Lyric Eye

The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance

Tyne Daile Sumner

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000422276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance presents the first detailed study of the relationship between poetry and surveillance. It critically examines the close connection between American lyric poetry and a burgeoning US state surveillance apparatus from 1920 to the 1960s. The book explores the myriad ways that poets—Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg and others—explored a developing and fraught environment in which the growing power of American investigative agencies, such as the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, imposed new pressures on cultural discourse and personal identity. In analysing twentieth-century American poetry and its various ideas about "the self, " Lyric Eye demonstrates the extent to which poetry and surveillance employ similar styles of information-gathering such as observation, overhearing, imitation, abstraction, repurposing of language, subversion, fragmentation and symbolism.

Ground-breaking and prescient, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, politics, surveillance and intelligence studies, and digital humanities.

1
Towards a theory of the Lyric Eye

I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing;

I see all; the currents of the Universal

Being circulate through me.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Nature

“Surveillance is about seeing things, and more particularly, about seeing people,” writes David Lyon in the opening to Surveillance Studies (1). Although this claim holds true to the fact that surveillance practices have always been based upon models of regimented visibility, it goes one step further in designating a major point of focus for the surveillant gaze: other human beings. Poets, of course, are acutely aware of this step. Long before the appearance of Surveillance Studies, lyric poets worked to problematise the linguistic and formal codes that govern the language and processes underpinning surveillance: acts and processes such as representation, expression, narrativisation, symbolism, communication, imitation and characterisation. In addition to sharing this complex set of concepts, both lyric poetry and surveillance are interested in the concept of truth. Although the need to seek out the truth undeniably involves an inherent surveillance apparatus, poetry reflexively complicates its own truth claims by ensuring a “constant alternation or pulse of sense and nonsense” (Blasing 3). To put this simply, poetry generates its own unique “truth” by using language that blurs the distinction between appearance and reality.

In a recent collection of essays that responded to the advent of the “New Lyric Studies,” Rei Terada probes this paradigm by suggesting that drawing attention to the associations between lyric and other phenomena would be an interesting exercise “only if we normally believed that lyric was closed” (196). Jumping ahead to the present day, she comments: “Now the associations justify themselves … in particular conceptual conclusions about nationalism, humanness, media culture, and other socio-political and philosophical problems. If ‘lyric’ is a concept that will help us think, it’s because it helps us think about something besides lyric” (196).

In stressing the conceptual and formal overlaps of lyric poetry and surveillance as well as the cultural and political impact of these overlaps on American poets in the twentieth century, I am fully implicated in the postmodern project that Terada describes. However, my reading of American lyric poetry during the period from the 1920s to the 1960s diverges from Terada’s subsequent submission that the lyric “zone of electrification is dissipating along with belief in the autonomy of the lyric object and in the specialness of the lyric mode” (196). It is precisely the specialness of the modern American lyric mode that allows it to express and reflect the tumultuous mood of the times, in the twentieth century and today. The unique properties of the lyric contribute, therefore, both to the lyric’s capacity to comment upon surveillance and to the (often unwarranted) attention given to it and its creators by an increasingly powerful American surveillance state.

Given these grand gestures, the key question I want to pose is this: What can a voice which is both personal and public, acknowledged and anonymous, tangible and disembodied, human and artificially constructed, tell us about the practices of surveillance in the twentieth century and, in particular, the effects of these practices upon the American psyche, both at the level of the individual citizen and for the collective American consciousness? To answer this, we must consider how the concept of surveillance came to pervade people’s private lives in America during the early to middle decades of the twentieth century and the role that lyric poetry played in turning the gaze back upon the surveillance machine, the mechanism that Richard Wright dubbed the “FB Eyes.” Therefore, a theory of the Lyric Eye must first address the burning question: why lyric?

Why Lyric?

every poem, is, in one sense, a little drama.

BROOKS & WARREN

Understanding Poetry

E.E. Cummings, the eccentric poet who has come to be associated with the lowercase “i,” deviates from the standard modern American lyric in his 1932 satirical poem “Ballad of an Intellectual.” The poems begins:

Listen, you morons great and small

to the tale of an intellectuall

(and if you don’t profit by his career

don’t ever say Hoover gave nobody beer).

’Tis frequently stated out where he was born

that a rose is as weak as its shortest thorn:

they spit like quarters and sleep in their boots

and anyone dies when somebody shoots

(951)

In peculiar dactylic/anapestic tetrameter rhyming couplets, Cummings lambasts everyone from Ezra Pound (“and many’s the heiress who’s up and swooned / after one canto by Ezra Pooned”) to the American nation itself (“Not I am a fake, but America’s phoney!”). The poem also presents several double entendres, aural and visual rhymes, and amusing intentional misspellings, all carefully positioned for satiric effect. The poem’s “puny” intellectual protagonist “hated the girls and mistrusted the boise” before, “encouraged by desperation,” his parents “gave him a classical education.” Cummings then writes:

You know the rest: a critic of note,

a serious thinker, a lyrical pote,

lectured on Art from west to east

- did sass-seyeity fall for it? Cheast!

