David Trotter, The Making of the Reader; Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English, and Irish Poetry (1984)

Abstract

If we assume the demise of the fabled Leavisite ‘common reader’, for which differently imagined readerships have poets been working? On what terms and how, drawing on what rhetorical and thematic resources, have Wordsworth and Arnold, Hardy and Yeats, Eliot and Pound, Auden and MacNeice sought to identify readers in and for their poems? Moving from the French Revolution to the period of the Second World War and on to 1980s Britain, The Making of the Reader offers a far-reaching analysis of the resources deployed and the devices at work in American, English, and Irish poetry, giving weight to the importance for those ambitions and resources of the various poets’ historical and political locations. The question of readership is then examined in the new themes and rhetorics that characterise the poetry of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Ed Dorn, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, and J. H. Prynne, with Trotter’s analysis underlining the significance and effects of the pathos and anti-pathos which marks their shifting poetic stances: each of these poets has doted on the pathos of subjectivity and each has turned away from this to a recalcitrance of theme and idiom, a negotiation of readership in remove from any certainty of voice and feeling and origin even as this anti-pathos itself is — in Hughes and Larkin especially — caught up in its pathos and the reader involved in that shifting subject-relation. The book’s conclusion, reproduced here, considers the institutional production of a readership today; with its particular focus the teaching of poetry in schools, where an attention to the rhetorics of form has long given way to the reading of poems as documents of the putative ‘personalities’ of their authors. The isolation of metaphor as the one admired and readily identified device in poetry provides a central instance of the fixing of a particular ‘convention of reading’. Alongside which, as against which, the poems of Davie, Larkin and Prynne, in their struggles around subjectivity, offer examples of the invoking of conventions that establish their own conditions for reading and readerships.