The Challenges of Orpheus
The Challenges of Orpheus
Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England
HEATHER DUBROW
© 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dubrow, Heather
The challenges of Orpheus : lyric poetry and early modern England /
Heather Dubrow.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-8704-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8018-8704-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. English poetry—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and
criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Literature and society—England—History.
3. Poetics—History. 4. Literary form—History. I. Title.
PR549.L8D83 2007
821'.0409—dc22 2007018748
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For my students
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Rhetoric of Lyric: Definitions,
Descriptions, Disputations
2 The Domain of Echo: Lyric Audiences
3 The Craft of Pygmalion: Immediacy and Distancing
4 The Predilections of Proteus: Size and Structure
5 The Myth of Janus: Lyric and/or Narrative
6 The Rhetorics of Lyric: Conclusions
and New Perspectives
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
The norms of lyric often—though, I will argue, not invariably—generate short poems. The debts I incurred while writing about lyric generate a long list. My work on this book has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Graduate School Research Committee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am grateful for the efficiency, judiciousness, and encouragement of Michael Lonegro, my editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press. I am delighted to have the opportunity to acknowledge my indebtedness to the following colleagues for useful information and suggestions: Stephen Buhler, Ronald Bush, Jonathan Culler, the late Gwynne Blakemore Evans, David Fleming, Cecilia Ford, Sara Guyer, Hannibal Hamlin, Jonathan Hart, Jane Hedley, Richard Helgerson, Jean Howard, Wendy Hyman, Robert Kaufman, Lynn Keller, Theresa Kelley, Richard Knowles, Barbara Lewalski, Jennifer Lewin, David Loewenstein, Harold Love, Carole New-lands, Jack Niles, Marcy North, James Phelan, Anne Lake Prescott, Patricia Rosenmeyer, David Schalkwyk, Henry Turner, William Waters, Neil White-head, Helen Wilcox, Susanne Wofford, Linda Woodbridge, and Carla Zecher. Special thanks to those who also read and offered valuable advice about chapters of the manuscript: Marshall Brown, Colin Burrow, Bonnie Costello, Mary Crane, Roland Greene, Jack Niles, James Phelan, Thomas Schaub, and the members of my department’s Draft Group. By fostering my own career as a poet, the creative writers in my department fostered my work on this book; I am grateful to Ronald Wallace in particular. A series of conscientious research assistants worked energetically and meticulously on the manuscript: Sarah Armstrong, Patricia Frank, Kimberly Huth, David Plastrik, Jason Siegel, and Aaron Spooner. It is a pleasure as well to acknowledge the indirect but nonetheless powerful contributions of the two undergraduate teachers who developed my interest in lyric poetry: the late David Kalstone and Neil Rudenstine. Some thirty years ago Sandy Mack became both a mentor to me and a model for me of generous and judicious professionalism; his helpfulness on innumerable occasions in the intervening years has deepened my debt. By incorporating the names of two elementary school teachers, Mary and Patricia Tighe, into the title of my endowed chair, I emphasized the significance of K-12 teachers, and I want to acknowledge it here as well. My debts to—and delight in—my own students, ranging from undergraduates to dissertators, are enumerated in the endnotes and celebrated in the dedication. Over the past six years, Donald Rowe has enriched this book in many ways; over the past sixteen years, he has enriched the life of its author in even more ways.
Part of Chapter 4 was published in different form in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 22 (2003), published by the University of Tulsa. Sections of Chapter 5 have also appeared in earlier form elsewhere and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers: “The Interplay of Narrative and Lyric: Competition, Cooperation, and the Case of the Anticipatory Amalgam,” Narrative 14 (2006), 254–271; “‘He had the dialect and different skill’: Authorizers in Henry V, ‘A Lover’s Complaint,’ and Othello,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s “A Lover’s Complaint”: Suffering Ecstasy, ed. Shirley Sharon-Zisser (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 121–136).
