hermann, 50 Meredith, George, 170
Meschonnic, Henri, 406 Nejgebauer, A., 131 661
Michael, Walter Benn, 596 Nelson, Cary, 488, 498n3
Michelet, jules, 263n7 Nerval, Gerard de, 210, 294, 298 INDEX OF AUTHORS
Mill, john Stuart, 3-4, 5, 32, 71, 86, 88, 89, go, 115, Newlin, William, 83-84
AND WORKS
132, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150-51, 154n2, 164, 268, 421, Nicholas of Guildford, 110, 112
453, 465; "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties," Niendorf, M.A., 49
12 Niethammer, Friedrich Immanuel, 464
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 556n4, 567n7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 270, 280, 284, 291-92, 303,
Miller, Nina, 567n7 339; The Birth of Tragedy, 584; On Truth and Lie,
Miller, Paul Allen, 566n5, 567n15 292-94,295.305-6,310
Millikan, Robert Andrews, 178-79, t8o-81, 182 Noh!, Herman, 50
Milne, Drew, 324-25; essay by, 361-67 Norwid, Cyprian, 235
Milton, john, 22, 32, 35, 46, 197, 244, 281, 282; "!! Novalis, 50
Penseroso," 142; ''L'Ailegro," 142; "Lycidas," 149, Nowottny, Winifred, 131, 14on6
279; Paradise Lost, 31, 56 Nyquist, Mary, 465, 466
Miner, Earl, 77n35, 569, 575; essay by, 577-89
Minturno, Antonio, 22 O'Brien, Sharon, 543
Mir, Muhammad Taqi, 607 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 59-60
Miraji, 612 O'Hara, Frank, 365, 455, 477; "Blocks," 132; "The
Molesworth, Charles, 624 Day Lady Died," 591
Moliere, 238, 579 Ohmann, Richard, 78
Monroe, Harriet, 543 Okigbo, Christopher, 590
Montrose, Louis, 126 Olsen, Tillie, 498n3
Moore, Marianne, 543, 548; "Camellia Sabina," 38 Olson, Charles, 496, 548, 626
Moore, Mary B., 566-67n7 Olson, Elder, 154n2, 154n4, 155n16
Morike, Eduard, 43, 347, 348, 373, 571; "Auf einer O'Neill, Eugene: The Fountain, 238
Wanderung," 345-46, 364-65 Ong, Walter, 277; Orality and Literacy, 487
Morris, Tracie, 563 Orgel, Stephen, 164
Morse, Richard, 618, 619, 622 Osmaston, F.P.B., 364
Morson, Gary, 59 Ovid, 117, 292; Hero ides, 117; Metamorphoses,
Moschus, 124 513, 514, 516, 519
Moser, Thomas C., jr., 107 "Owl and the Nightingale, The," 87, 106, 108-12
Moss, Thy lias, 563
Moxley, jennifer: "Our Defiant Motives," 491-92 Parker, Patricia, 465, 466, 469, 470
Mufti, Aamir, 571-72; essay by, 603-18 Pascal, Blaise, 297, 373
Mukarovsky, jan, 499 Pasternak, Boris, 243-44
Mulcaster, Richard, 119 Pater, Walter, 34, 203-4, 526; The Renaissance, 174
Muldoon, Paul, 594 Patterson, Annabel, 126, 466-67
Mullen, Harryette, 563, 564-65; "Fancy Cortex," Paul, jean, 44, 48, 49
563; "Poetics Statement," 565 Paul, Sherman, 547
Miiller, Gunther, 51 p'Bitek, Okot, 570; Song of Lawino, 598-99, 601
Mulvey, Laura, 521n31 Pearl, 37
Munier, Roger, 417n15 Pearsall, Derek, 105, 107
Munson, Gorham, 544 Peirce, C. S., 263n4
Muratori, Lodovico Antonio, 46 Peletier du Mans, jacques, 21
Murphy, j. )., 109-10 Pequigney, joseph, 132
Percy, Thomas (Bishop of Dromore): Reliques of
Nabokov, Vladimir: Alice in Wonderland Ancient English Poetry, 62, 65
(translation), 639-40; Eugene Onegin (trans- Perelman, Bob, 451-52
lation), 639 Peret, Benjamin, 258
Nadar, 332 Perloff, Marjorie, 453-55, 457, 458, 488, 566m, 624;
Naipaul, V. S., 479 essay by, 460-76; The Poetics of Indeterminacy,
Nancy, jean-Luc, 457, 495, 499n5 489; Wittgenstein's Ladder, 492
Nargeot, 332 Perrine, Laurence, 152
Nealon, Christopher, 456-57; essay by, 487-99 Peterborough Chronicle, 111
 662 Petrarch, 101, 116, 117, 121, 123, 505; Canzoniere Rampersad, Arnold, 543
(Rime sparse), 42, 46, 123-24, 511-21 Ranciere, jacques, 498n4
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Photius, 99 Ransom, john Crowe, 4, 151-52, 159, 161, 456, 524, 527
Pignatari, Decio, 620-21 Rapin, Rene, 21-22, 141
AND WoRKS
