Poetry as Discourse

Antony Easthope

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135033651
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. New Accents is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. This study presents insights into poetry as discourse ooking at language, conventual literary theory, and then a detailed look at the iambic pentameter, ballads in English Poetry, looking at Shakespeare's Sonnet 73. Also included is commentary on transparency looking at Pope's The Rape of the Lock, and Romanticism in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and Wordworth's Tintern Abbey. Before ending on the future of poetry there is also a section on the Modernism of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Part I

A Theory of Discourse

1

Discourse as Language

My Words are Things before they Become Words, and they Become Things Again When they Do

Michael Westlake,
One Zero and the Night Controller

In modern society we are surrounded by poetry more than we realize. In unofficial forms there are the nursery rhymes and skipping games learned by children, forgotten, then often re-learned by them later from their own children. Via the transistor radio and records pop music pervades the environment; its lyrics are written in lines, they invariably rhyme, and so by any neutral definition, they are a form of poetry. Unofficial poetry is used in advertising, on toilet walls, in football chants:

Georgie, Georgie, Georgie Best!

Georgie! Λ Georgie Best! (Λ = miss a beat)

and at political demonstrations:

Black and white

Unite and fight!

In ‘official’ forms there is poetry in church and in the Bible:

A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me;

He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.

(Song of Solomon, I, 13)

However, the main official form of poetry, promoted in schools and universities, is that of the high cultural tradition from the Renaissance to the present day. It is this canonical tradition that I shall be mainly concerned with here. I will argue that it may be better understood as a form of discourse.

Conventional Literary Theory

There is already a way of interpreting poetry put forward in conventional literary criticism, though with rather different emphases in Britain and America. The British version can be typified by a review of a National Theatre performance that appeared in The Sunday Times. For the performance an actor read 50 of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The poetry was seen as a form of the author’s presence:

It is almost as if Shakespeare himself were talking to you from that pool of light … the experience has been like having a glimpse into Shakespeare’s soul… He speaks nakedly as ‘I’ for the only time. (The Sunday Times, 8 June 1980, p. 33)

Although a piece of journalism, the review draws on a number of literary critics who have written on Shakespeare’s sonnets (including W. H. Auden, Stephen Booth and Martin Seymour-Smith). Its attitudes correspond to much that can be found elsewhere in British criticism of poetry. For example, in the introduction to an edition of Donne’s Songs and Sonets, Helen Gardner identifies the poetry with ‘the personality of Donne’ (1965, p. xviii) and claims it has ‘the dramatic intensity of present experience’ (p. xix). F. R. Leavis, in an earlier account, defines poetry in terms of the poet:

He is a poet because his interest in his experience is not separable from his interest in words; because, that is, of his habit of seeking by the evocative use of words to sharpen his awareness of his ways of feeling, so making these communicable. And poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and precision unapproachable by any other means. (1972, p.17)

Literary criticism in Britain is not always as explicit about its assumptions as this. Yet other examples of the same idea of poetry could easily be brought forward. Poetry expresses experience; experience gives access to personality, and so poetry leads us to personality. In poetry ‘the actual quality of experience’ is communicated; reading Donne is a ‘present experience’, and so poetry is to be read in search of ‘the personality of Donne’ or of a Shakespeare who ‘speaks nakedly as “I”’. A simple point about this notion, but one still worth making as a preliminary, is that Shakespeare the historical author died in 1616, and John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s, died in 1631. Whatever ghost walks the boards of the National Theatre or haunts the study of a reader of Songs and Sonets has stepped from the pages of a text, a script or book, held by a twentieth-century hand. This in essence is the theme of Poetry as Discourse.

Because the influence of T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards has been stronger there, the conventional American conception of poetry is somewhat different, at least on first inspection. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ says that honest criticism should be directed ‘not upon the poet but upon the poetry’ (1966, p. 17). The American New Critics took up this emphasis, particularly in relation to poetry, and its consequences can be seen clearly in the essay on ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. Against the view that poetry expresses the author’s experience and intention they pronounce:

The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge. (1970, p. 5)

So the author, if he (sic) comes into the poem at all, only does so ‘by an act of biographical inference’ (p. 5) since the poem is self-sufficient without him. The poem is like ‘a machine’ – it works ‘through its meaning’ and meaning inheres in words, since language is in public ownership. From this American account there emerges what is now a familiar figure in literary criticism on both sides of the Atlantic: the poem ‘out there’, an object, a ‘verbal icon’, the ‘meaning expressed by the poem itself’ (ibid., p. 87), fixed eternally as ‘the words on the page’. The difficulty is that no such object, a poem with a single fixed or univocal meaning, exists. A poem constantly changes its meanings as it is read and re-read.

