The Biography of "The Idea of Literature" from Antiquity to the Baroque (review)

??? COHPAnATIST in the next essay, on Pascoli's theorizing ofthe dead language as the only language ofpoetry, for which "to speak" means to "experience the letter as the experience of the death of one's own language and one's own voice" (74). In "The Dictation ofPoetry," a further reflection involves the relationship between life and poetry. In particular, it tackles the bond ofspeech and life according to the Christian tradition and shows such a bond dominating the concept ofbiography and the way several poets dealt with it. This issue carries on in the first ofthe appendices, where we read of Antonio Delfini's enigma of the Basque woman whose "spirit isjoined with the voice without the mediation ofmeaning" (120). With the poetry ofGiorgio Caproni, attention focuses on the relevance and understanding ofverse. Interesting here is the reduction ofverse to its limiting elements , namely the "enjambment" (100). This tension between the metric aspect and the prose sense continues in "The End ofthe Poem," where Valery's definition of a poem as "a prolonged hesitation between sounds and sense" (109) spurs a comparison between verse and the figurative turning of the plow. Thus the verse is never the end ofthe verse but its turning, its delaying the coincidence ofsound and sense. From this it follows that the last verse cannot do what it says, it cannot turn, cannot be a verse. The ending of the poem at this point must be marked by the poem's collapse into silence (115). To conclude, the opposition tragedy/comedy is followed by the treatment of the relationship between living language and dead language, life and poetry, and the "dialectical tension" between style and manner. Agamben points out that his second essay, "Corn: From Anatomy to Poetics," and his eighth, "The End ofthe Poem," are "to be understood as a first contribution to a philosophy and criticism of meter that do not yet exist" (xii). It should be noted that most of the authors treated belong to the Italian literary tradition, but themselves engage many other figures in the Western tradition, both modern and ancient, such as Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin. Particular attention is given to the Provençal poets in general, and specifically to Amaut Daniel. The fact that Dante is a point of reference throughout the entire book creates a sort of continuity. Agamben's TAe End ofthe Poem: Studies in Poetics offers insight into a typically Italian mode of thought, while giving readers a chance to ponder on its contribution to an understanding ofcritical theory. The book's relevance is hence twofold, philological and theoretical. On the one hand, it furnishes the reader with a deep and elegant analysis ofa variety oftexts not commonly present to an American audience. On the other, it develops a critical analysis directly from the texts themselves without recurring to pre-established methodologies that need only to be applied. Agamben's attention to the centrality ofgrammar over hermeneutics makes his work particularly useful to the American audience for both its historical and its analytical implications. Maurizio GodorecciUniversity ofAlabama ADRIAN MARINO. 7"Ae Biography of "The Idea of Literature" from Antiquity to the Baroque. Trans, from Romanian by Virgil Stanciu and Charles M. Carlton. Albany: SU ofNew York P, 1996. xiv + 315 pp. This is a closely structured book that takes in four periods ofWestern literary history : Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Humanism, and Classicism and the Baroque. Each ofthese large periods is set out through a set ofdefinitions, VcH. 24 (2000): 179 REVIEWS a description of its literary culture and "School of Literature," and a briefaccount ofthe "estheticizing" ofletters at this stage of Western history. As we move closer to the modem period, literary culture is inevitably a more complicated matter. All the same, Marino does not depend on a strict chronological account; hence he prefers "biography" to "history" because the former term suggests a kind oforganic evolution rather than a systematic development. In general the author follows a model ofGermanic critical theory that one associates with such figures as Herder, Curtius, and Wellek, but he mentions T. S. Eliot's famous essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" as a classic in...