Pindar, 21, 23, 74-75, 87, 96, 100, 102, 141, 284, Record of Ancient Matters, 582-84
341,362 Redpath, Robert Theodore Holmes, 130
"Plano-Piloto para Poesia Concreta" ("Pilot-Plan Reed, Thomas L., jr., 110
for Concrete Poetry"), 622 Reeves, james, 523-24
Plath, Sylvia, 506, 528; "Cut," 593, 601 Reik, Theodor, 330
Plato, 12, 17, 18, 21, 24, 25, 95; Apology, 203; Ion, 585; Rhys, Ernest, 86
Phaedrus, 425, 585; Protagoras, 74; Republic, Rich, Adrienne, 477, 507, 522; "To a Poet," 537-38
19-20, 28mo, 44, 93-94, 585; Symposium, 420 Richards, I. A., 4, 159, 164, 220, 319, 425; essay by,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 37, 95, 244, 247; "The Bells," 165-77; Practical Criticism, 159, 160; Principles of
38, 464; The Poetic Principle, 34-35, 38; "The Literary Criticism, 160-61
Raven," 38 Ricoeur, Paul, 423
Poirier, Richard, 164 Riddel, joseph, 285-86
Polivanov, E. D., 242 Riffaterre, Michael, 222-23, 471; essay by, 249-65
Ponge, Francis, 269-70 Riley, Denise: "Affections of the Ear," 365; "The
Pont martin, Armand de, 332 Castalian Spring, a first draught," 365; The
Poole, Roger, 283 Words of Selves, 365
Poovey, Mary, 2 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 68, 197, 282, 341
Pope, Alexander, 141-42, 435, 437, 441-42, 499, 500, Rimbaud, Arthur, 328, 373, 6oo
526; The Rape of the Lock, 245, 389, 442-47 Rime of King William, no, m
Popper, Karl, 626-27, 628 Rivard, Michael, 313, 315
Pound, Ezra, 36, 136, 151, 282, 350, 475, 486n4, 496, Riviere, jacques, 333
556n6, 558, 578, 590, 594, 621-22; Canto 20, 621; Robbins, Bruce, 75
Canto 81, 589, 591, 595, 601; Cantos, 34, 589 Rodenberg, julius von, 49
Pratt, Mary Louise, 591 Roethke, Theodore, 524
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics R6heim, Geza, 420
(various editions), 8m, 458, 502, 568-69, 575 Rolfe, Edwin, 498n3
Prins, Yopie: "Lyrical Studies," 75n2, 76mo; Rollins, Hyder, 129
Victorian Sappho, 87 Ronsard, Pierre de, 124
Prod us, 21, 99, 100 Rorty, Richard, 486
Propertius, 622 Rosenbaum, Peter, 78
Proust, Marcel, 321, 336, 410, 432-33; A Ia Recherche Rossetti, Christina, 523
du temps perdu, 329-30 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 193
Proverbs of Alfred, The, 108, 110 Rousseau, jean-jacques, 568
Prynne, ). H., 436-37, 438, 442, 446; "Aristeas, In Russell, Bertrand, 191
Seven Years," 439-40 Ruttkowski, W. V., 27
Pushkin, Alexander, 437, 438; Eugene Onegin, 639
Puttenham, George, 136; Arte of English Poesie, Sacks, Harvey, 83-84
114, 126 Sacrobosco, johannes de, 207
Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49, 286 Said, Edward, 465-66, 577> 589, 607
Saintsbury, George, 203
Quintilian, 21 Samoilov, David, 439
Sandburg, Carl, 6oo, 601
Racine, jean, 195, 255-56, 347 Sapir, Edward, 233n2, 234n4, 236, 425
Radcliffe, Anne, 523 Sappho, 21, 72, 86, 87, 94, 95, 97, 100, 101, 341, 362,
Radin, Margaret jane, 317m 366,558
Raimbaut d'Aurenga, 432 Sartre, jean-Paul, 567n15; Saint Genet, 358-59
Rajan, Tillotama, 567n15 Satie, Erik, 502
Ralegh, Sir Walter, 125: "Nymph's Reply to the Saussure, Ferdinand de, 219, 233n2, 264m6, 500
Shepherd," 125 Scarry, Elaine, 546
Ramazani, jahan, 570-71, 572, 618; essay by, Schelling,Felix,86
589-603 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm joseph, 47, 48
Schiller, Friedrich, 44, 46-47, 284, 285 Simon ides, 94, 102 663
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 47 Simpson, W. K., 632, 634, 635, 636, 637, 638
Schlegel, Friedrich, 13, 25, 47, 268, 283 "Sir Patrick Spens," 208 INDEX OF AUTHORS
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, so, 51 Siskin, Clifford, 15n4
AND WORKS
Schluter, Kurt, 51 Skelton, John, 38, 39, 116; The Garland of Laurel/,
Schoenberg, Arnold, 464 39: Philip Sparrow, 116
