Poetry's Imagined Community

Contemporary poetry resounds with the voice of the first person singular, an insistent chorus of 'I'. Yet we are becoming increasingly numerous. As fiercely as we might assert our individuality we are constantly reminded of the unruliness of our plurality–population growth is writ large in overcrowded commuter trains and oceans saturated with micro-plastics. As Bonnie Costello concedes in The Plural of Us, there are risks involved in being numerous. To invoke the first person plural is to walk a fine line between coercion, subjugation, and the open invitation of community. 'In our age', Costello writes, 'sensitive to diversity and wary of coercive power structures, speaking for others is difficult' (p. 8). However, with this wariness in mind, The Plural of Us nevertheless makes a powerful case for the potential of the poetic first person plural and its imagined community in lyric address:

The formation and support of group identity is surely one of the most important functions of poetry when it is not bent on gross dichotomizing. Culture requires group identity, and despite modernist moves towards an international style, poetry survives by embedding itself in particular traditions, ideas, language practices, and evocations of place that associate it with a cultural group. But this work of cultural distinction may also make the work of ambiguity more compelling as it predicates connection on the acknowledgement of difference and opens life to new forms of being and knowing.

(p. 98)

Costello posits that cultural distinction can offer a means of knowing and embracing difference. The creation of community can be an encompassing, inclusive gesture. But who or what is poetry's community? Is poetry able to enact its vision of a speculative community, and what does such a community mean if it remains a linguistic proposition rather than a reality?

Extolling the virtues and the scope of the first person plural, Bonnie Costello describes 'we' as 'modulated and palimpsestic', 'open and dynamic' (p. 13); the argument of her monograph is equally rich in scope. The Plural of Us is a literary study of the use of a single pronoun across the work of several poets, including T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and George Oppen. Yet it is also a tracing of W. H. Auden's lifelong search for community across poetic form; a philosophical meditation on how to be plural in the modern world; and an attempt to 'test and stretch the boundaries' of a possible American community in the future. Costello's The Plural of Us skilfully weaves together these multiple threads in a tribute to the flexibility of the pronoun at the heart of her study.

Costello is at her most eloquent when she is making broader, philosophical claims about the civic function of poetry, when she is reflecting on how poetry might rhetorically negotiate the relationship between the divided self and the plural, yet bounded, community. In the more meditative spaces of her writing, Costello draws on recent insights in philosophy, linguistics, and concepts of community, from Ted Cohen's reflections on the capacity of individuals to imagine the lives of others in Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor (2008), to Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly on crowds and the sacred in modern culture in All Things Shining (2011). As Costello writes, 'Poetry's first-person plural often prompts us to pose questions central to modern social thought' (p. 9). One of the key questions of this book is thus how civic poetry linguistically distils this philosophical thinking, and if on a broader scale poetry might create a sense of investment in the rich rewards of this kind of thought experiment.

In his 1948 lecture on 'Poetry and Freedom', as Costello notes, W. H. Auden offered one of many definitions of 'human pluralities': 'there are crowds, there are societies, and there are communities'. Auden's comments bear the weight of his particular political and historical moment: a fear of the crowd or mob and...