Note to the Reader
With one exception, my citations of Renaissance texts retain the original spelling, but I have regularized u/v and i/j, as well as the capitalization in titles, and ampersands have been replaced; in the instance of Spenser, however, orthography is not regularized.
The Challenges of Orpheus
Introduction
Despite the problems posed by defining and describing lyric, the term appears with telling frequency in contexts ranging from the scholarship of many disciplines to the seductions of Madison Avenue to the stanzas of lyric poets themselves. Northrop Frye, characteristically no less acerbic than acute, remarks that “there is a popular tendency to call anything in verse a lyric that is not actually divided into twelve books.”1 The word in question and its cognates are indeed used at best liberally and variously, and at worst merely loosely, in numerous academic fields. Deployed broadly by film critics, “lyric” is also applied more specifically to the work of Stan Brakhage; his own writings on his films and those of his critics draw attention to characteristics frequently though not uncontroversially attributed to lyric poetry, such as intensity, a disruption of linear chronology, and an emphasis on the emotions of the artist.2 A placard in the San Diego Art Museum observes of Edouard Vuillard, who, like other members of the late-nineteenth-century Nabi movement, created highly decorative surfaces: “his paintings are lyrical, poetic visions.” One study attributes to the modern Dutch architect and designer W. R. Dudock “a lyricism which had a close affinity with the Amsterdam School.”3
Positioned by John Stuart Mill, Theodor W. Adorno, and many others as an antithesis and even potentially an antidote to the commodified marketplace, lyric has nonetheless repeatedly been impressed into the service of commodification.4 An advertisement from the Crate and Barrel chain of stores celebrates the “lyrical patterning in luxurious, frosty silver” of a tablecloth.5 A type of wine glass from the same company has been graced with the name “Lyric Stemware,” either because it has the delicacy sometimes attributed to that mode or because it will contain the drink supposed to inspire it. A bar in Madison, Wisconsin, perhaps playing on that same ambiguity, sports the name “Liquid Lyric Lounge,” presumably encouraging its more sober patrons to debate whether the adjective applies to poetic or potable fare.
Poets too have attempted to deploy the resonances of the term present in both scholarly discussions and advertisements. When Robert Herrick declares in “An Ode to Sir Clipsebie Crew” that “A Gob
let, to the brim, / Of Lyrick Wine” (15–16) will be quaffed, he is referring not only to the wine’s capacity to inspire poetry and its association with Anacreon but also to the energy and sensuous pleasure that it, like poetry, can evoke.6 In our own era, the Irish poet Eavan Boland writes of an illness:
I re-construct the soaked through midnights;
vigils; the histories I never learned
to predict the lyric of
(“Fever,” 25–27)7
In the context of a poem where fever is associated with desire, loss, and irrationality and where disease also arguably gestures towards the presence of all three in Irish politics, lyric here seems to represent both the beauty and the meaning that are lost when temperatures rise. By linking that mode to “histories” (26), Boland also alerts her readers to the frequency with which it can be the companion and culmination of narrative rather than a temporary impediment, a point explored in Chapter 5.
