Lyric Utterance Research Articles

King Learand the Irony of Capacity

AbstractThis essay considers the relation between lyric utterance, dramatic irony, and intellectual disability in King Lear, particularly in Lear’s famous address to Cordelia—which begins with “Come, let’s away”—just before Edmund sends both to prison. Reading “Come, let’s away” alongside early modern prison literature, the essay argues that the speech’s work as lyric within tragic drama erodes dramatic irony, removing the audience from the superior knowledge position that such irony affords and that enables ableist perspectives to begin with. In shifting attention from tragic action to lyric power, Lear’s speech renders the ability and willingness to understand one’s situation, and to act efficaciously in that situation, irrelevant to accessing what is beautiful and true. Shakespeare thus separates the question of mental capacity from that of felicitous choice. The irony of capacity in “Come, let’s away,” then, is this: that when readers focus on the value of mental capacity and on the power over action that Lear lacks, they miss what his speech does, the lyric capacity that it has.

Making Flowers Speak: Petrarch and Idiorrhythmy

ABSTRACT This article brings Petrarch’s (1304–74) lyric poetry into dialogue with Barthes’s notion of “idiorrythmie” (idiorrhythmy) as outlined in his lecture course Comment vivre ensemble (How to Live Together). It explores both the idiorrhythmic aspects of Petrarchan desire and the traits of lyric utterance through which they are expressed, with a focus on canzone 126 of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of Vernacular Things). The article begins with a study of Barthes’s exposition of idiorrhythmy: its medieval origins in the monastic communities of Mount Athos and the productively unstable and improvised character of the “living together,” and apart, that it implies. Most significant for the analysis that follows is idiorrhythmy’s relationship to eros, Barthes’s idea that idiorrhythmy preserves a space for the body’s desires in opening to interruptions, deviations, and digressions. The remainder of the article offers a close reading of Petrarch’s Rvf 126, focusing on one image in the poem that, like Barthes’s idiorrhythmy, is rooted in fantasy and embraces errancy: the image of a flower that turning and falling around the poet’s beloved seems to speak of love.

In the shade of “beautiful style”: talking about the chamber vocal music pieces by G. Donizetti

In the shade of “beautiful style”: talking about the chamber vocal music pieces by G. Donizetti

Buried affect: the lyric “moment” in Peter Riley's Excavations

ABSTRACTThis article discusses Peter Riley's Excavations (1995–2004), a collection of 181 prose poems about Neolithic tumuli in the north of England, based on the accounts of J.R. Mortimer and William Greenwell. I argue that Riley combines different registers and voices to recuperate lyric as a moment rather than a genre. The first section discusses how syntactical, symbolic and vocal effects generate the ‘grounded relativism’ that Riley desires. I go on to resituate Riley's use of the prose poem alongside Charles Baudelaire and Jack Spicer instead of J.H. Prynne and the ‘Cambridge school’. The third part analyses how the lyric voice of Excavations changes over the course of the collection, becoming less effective and affective as its ambitions are made all the more explicit. Ultimately, I conclude that Riley's work has wider implications for recent debates about lyric utterance, particularly in the way it internalises critical scepticism towards its own project.

