The Last Word: The Ends of Poetry, Agamben, and Early Modern Spain

As daunting as a blank page may be, beginnings also brim over with the effervescence of creation. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, Genesis tells us. In the beginning was the Word, we read in John's Gospel. The snide narrator of Samuel Beckett's Murphy sneers, "In the beginning was the pun." By their beginning, incipit, were written works known before the advent of print and the cultural embrace of titles. Manuscript, printed, and now digitized collections of texts are saved from chaos and oblivion by an alphabetized table of "first words." But in a cosmos that celebrates beginnings as the advent of the new, who spares a thought for the end?

This critical cluster takes as its point of departure an essay from a project imagined by Giorgio Agamben and friends Italo Calvino and Claudio Rugafiori to examine what they called "the categorical structures of Italian culture." The project as such never came to fruition, but Agamben recuperated the essays inspired by the enterprise to examine foundational features of poetics such as "the end of the poem," the title given to the English translation of the collection as a whole. In the essay of the same name, Agamben sets out to examine "a poetic institution that has until now remained unidentified: the end of the poem" (109).¹ This seemingly limited scope, however, soon opens up to staggering depths that include at once matters of form and content (quite literally, the importance of studying closely the way a poem ends) and matters of care (what are ultimately the ends or purposes of poetry?). Or, in the words of David Ben-Merre, Agamben's short essay is an exploration of "indefinable spaces: the spaces between the lines of verse, the spaces between verse and prose, and the spaces between poetry and philosophy" (90).² The purpose of this cluster is thus to think together, through the close examination of six case studies that span the philosophical, poetic, sensual, and social aspects of the end of the poem as it abuts the rise of prose fiction, religious hermeneutics, and courtly expectations.

Agamben's essay turns to the conventional identification of poetry as "verse" (linguistic expressions with the potential to "turn," or run over into the next line of verse) to suggest that the "poetic institution" of the end of the poem poses a unique problem to the tension between the metric aspect of poetic expression and grammatical syntax which Paul Valéry held central to the definition of poetry as "a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense" (109). Considered from this perspective, the end of the poem can never fulfill its ends, that is, to continue into a subsequent line. Ending, therefore, is not always synonymous with closure. From this perspective, attention to the raw matter of poetics–phone, graphe, and logos–acquires an urgency that goes beyond wooden formalism: it is intertwined with the existential, psychological and bodily responses to loss and longing. Poetry and poetics give us an alternative to both the work of mourning and melancholia as imagined by Freud and his followers.

Moreover, the separation of the desire to end with the delivery of closure has repercussions for the ends/purposes of each poem and of poetry itself because in verse expression, more than in any other linguistic practice, meaning is tied to time and timing–hence the heightened importance of repetition most obviously recognized in rhyme. Anne Cruz's contribution shows us, in fact, how the expectation of a return is central to the melancholy poetics of the refrain–the break that nonetheless guarantees the precarious continued life of poetry. Taking the example of Garcilaso de la Vega's famous Egloga I, Cruz argues that the repetition of the refrain "salid sin duelo, lágrimas, corriendo" cannot be understood as the simple working "out" of the grief sung by Salicio; instead something is being worked "in" the stasis guaranteed by the repetition: when refrain is a refraction as much as a return, each iteration accrues new meaning. Endings become thus the site of...