Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words

Lyric Poetry

Lyric Poetry

THE PAIN AND THE PLEASURE OF WORDS

Mutlu Konuk Blasing

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, 1944–

Lyric poetry : the pain and the pleasure of words / Mutlu Konuk Blasing.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN: 978-1-40082-741-1

1. Lyric poetry—History and criticism. I. Title.

PN1356.B63 2006

809.1'04—dc222005056497

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Permission to reprint the following material is gratefully acknowledged:

Excerpts from Burnt Norton, from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

The Tree by Ezra Pound, from Personae, copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Excerpt from Said the Poet to the Analyst, from To Bedlam and Part Way Back by Anne Sexton. Copyright © 1960 by Anne Sexton, renewed 1988 by Linda G. Sexton.

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For John

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Making Choice of a Human Self

Lyric Theory

1. The Lyric Subject

2. The Historical I

3. The Scripted I

4. The Body of Words

Lyric Practice

5. Four Quartets: Rhetoric Redeemed

6. Wallace Stevens and The Less Legible Meanings of Sounds

7. Pound s Soundtrack: Reading Cantos for What Is on the Page

8. Anne Sexton, The Typo

Coda: The Haunted House of Anna

Works Cited

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I AM GRATEFUL TO Randy Blasing for his encouragement and many useful suggestions through the years; to Nancy Armstrong, for her support and helpful comments; to Hanne Winarsky, whose interest in this book made it possible; to Ellen Foos and Kathleen Cioffi, for seeing it into print; and, finally, to both readers for Princeton University Press, whose responses were invaluable to me as I made my final revisions.

Lyric Poetry

Introduction

MAKING CHOICE OF A HUMAN SELF

It is the human that is the alien.

—Wallace Stevens

POETRY HAS PRESENTED a problem for disciplinary discourse from the beginning. There is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, Plato declares; he gives no evidence and makes no argument as to why poetry would have a quarrel with philosophy, but his own discourse offers clear evidence of philosophy s issue with poetry. Poets are banned from the Republic, ostensibly on the grounds that mimetic fictions are imitations of imitations and thus twice removed from Truth. This threat to the discourse of Truth would not in itself pose a practical danger if it didn't also appeal to something within us that does: these productions which are far removed from truth . . . are also the companions and friends and associates of a principle within us which is equally removed from reason (1974, 77, 73). If epic or lyric verse is allowed into the state, not law and the reason of mankind . . . but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our state (76). For along with the manly principle of reason, is a womanly, other principle, which inclines us to recollection of our troubles and to lamentation, and can never have enough of them, [which] we may call irrational, useless, and cowardly" (75, 74).¹ The real threat, then, is not mimesis but a language use that mobilizes emotions, the variability and inconstancy of which pose a further problem (75). While reason would standardize a citizenry of coherent, self-determining subjects in charge of the city within their souls, the other principle is subject to variations, both within and among individuals. Poetry plays to the volatile part of our nature and thus has the power to create bad cities: it can move the promiscuous crowd at public festivals, for it is a sort of rhetoric which is addressed to a crowd of men, women, and children, freemen and slaves (75, 37).

On the social level, poetry threatens the project of establishing order in the city within the citizen as well as in the city of discourse;² it stirs unruly emotions, which are subject to different kinds of persuasions, and it has mass appeal. ³ But at the discursive level, the threat of poetry is not a threat of anarchy, for the autonomous, stringent orders of the linguistic and formal codes are evident. Rather, it is the threat of a different system underwriting—and, therefore, in effect overruling—the order of reason. What imperils rational language is what enables it: a non rational linguistic system that is logically and genetically prior to its rational deployment. The mimetic theory of poetry is a disciplinary suppression of the emotional and non rational public power of the linguistic code itself for the philosophical agenda, and it paves the way for banning poetry for the political agenda. Representations must be politically controlled, but before that, the power of the linguistic code itself must be discursively controlled, which is precisely what a mimetic theory of poetry ensures.⁴

Thus one is tempted to say that the attack on mimesis is something of a red herring. And it keeps on working. Even defenses of poetry remain within the framework of mimesis, representation, and Truth—although, of course, Truth keeps changing and Representation, for instance, can come to be the truth that poems represent. More important, the philosophical ban on linguistic emotion—a ban on the emotional power of language itself, which poetry focuses and intensifies—is also still at work. It has succeeded in keeping linguistic emotion out of the critical discourse on poetry by limiting our conception of poetic emotion to imitations, representations, or presentations of real-life emotions. Remarkably, there is no established critical vocabulary, theory, or methodology to engage the nature of specifically poetic emotion that draws on the rhetorical power of the affectively charged materials of language.

