While psychoanalytic literature engages the operations of the elements of the signifier – letters and phonemes – in the “unconscious” and amply documents the imbrication of language and sexuality, the notion of an “unconscious” is of little help in understanding the poetic “I” because it rests on the repression of the crucial, formative history of language acquisition. 15: ‘language is as sexually charged as sexuality is linguistically charged, and the concurrency of the two processes renders the borders between elements of language and the “textual”, erotogenic body permeable, as is clearly seen in psychopathological confusions of the body and language. 94–137 for the second of these situations see everyday life.įor an illuminating discussion of the relevance of language acquisition to prosodic and phonological features of verse, Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), e.g. ![]() Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1996), and, for comparable contemporary cases, Webb Keane, Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997), pp. I am grateful to the organisers for that opportunity to develop some of these ideas.įor the first of these situations, see, for a historical study, Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. 17–46.The present essay originated as a talk given at a conference on Long Poems: Major Forms at the University of Sussex, May 2008. Wimsatt, ‘Rhyme/Reason, Chaucer/Pope, Icon/Symbol’, Modern Language Quarterly, 55.1(1994), pp. For illuminating commentary on Wimsatt's argument, see James I. So that even were we to grant, as I do not, the assumption that the repertoires of vocal gestures deployed by poetry are in some absolute qualitative or quantitative sense insufficiently rich, this would still tell us nothing one way or the other about the poverty or richness of verbal music, which is dependent not on the materials, but on what is done with them. Otherwise, the ‘music’ of Bach's cello suites would always be ‘meager’ in comparison to an orchestral piece by Delius. ![]() But the richness or poverty of music is in no way dependent on the acoustic complexity of the forces involved. Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (New York: The Noonday Press, 1958), pp. Wimsatt, ‘One Relation of Rhyme to Reason’, The Verbal Icon.
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