Scholem, Gershom, 278, 279 Sling, S. R., 365
Scholes, Robert, 18, 152 Smart, Christopher: jubilate Agno, 36-37
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 49, 277, 439 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 5, 420, 421, 429, 556n7
Schor, Naomi, 555n3 Smith, H. H., ss6ns
Scott, Clive, 442 Smith, Kiki, 559
Scott, Sir Walter, 208 Snediker, Michael, 509
Scully, james, 624 Socrates, 74, 203; Ion, 146
Seckendorf, Leo von, 397 Soldier, David, 502
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 129, 509 Song, Cathy, 563
Seneca, 91 Sontag, Susan, 359
Sessions, Ina Beth, 154n8 Sophocles, 195: Oedipus Rex, 59-60
Sewell, Lisa, 562 Soul's Address, The, 110
Sexton, Anne, 507; "The Abortion," 536; "Men- Souter, David, 273-74, 311-12, 317n17
struation at Forty," 536 Southey, Robert, 522
Shakespeare, William, 31, 55, 119, 195, 499, 505, 513; Southwell, Robert, 122
All's Well That Ends Well, 195: As You Like It, 126; Spahr, Juliana, 509-10; essay by, 557-67
Hamlet, 187, 245-46, 585; Macbeth, 188, 199; Speare, Morris Edmund, 590
Measure for Measure, 33; A Midsummer Night's Spenser, Edmund, 37, 119; Amoretti, 116, 121, 123;
Dream, 585; Othello, 585; Richard Ill, 125; Sonnet Complaints, 121, 126; Daphnaida, 121; Epithala-
17, 538; Sonnet 20, 129, 134: Sonnet 25, 136-37: mion, 121; The Faerie Queene, 116, 149; Prothala-
Sonnet 29, 134, 138-39n2; Sonnet 30, 133; Sonnet mion, 121, 126; The Shepheardes Calender, 116,
33, 129; Sonnet 35, 123; Sonnet 6o, 139n5; Sonnet 118, 124-25
61, 138; Sonnet 66, 134, 137: Sonnet 73, 130, 140n6; Spicer, jack, 359
Sonnet 76, 134, 135, 136; Sonnet 104, 134: Sonnet Spitzer, Leo, 51
105, 134, 135, 139n5: Sonnet 116, 130, 134, 135, 139n5; Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 597-98, 599, 620
Sonnet 117, 135: Sonnet 125, 133; Sonnet 129, 130, Stafford, William: "Report to Crazy Horse," 595
134, 136, 139n5, 140n6; Sonnet 145, 137; Sonnet Staiger, Emil, 13, 48, 51; Grundbegriffe der Poetik,
148, 133: Sonnet 151, 135: Sonnets, 42, 88-89, 40,44-46
128-40; The Tempest, 196; Trail us and Cressida, Stanislavskij, Constantin, 237-38
189-90; Twelfth Night, 69, 514 Stankiewicz, Edward, 155n9
Shakespeare's Sisters (Gilbert and Gubar), 506, 513 Starobinski, Jean, 264m6, 427
Shaw, George Bernard, 33 Statham, Gertrude, 39
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 3, 67, 274, 279, 316, 325, 363, Stein, Gertrude, 460, 489, 628
506, 526; Epipsychidion, 30; "Ode to the West Steiner, Rudolph, 278
Wind," 30, 68, 211-12, 213, 530, 531-32, 539 Steinthal, Kermann, 234n8
Sheridan, Alan, 317n12 Stevens, John, 119, 120
Sheridan, Thomas, 434-35 Stevens, Wallace, 279, 280, 282, 317m, 471, 541;
Sherrington, Sir Charles, 161 "Bantams in Pine-Woods," 592, 594, 601;
Sherry, james, 559 "Disillusionment ofTen O'Clock," 555n4; "The
Showalter, Elaine, 523 Idea of Order at Key West," 362-63; "Notes
Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 122 towards a Supreme Fiction," 440-41; "An
Sidney, Sir Philip, 49, 118, 119, 140, 538; An Apologie Ordinary Evening in New Haven," 466; "Peter
for Poetrie, 21; Arcadia, 125; Astrophil and Stella, Quince at the Clavier," 466
117, 120, 122, 123, 126; "Defence of Poetrie," 88, Stewart, Garrett, 442
117, 122, 126 Stewart, Susan, 382-83
Sievers, Eduard, 246 Stieglitz, Alfred, 548, 556n5
Silkin, Jon, 538 Stoll, E. E., 201, 202
Silliman, Ron, 451-52 Storm, Theodor, 49-50
Simmons, D. C., 242 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom's Cabin, 537
 664 Sue,Eugene,333-34 Viertel, Berthold, 373
Swensen, Cole, 559, 563 Vietor, Karl, 26, 51
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 172, 173 Vigny, Alfred de, 433
Symons, Arthur, 150-51, 152 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 48
