Lyric Powers

Robert von Hallberg

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780226865003
• eBook ISBN: 9780226865027
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The authority of poetry varies from one period to another, from one culture to another. For Robert von Hallberg, the authority of lyric poetry has three sources: religious affirmation, the social institutions of those who speak the idioms from which particular poems are made, and the extraordinary cognition generated by the formal and musical resources of poems. Lyric Powers helps students, poets, and general readers to recognize the pleasures and understand the ambitions of lyric poetry.
To explain why a reader might prefer one kind of poem to another, von Hallberg analyzes—beyond the political and intellectual significance of poems—the musicality of both lyric poetry and popular song, including that of Tin Pan Alley and doo-wop. He shows that poets have distinctive intellectual resources—not just rhetorical resources—for examining their subjects, and that the power of poetic language to generalize, not particularize, is what justly deserves a critic's attention.
The first book in more than a decade from this respected critic, Lyric Powers will be celebrated as a genuine event by readers of poetry and literary criticism.  

1

Authority

Poetry is quoted in public, even from memory, and read aloud among friends, as often by working people as by intellectuals.¹ And of course it is taught everywhere in schools. It circulates because its words seem to count, but what is the source of its authority, and is that source secure? Intellectuals often speak of the “poetics” of all explanatory discourses, but even some professional critics of poetry doubt that poetry itself has distinctive authority: on this view, it is just one more variety of rhetoric; anyway, its devoted readers are too few and disempowered (it has recently lost curricular centrality in the academy). Canonical narratives (epics, novels, romances) “provide criteria, implicit or explicit,” as Steven Knapp observes, “by which contemporary models of action can be shaped or corrected”; lyrics preserve only locutions.² Poetry's authority—however great or slight—derives from linguistic forms, not approved patterns of behavior. This chapter identifies several sources of poetic authority—some sonic, some syntactic, and others semantic. The deepest well of authority is religious, though no one source works entirely on its own, and the chapters that follow examine various facets of poetic authority. Behind this deepest authority, I will explicate in this and the next chapter an orphic poetics, and then set some of its limits in chapters 3 and 4. My argument is that the most distinctive authority of lyric rests still on its affirmative function, whereas the intellectual disciplines derive from doubt. Insofar as the achievements of the art are measured by the criteria of skeptical intellectual disciplines, lyric inevitably seems slight.

The term authority, as Hannah Arendt observes, comes from the root of “augment”: with what does poetry augment ordinary language? If there is one answer, it is: music. Musicality authenticates poetry, a crucial function in a discourse that strains against social conventions. Poetry enjoys distinctive credibility: a reader is often asked to credit less what a poet says than the earnestness or genuineness of the effort. Poets do not expect simply to be believed where a prose writer would be doubted; they do not even expect to be fully understood. They need instead to pursue significance at the edges of conventions, where no significance is assured. Readers stay with poems, moving into uncertainty and even obscurity, because the history of this art demonstrates utter seriousness, and because shapely sounds draw them on. The worst that can be said of a poem is not that it is obscure, or without paraphrasable sense, but that it is frivolous or fake. A “high seriousness,” according to Arnold, is the defining feature of great poetry. A figure of authority does not exercise power, as Arendt notes, but rather approves or disapproves of a power or policy: a priest or judge, not a king, is an authority. “The most conspicuous characteristic of those in authority is that they do not have power.”³ A sense of displacement is built into the concept of authority. The indirectness of poetic expression corresponds directly to its authority. Poets are far removed from power, and that strengthens their authority. What they wield is not power but approval.

Autonomy is poetry's special aspiration: an independence from politics, philosophy, history, or theology, so that poetic value does not depend upon political conformity, logical argumentation, historical accuracy, or religious faith. If poetry has distinctive value, it must have special features that other discourses either lack or cannot exploit fully. Poems, in Fanny Howe's phrase, engage directly with what is bewildering. Intellectual disciplines reduce bewilderment, but poetry cultivates it. Poets write in forms that resist rational criteria. Many poems leave syntactic and prosodic structures open and unresolved. Even conventionally structured poems ring with traditional but bewildering echoes. The musical structure of symmetrical formal poems often pulls signification toward uncertainty. The separable syntactic and prosodic structures of a poem vie with one another for the focused attention of readers. Only the first leads directly to semantic sense. Critics reassuringly show how sound echoes sense, but it does so only occasionally; sonics are often bewildering, even in poems as shapely as Shakespeare's sonnets.

