On Teaching Early Modern Hispanic Poetry: Reflections and Remembrances

ON TEACHING EARLY MODERN HISPANIC POETRY: REFLECTIONS AND REMEMBRANCES Elizabeth B. Davis The Ohio State University To my father, Milton Davis, Jr., in memoriam. “Nuestras vidas son los ríos que van a dar en la mar que es el morir.” I f it is true that we cannot teach what we do not know, surely the other side of that premise is equally true: consciously or not, we pass on to our students what we learned from our own teachers. To be sure, one’s approach to teaching can also be informed to some extent by recent lyric theory (such as the essays in a collection edited by Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker), as well as by the work of other scholars. Nevertheless, it seems to me that from the perspective of a graduate student, no amount of theory or of reading literary criticism can take the place of the precious hours spent directly engaging the poetic text with the assistance of a knowledgeable and intuitive teacher. This is especially true in the case of early modern poetic texts, which are particularly multilayered and dense. Hence, I would like to open this essay by remembering three moments that were especially influential in forming my own understanding of poetology and Golden Age poetry. Certain presuppositions about early modern poems and poetic language that shape my teaching strategies today are directly traceable to these three intellectual experiences. While I realize that these presuppositions may not be undisputed in today’s academy, I consciously hold onto them because in the end, they still seem valid to me and eminently useful to students. The first of these is that poetic language is different from other types of literary expression and that the poetic function of language is specific. Unsurprisingly, this is shorthand for some of the fundamental assumptions of Prague School Structuralism. When these ideas came to me not intellectually, but almost with the power of a revelation, I had long been familiar with Roman Jakobson’s work. In conversations with poets whom I had known over the years, I had also become aware that special rules seemed to govern the “verbal alchemy” of poetic CALÍOPE Vol. 11, Number 2 (2005): pages 45-57 46 Elizabeth B. Davis D D D D D language, to use the Rimbaudian phrase. However, the full force of these ideas came to me in an evening stroll with one of my mentors, Eliana Rivero, during the 1992 meeting of the Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas at the University of California - Irvine. Our topic of conversation, on this as on many other occasions, was poetry. The burning question of the moment was “if poetic language is different, what exactly makes it so? ¿En qué consiste la poeticidad?” Professor Rivero described a class of hers that had centered on this very question. She related how she had presented students a lyric text by Ernesto Cardenal, urging them to identify specific elements that made the text “poetic.” With some coaxing, the students had been able to discover elements in Cardenal’s condensed epigram that seemed particularly important in terms of their ability to set the language apart from the prosaic idiom of direct speech, a feat the more remarkable because in this text, a main feature of Cardenal’s poetics is the deliberate use of a colloquial register.1 According to the professor’s account, the students immediately detected abundant examples of repetitions and echoes in the text, not merely verbal but conceptual ones. The parallelisms were equally easy for them to distinguish. With help, they were able to understand that the Jakobsonian principles of selection (similarity, metaphor), combination (contiguity, metonymy), and poetic reiteration were actively operating on many different levels of the poem. Because of the deceptively simple language used by the poet, however, in the end the students suggested that what ultimately made the text poetic was not so much its language as a particular subjectivity behind the words (a state of mind, an attitude that was palpable behind the apparently uncomplicated linguistic surface). The important thing about this exercise, from my perspective, was that the students were able to discover many elements in the text...