Lyric Image as Sensuous Thought

Abstract

Recent scholarship has given considerable attention to lyric poetry as a form of sensuous knowledge. This approach emphasizes the corporeal origins of poetry, its genesis in the body or in language viewed as material. The question of sensuous knowledge is central to the larger theoretical issue of itself, in which lyric holds a central yet ambiguous status. The question of sensuous knowledge is ultimately a question of meaning. However, modern thought — thought pertaining to modernity — is fundamentally circular. This would seem to establish an epistemological impasse for aesthetics. But I argue that this circularity offers an important, and necessary, way to limit knowledge and thereby ground an ethical subjectivity. My essay places formalism at the heart of sensuous knowledge. In this essay I develop an account of the importance of abstraction in sensuous knowledge by way of Kant's concept of Darstellung , [of sensory experience]. The presentation is the object as it has undergone a structural process of internalization and been made available for psychic use as meaning; that requires a recognition of loss. Where this is important for literature is that twentieth-century American poetry frequently uses very personal images of family life as a way of conveying sincerity about corporeal experience. I use this discussion of circularity in modern aesthetic thought to argue that there is a risk to taking shortcuts to meaning through images of the material bodies of children. In these contemporary poems by Gary Snyder, Sharon Olds and Rita Dove, the poets reject loss in favor of a very modern of the material. But affirmation and the visual image as a sign of affirmation cannot alone bind meaning to us. That meaning must be internalized through the work of poetic presentation.