AND WORKS
Szondi, Peter, 407 Voegelin, Charles F., 236
Vogelweide, Walther von der, 341
Tate, Allen, 4, 159, 465, 543, 544 Vogler, Abt, 147
Temple, Sir William, 141 Voris, Linda, 559
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 37, 90, 151, 457; "The Vossler, Karl, 233n2
Charge of the Light Brigade," 454, 471-74; Poems,
Chiefly Lyrical, 150; "The Sailor Boy," 208; "St. Wagner, Richard, 35
Simeon Stylites," 145-46; "Tithonus," 146; Walcott, Derek: Omeros, 592; "The Sea Is History,"
"Ulysses," 146 594
Terada, Rei, 66, 274n6 Waldman, Ann, 563
Theocritus, 21, 124 Waldrop, Rosemarie, 563
Theory of Literature (Warren and Wellek), 40, 41. Walker, Jeffrey, 74-75, 76-77n32
See also Warren, Austin; Wellek, Rene Waller, Edmund: "Go, lovely Rose," 70-71
Thessalonians, Paul's Second Epistle to, 433 WangLi, 242
Thomas, Clarence, 312-13, 314 Warren, Austin, 11, 17-18; Theory of Literature, 40
Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 17 Warren, Robert Penn, 4, 159, r6o, 465; Understand-
Thoreau, Henry David: Walden, 533 ing Poetry, 5, 159, 161-62, 164, 177-92
Thorne, J. P., 78 Warton, Joseph, 141-42
Tillyard, E.M.W., 201, 205 Wasserman, Earl, 466
Todorov, Tzvetan, 18, 30n31, 219 Watson, J. B., 233n2
Tolson, Melvin B., 591-92, 594 Watson, Thomas: Hecatompathia, 122-23
Tolstoy, Leo, 42 Watten, Barrett, 451-52
Tottel's Miscellany, 116, 120 Webern, Anton von, 347
Trakl, Georg, 406 Wellek, Rene, 5, 13, 66; essay by, 40-52
Trapp, Joseph, 141 Wentworth, Margery, 39
Trilling, Lionel, 354 Weston, Jessie L., 208
Tucher, Marie von, 464 Westover, Jeff, 596
Tucker, Albert, 314 Wharey, J. B., 154n8
Tucker, Herbert, 90, 454; essay by, 144-56 Wheeler, Susan, 563
Tuma, Keith, 366 Wheelock, John Hall, 527
Turville-Petre, Thorlac, 106 Whistler, James McNeill, 501
Tuttle, Richard, 559 Whitman, Walt, 3, 173, 282, 470, 551, 621; Calamus,
Twining, Thomas, 143m 550; "City of Orgies," 550; Leaves of Grass, 621
Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 233n2, 234n4
Ulmer, Gregory, 475 Wilde, Oscar, 97, 150, 544-45
Understanding Poetry (Brooks and Warren), 5, 159, William ofMalmesbury, 106
161-62, 164, 177-92 Williams, C. K., 477
Unger, Roberto, 425, 430 Williams, William Carlos, 558, 592-93; "The Red
Wheelbarrow," 618; "The Young Housewife,"
Valery, Paul, 101, 197, 198, 246, 278, 282, 331, 387, 430 555-56n4
Valles, Jules, 332 Wimsatt, James I., 442
Vance,Eugene,470,488 Wimsatt, W. B., 437, 441-42, 443, 445
Varnhagen, Rahel, 41 Wimsatt, William K., 4, 159, 163-64, 241-42, 245,
Vauquelin de Ia Fresnaye, Jean, 21 466; essay by, 201-10; Literary Criticism, 71
Vendler, Helen, 2, 88-89, 115, 164, 280, 384, 452, Winters, Yvor, 4
560; essay by, 128-40 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 434, 492
Vergil, 117-18, 125, 126; Eclogues, 124 Wood, Clement, 156n2o
Verlaine, Paul, 150-51, 328, 349, 591 Woolf, Rosemary, 105
Vickers, Brian, 131 Woolf, Virginia, 522, 524, 525-26; Mrs. Dalloway,
Vickers, Nancy, 505; essay by, 511-21 40-41; A Room of One's Own, 523
Vico, Giambattista, 426 Wordsworth, Ann, 286
Wordsworth, William, 67, 282, 304, 317n2, 363, 429, Yamanaka, Lois-Ann, 563 665
437, 446, 451, 541; "Expostulation and Reply," Yeats, William Butler, 34, 35, 49, 150, 188-90, 282,
184-85; Lyrical Ballads, 3, 13, 6o; "Ode on 489, 578, 588; "Ego Dominus Tuus," 145; "Lapis INDEX OF AUTHORS
Intimations of Immortality," 149; "Tintern Lazuli," 591; "Vacillation," 591
AND WORKS
Abbey," 149; "Westminster Bridge," 176 Yingling, Thomas, 507-8; essay by, 541-56
Wright, C. D., 563 Young, Edward, 141, 203-4, 435
Wright, Charles, 559 Yu, Pauline, 583
Wright, George T., 118
Wroth, Lady Mary: Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Zaheer, Sajjad, 607
