Volume 11, Issue 1

This statement does not challenge Jonathan Culler’s argument that lyric is not dramatic monologue but primarily »an event in the lyric present, a time of enunciation« (Culler 2014, 68; cf. Culler 2015). But it poses an alternative view of lyric ism , at least for Modernist poetry. The essay asks, in other words, not what lyric is, but what poets seeking to participate in a genre are doing and why. In »The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock«, for example, T.S. Eliot deliberately creates a clash between expectations born of dramatic monologue and those sustained by the staging of a lyric ego whose modes of presence cannot be contained within ironic distance. Similarly, when Yeats and Auden write lullabies, they are not content with individual instances of lullaby but want to capture the essence of lullaby as one aspect of levels of feeling inseparable from ideas of genre, not just uses of the genre. Lyricism also emphasizes, more than do studies of lyric as a genre, that poetry has a distinctive relationship to musicality. The essay develops two extended examples – in the form of a contrast between two poems in the first Imagist anthology Des Imagistes , namely H.D.’s (Hilda Doolittle’s) »Sitalkas« and Ezra Pound’s »Doria« – as an example of what Pound called »patterned music«, which Pound opposed to the »emotional music cultivated by the spirit of Impressionism«. Finally it turns to the contemporary poet Lisa Robertson’s »Sunday« as an instance of cultivating the power of indexicals as an alternative to any kind of overt »speaking situation« with its inevitably damaged versions of subjectivity.

The paper discusses articulations of personality and communication structures in the lyric: who is speaking in a poem? What is the status of the person who speaks, or the one who is spoken about? Is it the author himself who is speaking, or is it someone else – an autonomous being, completely different and detached from the subject developed in the text? Who is addressed in and by a poem? It is made clear that conventional concepts of Stimmung (mood), Erlebnis (experience), and lyrisches Ich (the ›lyric I‹) should be set aside and the nature of lyric communication should be redetermined. For this purpose, a precise examination of the specific use of personal pronouns in poems is necessary, especially of the pronouns ›I‹, ›you‹ and ›we‹. The indistinct ›lyric I‹ should be substituted by the term ›articulated I‹. The poetic text as a whole is being structured by a superordinate entity, the Textsubjekt (›textual subject‹). Every speaking entity in a poem has a counterpart being addressed by it. Analyzing communication structures in poetry thus means first of all looking for an addressee who is constituted by the text. Only in a second step should we figure out if the address refers to the intended reader.

The notion that a lyric poem generates a world seems derived from the analysis of narrative fiction and risks setting the study of lyric poetry on the wrong track. Although lyrics often contain fictional elements – minimally sketched characters and incident – it is best to start from the presumption that they are at bottom not fiction. One can then analyze the tension between what one might call fiction and song, or fictional elements and ritualistic elements, as in Roland Greene’s analysis of lyric sequences. The positing of a fictional world created by a lyric poem and including a fictional speaker or persona risks trivializing lyric poems by relativizing their claims to the situation of a particular individual instead of granting them the authority of poetic form. Even lyrics that do create a fictional speaker often make claims about the world – our world and not a special fictional world – that are authorized by the poet. A superior default model for thinking about lyric, then is the classical concept of lyric as epideictic discourse, closer to oratory than to mimesis. The lyric characteristically strives to be itself an event rather than a representation of an event.

This paper discusses biblical poetry in relation to the ancient Greek-Latin tradition of lyric poetry. Since the Greek word »lyric« and the Hebrew word »psalterion« each have musical connotations, there must be some connection between biblical psalmody and lyric poetry. Indeed, the liturgical superscriptions of many psalms and the numerous hints to musical instruments and singing within them suggest that many texts were originally used for accompaniment to music and so could be seen as ›lyric poetry‹ in the strictest sense. There are, of course, key differences between ancient and biblical lyric poetry. Hebrew poems are formally marked not so much by metre or rhyme as by more general conventions of sonority and word-play, perhaps to facilitate memorisation. Furthermore, Hebrew poetry is particularly recognizable by its balanced expression of thought, a ›parallelism‹ which includes repeated or contrasting ideas and figurative language. This feature is also evident in some Hebrew prose: this ›blurring of the boundaries‹ between prose and poetry is another feature which distinguishes biblical poetry from ancient Greek or Latin lyric poetry. One other distinctive feature of psalmody is that, although rooted in the liturgy of the first Temple (950–587 BCE), and developing in the liturgy of the second Temple period, it continued to thrive even after the fall of the Temple in 70 CE. The liturgical use of the psalms resulted in its continual prominence throughout Jewish and Christian history; and because the essence of Hebrew poetry is more dependent on sense than sound this has also enabled a rich tradition of translation. So Hebrew psalmody is ›re-invented‹ through the several Greek, Latin, and Aramaic versions, as well as through the many languages of the early modern period, right up to the contemporary vernacular. In this sense psalmody is unusual: unlike ancient classical poetry it provides an ongoing and living tradition for a community of faith.