Such linguistic emotion and the relation it bears to the systematic formality of poetic language are among the questions that concern me in this study. Although I begin with Plato’s ban on poetry, my project does not belong to the genre of pittiful defence[s] of poore Poetry.⁵ I invoke Plato only because I attempt to think of poetic language outside a Platonic framework and account for poetic emotion without swerving to the grounds of mimesis, representation, and truth. I focus on lyric poetry, where an I talks to itself or to nobody in particular and is not primarily concerned with narrating a story or dramatizing an action. Without these other ends in view, the lyric presents us with poetic language per se, which is my subject.

Lyric poetry is not mimesis. Above everything else, it is a formal practice that keeps in view the linguistic code and the otherness of the material medium of language to all that humans do with it—refer, represent, express, narrate, imitate, communicate, think, reason, theorize, philosophize. It offers an experience of another kind of order, a system that operates independently of the production of the meaningful discourse that it enables. This is a mechanical system with its own rules, procedures, and history. It works with a kind of logic that is oblivious to discursive logic.

The nonrational order that the formality of poetic language keeps audible is distinct from any cultivated, induced, pathological, or deviant irrationality, or the irrationality of dreams and other comparable experiences, which certain poetic practices may invoke. Nor is it to be understood as some primal irrationality. Such irrationals implicitly affirm logical language as the norm, but precisely that norm is in question in the formality of poetic language per se, which is not oriented in relation to reference and rational discourse. It is simply another language, another system of communication,⁶ and it commands power, for every speaker of a language emotionally responds to the language itself, even though complex ideas and figures may not be any more accessible to everyone than philosophical thought would be. The formal materiality of poetic language makes for its radically popular basis. And the more regular the patterns of the verse are, the more popular the verse. As Robert Frost puts it, the spirit of poetry is safest in the keeping of the none too literate—people who know it by heart (1968, 55).

Poetic language cannot be understood as deviating from or opposing a norm of rational language,⁷ because poetic forms clearly accommodate referential use of language and rational discourse. But they position most complex thought processes and rigorous figurative logic as figures on the ground of processes that are in no way rational. When poetry construes the symbolic function and logical operations as kinds of games one can play with language—right alongside wordplays and rhymes—all superstructures, all claims to extra linguistic truths, are in jeopardy. Poetry is a cultural institution dedicated to remembering and displaying the emotionally and historically charged materiality of language, on which logical discourse would establish its hold.⁸ It poses an ever-present danger for rational discourse, which must, for example, vigilantly guard against such poetic encroachments as alliterations or rhymes in serious prose. By contrast, in poetry words that carry the most import are highlighted as such by rhyming with other important words, by carrying more than one sense, or by where the beat falls. Poetry argues by appealing to the authority of the linguistic system, and poetic forms can host rational discourse, but not the other way around. While poetry ensures a constant alternation or pulse of sense and nonsense, rational discourse cannot afford to flash glimpses of the nonsensical, absurd, material base of the superstructure that it is.⁹ Reason needs to establish and maintain itself as what is not nonrational.

Thus one must not—if one wants to think poetry as such—posit an unconscious or instincts or any bodily drives to account for the power of poetry and its threat to rational discourse. Even if we were to recognize such entities, their relevance to poetry is highly questionable. Indeed, all such extra linguistic irrationals are historically and culturally specific disciplinary constructions of the others of disciplinary discourse, and they work only to confirm the priority of rational language. But poetry foregrounds a linguistic

non rational that is not a byproduct of reason; rather, it is the ground on which rational language and disciplinary discourses carve their territories, draw their borders, and designate their irrational others.

Just as the disciplinary state in the service of Truth must rule out and/or censor poetry, so must any disciplinary discourse in pursuit of truth, for the status of language is always at stake: it must remain a neutral, stable instrument of thought. Certainly, the thinkers who shaped modern disciplinary thought register the threat of poetry. Marx, for example, started out with poetic ambitions but abandoned poetry for philosophy. Poetry was unsettling: Everything real grew vague, he writes his father in 1837, "and all that is vague lacks boundaries. He decides to focus on positive studies only—I burned all my poems—and to demonstrate our mental nature to be just as determined, concrete, and firmly established as our physical."¹⁰ Freud started with hysteria and the dangerous contamination of language—the contagion of the body, affect, and the operations of the linguistic code—but he abandoned hysteria to establish his science of psychoanalysis. Saussure abandoned his fascinating early work on anagrammatically in scripted names in Saturnine funerary verse, which display the compulsions of language and jeopardize its status as an instrument of communication, in order to formulate a science of linguistics. In a sense, these disciplines implicitly draw the line at poetry as something that must be exorcised, displaced, or bracketed in order to establish their territories, carve out their nation-states. Disciplinary discourse inaugurates itself as not poetry. This rough outline, which would require another project to fill in, is meant only to point to the special, extra disciplinary status of poetic language and its fundamental challenge to any rational discourse in pursuit of truth.

