Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (review)

This book required ten years to write. It is the kind of fully mature book that anchors a scholarly career, so long and argued with such energy of personality that it is hard to imagine the author delivering quite so much again. However, Susan Stewart has lots of ideas, and it is promising that she can recruit her scholarly writing with her discoveries as a poet. (A book on the human senses also implicitly defends her own poems of listing and summoning in the volumes I know, Yellow Stars and Ice [1981] and The Forest [1995].) The reader, who must live with this book for a season, comes away admiring Stewart's ambition in taking on a history of seeing-hearing-smelling-touching and the time sense as these are used in lyrics in several languages, and admiring also her skills at argument and analysis, her ability to bring in relevant examples from music (Victorian popular song) and the visual arts (a statue by Gianlorenzo Bernini), her poet's understanding of technique in the sequencing of speech stresses and images. She seems to have read everything relevant to her theme in several fields except the books of this reviewer and, much more important, Walter J. Ong on the interplay over time of speaking and writing, as well as the 1982 and 1989 books on rhythm of France's capacious historical anthropologist of language, Henri Meschonnic.¹

After giving the intent, method, and local merits of Stewart's book, I would like to say a word about her insistence, throughout, on the concept of a person. Since I welcome this speech on persons and want to help an emergent trend, which is actually a reconnection with such thinkers as Max Scheler, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, I conclude with a comment on the self-revelation of the scholar-author—as I understand the image of her as a person from reading her sentences. For a book "about poetic making of all kinds," especially poems that include "common human experiences of the senses, facial expression, vocalization of sounds, motion, and rhythm" (ix), Stewart seems to have founded her work on two primal assumptions: that the senses need a body to center and register them, and a person to socialize the body; and that persons and their poetic making emerge from, and stand against, the privations of an originative darkness. This is a poet's scholarship in the handling of the threatening image of darkness (standing for solitude and silence) and the counterdiscourse of actual light (standing for understanding, making, praying). The opening chapter and the closing "Afterborn" (a seven-page coda) are both swaddled in images of borderless dark, and a high point of the book is chapter 6, "Out of the Darkness," on the nocturnes of the wonderful Anne Finch and others in her tradition who work in the genre of the night. The middle chapters—"Sound" (chap. 2), "Voice and Possession" (chap. 3), "Facing, Touch, and Vertigo" (chap. 4), and "Forms and Numbers of Time" (chap. 5)—all fight toward the light of perception and creation, but even in these the author keenly attends to negation, absence, elegy. Chapter 7, "Lyric Counter Epic," is the last and meditates on whether poems can, like the older epics, still legitimate human deaths in wars, if wars are the annihilation of sense experience on the largest scale. So a book that celebrates the joyous life of the senses is also, throughout and with one the linked response to the other, a somber study of loss.

Stewart cites Karl Marx, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Louise Vinge, and others on the order of the senses and how their relations with each other in the body might change over time: for example, since the early modern discovery of perspective, the human sensorium is increasingly dominated by the distance senses of vision and hearing. But Stewart...