Treatise: Toward a Theory of Silence in Modernist American Poetry

Abstract

This essay has two premises: first, that written lyric poems by convention record the performance of a speaking or singing voice, and second, that these performances of speech and song cannot but engender silences of the voice before, between, and after the words that comprise them. These silences need not hold significance; that is, they may arise strictly as the incidental concomitants of the performance of the audible voice. In certain instances, though, poets imbue the silences of their works with the force of intentionality, positing the absence of speech and song as an integral element of the lyric poem. The twentieth century in American poetry witnessed the explicit problematization of silence in the works of the poet and composer John Cage (1912–1992), whose lecture “Nothing to Say” (1949) and whose musical composition 4’33” (1952) present just two of the many examples of Cage’s intellectual engagement with performed restraint from speaking, singing, and playing. Paul Zukofsky, the son of the modernist poet Louis Zukofsky and an artistic collaborator of John Cage, asserted that Cage’s work “elevated silence to a place of importance equal to non-silence.”1