Apostrophe, or the Lyric Art of Turning Away

Abstract

Apostrophe, or the Lyric Art of Turning Away J. Mark Smith Grant MacEwan College Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Turn away no more: Why wilt thou turn away?1 I. Introduction Lyric, when it works, works on its audience in a peculiar way. Its effects are not exactly "rhetorical." And so when I claim (as I do in this essay) that where there is lyric there is apostrophe, a corollary of my claim is that apostrophe names not a codified rhetorical device or trope, but a demand that lyric poems lay upon their readers.2 The English poet Geoffrey Hill, mulling over the problem of "poetic voice" in a 1981 interview on BBC Radio, made this remark: . . . those old distinctions that you get in the Victorian and Romantic observers and auditors—the kinds of distinction that they are trying to draw all the time between a dramatic and a lyric voice—I think in our time inevitably merge. The lyric voice must exist, or must be heard, or has to be heard, or is constrained to be heard, in a dramatic context. (cited in Griffiths, 76) On this occasion, Hill had in mind the poet's public reading of his own poem, but what he says has broader application. He describes, in fact, the predicament of any reader or listener. Every spoken iteration of a lyric "must be heard" in the dramatic context he refers to. Of course, "dramatic" has some special sense here. A lyric poem is not a script for speaking. Nor is it exactly a staging of speech. Speaking a lyric is only accidentally related to acting. The essay that follows focuses on the figure of apostrophe in order to cast some light on the "dramatic context" that constrains lyric in our time.3 My analysis touches on poems from a range of periods over the last four hundred years, including sixteenth- and seventeenth-century, Victorian, [End Page 411] and mid-twentieth century works. The examples have been gathered from my own itineraries of reading, and considered through a modernist lens. My thesis has a transhistorical reach, though its assumptions are of a late modernist moment. I come to my guiding conception of lyric apostrophe primarily by way of Pound (via an Olson-related anecdote, and Canto 82). What starts as bare intimation gains inductive and genealogical powerin the turn to Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." The example of apostrophe in Whitman's mockingbird passage is remarkably original, to the point of idiosyncrasy. Nevertheless, general principles of lyric can be abstracted from it (and reconfirmed even in much older poems, such as Herbert's "Denial," or those of other traditions, such as Celan's "Sprachgitter"). A crucial first step is to distinguish between lyrical and oratorical apostrophe.4 In oratorical apostrophe, the orator averts his speech from a "judge" and, in passing, addresses individuals in the audience, opponents perhaps (as Demosthenes to Aeschines, or Cicero to Catiline), or absent others, or even inanimate things ("O sacred traditions of Rome . . . ").5 Despite this temporary aversion of address, the orator's intent continues to be to interest and persuade whoever is sitting in judgment on a case or argument or plea. Quintilian (51–55) called it a "remarkably effective" lawyerly sort of trick.6 All oratorical apostrophe, then, is a kind of address. Conversely, all instances of lyric address turn out to be apostrophe. In a poem, the initial judge or audience appealed to (the explicitly or implicitly addressed "you") is never in fact present or available for persuasion, and so in the moment that lyric speech "turns away" toward another addressee (whether person or nonperson), it cannot turn back again (as in oratorical apostrophe). Any further addressee is also not in a position to hear or to reply (and not simply because it is inanimate); and so no lyric address ever reaches its "you." That is, every instance of lyric is coincident with a movement of speech...