For this reason, as Catherine Belsey has shown very clearly in Critical Practice, an earlier volume in this series, New Criticism threw the author out of the front door only to sneak him or her in round the back. The author’s intention was needed to fix in place, to guarantee, an univocal meaning for ‘the words on the page’, even if in the American emphasis this guarantee was available only at a remove. What survives from New Criticism is ‘a kind of implicit intentionalism, a quest for what it appeared the author had had in mind on the evidence of the text itself’ (Belsey 1980, p. 16). Wimsatt and Beardsley had left open this loophole: ‘If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do’ (Wimsatt 1970, p. 4). On this basis it becomes possible to distinguish the ‘implied author’, the author implied by the poem, from the actual historical author. And on this basis it becomes possible to equate them again by treating the implied author as a mask worn by the historical author. In The Rhetoric of Fiction Wayne C. Booth introduces the term ‘implied author’ by saying that this is how the historical author ‘creates … an implied version of “himself”’ (1961, p. 70). Thus re-routed, the poem can once again be fixed in place as expression of the author’s experience and intention, and read in terms of personality and presence.

Conventional literary criticism in Britain and America can be contrasted as follows: in Britain it moves directly from the poem to the author’s experience while in America it moves indirectly from the poem as artefact to the author who made it as a version of himself or herself. Both positions have recourse to authorial intention for the same reason: to try to fix the poem in terms of a univocal meaning given, once and for all, by ‘the words on the page’. This formulation sounds very confident but it cannot stand up to interrogation by any linguistics which takes account of the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified, between the sound image (the shaped, material sound of the word) and concept (the meaning of the word), applies to all words, and so can be applied to these ‘words on the page’ of the poem. The question which then arises is: are these words on the page signifiers or signifieds? Clearly the assumption silently invoked by the usual way the phrase is used is that ‘on the page’ the signifieds are forever fixed on to their signifiers and the meaning of the poem is forever attached to the sounds represented there. This is not the case. The signifiers of a text such as a poem do have a material identity (these signifiers and not others) defined within the structure of signifiers in a given language, as Saussure shows. Further, they can have a physical identity fixed on the page by means of a writing system which aims to represent phonetic correspondence with the sound. But the signifieds are not fixed and cannot be so fixed. Any text, especially one such as a poem, is constantly read and re-read in different ways—by different people, by the same people at different times in their lives, by different people at different periods in history.

The meaning of a text is always produced in a process of reading. It is in order to bring a necessary stability to this process that conventional criticism of poetry treats the poem in relation to the supposed intentions and personality of the author. In so doing it is in fact reading poetry not simply as language but with the implicit assumption that it is a certain kind of discourse. I intend to make fully explicit the idea that poetry is to be read as discourse and also propose a conception of discourse that gives a better understanding of poetry than that assumed in conventional criticism. A major reason why the theory of discourse I shall put forward ought to be preferred is that it can explain the author as product or effect of the text, whereas conventional criticism accepts the notion of the author as unquestionable and pre-given in order to be able to define how the text should be read.

Language and Discourse

Saussure distinguishes between langue and parole, between the system of a language, and any act of individual utterance that takes place within it. Parole depends upon langue in that an individual utterance can only be an instance of the system which makes it possible – I cannot speak in English without making use of the sounds and syntax of English. A poem obviously is an example of parole, an utterance constructed according to and within the system of a language. But then so is any utterance in that language, not just a poem. To understand what is specific to poetry we need to distinguish between language and discourse.