A more cynical view of lyric is adumbrated by the twentieth-century Australian poet and librettist Gwen Harwood, whose own work in that mode is extraordinary in its range and complexity—no less extraordinary than the widespread neglect of it in both Great Britain and the United States. In a poem about the many ways communication breaks down when a marriage does, she declares, “Master writes a lyric poem / So his pain is manifest” (“Fido’s Paw is Bleeding,” 21–22), thus ironically gesturing towards yet another way the expository functions of language can really be an instrument for misleading oneself, others, or both.8 Langston Hughes’s “Little Lyric (Of Great Importance),” which reads in its entirety, “I wish the rent / Was heaven sent,” deploys its title to play the idealization associated with lyric, ironically signaled as well by the noun in its second line, against the practical exigencies of quotidian life.9 In addition to these stars of the poetic playing fields, players indubitably on minor league teams have also utilized “lyric” as a trope; for example, I too engaged with the complexities of the word when I compared the remission of a cancer patient to “the newborn curls that lyric across a baby’s head” (“Remission and Revision,” 19), associating her temporary reprise and the hair that signaled and symbolized it at once with fragility, energy, and delight.10
In responding to these conflicting definitions and descriptions of lyric, I choose to explore a range of its attributes without crisply positing a single characteristic, such as a trope, that could categorize all lyric poetry, or even all its versions in a particular period. Indeed, at several junctures this book demonstrates the problems arising from attempts to attribute a signature characteristic to the mode; such an enterprise is more foolhardy than brave (in the study as in the kitchen, aiming for crispness risks brittleness or even conflagration). Similarly, rather than developing a single overarching thesis, the book pursues a series of interlocking arguments. This introduction specifies why and how I have adopted these and related approaches and adumbrates some of their results.
The range of historical periods and of putatively lyric creations within even the handful of examples on which this chapter has opened gestures towards three of the principal questions, interrelated but separable, confronting the author of a study of lyric. Should it be defined transhistorically? What other problems complicate defining and describing it? And, however that first query is resolved, should a study of this mode focus primarily on a given historical period? This introduction argues for the real though limited value of transhistorical definitions if inflected—and hence sometimes destabilized—historically; at the same time, I defend the decision to concentrate on a single era as one of several viable responses to the complexities variously manifest in those definitions and in, for example, the poetry of Herrick and the platitudes of Crate and Barrel.
In considering the first of my three questions, the viability of transhistorical definitions, it is immediately clear that to deny significant generic affinities between, say, Anacreon and Herrick would be merely tendentious, not least because Herrick himself emphasizes those connections in a poem explored at the end of Chapter 1. And surely one needs to ask why, for example, stanzas recur in the lyrics of many different eras. Yet what might be categorized as the same characteristic may serve different functions and elicit different responses in different eras—variations that are no less significant than the apparent similarities. For example, whereas lyric is indeed associated with stanzas in many periods, the cultural coding of form varies from period to period and within a given era or a given text. The decision to write a sonnet in particular is typically an advertisement of one’s virtuosity and genealogy in the early modern period and of a determined, in some circles even defiant, interest in form in our own day.
Unnuanced transhistorical generalizations court further dangers: the history of the criticism of lyric offers all too many examples of the perils of positing as normative a characteristic that dominates in a given period or author. Marjorie Perloff frequently attacks the celebration of Romantic poetry as the norm for its mode.11 Cogently and characteristically, Earl Miner emphasizes that apostrophe and its companion prosopopoeia, though heralded as the signature trope of the mode in large part because of their centrality to the work of Romantic poets, in fact appear rarely in much of the world’s literature.12 Indeed, as my own study stresses, they are relatively rare even in English early modern texts.
