ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FOREWORD
“socially specified self” that she finds best exemplified in the novel—and
therefore understood primarily through “changing registers of diction,
contrastive rhythms, and varieties of tone,” what she calls the “destiny” of
words—it is also the case that in the Renaissance and early seventeenth century
“lyric” was a generally more inclusive genre than her intensely perceived
valuation of the “private” implies. A poet like Jonson, who has been nearly
“rediscovered” in the aftermath of New Criticism, is difficult to hear if we don’t
attend to the ways a “self” becomes “socially specified” through talking in verse
with another. And a poem like Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s
Return from Ireland” requires at the outset an even more radical trimming of
the private as the privileged domain of the lyric.
My point is not that Vendler’s preference for lyric as private utterance is
partial when it comes to understanding seventeenth-century poetry more
generally, let alone to deny, in the name of sophistication, the process of learning
that comes with the experience of identifying with the speaker of a lyric or the
poet. Rather, it is to take her principal point about lyric identification one step
further, as Marvell himself did, and urge that it also includes gaining tempting
access to, if not exactly permitting easy identification with, a world different
from the one we think we know around us. In this context, it is worth recalling
Jorge Luis Borges’s enticing description of what happens between the poem and
the reader, as told by Seamus Heaney in “The Redress of Poetry,” for it helps to
illuminate a reading process as potentially true for Jonson’s “To Penshurst” as
for Herbert’s “Affliction”:
The taste of the apple (states Berkeley) lies in the contact of the fruit
with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way (I would say)
poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of
symbols printed on pages of a book. What is essential is…the thrill, the
almost physical emotion that comes with each reading. 3
Where Borges differs from most reader-response theorists of a decade ago is in
his emphasis on the palpable “thrill” of the encounter, “the fluid, exhilarating
moment which lies at the heart of any memorable reading,” which Heaney,
widening the frame a bit, sees as fulfilling “the continual need we experience to
‘recover a past or prefigure a future.’” Not every poem will supply the “thrill” of
which Borges and Heaney speak, but a history of poetry that does not, at some
level, signal the precipitous attraction of verse as “possessing” a different kind of
knowledge from what is won in reading a novel or a diary is also not quite doing
its work. To press this point a little further, by way of attempting to fuse
Vendler’s weighty sense of the “destiny” of words as a special prerogative of
poetry with a Borgesian emphasis on the heady rush, “the almost physical
emotion that comes with each reading,” I would emphasize that an encounter
with the literary (aesthetic) provides, as Heaney suggests, an encounter with
history (politics) at an experiential level. “In the contact of the fruit with the
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