Proceeding from a distinction between ›poetry‹ and ›lyric‹, the present article outlines a prototype theory of the lyric as transhistorical mode. As such the lyric prototype cannot be defined by means of empirical tests, but is a theoretical construct that presupposes the knowledge of highly diverse discursive systems and traditions and the recourse to interpretative-hermeneutic methods for its validity. The model of the prototypical lyric the article proposes is based on four interdependent components: (1) a speech situation characterised by an I-here-now deixis; (2) a represented situation which comes into being in and through the simultaneous speech act based on an identical deixis; (3) a fiction of performativity whose performative character results from the simultaneity and coincidence of speech situation and represented situation, and whose fictionality is based on the fact that the relation of simultaneity is text-internal, thus ›staged‹, and does not conform to the communicative situation between producer and recipient; and finally (4) a lack of, or an asymmetry in, the relationship between speaker and addressee, in as far as the speaker has the ›licence‹ to either perform a locutionary act directly and without any explicit motivation or addressee, or to explicitly address recipients. Unlike in normal face-to-face communication, however, these recipients cannot turn into speakers themselves. At best, they can function as quoted speakers, who are introduced by the ›speaker proper‹, and whose utterances assume the form of mere reported speech.

The paper surveys and comments on some of the issues that arise about the lyric in philosophical, principally analytical, aesthetics. In brief these are: definition, expression, paraphrase, form-content unity, experience, and truth and profundity. The paper shows in each case why these issues are important from the perspective of analytical philosophy but also why lyric poetry is not always an easy subject matter to accommodate to standard analytical presuppositions. It might be thought that theories of meaning within philosophy of language (be it semantics, speech act theory or truth-conditions) should be applicable to a full range of linguistic usage. But lyric poetry confounds that expectation and yields a context where familiar models of meaning and communication can seem inadequate. Yet analytical philosophers should not simply dismiss poetry as somehow exceptional or aberrant but would gain from looking afresh at basic assumptions to see how their views about language might be broadened and modified.

The following statement suggests reconsidering recent debates on a theory of lyric in terms of form and content. Four aspects and issues of the ongoing debate are discussed. In a first step, it is necessary to establish the relation between authorial poetics and lyric theory, since it is often characterised by fuzzy boundaries. Secondly, in order to specify the problem of form in lyric theory, it is suggested to have a closer look at the performative in lyric practice. Another important aspect of form is the semantics of lyrical genres. Lyrical genres mark an area in which form and content are intertwined and in which aspects of the form itself become semantic. Finally, the author argues that we should discuss – if possible assisted by a didactics sensitive to literary texts – whether and how theoretical proposals could be transformed into a practice of teaching poetry.

Taking the definition of lyric poem as ›Einzelrede in Versen‹ for its basis, this article pursues two objectives: firstly, to advocate the concept of lyric poetry as an intertextual system of relationships against the background of world literature (a concept that can also constitute the theoretical foundation for the universal history of lyric poetry) and, secondly, to encourage a profound discussion with philosophy to locate lyric poetry within the ›life of the mind‹ as well as to grasp it in theoretical terms.

The lyric poem does not construct a world in the way fiction invents universes. By eluding the circumstances, and promoting an intense plasticity in its modes of enunciation, the lyric poem rather seeks a congruence between what is said and an emotional state, the communication of an impetus crystallizing in the form of the poem. This impetus can be described as a gesture, or as a set of lyrical gestures. Poems try to capture an energy that comes from the outside world as well as from the inner space. A force is conveyed through a form – since modern poetry has given up rules of versification – that is never completely fit. This lyrical energy is shared by the reader through the re-enunciation of the poem. The lyrical »I« has a certain porosity, a manner of subjective transparence that allows the reader’s subjectivity to lodge there and during the time of recitation. It is thus the dynamics between force and form in modern poetry that this article tries to understand.

