On Modern Poetry

Guido Mazzoni, Zakiya Hanafi, Zakiya Hanafi

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780674276161
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria moderna

An incisive, unified account of modern poetry in the Western tradition, arguing that the emergence of the lyric as a dominant verse style is emblematic of the age of the individual. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, poetry in the West was transformed. The now-common idea that poetry mostly corresponds with the lyric in the modern sense—a genre in which a first-person speaker talks self-referentially—was foreign to ancient, medieval, and Renaissance poetics. Yet in a relatively short time, age-old habits gave way. Poets acquired unprecedented freedom to write obscurely about private experiences, break rules of meter and syntax, use new vocabulary, and entangle first-person speakers with their own real-life identities. Poetry thus became the most subjective genre of modern literature. On Modern Poetry reconstructs this metamorphosis, combining theoretical reflections with literary history and close readings of poets from Giacomo Leopardi to Louise Glück. Guido Mazzoni shows that the evolution of modern poetry involved significant changes in the way poetry was perceived, encouraged the construction of first-person poetic personas, and dramatically altered verse style. He interprets these developments as symptoms of profound historical and cultural shifts in the modern period: the crisis of tradition, the rise of individualism, the privileging of self-expression and its paradoxes. Mazzoni also reflects on the place of poetry in mass culture today, when its role has been largely assumed by popular music.The result is a rich history of literary modernity and a bold new account of poetry's transformations across centuries and national traditions.

CHAPTER ONE

A History of Concepts

Lyric and Poetry in Modern Genre Theory

Between roughly 1550 and 1800, the concept of poetry underwent a profound metamorphosis, comparable in intensity to the transformation in the writing of poetry that took place between the time of Charles Baudelaire and the time of the historical avant-gardes. This change represents both the beginning of modern poetry and the necessary conditions for poetry’s entrance into the modern epoch of its history. Five centuries ago, the ideas many people use today to describe this genre were literally inexpressible. Three centuries ago, they were endorsed by only a minority of specialist readers, starting with the most significant one: that poetry corresponds for the most part with the lyric, viewed as a genre in which a first person speaks about itself in a style intended to be personal. This conflation of attributes, a foregone conclusion in the eyes of many today, rests on assumptions that are anything but to be taken for granted. The most important is a notion of the lyric that differs from the etymological meaning of the word.

In ancient culture, the lyric was a poem sung to the sound of a lyre. By metonymy, it was a poem intended to be read silently but whose subject matters and meters drew on the tradition of poetry accompanied by string instruments. In our culture, the lyric is one of the three major theoretical families into which literature is divided. It groups together texts in which a first-person speaker expresses content considered to be personal: individual passions, states of mind, reflections. This modern concept has an origin and a history: it is actually contemporary to the division of literature into three theoretical groupings that emerged around 1550 and became established between approximately 1750 and 1850. In only a few decades, it replaced the divisions that came into existence in classical antiquity but were still alive in eighteenth-century classicism, and it spread throughout Europe in countless variants that had different nuances but were similar in substance. The systematic version of this schema can be read in Hegel’s Aesthetics. Literature is composed of three major genres: epic (or narrative), lyric, and drama. Epic “presents what is itself objective in its objectivity”; lyric gives voice to “the subject, the inner world, the mind that considers and feels, that instead of proceeding to action, remains alone with itself as inwardness, and that therefore can take as its sole form and final aim the self-expression (das Sichaussprechen) of the subjective life”; drama unites the characteristics of epic and lyric “into a new whole in which we see in front of us both an objective development and also its origin in the hearts of individuals.”¹

This three-part schema has become common knowledge. You understand this when you look at the categories found in twentieth-century criticism, categories coming out of critical writings as well as those crystallized in institutions.² Histories of literature organized by genre are often divided into three groupings: narrative, poetry, and theater, sometimes with the addition of a fourth, which collects forms that lie outside the literature of invention in its narrowest sense, what for some time has been referred to as nonfiction. In the public stacks of the largest library in the European Union, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, literary criticism is divided into writings on poetry, the novel, and theater; on the shelves of many mainstream bookstores, the only theoretical genre that deserves to be broken down into subgenres is narrative, whereas writings in verse and for the stage are normally stacked on small shelves under signs saying “poetry” and “theater.” In all these cases, the archetype to which these taxonomies refer unconsciously is the Romantic theory of literary genres. In lyric, an I speaks to itself in the first person, focusing the reader’s interest not on the objective interest of the experiences described but on the way of describing them and on the significance that these experiences have for the speaker. In drama, many first-person voices speak and act within the public space of the stage. In narrative, the narrator’s persona recounts the words, thoughts, and actions of a number of characters, or its own as a character, focusing the reader’s attention on the intrinsic interest of the things recounted rather than on the way they are told. This schema does not change for a story told in the first person, because there is usually a logical and chronological distance between the narrating I and the narrated I, a distance comparable to that separating the narrator and the hero in a third-person story. Obviously, as Goethe points out, theoretical categories do not coincide perfectly with historical genres or real works:

