“In”: M. NourbeSe Philip and “Center”

The Hyperion poems are Keats's epics. Like Wordsworth in The Excursion, in these poems Keats attempts to write an epic of the unexplored regions of the human mind. Unlike Wordsworth, however, Keats uses the narrative vocabulary of Hellenic myth--a vocabulary already at hand--but alters it to suit his own purposes. As they are concerned with the mind, these poems deal with the same issues that characterize contemporary debates about the relation of mind to language, issues that illuminate what these poems are about as much as they illuminate Keats's own use of language and theory of poetry. This essay reads "The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream" in light of these contemporary ideas and in conjunction with Keats's poems and letters. The reading concludes that Keats saw poetic language--figurative, sonorous, sensual--as the most powerful means to speculation, which he claimed to be the end of poetry. For him, the end of poetry was not imitation, and the focus of poetic activity was not the construction of a product: the poem. Rather, poetic activity was sensual and spiritual engagement with the world, and the residue of that engagement was the poetic text.

Throughout his literary career, which spanned over sixty years, Avot Yeshurun responded to readers’ dismay at his poems’ hermeticism by attempting to explain the logic of his writing. Although critics never fail to mention the difficulty of Yeshurun’s poetic language, his self-exegetic texts, which often appeared as paratexts in his volumes of poetry, have gone largely ignored. This essay reads Yeshurun’s self-commentary as a fundamental tenet of his writing and as a crucial aspect of his poetic address. While this self-commentary is at times hermetic in itself, it embodies the tension between Yeshurun’s pursuit of self-knowledge and the ineffable nature of his inner world. Yeshurun’s exceptionally difficult poetic language, and especially his use of the enigmatic word “yahndes,” which provoked critics’ ire upon its first appearance in 1952, will be read in two discursive contexts: Roman Jakobson’s “Linguistics and Poetics” and W.R. Bion’s “Attacks on Linking.” While both Jakobson’s and Bion’s formulation may shed light on the fractured communication between Yeshurun and his readers, his self-commentary may be viewed as attempts to reach out and mend this rift.