(951)

Here, we have the characteristic linguistic irregularity of Cummings infused with an exaggerated humour uncommon for poems of the period. In the stanza above, these techniques are used to mock the seriousness of the “lyrical pote,” a figure “sass-sayeity” has foolishly taken to be the arbiter of high culture and taste. Yet there is something far more significant at stake in the poem’s clever arrangement of wordplay and finger poking. In using an uncommon rhyme scheme while making fun of the very figures that are best positioned to notice that scheme’s atypical nature (he begins the poem by rhyming “small” and “intellectuall,” for example), Cummings draws attention to the very mode from which he dramatically deviates. Simply put, “Ballad of an Intellectual” (though still technically a lyric poem) reflexively estranges itself from the archetypal modern American lyric in order to highlight the primacy of particular critical distinctions; in doing so, it exploits the stance and structure it mocks. The poem reveals the way in which the lyric that emerges in the middle decades of twentieth-century America “appraises its own possibilities, if in the very act of having them questioned and even, sometimes, sadly denied” (Oberg 4). Cummings uses an irregular form of lyric, one whose central theme is intellectualism, to question what a lyric might be. This may seem like a radical manoeuvre, but the definition of lyric poetry was as contested during Cummings’s time as it continues to be today. Moreover, the effects and possibilities of the lyric poem—political, cultural or aesthetic—often depend upon the formal characteristics that are emphasised at any given moment.

Putting the definitional contestation over the lyric and, by extension, the apparent contemporary “resistance to poetry” into perspective, James Longenbach reminds us that “poets have been on the defensive at least since the time of Plato, and rightly so, since philosophers and literary critics have distrusted poetry” (The Resistance to Poetry 1). While this may be true, it is also the case that those who revere it most have always challenged the very meaning of lyric poetry. “We take it for granted that we know what a lyric is,” write Jackson and Prins, yet the dauntingly large number of different definitions of the genre—extending from John Stuart Mill, Theodor Adorno and Northrop Frye to Helen Vendler, Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Culler—suggests a very different situation (The Lyric Theory Reader 1). Before examining the qualities and sociocultural effects of the modern American lyric and its associated surveillance poetics, we should consider the broader definition of lyric poetry and some of the conceptual tensions that have shaped it from the start.

Derived from the ancient Greek word lurikos (for the lyre), the term lyric has come to be associated with a performance that exists today in the popular form of “song lyrics” with musical accompaniment. Historically, the semantic and emotional influence of the lyric is therefore inextricable from its sister act: musical performance. As Robert Von Hallberg explains: “Euterpe, the muse of lyric poetry, needs a flute; Terpsichore, the muse of choral poetry, a lyre. Diverse forms of musicality are attractive to poets, but no poet can afford to tap only lightly the musical resources of language” (7). This is in part because lyric equally denotes a short poem that expresses a poet’s own thoughts and feelings: in essence, a literary production that is read and not sung. Yet although it may carry a traditional relation to melody, the lyric—a linguistic arrangement that has no actual sound—is not music. Stressing the lyric’s auditory effects prompts us to recall the original moment (or moments) of a lyric’s composition. Thus, unless we are literally listening to a lyric poet spontaneously compose a poem, we are always recalling sound “with only some regard to an originating auditory experience” or perhaps we are simply imagining what we would have heard if we had been there (Stewart 29). Of course, whatever sounds we recall, they are probably human. The sounds of lyric are not an abstract sequence of tones and intonations without a point of reference; rather, what we are most likely to—instinctively—imagine is the sound of human speech. Recognising this is central to recognising the importance of brevity to the lyric’s classification but is also an influential factor in tracing the relationship between lyric poetry, confession and surveillance. Even at the level of title alone, though, we can see the lyric’s long-standing correlation with the sound of human speech, evident in Plath’s “Word Heard, By Accident, Over the Phone,” W.D. Snodgrass’s “Nightwatchman’s Song” or John Berryman’s “Eleven Addresses to the Lord.”

Each of these titles positions us not only to overhear some kind of poetic voice but also to imagine a poetic scenario. Plath’s poem prompts the image of a domestic setting, and “Nightwatchman’s Song” suggests an evening scene, perhaps played out in complete privacy. Ultimately, what we automatically do when we encounter a lyric poem is imaginatively reconstruct a context or setting of some kind; this might in...