Poetic Calling, Poetic Failure: Self-reflexivity in Texts of Holderlin, Wordsworth, and Shelley

Abstract

Poetic vocation has traditionally been represented as the interpellation of one being by another. A presence intervenes in the life of the poet to become permanently identified with the voice of poetry. In older poetry that voice is most often subjectified as a tutelary presence, either a person or a god. In romantic poetry that is not necessarily so. Even where it may still seem to be so, as in some texts of H6lderlin, Novalis, and Shelley, the subject the poem addresses, its agent of interpellation, is rather the marker or sign of a subliminal and elusive presence that itself remains unsubjectified. The romantic vocational poem avoids investing a discrete subject with authority as the source of poetic vocation, even with a borrowed or appointed authority. Authority is invested instead in a free selfhood, however conceived.' Yet if this self-authorizing gesture aims at a greater authenticity, it also creates for the poet a certain impasse. The poet at once renounces any other authority than that of mere experience and yet continues to represent poetic vocation as interpellation, that is, as the bestowal of a sanction. The impasse, moreover, raises ulterior questions about the poem's authority and self-presence: to what extent is the poem's utterance anything more than a self-validating one? And does not the poem's self-validating act represent the abridgement of a more heteroge-