The preceding analysis exemplifies some interrelated types of argumentation with wider ramifications: my emphasis throughout this study has been on the multiple over the monolithic, the inclusive over the rigidly hierarchical or exclusionary. I have tried to attribute a series of qualities and practices to lyric without privileging a signature trope or mechanism and to pursue a number of interlocking arguments without focusing on a single central assertion. Similarly, in several instances this book has profferred both/and analyses of the texts in its era—the speech of lyric is both internalized and social, it juxtaposes effects of immediacy and distance, it sometimes impedes and sometimes impels narrative—rather than bestowing dominance on one side or another. The variability and range of English early modern lyric, as well as its predilection for process and movement, encourages such approaches.
Crafting interlocking arguments rather than a single overarching thesis and adopting both/and approaches would benefit critical analyses of many subjects besides early modern lyric. To be sure, I hardly suggest that these perspectives should become norms for all literary and cultural analysis: numerous subjects demand and numerous monographs have benefited from more unidirectional approaches. Conversely, at their weakest the models I advocate can slide into fruitless indeterminacy. But, that risk averted, those paradigms would prove valuable for many subjects besides lyric. Should further material evidence (so to speak) of their value be needed, witness the practices of land ownership outlined in the conclusion of Chapter 4. More generally, such approaches allow a writer to avoid a clear and present danger, the central assertion designed to unite an entire book, which, though not perilous in its own right, so readily morphs into its hyperbolically insistent cousin. As a result, too much scholarly writing values the audacious at the expense of the judicious, striving to create a tidal wave itself rather than navigating smoothly through storms.
The alternative forms of argumentation advocated here offer more positive benefits as well, a contention adumbrated in Chapter 4 in particular. In terms of their intellectual potentialities, far from instantiating indecisiveness, they can initiate powerful and forceful insights, for often it is precisely in the dialogue between apparent opposites that important truths about both of them are spoken. Thus the relationship between internalized and socially oriented speech illuminates issues ranging from the relationship of ecclesiastical practices and secular poetry to gendered combat. And in terms of their contributions to collegiality, inclusive arguments model cooperation and reconciliation, behaviors too often lacking in our profession. Conversely, frequently (though certainly not invariably) the blanket dismissal rather than incorporation or negotiation of rival arguments encourages and is encouraged by the winner-take-all competitiveness that too often structures professional relationships on so many levels. An Australian scholar, Liam Semler, ruefully observed that the struggles to obtain one of the very few faculty positions available there frequently inducts scholars into a model of competitiveness that shapes the rest of their careers, and the same danger is clearly present in the United States.23 Having herself forcefully and influentially advocated both/and approaches elsewhere in her writing, Linda Hutcheon also comments cogently on the price paid for such rivalries: “despite our ideological protests against the commercialization and corporatization of the academy (and the attendant rhetoric), we [may] have somehow absorbed the business model of competition along with the individualist model of looking out only for ourselves….the opposition must be removed or destroyed; our intellectual profits must be maximized by minimizing the intellectual profits of others.”24 Do we not need to reconsider the intellectual presuppositions and the rewards systems that too often privilege such habits, thus undermining collegiality in the many positive senses of that contested term?25
By celebrating the achievements of Orpheus, the eponymous myth of this book also invites us to address another threat to collegiality: the gap between critics and creative writers (a term rejected by some sailing under its flag). The fact that many writers still attribute that fissure to the dominance of theory in the academy, years after that critical approach has lost much of its status, is a symptom and source of, not a justification for, the rupture. Similarly, literary and cultural critics too often regard the more pragmatic responses that writers of poetry, prose, and creative nonfiction typically bring to literature as not a different language but an unsophisticated version of their own tongue. One solution would be to build more experiences with creative writing into literature courses; students studying sonnets, for example, can be encouraged to create them or required to compose at least a quatrain or couplet. Likewise, another remedy would be to include more courses in literary criticism in those graduate writing programs that scant them. And if critics of literature celebrate Orpheus, the more established members of the profession should also encourage and support graduate students and younger colleagues who wish to wear hats as both poets and critics—in part by reevaluating reward systems, pecuniary and otherwise, which too often discourage that type of cross-dressing.
