The Potential and Limitations of Symptomatic Criticism: The Case of Ruth Miller’s Poetry

Abstract

My article has two interrelated aims: to subject a text-focused criticism to a symptomatic demand and, in the process, to introduce, or rather re-introduce, a neglected but significant voice: that of the poet, Ruth Miller. I relate my own earlier textual response to my later symptomatic reading and conclude that, whatever the potential or limitations of the two responses, this South African poet of the 1960s continues to move beyond categorisations such as women’s poet, or political or non-political poet, to engage readers in a compulsion of language, thought, and feeling: what is it to live with awareness in the shadow of death? As Miller’s two collections are long out of print, I regard it as integral to my task of introduction to quote substantially from her poems.