Linguistics, the science which takes language as its object, can show how an utterance takes its place in the system of language at levels up to and including the sentence. It cannot show how and why one sentence connects with another into a cohesive whole: this is a matter of discourse. The term discourse and the distinction between it and language is not modern. In 1776 the British rhetorician George Campbell in his Philosophy of Rhetoric pointed out that ‘Syntax regards only the composition of many words into one sentence; style, at the same time that it attends to this, regards further the composition of many sentences into one discourse’ (cited in Hendricks 1976, p. 32). A revised and updated expression of the distinction is given by Emile Benveniste as follows:

Phonemes, morphemes and words (lexemes) can be counted; there is a finite number of them. Not so with sentences. Phonemes, morphemes and words (lexemes) have a distribution at their respective levels and a use at higher levels. Sentences have neither distribution nor use … with the sentence we leave the domain of language as a system of signs and enter into another universe … whose expression is discourse (Benveniste 1971, pp. 109–10)

Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 73’ contains four sentences. Each is an instance of sentence structure in Modern English. The cohesion of these four sentences together is the province of discourse.

Discourse, then, is a term which specifies the way that sentences form a consecutive order, take part in a whole which is homogeneous as well as heterogeneous. And just as sentences join together in discourse to make up an individual text, so texts themselves join others in a larger discourse. In fact, the way in which Eliot in his famous essay describes the relation between tradition and the individual poem can be interpreted as an accurate account of how texts are ordered in relation to each other as discourse. As Eliot says:

The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. (1966, p. 15)

This is advanced as an account of aesthetic discourse in general. But it can be accepted as an analysis of the cohesion of a discourse, including a particular poetic discourse such as that of English poetry since the Renaissance. Each additional text both repeats the discourse and differs from it, each is a term which conforms to the discourse but (however slightly) transforms it. Of course a poem has to be understood in language (how else?) but it has to be grasped also as an instance of a poetic discourse, part of an autonomy in which the monuments form an ‘order among themselves’. The only word of Eliot’s account I shall disagree with (in Chapter 2) is the word ‘ideal’. And I shall reconsider Eliot’s essay with reference to Modernism in Chapter 9.

There is already in existence a conventional theory of discourse analysis. Since this is not the one to be set to work in this book, it will be discussed briefly in order to be rejected. Conventional discourse analysis brings together work from a number of different areas, including linguistics and philosophy. It has found a philosophic underpinning in the work of J. L. Austin, especially in his How to do Things with Words (1962). In this tradition the analysis of discourse consists particularly of a careful description of different discourses on the general assumption that the production of discourse is a rule-governed activity and that these rules, like those of syntax or of chess, generate specific examples. Although this summary is too broad and there are important differences of emphasis within conventional discourse analysis, I shall not attempt to distinguish these since the tradition rests on a central assumption, one so deeply held that it is rarely made explicit for comment and criticism: it is that language and with it discourse is a matter of communication:

1. ‘But a piece of language use, literary or otherwise, is not only an exemplification of linguistic categories … but is also a piece of communication a discourse of one kind or another’, (my italics) (Widdowson, ‘Literature as Discourse’ in Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature (1975), p. 27)
2. ‘While all linguists would agree that human communication must be described in terms of at least three levels – meaning, form and substance, or discourse, syntax and phonology – there are disagreements over the boundaries of linguistics.’ (Coulthard, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1977), p. 1)
3. ‘The processes discussed in the last few sections demonstrate that a good deal of what gets communicated through language is “unspoken” in the sense that it involves conveying meanings other than or in addition to the literal meaning of what is said. The importance of this fact emerges particularly clearly in the analysis of discourse.’ (my italics) (Traugott and Pratt, ‘Analysing Discourse’ in Linguistics for Students of Literature (1980), p. 241)

Briefly stated, the difficulty here is simple and fundamental. To identify language and so discourse with communication operates a kind of synecdoche. It gives us the part for the whole. Communication, one major effect of discourse, is generalized and made into a definition of discourse as a whole.

The classic diagram of language as communication is offered by Jakobson. His ‘concise survey of the constitutive factors in any speech event, in any act of verbal communication’ specifies six factors. Three (‘CONTEXT’, ‘CONTACT’, ‘CODE’) function as ‘means’ by which the act of communication takes place and three define the event itself, ‘The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE’ (Jakobson 1960, p. 353). All these...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: A Theory of Discourse
• Part II: English Poetry
• Texts
• References
• Further Reading
• Index