Mimicry, Originality, and Sarah Piatt’s Ekphrastic Failures

Mimicry, Originality, and Sarah Piatt’s Ekphrastic Failures Christa Holm Vogelius (bio) Sarah Piatt might seem a strange case study for originality and mimicry in nineteenth-century women’s verse, given her own strained relation to poetic convention. Her layered dialogue, distancing irony, and sharp, often cutting turns produce an effect askew of polished gentility. There are children here, but they are not innocent; there is romance, but it often ends badly; there are paintings and beautiful things, but the sense they leave us is more somber depth than reflective surface. Nonetheless, it is precisely Piatt’s engagement with and resistance to convention that make her poetry worth thinking about through these terms. This essay considers Piatt’s use of mirroring images and mimicry to test the boundaries between original and copy. This testing leads organically to Piatt’s ekphrastic verse, which as a detailed verbal description of a visual artwork is both in its basic function a literal copy and one that also deals very explicitly with the imitative function of images as behavioral models. If the nineteenth-century woman poet was on the one hand associated with a transparent, artless sentimentality and a seamless embodiment of her own verse, and on the other with imitation and a failure to truly originate, Piatt’s poems, particularly her ekphrases, [End Page 300] present an escape hatch from the traditional Poetess mode. These poems work within and unsettle a tradition in which, as Yopie Prins explains, the Poetess was a “detachable figure that exceeded the work of any actual woman poet,” “a repeatable trope, a personification performed by female poets.”1 Piatt’s poems engage sentimentality, but they do so through irony’s distancing lens, complicating the notion of poetic embodiment—by, in Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s terms, “mak[ing] evident the fragmented nature of lyric utterance … [and] lay[ing] bare the contradictory connection between embodiment and representation.”2 At the same time, the obvious attention to craft evident in Piatt’s poems denies the role of the Poetess as an astute mimic of form. What develops from this engagement and resistance are poems whose layering of voices elude a particular conceptual center and copies that perpetuate with no clear original, in a nineteenth century version of hyperreality that slips past the basic ethics of poetic embodiment. Piatt’s verse, in other words, may seem to us innovative in its anticipation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century modes of thought and writing, but it achieves this effect through its direct engagement with nineteenth-century Poetess tropes. The gift that Piatt gives us, then—and Paula Bernat Bennett through her—is the ability to see this mode as not (just) a harbinger of modernity or postmodernity, but as a state of mind that was already deeply embedded in nineteenth-century conventions, already a part of the way that writers and critics talked with and about this poetry. This essay begins by discussing the vocabulary of nineteenth-century editorial writing in relation to both feminist theory and our contemporary critical conversations. The second section frames Piatt’s verse of mirroring imagery in this context, while the final section, on Piatt’s ekphrases and ekphrastic theory, argues that this work is emblematic of her poetics as well as representative of the contradictory demands on the nineteenth-century woman writer. [End Page 301] i: the terms of criticism: origination, mirroring, and mimicry In the preface to the first edition of The Female Poets of America (1848), editor Rufus Griswold opens with an assertion that to his contemporary readers must have seemed a platitude: “It is less easy to be assured of the genuineness of literary ability in women than in men.”3 Women’s verse, particularly the genteel newspaper and periodical verse that Griswold strove to consolidate, had a lot to prove in these early years of nationalist literary collection. Anthologies like Griswold’s attempted to define, however unsystematically, what should count as American literature at a point when writers and editors were pushing back against European models. And “genuineness of literary ability” often hinged on tenuous and subjective terms like originality at a time when women’s writing was undeniably dominated by both...

Kirill Medvedev and Elena Fanailova: Poetry, Ethics, Politics, and Philosophy

This essay argues that the categories of lyric utterance, subjectivity, and political insight have been rethought and reinvented by contemporary Russian poets, focusing on the exemplary work of Kirill Medvedev and Elena Fanailova. Their poems show how the category of the everyday is a scene where political meanings can be discerned: poems can be built out of rather ordinary encounters and experiences. Fanailova and Medvedev seek to make visible previously unnoticed aspects of experience, and to engage in forms of political speech based on personal interactions, economic transactions, and sexual encounters. The essay draws on theoretical work that ties poetic subjectivity to an emerging idea of freedom (Jacques Rancière), or that links personal evolution to ethics (Stanley Cavell).

Mary Jacobus Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a CloudRomantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud. Mary Jacobus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. viii+221.

Mary Jacobus Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a CloudRomantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud. Mary Jacobus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. viii+221.

“The Pitch of the Dawn”: Reading Lyric in Jorie Graham's Aubades

This essay considers the aubade as a special case of that threshold condition to which all lyric utterance is subject. Drawing on recent work by Mutlu Konuk Blasing, it argues that the dawn songs in Jorie Graham's The Errancy (1997) instantiate and figure the interference of linguistic materiality with discursive logic that is central to the workings of lyric. The poetry's fostering these cross-purposes—the aubades' formal patterns getting in the way of the things they say—serves as a stay against time, prolonging the interlude between wordless oneness and the transparency of daylit sense, and, paradoxically, as a conduit between the private sphere of waking consciousness and the busied world that lies traditionally outside the scope of lyric. Graham learns her craft partly by listening to Shakespeare, Stevens, and Hopkins, their presence felt in the poetry's quotations and veiled allusions, and in those formal reflections whereby Graham cultivates the dense materiality of lyric language. Focusing on this intertextual dimension of The Errancy's aubades, the article brings new light to the condition of aftermath or late time in and against which Graham's belated poetic speaks.