What is called lyric is more effort than thing, a variety of language use differentiating itself from other discourses. Lyrics are conventionally distinguished from speech or prose by diction, syntax, prosody, and typography. Poetry's conventional markers facilitate memory, but provide no guaranty of poetic value; light verse and doggerel display the same markers. Roman Jakobson said that “form exists for us only as long as it is difficult to perceive, as long as we sense the resistance of the material, as long as we waver as to whether what we read is prose or poetry.”⁴ The marking of poetry as distinct, as he saw, initiates a contest of uncertain outcome. Although some poets continue to write gnomic lines, more often poetic craft serves ways of thinking and formulating that rarely settle into judgments, or even generality, and often dissolve altogether. Poetry explores language usage beyond conventional prose or speech; it competes with other discourses for authority or credibility, but is hobbled in that competition by an indefinite account of its own distinctiveness. The most ancient contest is between poetry and philosophy, which Goethe addressed in his autobiography: “In poetry a certain faith in the impossible,…as in religion a like faith in the inscrutable, must have a place[;] the philosophers appeared to me to be in a very false position who would demonstrate and explain both of them from their own field of vision.”⁵ Poetry solicits the faith of adherents. But faith in what? Not in doctrine or dialectic. Poems try to move past the points where rationality rests to recover a remainder of the impossible, inscrutable, overlooked, negligible, or even erroneous. Poets are thinkers, but they are believers too in the value of what eludes rationality.

English-language intellectual culture has been preponderantly secular for over a century, though the religious roots of poetry have remained, however buried, vigorous. The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski acknowledges the inevitable limit on the knowledge that poetry offers: “Poetry is condemned to live with mystery, alongside mystery, in endless, energizing uncertainty.”⁶ Even the rationalizing methods of New Criticism relied on a sense of mystery. John Crowe Ransom's understanding of the contest of discourses—poetry, theology, philosophy, political theory, economics, sociology, history—was mundane: he measured their relative command of power, economic and political, and social prestige. Poetry is weak in these ways, though it has a distinctive strength because it is less abstract than philosophy, political theory, and economics. The unexplained specificity of life is honored in the language of poetry, according to Ransom, whereas other discourses try to explain everything. Poetry needs the unexplained, even the inexplicable. At its core is approval of the fullness of experience made evident by the unwillingness of poets to subordinate difficulties to explanatory principles: this distinguishes it from other discourses. A lyric conveys exaltation, but also a sense of limits—those of agency as well as rationality. Poetry and religion both lead toward submission. Schiller argued that the most developed poetry produces a “serene clarity,” a moment when there is nothing to be done.⁷ Adorno follows him much later in saying that the lyric strives “to remain unaffected by bustle and commotion.”⁸ From this point of view, a didactic or provocative poem is a contradiction in terms. A journalist hews closely to what is said to be known and delineable. In poetry, prayer, and song what is not known is affirmed; these uses of language acknowledge, as others more rarely do, that the wavering boundary between understanding and misapprehension is a threshold of value. Ignorance and incomprehension are necessary horizons of the art.

Poetry is an art of ideals shadowed by failure. The “language of the actual,” as Ransom says, is plainly prose, which dominates “the marketplace, the senate, the camp, the executive offices, the laboratories, the learned professions, and nearly all the public occasions.” Idealistic prose is projected toward a future: space travel, artificial intelligence, triumphalist histories, and so on. But the idealism of poetry is retrospective: “it handles the past, and in particular those clearly marked alternative paths which we came to in the past but did not take.”⁹ Poetic diction consists of faux archaisms. Poetry, archival and utopian, resurrects forms of expression and conception that might be more regularly accessible if history's losers had been winners. Yes, if the South had won the war, in Ransom's case. An appalling thought: slavery and agriculture. But Ransom had a pertinent point in that poems, after Virgil, sing of lost causes, and figure the costs of historical choices. What one hears is a minority report. “Over every poem which looks like a poem,” Ransom wrote, “is a sign which reads: This road does not go through to action; fictitious.”¹⁰ Past choices, made differently, might have enabled some fictions to be facts, and vice versa. The categories of academic literary interpretation are aligned against this poetic project. Daniel Tiffany, for instance, has argued that Pound's “crypt aesthetic,” his pursuit of the cherished dead, is a version of fascist kitsch. Pound's retrospective orientation seems to many scholars now void of allegorical significance, rich only in “the rhapsodic sensibility of kitsch.” The most musical passages of the Cantos are the worst violations of the academic taste for paraphrasable sense.¹¹ Orpheus wore jackboots, on this view.