Today poetry is largely ignored by literary studies because it forces the question of the category of the poetic as such, for poetry does not respond very well to current constructions of the discipline of literary study, which emphasize the social, economic, or political determinants of literary production. Literary production may be so determined, but critical approaches to poetry from these angles cannot tell us much about the nature and function of poetic language, which may be said to be the marker of the literary, the presumed object of literary study.¹¹ The form that the disciplinary censoring of lyric poetry takes today is a determined evasion of the special status of poetic language as such. Under the mandate to historicize, for example, the lyric reduces to a documentary of the inner experiences and private affairs of a bourgeois individual. The lyric is a foundational genre, and its history spans millennia;¹² it comprises a wide variety of practices, ranging in the West from Sappho to rap. Historicizing the lyric as essentially a late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European invention in effect universalizes a historically and geographically specific model of a subject.¹³ And the term lyric, still used in this sense, has come to serve as an ideological weapon in the ongoing politicized poetry wars. Whether the lyric is read as oppositional or complicitous, it is still understood to be the self-expression of a prior, private, constitutive subject.

Lyric language is a radically public language,¹⁴ but it will not submit to treatment as a social document—of a certain stage of capitalism, for example—because there is no individual in the lyric in any ordinary sense of the term. The lyric makes audible a virtual subjectivity in the shape of a given language, a mother tongue, and the historical permutations of the concept and status of an individual are not of help in understanding poetic subjectivity, which will elude methodologies that assume that concept as a given—itself a Western bourgeois assumption.¹⁵ The emphasis on an extra linguistic individual is a historically specific form that the repression of the material and formal rhetoric of poetic language takes. For the subject represented in or by or as the poem’s referential language, the subject that is its fiction, is absolutely distinct from the subject produced and heard in the voice, rhythm, and sound shape of the poem.

In the form of a poem the prescriptive shape of the language itself becomes audible, and the voice—an individuating emotional inflection and rhythm, a voice print of a speaker—is heard in and as its manner of submission to the constraints of a prescriptive code. While the sorrows of the bourgeois individual may be a historically specific resonance of the lyric subject’s discourse of alienation, the alienation in poetic language is not specific to lyrics of bourgeois subjectivity: it is the enabling condition of subjectivity in language. The concept and status of an a priori individual are always already in question in a language that foregrounds the rules of the linguistic and formal codes; a subject is historically formulated in language precisely by subjection to a preexisting system that at once socializes and individuates it. Language produces the subject, not the other way around. The lyric I is a metaleptic figure, an Apollonian illusion of an individual projected upon, to use Nietzsche’s words, a piece of fate (1979, 54).

The current forms of disciplinary censoring of poetry themselves trace back to the nineteenth century. T. S. Eliot writes that at the end of the eighteenth century the attitude towards poetry and the expectations and demands made upon it changed significantly, as the decay of religion, and the attrition of political institutions left dubious frontiers upon which the poet encroached.

Wordsworth and Coleridge are not just demolishing a debased tradition, but revolting against a whole social order; they begin to make claims for poetry which reach their highest point of exaggeration in Shelley’s famous phrase, ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.’ While in Shelley we get a first in this tradition of poets as Nature’s M.P.’s, the other reading of the poet as priest results in Matthew Arnold’s notion of poetry as substitute religion—coffee without caffeine, tea without tannin—which is extended and travestied by the art for art’s sake position (1986, 16).

The exaggerated expectations placed on poetry in the nineteenth century leads to a kind of criticism that views poetry as a pretext for discourses compelled by other agendas. For Johnson, Eliot writes, poetry was still poetry, and not another thing; in the nineteenth century, however, we have critics who do not so much practice criticism as make use of it for other purposes (1986, 57). If lyric poetry is dismissed today as an anachronistic, nineteenth-century phenomenon, the criteria used for this judgment are nineteenth-century, moralistic, normative criteria following from expectations that poetry do something other than poetry—the expectations of a last-ditch humanism.

