Reading the Lyrical “Self”

Abstract

Lyrical subjectivity is often thought of as the manifestation or self-expression of real, empirical personhood. The concept of “lyrical self” has since long served as a means to distinguish between lyrical subject, considered as a poetic form and the empirical person of the author. The theoretical presuppositions behind this concept seem, however, to blur the line of separation between the two. The paper proposes a reconsideration of the issue by drawing the attention to the discursive and material techniques of recording the empirical subject in poetic texts. In the first part, it discusses Rilke’s lyrical epitaph and one of Charles Olson’s Maximus poems, and confronts the conclusions with the theoretical concept of lyrical self as elaborated in German Geistesgeschichte. In the second part, it outlines a case study on the reception of the Hungarian poet Attila József with special respect to those phenomena (traces of a lyrical autobiography, appearances of the author’s name in the poems, references to the author’s body) which at first sight seem to be records of the empirical subject in the poetic text.