Stevens and Modernist Narrative

TUDENTS OF NARRATIVE, whether they are anthropologists, bib- lical scholars, historians, or literary critics, agree that storytelling is fundamental to human culture. We tell stories about the origin of the world and the collective experience of our family, ethnic group, and na- tion. We understand ourselves as the product of a sequence of events and project a future that unfolds plausibly from that sequence. Narrative, in short, is one of the primary ways in which we discover or make meaning in our lives. Considering the importance of narrative and its central role in litera- ture, we might question the judgment of writers who try to dispense with it altogether. Traditional lyric poetry, though it relies less on narrative than other literary genres, usually implies a story. But in the pure of Mallarme, the collage-like structures of early Eliot, and the Imagist poetry of Pound and H.D., we encounter something new, the modernist flight from narrative sequence. In modernist fiction, Joseph Frank pointed out years ago, writers such as Joyce and Proust (Faulkner too, I would add) likewise suppressed the diachronic element in their stories so as to create the illusion of synchronicity—what Frank called spatial form. How about Wallace Stevens? It is a commonplace of Stevens criticism that he is not a narrative poet, that he prefers lyric utterance and musical structure to storytelling. 1 Daniel R. Schwarz departed from convention- al wisdom in Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, which teases out the narratives implicit in poems that seem not to tell stories. In 1994, a year after that book appeared, the Wallace Stevens Soci- ety sponsored a Modern Language Association special session on Stevens and narrative with Schwarz as respondent. Though one of the presenters subsequently published his paper in The Wallace Stevens Journal, there was apparently not enough material for a special issue on the subject. 2 Is there anything to be gained by picking up a thread that was dropped so long ago? I believe that there is, especially if we draw on the insights of narrative theory. Narratology offers a wide and ever-expanding array of strategies for analyzing plot, character, setting, point of view, and so forth. In this essay I make use of several that help us to relate Stevens' work to modernism. Along the way I consider a possible shortcoming in

Editor's Introduction: The Worldly Powers of Lyric

The powers of lyric poetry are strikingly emphasized in all of the essays and reviews in this issue of jml. The shared emphasis argues that poetry does make something happen, despite W. H. Auden’s notorious line in his elegy for Yeats. Even in Auden’s elegy, of course, the “survival” of lyric has an effective impact: it teaches “the free man how to praise,” despite “the prison of his days.” Lyric’s use as a mode of teaching is only one aspect of the forceful character its producers in the last century appear to have sought for it. Ever since the moment of modernism, as our essayists will be seen to demonstrate, lyric utterance has taken on epic ambitions. It has turned a subject-centered mode of expression, at home in the self, towards public history, in an effort to become a world-making and world-liberating agent. The agency of lyric, to be sure, is an old story, to judge by the legends of Amphion and Orpheus. Amphion’s magical music animated stones, dancing them into architectural structures. It so happens (perhaps by a deep orphic logic affecting critics as well as lyrists) that poets who define their vitalizing abilities “amid a place of stone” are the focus of the first and last of the critical studies here. The phrase about a stony place is from Yeats’s Responsibilities (1914), where the poet confronts the harsh ground—the national architecture or “housing”—that his lyric art must enliven. At the other end of the century a place of stone re-appears as the object of Josef Komunyaaka’s “Facing It” (1988). “It” is the granite national memorial to the Vietnam war, against which the poet must measure the power of his words to prevail. Unlike Amphion, neither Yeats nor Komunyaaka has magic to rely on as he re-assigns lyric subjectivity to public duty. They must bring orphic dimensions down to earth, where they, their fellow citizens and politics constitute the rocky ground. Accordingly, a Yeats who replaces his evocations of spirits with a shrewd worldly materialism is disclosed by Rob Doggett in the first essay in our lineup. It might look as though Yeats is appealing to an ethereal realm; nevertheless, he is manipulating his verse into the service of advertising and economic consumption. His poetry does so because it will make public support of the arts happen; and the stones respond fruitfully, Doggett says, because Yeats sees to it that “the logic of the modern marketplace has remained in place [in his poems], strategically

Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions

Reviewed by: Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions Jesse Matz Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. Michael D. Snediker. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 273. $25.00 (paper). "Queer optimism" would be likely to dispel the shame so important in queer theory and to reverse the negative impulse that has more generally motivated much work in the field. But a finer distinction is at work in Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. Michael Snediker notes that much queer-theory work focused on shame and committed to forms of negativity "in fact seems optimistically motivated" (15). Leo Bersani's notorious "self-abolition" is in fact fairly self-hyperbolic, for example, and Judith Butler's melancholy "doesn't seem quite melancholic" (72, 20). In these and in other cases, optimism of a certain kind gives queer theory a different feel, which might also be said to lighten some of the heavier moods known to (and even definitive of) queer people. Snediker defines this form of optimism and shows it at work in the lyric persuasions of poets including Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Jack Spicer, and Elizabeth Bishop. Nothing suddenly cheerful emerges from these poets, however, [End Page 690] for just as Snediker discovers optimism in the negativity of queer theory, he discovers something like negativity in queer optimism, which is not at all a matter of hope for a better queer future but an entirely different way of looking on the bright side. Traditionally "utopic" optimism has a promissory bent. It tends toward sentimentality rather than rigorous thinking about what might be, which is why it is not typically an option for radical thought or oppositional critique. Traditional optimism (defined here through reference to Leibniz and, by contrast, the hermeneutics of suspicion) presumes the existence of whole human selves (rather than "subjectivities") and in many other ways takes too much on faith. Queer optimism attaches to no future but focuses instead on the present; it is not about hopes for the future but the possibility that what exists right now is interesting. Queer optimism does not take happiness on faith but still takes it seriously, and these forms of positive interest make queer optimism a kind of "meta-optimism," a mode of forbearance toward better possibilities. Rigorous and critical, queer optimism also has fundamental implications for who we are: neither whole human selves nor "subjectivities," but "aesthetic persons" who exist insofar as we find it interesting to do so. Snediker wants to theorize this new form of optimism in part because he wants to close the gap between what the queer theorists find interesting (or true) and what they might want for themselves. He explains the difference—and the reason to resolve it—autobiographically. His commitment to the shattered, performative, or fictional selfhood of queer theory could only be an intellectual one, he says; it could not meet personal needs. His work in Queer Optimism is an effort to reconcile intellectual and personal commitments in a form of feeling capable at once of shame and pride, skepticism and pleasure, pessimistic critique and optimistic interest in the truths happiness might bespeak. If lyric poetry might not seem to be the first place to go for this reconciliation, Snediker justifies his focus upon it first through reference to lyric's notorious shamelessness. Grounded in presumptions not unlike those at work in optimism itself, lyric utterance is in fact the most challenging test-case for any effort to redeem it. Snediker also sees poetry "as the space from which one might escape . . . the nonnecessary interlineations of suffering and being: suffering and writing, suffering and thinking" (36). If we have unnecessarily associated these things, poetry is our best hope for uncoupling them, and achieving something that may be Snediker's most exciting objective: a nonnegative form of intelligence, a world in which "joy could be a guarantor of truth" (20). Or a world in which smiles are authentic. Hart Crane features smiles throughout his work and critics have tended to read them as false, fleeting, or ironic performances. But what if we were "to take smiles seriously as unyielding rhetorical and affective phenomena"? (52...

Historical Poetics, Dysprosody, and The Science of English Verse

“The sound of poetry, the poetry of sound” resonated as Marjorie Perloff's theme for the 2006 MLA Convention, where one could hear about this topic at panels, poetry readings, and the Presidential Forum. Addressing a large audience at the forum, Charles Bernstein tapped the microphone and loudly intoned, “Is this working? Can you hear me?” The moment was a self-conscious performance, perhaps parody, of lyric utterance addressed to “you” from “me”: even before beginning his speech, Bernstein called our attention to the amplification of voice. Instead of addressing any particular you, singular or plural, he seemed to address the microphone, a mediating apparatus that makes possible but also interrupts the intimacy of address that lyric poetry (after John Stuart Mill) invites us to overhear. Through the microphone, Bernstein gave new overtones to Mill's definition of poetry as “overheard,” which could also mean hearing it too much, making it too loud, overworking the metaphor of the voice that we think is speaking directly to us. Although we tend to think of sound as immediate (is it?), the sound of poetry is never heard without mediation, and we should attend to the medium.