And when it turns out that poetry doesn’t do anything other than poetry-that it does not do what it should or could do-it disappoints and becomes irrelevant to the huge social and political problems that are understood to be the moral burden of literary study to address, and thus redress, so to speak, the failure of poetry to do so.¹⁶

Literary study is a rational enterprise, of course, and if, as Eliot put it, the question What is poetry? posits the critical function (1986, 10), it also necessarily posits a discursive erasure of poetry. Poetry generates discourses of truth, given its constitutive split between sound and sense, appearances and reality. Yet it becomes dispensable to the discourses it generates, reducing to a means to the end of truth-whether the real meaning of the text or its refusal of stable meanings, or its historical, social, political, or ideological determinants or agendas. Truth keeps receding behind representational appearances of various sorts. In all cases, though, the physical materials of the text, the ground of all sorts of discursive appearances, remain superfluous, outside the game of meaning and the disciplinary borders of literary study.

Wlad Godzich, discussing Paul de Man, points out that criticism is a form of language trained upon reason and it aims to permit meaning to speak directly, in its own voice, rather than through representation and mediating figures (1983, xxvi). Criticism aims at transparency, at stripping the text of its figural appearances; it works with the premise that meaning, or the truth, is not ‘at home’ in the language of representation of the primary text (xxiii). This is no doubt true. Yet if appearances is only a figure for figurative language, the specialness of poetry again disappears from view, for we are again within the framework of a discourse of representation and truth or the lack thereof. This is, in effect, transparency at another level, for the material reality of poetic language is now relegated to the category of appearances at a different level—and this done so naturally that it doesn’t seem to need mentioning. For the premise here is that the discourse of truth and representation is not at home in the materiality of the primary text. But figural and rational languages alike depend on a prior material language and a prior operation that gets us from the material letters and sounds to words. And that operation cannot be subsumed under the rubric of figuration because it has a history. We did not come with language; we have all had to learn it. To dismiss the materiality of language is to dismiss the emotionally charged history that made us who we are—subjects in language, which is the subject of the lyric.

As important as de Man’s work is for reading the rhetoric of poetry, it draws the line at the rhetoric of the linguistic code itself and the history of our emotional relationship to the code. Here his insight into the blindness of theory is disarming, and I want to consider in some detail his resistance to what resists theory. Writing on Walter Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator, de Man explains the demystification translation performs as it foregrounds the slippage between what one means and the way one means:

To mean bread, when I need to name bread, I have the word Brot, so that the way in which I mean is by using the word Brot. The translation will reveal a fundamental discrepancy between the intent to name Brot and the word Brot itself in its materiality, as a device of meaning. If you hear Brot in this context of Hölderlin, . . . I hear Brot und Wein necessarily, which is the great Hölderlin text that is very much present in this [text]—which in French becomes Pain et vin. "Pain et vin" is what you get for free in a restaurant, in a cheap restaurant where it is still included, so pain et vin has very different connotations from Brot und Wein. It brings to mind the pain français, baguette, ficelle, bâtard, all those things—I now hear in Brot bastard. This upsets the stability of the quotidian. I was very happy with the word Brot, which I hear as a native because my native language is Flemish and you say brood, just like in German, but if I have to think that Brot [brood] and pain are the same thing, I get very upset. It is all right in English because bread is close enough to Brot [brood], despite the idiom bread for money, which has its problems. But the stability of my quotidian, of my daily bread, the reassuring quotidian aspects of the word bread, daily bread, is upset by the French word pain. What I mean is upset by the way in which I mean—the way in which it is pain, the phoneme, the term pain, which has its set of connotations which take you in a completely different direction. (1989, 87)

This lively account of what upsets a native speaker goes to the heart of poetic language, the dis articulation—the suffering, the pain—of language that Benjamin talks about and that Nietzsche addressed before him. But de Man reduces the issue to one of quotidian comforts, and his tone already makes light of it. Later, he wants to take back this passage; it was just aiming for a cheap laugh.¹⁷ He admits and backs off from feelings for words in the mother tongue—surely not irrelevant to a writer, reader, or theorist of poetry. For poetic experience is at once an experience of the inhumanity of the linguistic code, its obliviousness to meaning, and of the personal feelings that are nevertheless attached to its material elements.

