Lyric Tactics - Ingrid Nelson The Middle Ages Series

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these elements inevitably enter.”99 A good critic “must be an adept at experiencing, without eccentricities, the state of mind relevant to the work of art he is judging.”100 For other critics, the primary subjectivity constituting the lyric poem is that of the poet himself. Eliot identifies “three voices of poetry” that depend as much on who speaks as on who listens. The three voices are the poet talking to himself or to no one (lyric), the poet addressing an audience of any size (epic or, Eliot asserts, dramatic monologue), and the voice or voices of distinct dramatic characters addressing an audience (drama). Eliot prizes the “first voice” of lyric, which he prefers to call “meditative verse,” as fulfilling the primary function of poetry: “The first effort of a poet should be to achieve clarity for himself.”101 Likewise, in an analysis of Herrick’s “Corinna’s going a-Maying,” Cleanth Brooks remarks, “The poet is a maker, not a communicator. He explores, consolidates, and ‘forms’ the total experience that is the poem. I do not mean that he fashions a replica of his particular experience of a certain May morning like a detective making a moulage of a footprint in wet clay. But rather, out of the experiences of many May mornings, and out of his experience of Catullus, and possibly out of a hundred other experiences, he fashions, probably through a process akin to exploration, the total experience which is the poem.”102 Rejecting mimesis, Brooks posits poetry as the linguistic “vehicle,” to use his term, of the poet’s complex subjectivity.

      W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley expunge both poet’s and reader’s subjectivities from the reading of lyric, replacing it with a “speaker”: “[E]ven a short lyric poem is dramatic, the response of a speaker (no matter how abstractly conceived) to a situation (no matter how universalized). We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immediately to the dramatic speaker, and if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference.”103 This at once anonymizes and universalizes the complex, experiential subjectivity that generates a lyric poem. This view of lyric persists, notably in the work of Helen Vendler, for whom modern lyric poetry expresses the common “soul” divested of attributes such as race, gender, or social class.104

      Most recently, Jonathan Culler’s aptly titled Theory of the Lyric puts forward a model of the genre that identifies the distinctive language of lyric poetry as the defining feature of the genre. Culler identifies four qualities of language specific to lyric poetry: (1) its mode of address to another person or object, which constitutes an indirect address to the reader; (2) its nonmimetic language “events”; (3) its “ritualistic” sound patterns (rhyme, rhythm, etc.); and (4) its use of hyperbole.105 Just as post-Enlightenment poetic theorists found lyric’s transhistorical genre identity in its capacity for subjective utterance, Culler identifies these verbal and rhetorical features as the basis for defining a unified lyric genre across time and space. As he puts it, genres “have the singular property of being potentially resistant to unidirectional historical evolution, in that generic possibilities once exploited remain possible, potentially available, while political, social, and economic systems have moved on in ways we think of as irreversible.”106

      Critiques of such universalizing claims frequently situate both lyric and nonlyric verse in its plural, contingent, and social contexts.107 In his 1957 radio address, “Lyric Poetry and Society” (translated into English in 1974), Theodor Adorno observed that the concept of the solitary speaker of lyric has ideological underpinnings, since this figure emerges from the alienation produced by capitalist social structures.108 Adorno and other Marxist critics articulate ways in which qualities of the lyric genre, such as Hegel’s durable assertion that it is “subjective,” emerge from specific structural and ideological features of culture, such as the alienation produced by capitalism. When applied to modern lyric, Marxist critique tends to be oppositional: the private self is in necessary conflict with a postindustrial society; what Charles Bernstein calls “official verse culture” is antagonistic toward the eccentric poetry of the avant-garde.109 The group of poet-theorists that identify as the Language poets assert that their writing “places its attention primarily on language and ways of making meaning that takes for granted neither vocabulary, grammar, process, shape, syntax, program, or subject matter. All of these remain at issue.”110 Language poetry attempts to extend the boundaries of linguistic expression beyond reference, rhetoric, or ritual, drawing into the ambit of poetry (if not of lyric) abstract sound, discourses from the colloquial to the bureaucratic, and the layout of the printed page. This school largely subscribes to a Marxist politics of lyric, in that it understands uses of language to express “the social determination of consciousness,” especially, for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, by capitalist economic and cultural forces.111 As Marjorie Perloff notes, however, the protesters against “official verse culture,” too, adhere to particular lyric canons that, even as they claim expansiveness, elide a great deal of poetry that could productively enter into and alter their lyric theories.112 Recognizing marginal voices and difference as constitutive of the plural identities within cultures, many readers have turned away from lyric to focus on forms that more apparently express these heteroglossic voices: novels, autobiographical narratives, and other writings not conventionally considered literary.113

      Yet lyric in particular and poetry more generally are far more diverse and flexible than conventional post-Enlightenment aesthetics allow. As so-called New Formalist analyses, especially those pertaining to lyric and poetics, demonstrate, rhetorical and material poetic forms are themselves historically contingent, and expanding our study of verse beyond the traditional definitions of “lyric” promises to reveal a different literary history.114 Yet many critics also find lyric’s formal and practical qualities compelling enough to retain its status as a distinct object of study. For every call to “let ‘lyric’ dissolve into literature and ‘literature’ into culture,” there is a plea to preserve lyric as a distinct genre.115 Defenders of lyric cite many qualities that distinguish it as an object of study: its special ability to suspend temporality, its difference from narrative, the particularities of its voice, and its verbal music, to name a few.116 Further, the pedagogical usefulness of lyric that I. A. Richards recognized—it is a text short enough to be read, digested, and discussed in a single classroom session—remains for many a compelling reason for its study. Another is doubtless the unique pleasure of reading lyrics: their gemlike intricacies, their verbal music, their rhetorical richness, and the intimacy of lyric voices.

      Medieval lyrics, it must be said, have often been accused of falling short of these marks. For every “Alisoun,” with its earthy eroticism and intricate stanza form, there are ten monorhymed didactic lyrics prodding their readers toward renunciation and contrition. For this reason (among others), medieval English lyrics have often been omitted from or superficially treated in transhistorical accounts of the genre.117 But it is precisely because these poems resist the formal paradigms and aesthetic models that have determined much lyric criticism in the past century that a new examination of this corpus promises to generate a critical paradigm that might productively enter into and enrich transhistorical lyric theories. Conversely, features of multiple contemporary poetic theories that present themselves as oppositional can productively inform a study of medieval English lyric, which at once participates in the kind of rhetorical ritual language that Culler identifies and draws widely on the kinds of linguistic and material resources championed by the Language poets. Yet none of these modern poetic theories offers an entirely adequate lens for understanding the premodern genre. While the theory of tactics that I have outlined above is essentially Marxist (in its concern with practice, use, and structures of power), it differs from existing Marxist lyric criticism in an important way. The theory of tactics is not oppositional with respect to the structures of power; it is relational, recombinative, and generative. As such, while specific tactics may be subversive in effect, they are as a whole dependent on existing structures. Further, while medieval English lyrics share some commonalities with lyrics of other times and places, their specific cultural contexts influence and even produce their forms, material witnesses, and performances. Thus, understanding that all of these features of medieval lyrics are governed by ad hoc tactics allows us to recognize how a particular approach to practice can do as much to define a genre as its rhetorical forms. Shifting the emphasis from form to practice in the study of this genre suggests that for medieval

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