These three modes of poetry can work together or separately. They can often be found jointly even in the shortest poem, and precisely through this compression into the smallest space they engender the most admirable creations, as we can notice clearly in the ballads of all nations. In early Greek tragedy we see all three of them united as equals, and only after a certain period of time do they separate. So long as the chorus plays the primary role, lyricism ranks at the top. When the chorus becomes more of a spectator, the other two become more prominent. Finally, when the action is reduced to personal and domestic life, the chorus is felt to be unwieldy and burdensome.³

Following Goethe’s reasoning, we might say that The Cantos by Pound, Le ceneri di Gramsci by Pasolini, and “The Glass Essay” by Carson mix lyrical and narrative elements, that Bertolt Brecht’s theater superimposes epic forms on top of dramatic forms, and that first-person novels based on style cast a lyrical patina over the epic subject matter of the story. Although theoretical categories do not correspond to historical genres, there do exist empirical forms that almost match the ideal archetype: ones that are almost entirely narrative, dramatic, or lyrical, as Goethe viewed the “purely epic” poetry of Homer.⁴ A Greek epos is almost always narrative: the interest falls on the doings of the heroes and not on the bard’s style, which transcends the personal; a fully dramatic text for the theater is one that succeeds in creating a perfect mimetic illusion according to the convention of the fourth wall; a lyric poem is one in which a first person speaks about itself in a strongly distinctive style.

Some consider this division to be immanent to the logic of literature, in part, perhaps, because this theory of the three genres appears to have deep linguistic roots. These are the same roots from which the system of personal pronouns arose, following the tripartite schema of I-you-he / her / it in every language, almost as if it mirrored the elementary anthropological structures of identity and otherness.⁵ We find the same patterns again in the three major groupings of lyric, drama, and narrative, oriented respectively toward the first, second, and third persons.⁶ The history of literature shows us instead that the modern triad actually has a specific genealogy: it did not exist before the Romantic age, and even when it began to exist in embryonic form, it had a minor status compared to another way of dividing up the literary space. This latter way was much more ancient, much more illustrious, and utterly impossible to reconcile with the genre of the lyric.⁷

Lyric and Poetry in Ancient Poetics

There are three theoretical genres in the fundamental texts of ancient poetics too—Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics—but the distinguishing criterion they use is completely different from the one employed by the Romantics. According to Plato, everything said by poets or storytellers is a story, and the story can be told using simple narrative (aple diegesis), imitation (mimesis), or both together. In pure narrative, poets speak in the first person; in the imitative form, they reproduce the characters’ speeches; and in the mixed form, they alternate between their own speech and the speeches of the characters.⁸ Tragedy and comedy are imitative, because the speeches are made directly by the characters without any mediation on the part of the narrator. Epic poetry is instead a mixed genre, because the narrator’s speeches alternate with those of the characters. Only dithyrambs are pure story:

One kind of poetry and story-telling employs only imitation—tragedy and comedy.… Another kind employs only narration by the poet himself—you find this most of all in dithyrambs. A third kind uses both—as in epic poetry and many other places.⁹

Thought on genres becomes more complex in Aristotle’s Poetics, because he brings variables into play that Plato had not considered. Seeing that art is mimesis, there are three criteria for classifying works: the media used to imitate, the objects imitated, and the mode or manner of imitation.¹⁰ The first distinguishes poetry from music and painting, and imitation in verse from imitation in prose; the second organizes works by subject matter, since imitators can represent the actions of people who are better than us, just like us, or worse than us; the third separates dramatic works from narrative and mixed works, because the poet can imitate by speaking directly, by giving voice to the characters, or by alternating the two techniques.¹¹ Aristotle basical...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on Translation
• Introduction: Sundials: Literary Genres and the Time of History
• Chapter One: A History of Concepts
• Chapter Two: A New Paradigm
• Chapter Three: A History of Forms
• Chapter Four: The Literary Space of Modern Poetry
• Conclusion: Modern Poetry as a Symbolic Form
• Acknowledgments
• Index