Speaking and Making: Arendt, Stevens, and the Poetics of Public Discourse

Abstract

What is the relationship between the art object and the activity of public discourse? For Hannah Arendt, the constructed world, which includes artworks, is the necessary precondition for substantial and sustained public discourse, which includes politics. However, the artwork itself does not fully participate in that discourse; it does not constitute public speech and action in the properly political sense. Reinterpreting Arendt’s concepts of speech, action, recognition, memory, and the space of appearances, this essay reconsiders the public life of poetry, its existence as both a constructed artifact and a rhetorical act. Synthesizing Arendt’s reflections on the artwork with recent work in contemporary poetics, I illustrate the discursive capacity of poetry through a reading of Wallace Stevens’s “Description without Place.” In Stevens’s poem, public rhetoric and formal construction are inseparable, generating an object that can speak.