Dark, lost causes. Lyric poets have no reason to expect their art to transform the future, to right wrongs, or redeem loss. An expectation of failure, not triumph, is built into poems. “There is no poetry,” according to Bonnefoy, “but that which is impossible.”¹² Lyric begins in a sense of implacable limits, against which it is appropriate to strain; tough odds justify strenuous language. Music's power to charm is validated by the apparent impossibility of overcoming these limits. So “strain” in both senses: a hard push and a song too. The impossibility of poetry is not a historical development; journalism about the death of poetry, or its regrettable adversity, is off point. Poets are drawn less to questions that can be answered, than to those that cannot, to irresolvable problems, and inevitably obscure issues. “Poetry is a search for the inexplicable,” Stevens says.¹³ Not a confrontation with the inexplicable, but a search for it. Poets look for trouble, taking only the long shots. And they plan to lose. Whitman's young poet, in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” grows “ecstatic” in response to a birdsong of loss and misery. Pleasure in the bird's adversity sets the poet apart from others, from the natural order of things, and from the boy he was before his vocation. The prospect of a thousand songs yet “more sorrowful” than the bird's excites him. The peace the boy knew before he felt his inspiration is gone forever; in its place: “the sweet hell within, / The unknown want.”¹⁴ He will now live in paradox and yearning for a lost satisfaction; that is perversely thrilling to the poet. “The word of the sweetest song and all songs” is “death.” His destiny is to hear in the sea that dark song, “some drowned secret hissing.” The exact nature of the secret, as the phrase suggests, is beside the point: it might be one secret or another. What counts is that it is drowned, irrecoverable, mysterious. That is the birth of song.

Ovid tells the story of Orpheus as a first poet. Book 10 of the Metamorphoses begins with the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice; their union is impossible from the start. Hymen waves his torch in a celebratory fashion, but it gutters and smokes, bringing tears to everyone's eyes. This couple had only one night together; on the morning after the wedding, she dies suddenly of snakebite. Orpheus sings his laments the world over, and all the species weep at his music. He takes his laments to the underworld and charms even the Furies to tears. He is allowed to revive his dead bride and lead her back to her mortal life, on condition that he not look back at her as they ascend the path out of Hades. As they are about to emerge from the underworld, he turns in doubt, and she recedes into the gloom, whispering goodbye.¹⁵ He is driven by devotion to his lost beloved Eurydice, but their union was impossible from their wedding day. His song is extraordinarily persuasive; it falters, though, on a doubt. Orpheus turned away from women then. As Seamus Heaney translates the last lines of book 10:

Many women loved him and, denied
Or not, adored. But now the only bride
For Orpheus was going to be a boy
And Thracians learned from him, who still enjoy
Picking those spring flowers bright and early.¹⁶

Book 11 narrates the death of Orpheus. Wild women, hearing his song and resentful of his disdain of women, launch an attack. His song charms even the sticks and stones thrown at him. He is beaten, though, because they make a rival music: his sweet songs cannot be heard over their wild sounds, and the stones begin to reach their mark:

The furies were unleashed. And his magic note
That should have stalled their weapons was drowned out
By blaring horns and drums, beatings and yells
And the pandemonium of those bacchanals
So that at last his red blood wet the rocks.¹⁷

Orpheus dies horribly, torn limb from limb, in a sonic combat; noise, bad music drives out the good. The women misuse tools as weapons and brutally slaughter farm animals. Charles Martin's translation connects the struggle to religious authority:

having torn apart the oxen
whose horns had threatened them, they hastened back
to finish off the seer, who, with raised hands, spoke words unheeded for the first time ever,
his voice not moving them the slightest bit;
the sacrilegious women struck him down.…¹⁸

The death of the poet ends an era of faith: his song thereafter fails to charm. His singing head washes up on the shore at Lesbos, where Sappho's song begins. What we know as lyric has the musical and religious crisis (he succumbed to doubt) of Orpheus behind it. The musicality of poetry is not going to be entirely extricated from issues of faith. Music solicits a hearing, as a speech does too, but a belief as well in the indefinite power of words.

Fanny Howe, as I noted, refers to “a Muslim prayer that says, ‘Lord, increase my bewilderment,' and this prayer belongs both to me and to the strange Whoever who goes under the name of ‘I' in my poems…where error, errancy, and bewilderment are the main forces.”¹⁹ This wonderful notion of seeking confusion is related to Stevens's point, but not quite the same. When she puts error and errancy together, she evokes a sense of movement, wandering without direction. The objective of expunging or correcting error is irrelevant. There is no criterion of rightness, in this way of thinking, only a technology of error. She especially feels a need for movement, or change, to develop a project without any profound truth to support its authority. Just one line after another, wayward, bewildered. Errant poets do not resolve issues—in this they are close to Stevens—but they are especially determined to find paths of continuing surprises, and that is not exactly Stevens's point. “The serial poem,” she writes, demonstrates an attention to what is “cyclical, returning, but empty at its axis. To me, the serial poem is a spiral poem. In this poetry circling can take form as sublimations, inversions, echolalia, digressions, glossolalia, and rhymes.”²⁰ The formal language of poetry echoes, approximates, or digresses from, something else; the poem itself is not the thing. A poetics of the achieved artifact misses the authority of the art. A spiral is hollow.

The attraction to impossible subjects is ancient. Pindar celebrates the effort...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Authority
• 2. Praise
• 3. Civility
• 4. Thought
• 5. Music
• 6. Universality
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index