Louise Glück's “I”

AbstractThis article is one of three presented as a panel at the 2005 MLA Convention in Philadelphia (with poet Karl Kirchwey of Bryn Mawr College as panel chair and commentator): “Are You Talking to Me?”: Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris – Willard Spiegelman, Southern Methodist University “I’ll tell you something”: Reader‐Address in Louise Glück's Ararat Sequence – Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College Louise Glück's “I” – Nick Halpern, North Carolina State UniversityJane Hedley here introduces the three papers for Literature Compass. The full text of Nick Halpern's MLA paper itself follows this introduction: Lyric Utterance and the Reader: Overheard, Performed, or Addressed? In the first line of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who is being addressed? “Let us go then, you and I”: is Prufrock talking to himself, and has Eliot thereby put the poem's readers in a position to “overhear” an inner monologue? Is “Let us go then” addressed directly to the poem's hypocrite lecteur, who is presupposed to be the secret sharer of Prufrock's emotional paralysis? Or has the reader been offered the opportunity to step into the “I”‐position and become, for the duration of the poem, the sort of man who would have this conversation with himself?All three ways of conceiving of lyric utterance, and of what Northrop Frye terms its “radical of presentation,” are concurrent among us, and the question of lyric address is one that is undergoing reconsideration in a number of critical and scholarly venues at the present time. William Waters chaired Special Sessions on poetry's “you” for three years running at the MLA convention, beginning in 1999. Recently published books and articles from Charles Altieri, Sarah Zimmerman, and Virginia Jackson have revisited the rhetoric of Romanticism from the standpoint of how the reader is implicated and/or addressed. In “Lyric Possession,” Susan Stewart's 1995 essay for Critical Inquiry, the problematic of lyric address is given a memorably postmodern formulation with her suggestion that “when speakers speak from the position of listeners, when though is unattributable and intention wayward, the situation of poetry is evoked.”The conception of lyric utterance that was “canonized” by both Northrop Frye, in the Anatomy of Criticism, and T. S. Eliot, in The Three Voices of Poetry, is that the lyric is pre‐eminently and distinctively the genre of self‐communion. Paul De Man, Jonathan Culler, and Barbara Johnson are furthering this conception when they cite “apostrophe” as the rhetorical device that is generically constitutive of the lyric: by addressing himself to the west wind or to the sister who is also his soul mate, the lyric poet is turning away from the poem's readers the better to bring a distinctively lyric “self” into focus. W. R. Johnson has argued, contra Frye and Eliot, De Man and Culler, that the Romantic “meditative” lyric was a local aberration from the central tradition of the lyric; according to Johnson, and more recently William Waters, the lyric speaker and his hypothetical reader are always more or less explicitly in dialogue. Helen Vendler has meanwhile urged us toward yet a third conception of how the lyric engages its readers. Lyrics offer themselves to us, according to Vendler, as scripts for performance: “a lyric is meant to be spoken by the reader as if the reader were the one uttering the words.” In these three position‐pieces Willard Spiegelman, Jane Hedley, and Nick Halpern have undertaken to stage the conflict between these three differing approaches to the lyric. Their underlying premise is that it does matter which approach we take, but that none of them is simply mistaken – each has its uses.Louise Glück is a poet who has gone on record as preferring to read and write poetry that “requests or craves a listener”; but is the listener she envisions an overhearer, an interlocutor, or an alter ego who listens in order to transform himself into the speaker of her poems? Nick Halpern's essay on Glück's Pulitzer Prize‐winning volume The Wild Iris (1992) takes its departure from the traditional conception of lyric utterance as an interpersonal drama whose “persons” are all internal to the poem. Jane Hedley uses Glück's 1990 volume Ararat to argue that Glück is choosing to address the listener she craves directly, a choice that has rhetorical and characterological implications which will fail to emerge if we assume we are supposed to “overhear” her poems. Nick Halpern uses Glück's 1996 volume Meadowlands to enact the claim that poems are neither overheard nor addressed to their readers, but challenge us to inhabit a process of thought and feeling the poem has scripted. According to Halpern we neither hear Glück out, as Hedley would have it, nor do we overhear her, as Spiegelman supposes: instead, we are called upon to become her.Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College

“Are You Talking to Me?”: Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris

AbstractThis article is one of three presented as a panel at the 2005 MLA Convention in Philadelphia (with poet Karl Kirchwey of Bryn Mawr College as panel chair and commentator): “Are You Talking to Me?”: Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris – Willard Spiegelman, Southern Methodist University “I’ll tell you something”: Reader‐Address in Louise Glück's Ararat Sequence – Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College Louise Glück's “I” – Nick Halpern, North Carolina State UniversityJane Hedley here introduces the three papers for Literature Compass. The full text of Willard Spiegelman's MLA paper itself follows this introduction: Lyric Utterance and the Reader: Overheard, Performed, or Addressed? In the first line of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who is being addressed? “Let us go then, you and I”: is Prufrock talking to himself, and has Eliot thereby put the poem's readers in a position to “overhear” an inner monologue? Is “Let us go then” addressed directly to the poem's hypocrite lecteur, who is presupposed to be the secret sharer of Prufrock's emotional paralysis? Or has the reader been offered the opportunity to step into the “I”‐position and become, for the duration of the poem, the sort of man who would have this conversation with himself?All three ways of conceiving of lyric utterance, and of what Northrop Frye terms its “radical of presentation,” are concurrent among us, and the question of lyric address is one that is undergoing reconsideration in a number of critical and scholarly venues at the present time. William Waters chaired Special Sessions on poetry's “you” for three years running at the MLA convention, beginning in 1999. Recently published books and articles from Charles Altieri, Sarah Zimmerman, and Virginia Jackson have revisited the rhetoric of Romanticism from the standpoint of how the reader is implicated and/or addressed. In “Lyric Possession,” Susan Stewart's 1995 essay for Critical Inquiry, the problematic of lyric address is given a memorably postmodern formulation with her suggestion that “when speakers speak from the position of listeners, when though is unattributable and intention wayward, the situation of poetry is evoked.”The conception of lyric utterance that was “canonized” by both Northrop Frye, in the Anatomy of Criticism, and T. S. Eliot, in The Three Voices of Poetry, is that the lyric is pre‐eminently and distinctively the genre of self‐communion. Paul De Man, Jonathan Culler, and Barbara Johnson are furthering this conception when they cite “apostrophe” as the rhetorical device that is generically constitutive of the lyric: by addressing himself to the west wind or to the sister who is also his soul mate, the lyric poet is turning away from the poem's readers the better to bring a distinctively lyric “self” into focus. W. R. Johnson has argued, contra Frye and Eliot, De Man and Culler, that the Romantic “meditative” lyric was a local aberration from the central tradition of the lyric; according to Johnson, and more recently William Waters, the lyric speaker and his hypothetical reader are always more or less explicitly in dialogue. Helen Vendler has meanwhile urged us toward yet a third conception of how the lyric engages its readers. Lyrics offer themselves to us, according to Vendler, as scripts for performance: “a lyric is meant to be spoken by the reader as if the reader were the one uttering the words.” In these three position‐pieces Willard Spiegelman, Jane Hedley, and Nick Halpern have undertaken to stage the conflict between these three differing approaches to the lyric. Their underlying premise is that it does matter which approach we take, but that none of them is simply mistaken – each has its uses.Louise Glück is a poet who has gone on record as preferring to read and write poetry that “requests or craves a listener”; but is the listener she envisions an overhearer, an interlocutor, or an alter ego who listens in order to transform himself into the speaker of her poems? Willard Spiegelman's essay on Glück's Pulitzer Prize‐winning volume The Wild Iris (1992) takes its departure from the traditional conception of lyric utterance as an interpersonal drama whose “persons” are all internal to the poem. Jane Hedley uses Glück's 1990 volume Ararat to argue that Glück is choosing to address the listener she craves directly, a choice that has rhetorical and characterological implications which will fail to emerge if we assume we are supposed to “overhear” her poems. Nick Halpern uses Glück's 1996 volume Meadowlands to enact the claim that poems are neither overheard nor addressed to their readers, but challenge us to inhabit a process of thought and feeling the poem has scripted. According to Halpern we neither hear Glück out, as Hedley would have it, nor do we overhear her, as Spiegelman supposes: instead, we are called upon to become her.Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College