Despite caveats like Perloff’s and Miner’s, generalizations about lyric rendered dubious by the absence of historical inflection continue to flourish. The dismissal of the mode as the last refuge of a scandal—that is, of the positing of an idealized, individuated subjectivity—flourishes in many quarters and includes pronouncements by some experimental poets eager to distinguish their own work (in both senses of that verb), an agenda to which I will return. One study declares that the dialogic propensities of the Song of Solomon distinguish it from “the lyrical tradition as we know it in the West”; yet that tradition in fact includes numerous dialogic poems, and pastoral in particular has a propensity for the dialogic.13 Similarly, although his emphasis on the social interactions in classical lyric is a valuable counterweight to commonplaces about the isolated speaker, W. R. Johnson’s establishment of those interactions as normative leads him to condemn the alternative meditative form as “an essentially unsatisfactory genre.”14
Divided on so many other issues, those who discuss definitions of lyric often unite in despairing of that task. Daniel Albright’s attempt to anatomize the form opens with, “In one sense there is no such thing as a lyric.”15 René Wellek, lamenting the impact of German theories of Erlebnis, despairs of transhistorical definitions: “One must abandon attempts to define the general nature of the lyric or the lyrical.”16 Other students of lyric, however, defend traditional descriptions of it with the unqualified intensity often associated with the mode itself. Helen Vendler firmly announces that while lyric may refer to social events, it “directs its mimesis toward the performance of the mind in solitary speech. Because lyric is intended to be voiceable by anyone reading it, in its normative form it deliberately strips away most social specification…. A social reading is better directed at a novel or a play.”17 The many German scholars who have anatomized the form are often equally firm in their judgments; Emil Staiger insists that we do have a clear sense of lyric, though in arguing that it is a quality that may be represented by, for example, a landscape, he blurs the distinction between lyric and lyricality that, as I have indicated, other critics of the form attempt to establish.18
Despite the assurance of Vendler and the assurances of Staiger, virtually all the qualities on which the category of lyric is based have been challenged, as even a brief catalogue of issues and scholarly debates will indicate. Is it the product of a single sensibility, as the highly influential German concept of Erlebnis would suggest, or is it dialogic—or are both those readings symptomatic of an undue emphasis on the issue of personality, a position explored by students of lyric ranging from Jonathan Culler to those opponents of the mode as they conceive it, t
he Language Poets?19 The choral performance of many classical lyrics confounds these questions.20 And is lyric unmediated expression or, as so many critics have insisted, the representation of such expression? Behind that debate lies a particularly fraught conundrum: is lyric expression as trustworthy as Paul Celan famously implies when he compares poems to a handshake or pressing of hands (a statement to which I will return in Chapter 3), or is it tainted with rhetoricity? Is it immediate or do its titles, authorial and otherwise, create effects of distance, as Anne Ferry has asserted?21 Similarly, is a type of present tense a presupposition of lyric, or should one second Sharon Cameron’s argument that Dickinson and other lyric poets struggle to achieve timelessness while often dovetailing several temporalities, or is neither position correct?22 Is lyric hermetic meditation, or is it social in its direction of address, as its putative roots in communal chants and, later, ceremonial odes might suggest?23 And might it even be social in its authorship, as those connections with choral performance could again indicate?
That last problem is but one of many issues arising from the links between lyric and music. C. Day Lewis asserts, “A lyric is a poem written for music—for an existing tune, or in collaboration with a composer, or in an idiom demanded by contemporary song-writers, or simply with music at the back of the poet’s mind. Lyrical poetry is a much looser thing, but it has not quite forgotten its origin in music and has not lost the singing line.”24 More recently, Marshall Brown has commented acutely on the relationship of the modes in certain texts: “Song converts logic into mood, negation into hesitation, and hence dialectic into an existential skepticism.”25
Song and lyric are, then, certainly closely allied; yet the interdisciplinary linkage Day Lewis posits is, as we will see throughout this book, fraught and sometimes debatable, challenged by critics as distinguished as Paul de Man, among others.26 It is not easy to discern songlike characteristics in, say, Donne’s “Flea”; conversely, an important study of song emphasizes its distinction from many written lyrics.27 Nor is it safe to collapse distinctions among various types of song and singing: the presence or absence of musical accompaniment and the possibility of the audience joining in are among the many important variations.28 Moreover, not song but chant lies behind the Greek conception of lyric, insists no less an authority than Northrop Frye.29 And even at this juncture one can observe that the term “song” and associated labels are used in loose and often confusing ways in the early modern as well as other periods. How literally is one to interpret the references to the Muse “sweetely warbling” (7) her “melodious notes” (9) in “Alli Veri Figlioli delle Muse,” the introductory poem of the anonymous sequence Zepheria? (And for that matter, how is the reader to respond when the same poem pulls the Donnean move of calling apparently secular lyrics “hymns” [11]?)30
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