Introduction

There is nothing that literary theory and interpretation cur-rently need more than a reconstructed poetics. For over a decade now, scholarship in the humanities has lavished its attention on contextual relations. Under the banners of historicism and of ideological or material cultural studies, the critical understanding of literature has aimed at illuminating the situatedness of the text: its diachronic or synchronic coordination with other texts and, more ambitiously, the co-determinate relation in which the system of literature stands to other cultural systems. The achievements of this contextualism are unmistakable, but they are won at a cost. The privilege such study accords to the relational aspect of literature tends in practice to entail a like privilege—less intentionally granted, and therefore less circumspectly—for the merely referential aspect of literature; the interpretive correlation of the text with its contexts typically emerges through a comparison among contents. Left to itself, the often politically urgent critique of historical and cultural meanings has a way of approaching literature as if it were information, of regarding a text’s formal literariness as if it were a code to be broken and discarded in favor of the message it bears. But this is no wiser than shooting the messenger, which it indeed resembles. Rifling literature for its content can readily become a procedure too efficient for its own good, or for the good of the contextual understanding that the procedure aims to promote: it risks suppressing those formal components of meaning which not only mediate literary messages but actually constitute them. Under patient cross-examination, the elements of form can provide information of a more surprising kind than the referential inventory of contents is likely to disclose.

If sophisticated interpretation and theory feel somewhat at a standstill nowadays, that is because tarrying with the signified means courting stalemate. It seems time we broke up the habits of a decade and renewed our attention to the interrogation of the literary medium and, concurrently, of the critical medium of the interrogation—reflecting on the formal and generic conventions which structure not only creative practice but also the scholarly practice that recovers and assesses it. In theory a revived poetics should survey all literary modalities, but the best ground for its revival should be found in poetry itself, where technique most conspicuously produces meaning and where the linguistic medium commands attention in its own right.

Accordingly this issue of New Literary History comprises essays that invoke Seamus Heaney and Arnold Schwerner as well as Milton and Marvell, Hölderlin and Tennyson, Beowulf and the Antigone, Wordsworth and Yeats, Wilfred Owen and Paul Celan, and in unsolicited but welcome strength Dickinson and Stevens—a wide range of poets and poetry, addressed in their particularity yet also bearing out a variety of general arguments in poetics. Amid their variety our contributors evince the perennial concern of poetics to honor poetry’s transmemberment of reference with design. Denis Donoghue’s defense of the force that inhabits verbal form, Warwick Slinn’s analysis of poetic performativity, and Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels’s acrobatic illustration of critical deformativity all grapple with the problem of how form brokers the significance it conveys. Articles by Thomas Greene and Kathrin Rosenfield come at the matter from the other side, beginning with received ideas about containment—respectively the trope of the bounding perimeter and the seeming fixity of the canonical work—and showing how the life of the spirit in relationship, and the survival of the classical letter in translation, alike require the recreation of formal play. From the vantage of a practicing poet John Koethe posits an analogue to such recreation: the resistance that the poetic self sets up to all contingencies not instituted on the poem’s developing terms.

Facing the least tractable of public contingencies six decades ago, Wallace Stevens said of modern poetry that it has to think about war. Articles here by Tom Prendergast, Sandra Gilbert, and James Campbell think about such poetic thinking about war, and also about the critical thinking it has elicited. Their observations on the ambivalent, potentially violent recursivity of epic commemoration, on elegy’s testimony to the unspeakable...