The paragraph immediately following the passage above begins, This disjunction is best understood (to take it to a more familiar theoretical problem) in terms of the difficult relationship between the hermeneutics and the poetics of literature (1989, 87–88). Recasting the disjunction between meaning and the way of meaning in the terms of hermeneutics and poetics—the mutually exclusive pursuits of attending to the extra linguistic meaning or to the form of poetic language—theoretically neutralizes precisely that which, in language, constitutes the resistance to theory. As de Man admits, when one tries to achieve a complementarity of hermeneutics and poetics, the poetics always drops out, and what one always does is hermeneutics. One is so attracted by problems of meaning that it is impossible to do hermeneutics and poetics at the same time. . . . The two are not complementary, the two may be mutually exclusive . . . (88). The one who always prefers to do hermeneutics is the one who draws his disciplinary limit on this side of the I who is upset by pain. Another one may always prefer to do poetics but would draw the same line, excising emotion.

The familiar theoretical problem recuperates quotidian comforts, dismissing the historical and emotional charge of words in the native tongue. And to erase linguistic affect or emotion, whether one is doing hermeneutics or poetics, is to erase linguistic intention or motivation-precisely what enables meaningful language, the conditions for which poetry spells out. Only a theoretical accounting of the rhetoric of the language itself-and thus, at another level, of poetic forms-would get us out of the hermeneutics/poetics binary by instituting the history formative of the subject at that divide, as what generates that divide.

The passage I have quoted presents a phenomenon that does not come under hermeneutics or poetics, because it raises the question of personal and cultural histories in the native tongue. A cultural and personal connotational intension (intensio) historically intentionalizes the word in the mother tongue. This kind of history falls in the crack of the disciplinary binary; it is voiced as an I who prefers to say "Brot to intend bread because, for example, he hears it in the context of Hölderlin. But this I also prefers to say Brot because he has had to say Brot": he has had to intend the phonemic sequence that constitutes the word "Brot." Here a personal history of intention embedded in the prescriptive word, rather than in Hölderlin, is at issue.

Insofar as we obey the law to function within language, de Man writes, there can be no intent; there may be an intent of meaning, but there is no intent in the purely formal way in which we will use language independently of the sense or the meaning (1989, 87). That is, I can intend the object bread but not the word bread, for it is already a given. Yet I have already intended to say bread; I have a history of desiring and learning to produce the sounds of that word out of random noise and muscular activity. I am constituted as one who has inaugurally intended the word bread—and thus did my part to make sure that it stays a given. The word in its materiality is not just a device of meaning, and the way we use language is not purely formal, because we are historically bonded to the physical materials of words. Thus it is not only the cultural connotations that make words in different languages mean differently but the sound shape of words and the auditory and muscular memories that cluster around word sounds and make for one’s emotional relationships to them: pain just doesn’t feel anything like Brot in one’s mouth.

The divide between meaning and the way of meaning, which can only be duplicated on a theoretical register, is historically created, and it is the foundation of a history that is not just a constant deferral but a constant choice and motivation of meaning, which de Man’s wording represses: "the phoneme, the term pain, which has its connotations conflates a phoneme with a term, a meaningful set of phonemes. Perhaps it is the English pain that underwrites this passage and tells the real story: the pain of the phoneme that must be subsumed by the term pain in order to carry on discourse and make sure that pleasure and pain will not be the rulers in our state. De Man evades the question whether, for a native speaker, the phonemes themselves might not be connotationally intensified; he evades the historical event of the phoneme and the history whereby sounds come to be phonemes and phonemes come to make up terms." In the beginning was not a phoneme, let alone a word.

As for Benjamin, the apocalyptic thrust of his essay is that translation gestures toward a pure language, stripped of emotional connotations, history, and therefore the possibility of intention. Such meaning-less language obviates a subject and becomes a sort of god, and translation points the way to that Word: it provisionally comes to terms with the foreignness of languages (1969, 75)—above all one’s own—by cleansing language of personal and cultural connotational histories and revealing its inhumanity—its independence, in de Man’s words, of any intent or any drive or any wish or any desire we might have (96). Language does things so radically out of control, he adds, that they cannot be assimilated into the human at all (101).

Is a human a rational creature, a given prior to or outside of language, who ought to be in control of language? Is a human one who forgets the inhumanity of the code in which he or she became a human? The revealed foreignness of the inhuman code upsets the personal and historical at-home-ness in the mother tongue. It is an alienation from the human. Yet this is what poetry does in the first place: it remembers what the human forgot—that he is not God.¹⁸ With poetry, we must think of language as a foreign mechanism and an intimate, constitutive history at the same time. We are never at home in poetry, for we experience at once the foreignness of the familiar language and the intimacy of the alien code. Translation rationalizes the alienation and loses the sense of the unheimlich that is at the heart of poetry, the experience of the intimate otherness of the mechanical operations of the linguistic code and of our histories, both personal and communal. This is an experience of