Poetry's Knowing Ignorance by Joseph Acquisto

Abstract

Reviewed by: Poetry's Knowing Ignorance by Joseph Acquisto Derek Schilling Acquisto, Joseph. Poetry's Knowing Ignorance. Bloomsbury, 2020. ISBN 978-1-5013-5523-3. Pp. 213. That European philosophical systems failed to delimit what Baudelaire would call "le beau multiforme et versicolore" (44) and offered woefully inadequate definitions of poetry was a core insight of the German Romantics. It fell to modern poets incessantly to ask, in an idiom irreducible to "criticism," what relation poetry, a contingent object rooted in subjective experience, establishes with the external world via the mediations of language. In this deeply attentive foray into French poetic thought from Hugo to Maulpoix, Acquisto argues that poetry's most consequential claim to knowledge lies in lucidly realizing its own ignorance and espousing a state of perpetual unknowing. Unable to ascertain what poetry is (or is not), modern poets embrace an apparent epistemological weakness to instantiate, through reading and writing, a dynamic community of sense-making that reshapes the world. Neither silent mystical revelation nor the "universel reportage" lambasted by Mallarmé are adequate to poetry's unending task, which amounts to raising questions without answers. Rather than pursue genealogical arguments about the origins and reception of la docte ignorance, Acquisto examines, in pairs, rough poetic contemporaries who similarly cast poetry as "an infinitely revisable definitional space" (80) even as they diversely conceive of the interrelations of poet, language, and world. Breaking with Hugo's visionary aesthetics of unmediated truth, Baudelaire is for Acquisto the watershed figure who moved poetry beyond didacticism and doctrine (l'art pour l'art) into the realm of epistemology. The modern poet intuits that if statements that begin with "poetry is…" are contingent and fleeting, this is "not a defect in poetry's knowledge but the very heart of it" (43). A second chapter takes as a springboard Reverdy's dream of capturing "le lyrisme de la réalité" (54) to examine Valéry's regulatory ideal of pure poetry: internally divided, poetry for Valéry is its own reality even as it dialectically contains its relation to an outside. Bataille radicalizes this non-identity of poetry under the guise of non-knowledge wherein words are "victims" sacrificially wrested from the transactional world of humans and things, while for Blanchot, poetry, like the neutral, does not unveil presence but indicates "'l'inconnu comme inconnu'" (115). Subsequent to these dark, mid-century disquisitions, the new lyricism of the 1990s marks a return to Romantic poetic subjectivity: if Jaccottet's insistence upon poetry as "cette clé qu'il faut toujours reperdre" (4) chimes with the need endlessly to question the world in its strangeness, Maulpoix's lyrisme critique comes across as a less focused project, perhaps even an albatross-like retreat into literary commonplace. Compiling lengthy quotations (with English renderings) from each poet, Acquisto makes an unassailable case for ignorance as a foundation and force for poetic creation. [End Page 226] The four core chapters skillfully prepare the ground for a closing appeal, informed by Jean-Luc Nancy, for a nomadic "open community" (171) united in an hermeneutic quest both public and private which maintains difference. All that remains to ask is whether this exacting, thought-provoking exploration is better qualified as critique, or as itself an unsettled refusal of definitive knowledge—poetry by any other name. [End Page 227] Derek Schilling Johns Hopkins University (MD) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French