“I’ll tell you something”: Reader‐Address in Louise Glück's Ararat Sequence

AbstractThis article is one of three presented as a panel at the 2005 MLA Convention in Philadelphia (with poet Karl Kirchwey of Bryn Mawr College as panel chair and commentator): “Are You Talking to Me?”: Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris – Willard Spiegelman, Southern Methodist University “I’ll tell you something”: Reader‐Address in Louise Glück's Ararat Sequence – Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College Louise Glück's “I” – Nick Halpern, North Carolina State UniversityJane Hedley here introduces the three papers for Literature Compass. The full text of her MLA paper itself follows this introduction: Lyric Utterance and the Reader: Overheard, Performed, or Addressed? In the first line of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who is being addressed? “Let us go then, you and I”: is Prufrock talking to himself, and has Eliot thereby put the poem's readers in a position to “overhear” an inner monologue? Is “Let us go then” addressed directly to the poem's hypocrite lecteur, who is presupposed to be the secret sharer of Prufrock's emotional paralysis? Or has the reader been offered the opportunity to step into the “I”‐position and become, for the duration of the poem, the sort of man who would have this conversation with himself?All three ways of conceiving of lyric utterance, and of what Northrop Frye terms its “radical of presentation,” are concurrent among us, and the question of lyric address is one that is undergoing reconsideration in a number of critical and scholarly venues at the present time. William Waters chaired Special Sessions on poetry's “you” for three years running at the MLA convention, beginning in 1999. Recently published books and articles from Charles Altieri, Sarah Zimmerman, and Virginia Jackson have revisited the rhetoric of Romanticism from the standpoint of how the reader is implicated and/or addressed. In “Lyric Possession,” Susan Stewart's 1995 essay for Critical Inquiry, the problematic of lyric address is given a memorably postmodern formulation with her suggestion that “when speakers speak from the position of listeners, when though is unattributable and intention wayward, the situation of poetry is evoked.”The conception of lyric utterance that was “canonized” by both Northrop Frye, in the Anatomy of Criticism, and T. S. Eliot, in The Three Voices of Poetry, is that the lyric is pre‐eminently and distinctively the genre of self‐communion. Paul De Man, Jonathan Culler, and Barbara Johnson are furthering this conception when they cite “apostrophe” as the rhetorical device that is generically constitutive of the lyric: by addressing himself to the west wind or to the sister who is also his soul mate, the lyric poet is turning away from the poem's readers the better to bring a distinctively lyric “self” into focus. W. R. Johnson has argued, contra Frye and Eliot, De Man and Culler, that the Romantic “meditative” lyric was a local aberration from the central tradition of the lyric; according to Johnson, and more recently William Waters, the lyric speaker and his hypothetical reader are always more or less explicitly in dialogue. Helen Vendler has meanwhile urged us toward yet a third conception of how the lyric engages its readers. Lyrics offer themselves to us, according to Vendler, as scripts for performance: “a lyric is meant to be spoken by the reader as if the reader were the one uttering the words.” In these three position‐pieces Willard Spiegelman, Jane Hedley, and Nick Halpern have undertaken to stage the conflict between these three differing approaches to the lyric. Their underlying premise is that it does matter which approach we take, but that none of them is simply mistaken – each has its uses.Louise Glück is a poet who has gone on record as preferring to read and write poetry that “requests or craves a listener”; but is the listener she envisions an overhearer, an interlocutor, or an alter ego who listens in order to transform himself into the speaker of her poems? Her essay on Glück's Pulitzer Prize‐winning volume The Wild Iris (1992) takes its departure from the traditional conception of lyric utterance as an interpersonal drama whose “persons” are all internal to the poem. Jane Hedley uses Glück's 1990 volume Ararat to argue that Glück is choosing to address the listener she craves directly, a choice that has rhetorical and characterological implications which will fail to emerge if we assume we are supposed to “overhear” her poems. Nick Halpern uses Glück's 1996 volume Meadowlands to enact the claim that poems are neither overheard nor addressed to their readers, but challenge us to inhabit a process of thought and feeling the poem has scripted. According to Halpern we neither hear Glück out, as Hedley would have it, nor do we overhear her, as Spiegelman supposes: instead, we are called upon to become her.Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College

“The Jewelled Bow”: A Study in Browning's Imagery and Humanism

In Browning's second letter to Elizabeth Barrett he uses the imagery of “white light” versus “prismatic hues” to represent the contrast between the full and direct reflection of her personality in lyric utterance, and the partial and oblique refraction of his own personality in the medium of the dramatic monologue. A little later, he reveals his consciousness of the limitations of his poetry through a kindred image: “these scenes and song-scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you …” In response, Elizabeth Barrett, while deprecating the merit of her own poetry and paying tribute to the worth of Browning's, acknowledges the justice of his self-criticism: “and in fact, you have not written the R. B. poem yet—your rays fall obliquely rather than directly straight. I see you only in your moon” (i, 22). In one of her letters, though referring to “the glory of dramatic art,” she urges: “Yet I am conscious of wishing you to take the other crown besides—and after having made your own creatures speak in clear human voices, to speak yourself out of that personality which God made, and with the voice which he tuned into such power and sweetness of speech” (ii, 182).