Poetic Acts: Making Meaning

About five years after I had completed two MAs and a PhD, I suddenly realized that in all that training noone had ever asked me about language. Here I was a fully employed student of poetry, studying the art of language use, and I had never been required to consider, nor had it occurred to me to consider, the nature of the medium. Was this not extraordinary? Great emphasis had been placed on quality of tone and mellifluous prosody, seven types of ambiguity, and the transhistorical truths proposed by metaphor, but no attention had been required on the fundamentals of language itself—how meaning might be generated, how words function, how the structures of language might relate to understanding. It did not take long to look around and find that some literary scholars had begun to ask about language, including, close to home, Isobel Armstrong, and, further afield, emerging structuralist theorists. It took a little longer to begin to understand how the silence on this question was an ideological residue, an idealist inheritance that regarded language as transparent and neutral, as not an active medium. Readers should look through the transparency of the poem, it was supposed, toward the transcendent truths beyond, like Romantic poets reading/rending the veil of nature. But the poem as "window on the world" is an inordinately inept metaphor for poetry/world relationships, and once questions began to be asked, the consequences quickly followed: language is a material as well as idealist phenomenon, it generates perceptions of gender and class as well as transcendent possibilities, it affects assumptions about the human subject, and it connects with the materiality of other historical and cultural activities—meaning in poetry (or any literary language) is neither "self-evident" nor contained within the work itself.

So much for personal (and critical) history. My point here is that notwithstanding the energy, intellectual acumen, and devoted scholarship that is apparent in the excellent discussions by younger colleagues in this forum, so excitingly promoted by Linda Hughes and Victorian Poetry, I do not see consistent evidence that these basic questions about language remain alive and well. Yet I doubt they have all been answered to anyone's satisfaction. So my niggle remains: if we purport to be studying the most sophisticated and highly organized language use in our culture, why is language itself not always the underlying question? Given that the most obvious definition of poetic writing that emerges from the twentieth century is language that draws attention to itself as language, why is it not axiomatic that the continuing study of poetry from any period should require an engagement with the function of language? Perhaps my colleagues, with a few notable exceptions, are taking this for granted, but that is not clear from the many arguments, for instance, about pursuing more work on associated, and potentially separable, topics—the sister arts, poetesses, photography, technology, minority status. Poetry as technology or poetry as perception strike me as excellent concepts to explore, but not if the consequence is that poetry is subordinate to, or rendered a passive version of, some other kind of discourse. Our question should be about the cultural function of the poetry itself. The capacity for poetic language, by means of its self-conscious gesticulation, to expose (intervention is less easy to demonstrate) the ideological practice of these other discourses gives it, I suggest, at least equal, if not prior status (depending no doubt on one's political and intellectual agenda).

At times in these discussions (and in recent critical writing elsewhere), it seems as if the ardent debates of the 1980s (about subjectivity, gender, representation) have disappeared, as if the linguistic turn that characterized literary study and cultural theory in the last thirty years can be taken for granted. I doubt that. The rigor demanded by, say, Isobel Armstrong's "double poem" as an account of Victorian poetry is not so easily attained. It is, for example, a structural not a descriptive model. The radical nature of...