123 Zeami, 580
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 38-39, 49, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121 Zhirmunsky, Viktor, 437-38, 440, 445
Zorn, john, 502
Xenakis, !ann is, 502 Zukofsky, Louis, 501
The Lyric Theory Reader collects major essays on the modern idea oflyric, made available here for
the first time in one place. Representing a wide range of perspectives in Anglo-American literary
criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the collection as a whole documents the
diversity and energy of ongoing critical conversations about lyric poetry.
Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction,
bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology's ten sections: genre
theory, historical models of lyric, New Criticism, structuralist and post-structuralist reading,
Frankfurt School approaches, phenomenologies oflyric reading, avant-garde anti-lyricism, lyric
and sexual difference, and comparative lyric.
Designed for students, teachers, scholars, poets, and readers with a general interest in poetics,
this book presents an intellectual history of the theory of lyric reading that has circulated both
within and beyond the classroom, wherever poetry is taught, read, discussed, and debated today.

Through an astute selection of essays and a series of brilliant commentaries on them, Jackson
and Prins show that, although the way we conceive lyric is a recent invention that embodies a
singularly modern and Western set of cultural ideas and values, we uphold lyric as the universal
model of what poetry is and should be. Reading The Lyric Theory Reader is an exhilarating
experience. In collecting what are arguably the most important modern statements about lyric
it opens up the diverse acuity of commentary on this most enduringly canonical of literary
categories, and in that process encourages our most searching reflections on the historical
existence of literary forms." -MICHAEL McKEON, Rutgers University
A distinct account emerges of the life-history of the conception of the lyric as a genre-from
the moment of its recognition as a genre that is said to have always been central, to the New
Critical insistence that lyric is available because everyone can overhear it, to the increasing
equation of lyric with poetry that occurs as the collapse of the genre system washes over both
the novel and the lyric, leaving narrative and poetry in its wake. The Lyric Theory Reader is a
worthy counterpart to Michael McKeon's Theory of the Novel. It will be essential reading for
anyone interested in the lyric, in poetry." -FRANCES FERGUSON, University of Chicago
Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have done tremendous service to poetics in the nuanced and
comprehensive work of constellation and accompanying commentary-providing a model of
editorial lucidity, a library in a box, and a ceaselessly generative contradiction which is in the
end perhaps itself the strongest argument for the lyric's eccentric centrality."
-JosHUA CLOVER, UniversityofCalifornia, Davis

Virginia jackson is the UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric in the Department of English at the
University of California, Irvine, and the author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading.
Yopie Prins is a professor of English and comparative literature att]t~ University of Michigan and
the author of Victorian Sappho. ,·l:·:~~; :.;:·;.· '"
,-,~~.~
IOHMS HOPKINS
Baltimore J www.pressjhu.edu
ISBN 13: 978-1-4214-1200-9
ISBN 10: 1-4214-1200-4
Cover design: Glen Burris
Cover illustration: Cy Twombly, Camino Real//, 2010.
© Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo courtesy Gagosian Gallery.