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Mutlu Konuk Blasing is Professor of English at Brown University. She is the author of The Art of Life, American Poetry, and Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry.

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"This is a splendid book, one of the best on the lyric that I have ever read, combining a rich and original theoretical account with chapters on four major twentieth-century American poets. Blasing's take on the lyric is convincing and original."--Jonathan Culler, Cornell University

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"This is a splendid book, one of the best on the lyric that I have ever read, combining a rich and original theoretical account with chapters on four major twentieth-century American poets. Blasing's take on the lyric is convincing and original."--Jonathan Culler, Cornell University

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Lyric Poetry

Princeton University Press

Introduction

It is the human that is the alien. -WallaceStevens

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). 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; it stirs unruly emotions, which are subject to different kinds of persuasions, and it has mass appeal. 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 nonrational 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 nonrational 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.

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." 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, 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, 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 extralinguistic "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. 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"...