But, as I noted at the beginning of this book, Orpheus, though the keynote speaker in so many analyses of lyric, is by no means its only mythological exemplar. Orpheus kept singing until the Maenads tore him apart. His colleague Arion, a lesser but wiser poet, jumped ship at a more opportune moment—hoping that alert copyeditors and beneficent book reviewers, not sharks, waited in the waters below, having enjoyed his song enough to waft him to shore.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Northrop Frye, “Approaching the Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 31.
2. See P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000, 3rd ed. (1974; rpt., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Chapter 6.
3. Maristalla Casciato, The Amsterdam School (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1996), 66.
4. On the writings of Adorno and Mill on this issue, see below, Chapter 2.
5. Crate and Barrel holiday catalogue, 2003.
6. All citations are to The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956).
7. Eavan Boland, An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967–1987 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
8. Gwen Harwood, Selected Poems, ed. Gregory Kratzmann (London: Penguin, 2001).
9. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
10. Heather Dubrow, “Remission and Revision,” Journal of the American Medical Association 291 (January 14, 2004), 160.
11. See, e.g., Marjorie Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. 172–181.
12. Earl Miner, “Why Lyric?” in The Renewal of Song: Renovation in Lyric Conception and Practice, ed. Earl Miner and Amiya Dev (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000).
13. I quote Harold Fisch, Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 104.
14. W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 16.
15. Daniel Albright, Lyricality in English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 1.
16. René Wellek, “Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnis,” in Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 252. Also compare the observations of Paul Hernadi, who, after proposing some paradigms for distinguishing lyric, epic, and narrative, cautions that several principles, including ones customarily associated with the other two modes, coexist in each text (Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972], 166).
17. Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1–2.
18. Emil Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, trans. Janette C.
Hudson and Luanne T. Frank, ed. Marianne Burkhard and Luanne T. Frank (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), esp. 43–96.
19. On that putatively undue emphasis on subjectivity, see, e.g., Jonathan Culler, “Changes in the Study of the Lyric,” esp. 38–41, in Lyric Poetry, ed. Hošek and Parker.
20. A more recent challenge to these questions appears in the important work of Roland Greene: he has diagrammed lyric in terms of two principal drives, the ritualistic, which he associates with a communal, often aurally focused activity that coerces participation and identification, and the fictive, in many versions of which a clearly defined speaker emerges (Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991], esp. Introduction).
21. Anne Ferry, The Title to the Poem (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), esp. Chapters 1–4.
22. Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); see esp. the useful overview of her position on 212–213.
23. In a thoughtful comparatist analysis that unfortunately appeared after I had written my manuscript, Lisa Lai-ming Wong observes, as I do, that lyric operates in both interior and social arenas; she argues that repetitive performativity bridges them (“A Promise [Over] Heard in Lyric,” New Literary History 37 [2006], 271–284).
24. C. Day Lewis, The Lyric Impulse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 3.
25. Marshall Brown, “Negative Poetics: On Skepticism and the Lyric Voice,” Representations, no. 86 (Spring 2004), 127.
26. Paul de Man argues that lyric’s claim to be song, directly asserted in Charles Baudelaire’s “Correspondances,” is compromised in that and other of his poems, thus complicating the very conception of lyric (The Rhetoric of Romanticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 254); but applying the concept of family resemblances and acknowledging that certain periods are more prone to produce songlike lyrics than others preserves some options for classification. For a debatable but provocative argument about the differences between lyric and song, also see John T. Shawcross, Intentionality and the New Traditionalism: Some Liminal Means to Literary Revisionism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 79–80.
27. Mark W. Booth, The Experience of Songs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 23–26; this assertion is, however, rendered problematical by the study’s equation of song with a communal expression of predictable sentiments, a definition often but not invariably valid.
28. I am indebted to conversations with David Lindley for useful comments on this and many other issues about the relationship of music and lyric.
29. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 273. On the significance of chant, also see Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), Chapter 7.
30. I cite Zepheria (London, 1594).
31. See Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 40–41; the passage I quote appears on 41. Also cf. the application of the theory in Robert C. Elliott, “The Definition of Satire: A Note on Method,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 11 (1962), 22–23; and the challenge to it in Maurice Mandelbaum, “Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts,” American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1965), 219–228.
32. Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
33. Timothy Bahti, Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); William Waters, Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
34. See the discussion of the transgressiveness of the ghinnwa in Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), esp. 243–244, 251.
35. William Fitzgerald, Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 5.
36. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1669 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), Chapter 8.
37. Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1.
38. J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1966), 9, 13.
39. William Preston, Thoughts on Lyric Poetry (Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, 1787), 60–61.
40. Newberry Library Case MS A.15.179, 24.
41. Paul H. Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
42. David Lindley, Lyric (London: Methuen, 1985), 23–24.
43. On critical investments in subjects other than lyric, see Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
44. George T. Wright, Hearing the Measures: Shakespearean and Other Inflections (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 57, 58.
45. Wright, Hearing the Measures, 56.
46. See, e.g., my essay, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Reevaluating Formalism and the Country House Poem,” MLQ 61 (2000), 59–77.
47. The turns in this legend are explored as well in Melissa F. Zeiger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), esp. 50.
48. As noted above, one of the best discussions of temporality in lyric is Cameron, Lyric Time.
CHAPTER 1: THE RHETORIC OF LYRIC
1. Roland Greene, “The Lyric,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. III, The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 216.
2. Compare Paul H. Fry’s trenchant demonstration of the failures and tensions in early modern odes in particular (The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980], Chapters 1 and 2).
3. These and many other modern poems on Orpheus appear in Deborah DeNicola, ed., Orpheus and Company: Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999).
4. For the theory, posited by Spenser’s editors, that this allusion is present, see The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 67. I cite this edition throughout this chapter.
5. For a more detailed treatment of these issues, see the source on which my overview is largely based, John Block Friedman’s comprehensive study, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).
6. Anthony Cope, A Godly Meditacion upon .xx. Select Psalmes of David (London, 1547), sig. iiv.
7. Compare Melissa F. Zeiger’s reminder that in both the classical and the Christian retellings of this myth, Orpheus is associated with failure (Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997], esp. 27).
8. Frye discusses blocking throughout “Approaching the Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); see esp. 32–33.
9. Judith Wright, Collected Poems, 1942–1985 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1994).
10. Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 44–47. Also cf. Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 86–87; Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, Renaissance Fantasies: The Gendering of Aesthetics in Early Modern Fiction (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1999), esp. 69.
11. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 51.
12. George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englis
hed (London, 1632), 339.
13. See Scott Newstok’s as yet unpublished manuscript, “How to Do Things with Renaissance Epitaphs.” I thank the author for making his work available to me.
14. On Arion, see Linda Phyllis Austern, “The Siren, The Muse, and The God of Love: Music and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Emblem Books,” Journal of Musicological Research 18 (1999), 125–128; C. M. Bowra, “Arion and the Dolphin,” Museum Helveticum 20 (1963), 121–134; A. W. Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb: Tragedy and Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 19–22.
15. In Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 46–47, Stephen Greenblatt suggests that the Kenilworth production may lie behind Shakespeare’s reference to Arion in Twelfth Night.
16. For a transcription and discussion of Ramsey’s poem, see Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 193–194.
17. On Whitney’s emblem see Linda Phyllis Austern, “The Siren,” 123–125; the essay also comments usefully on broader questions about the gendering of music.
18. Leslie C. Dunn, whose work I encountered only after drafting this chapter, also observes that singing women are often represented as sirens and associated with effeminizing seduction (“The Lady Sings in Welsh: Women’s Song as Marginal Discourse on the Shakespearean Stage,” in Place and Displacement in the Renaissance, ed. Alvin Vos, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies [Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1995], esp. 60–64).
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