This essay ventures a dozen postulates: 1) lyric can’t be defined by one or even many formal features that are exclusive to it; 2) lyric can be described as a range of nonexclusive formal strategies encoded in texts and the communities that produce and receive them; 3) thus, if we understand »genre« in a way that fuses poetics with hermeneutics, lyric is a genre; 4) lyric and affiliated subgenres and modes live historically but survive transhistorically, albeit often dramatically refashioned; 5) lyric is neither merely personal nor entirely impersonal, making it readily appropriable; 6) lyric differs from more empirical and mimetic genres by virtue of the density of its verbal and formal mediation of the world; 7) lyric is intergeneric, best understood in its dialogue with its others; 8) lyric is transnational; 9) lyric needs to be studied at both the micro and macro levels – both its language-specific intricacies and textures, and its participation in broader patterns of genre, history, and cultural migration; 10) the strategies of a transnational poetics can be extended across languages; 11) a transnational poetics should be attentive to cross-cultural hybridization, creolization, and vernacularization in lyric; 12) lyric isn’t dead, and it isn’t only an elite form.

Numerous studies on lyric poetry have considered formalist questions, speakers or historical contexts. The act and the action of reading, however, were less often explored. Thus, the following questions arise: Is there a lyric reading? What are the reader’s motivations? Does the same logic apply to narrative, satirical and didactic poems? How can it be described? This article outlines the many problems which the heterogeneity of poetry is likely to generate. It further intends to examine how the notion of »empathy« could help to actualize this specific way of reading. Based on recent research on intentionality and empathy, this paper makes apparent some of the general principles for a holistic theory of lyric, which enables to link poetics, psychology and anthropology.

A tenacious tradition considers the lyric as the manifestation of a subjectivity, whether personal or universal. But folk traditions as well as the twentieth-century avant-gardes offer the counter-example of poetry that arises from the collocation of verbal fragments, of artificial languages, of subjects in name only, and dare to present these as a new-style lyric. Less startling versions of this displacement of the lyric subject occur in such artifacts as the overheard poem. For such poems, the fact of publication replaces the mythic occasion of utterance as the poem’s moment of truth. This foregrounding of the moment of production is a feature linking the so-called primitive, oral, or folk poetry of many cultures to the purportedly post-humanist poetry of the different avant-gardes, and it links them, not through an irony, metaphor or coincidence, but through a model of the function of the artwork that indeed puts the act of signifying temporally and axiologically before the signified meanings

Recent theory of lyric shows no interest in the subject, because it is no longer considered a basic generic parameter of lyric poetry. Nevertheless, the subject has resurfaced in contemporary practice in a wide range of new and complex forms specific to the lyric mode. This article suggests a multilevel model for both the formal and historical analysis of the subject in contemporary lyric poetry.

Descriptions of the lyric have been stressing its artificial, self-referential character, constructing it as an intrinsically a-temporal, non-kinetic, non-mimetic and anti-illusionist mode. While the lyric certainly derives much of its effect from its horizontally superimposed patterns of formal equivalence, our pleasure as readers does not solely derive from the physical re-enactment of a poem’s sound patterns or the cognitive appreciation of its formal mastery. Many lyric texts are immersive; they project a fictional universe and prompt readers to emulate a speaker’s strongly perspectivized vision and subjective vantage point. This paper examines the lyric’s world building potential. It investigates the conditioning factors and referential components of lyric illusion, reviewing in particular the genre’s alleged inability to produce narrative sequence, embodiment and experientiality (Fludernik). Conceiving of the lyric speaker as an innovative cognitive blend (Turner/Fauconnier) provides a possible alternative to biographical constructions of the lyric self. Possible worlds theory (Ryan) is used as a way to approach the genre’s marked tendency towards cognitive mapping and conceptual innovation, towards foregrounding the human endeavour of mentally grasping and representing the world.

The article gives a metatheoretical definition of ›lyric‹. The definition pinpoints that lyric is either scriptural and visual or vocal and something that you can hear; it can be fictional or non-fictional, and it belongs to the social system, which modern ›westerners‹ call ›literature‹, but it can also be part of cultural practices, which are outside of any social system of ›literature‹. One can differentiate analytically with regard to the graphic type as well as to the vocal type of ›lyric‹ between the ›material How‹ and the ›semantical What‹. The ›How‹-side and the ›What‹-side provide each and together special signals for the hearer or for the seer or reader, which attract and bind his or her attention and which inform the hearer or the seer and the reader basically that language itself (which is understood as a cognitive system or tool) is something with which you can develop or create meaning; in doing this the signals of lyric constitute aesthetic evidence (the reader, seer or hearer will be ›convinced‹ or ›made sure‹ or emotionally satisfied in a way by the aesthetic qualities of the lyric: non-propositional, as if looking through the ›veils of poetry‹. In the next step the article discusses some types of lyrical ›worlds‹ and lyrical ›world-making‹ with regard to this definition. Finally, the article presents a couple of theses.