Introduction

Sundials: Literary Genres and the Time of History

Literature and the Longue Durée

Giacomo Leopardi’s complete works include fourteen series of preparatory notes written between 1819 and 1834 and published in 1878 under a title chosen by the editor: “Disegni letterari,” or, in English, “Literary Designs.”¹ The notes are varied and difficult to compare with each other. Some fill several pages and carefully describe the texts that Leopardi intended to work on, while others do no more than put vague possibilities to paper—ideas rarely embarked on and almost always abandoned, as suggested by the impressive number of projects listed: more than a hundred and sixty just on the sheets in our possession. Part of the list was drafted in a hurry, without much thought. Precisely for this reason, it is an extraordinary document. Setting out the texts that Leopardi had been working on for some time alongside his impromptu desires, leaving a trace of real projects as well as hazy ambitions, his “Literary Designs” describes the range of possibilities available to an Italian writer of that period and of that social class—the topography of his literary space.

I call literary space the set of works that writers of a particular period judge reasonable to write and believe are in keeping with the times, to use the metaphor on which every form of historical knowledge is based. Our current literary space includes the genres that are still alive, the works to which it makes sense to dedicate oneself in the early twenty-first century if one hopes to satisfy the tastes of a mass or elite audience: countless varieties of novels and poetry, some residual forms of theater, screenplays for movies and television, journalism, and nonfiction. Between 1819 and 1834, the writer who today is thought by many to be the first modern Italian poet considered very different works in keeping with his times: a novel that tells the story of a woman forced to become a nun, modeled after Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse; the life of General Kosciuszko, in imitation of the life of Agricola by Tacitus; a historical novel according to the taste of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, which would have recounted the destiny of a great nation gone into decline and then restored to its former dignity; a didactic poem on the woods; the lives of illustrious Italians, in the likeness of those by Cornelius Nepos and Plutarch; a tragedy on Iphigenia; novelle similar to those of Ludovico Ariosto written in ottava rima; a poem or novel modeled on Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock; a prose epic in imitation of Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque; some “idylls expressing situations, affections, historical adventures of my soul,” that is, short poems on an autobiographical subject; a novel, Eugenio, in imitation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther; a series of philosophical odes modeled on William Collins; and so on.² The reader of today cannot help but be surprised by the dissonances created by certain combinations. It seems inconceivable to us that a novel in imitation of Diderot’s La Religieuse can coexist with biographies written in imitation of Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch, and Tacitus; or that the project of a novel about an intellectual hero modeled on The Sorrows of Young Werther could be contemporary with the project of a prose epic modeled on Les Aventures de Télémaque. Two centuries later, we know that the works listed by Leopardi belong to two historical worlds, one modern and one—for want of a better expression—we will continue to call premodern. But Leopardi did not see it that way.

In only a few pages, this discordant list condenses in its dissonant brevity the effects of a great metamorphosis that European literature experienced between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, transmitting to us a vivid impression of the change and the image of its force. Like an artifact whose meaning is only decipherable centuries later, Leopardi’s projects register the moment when a new literary space appears alongside an old one with a tradition lasting thousands of years. Leopardi thought it was still possible to move around in both, whereas those who read this assortment looking back from the present are surprised by the conflict between old and new, past and modernity that the writers of that period were unable to perceive. Like Leopardi, after writing The Sorrows of Young Werther Goethe could still imagine dedicating himself to Iphigenia in Tauris and Hermann and Dorothea; in the 1810s, Sir Walter Scott published both long narrative poems and historical novels; and Alessandro Manzoni, in the 1820s, worked at the same time on a tragedy in verse, Adelchi, and the first draft of The Betrothed. Today we recognize the protomodernity or modernity of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Waverley, and The Betrothed, but we view the idyll (Hermann and Dorothea), tragedies in regular verse (Iphigenia in Tauris, Adelchi), and poems in regular verse as extinct. In the first works we glimpse signs of the present, but we study Iphigenia in Tauris, Hermann and Dorothea, The Lady of the Lake, and Adelchi the way we study texts that no longer have a place on our historical horizon. The striking thing about “Literary Designs” is the absence of such a frontier. A few decades after the list was compiled, not many writers would have wanted to compose novelle in ottava rima or imitate Cornelius Nepos, Tacitus, Plutarch, Fénelon, or Pope, while some of the more recent genres that interested Leopardi during those same years, like short lyric poems or the artist’s novel, would meet with huge success. Traditional literary histories often provide a fragmentary image of this unprecedented transformation of Western literature, perhaps the most sudden and profound it ever underwent; Leopardi’s document, on the other hand, gives a confused but synoptic vision of this change, aptly capturing its sense.

Walter Benjamin likened the becoming of epic forms to the evolution of the earth’s surface through the geological ages.³ The comparison is worth developing, because if it is true that transformations are almost always gradual, it is also true that movements of long duration sometimes progress slowly for centuries and then bring on sudden earthquakes. Reading Leopardi’s “Literary Designs” almost two centuries later, we immediately notice the fault line that splits this miscellaneous list of projects in two, and we understand that the works he talks about refer to two irreconcilable ideas of literature—almost as if the chronological distance gave us a snapshot of historical time condensed in these few pages, as the crystallized image of an epochal shift.

But Benjamin’s geological simile has a hidden sense as well. It evokes another characteristic of aesthetic materials that traditional histories often end up concealing, because of their inclination toward describing small changes rather than reflecting on long continuities. Great artistic forms have longevity: it took centuries for the pictorial space inaugurated by perspective to dissolve, for European music to free itself of tonality, for the novel to achieve its hegemony over narrative, for Western literature to begin representing the everyday life of common people in a serious and problematic way. This may seem like a banal observation, but not much is needed to transform it into a philosophy of art. What Benjamin really wanted to show by talking about epic forms, and using the history of genres as a seismograph, was the changes in the way reality was experienced during the transition from the closed, community-based premodern world to the individualist, disintegrated modern world. From this perspective, his comparison with the times of the earth’s surface acquires a philosophical significance: indeed, Benjamin seems to suggest that narrative structures—and, by synecdoche, aesthetic materials—evolve slowly because they express the deep transformations of human history, their long time. Thanks to its plastic force, art translates the conceptual continuity of an era into the visible continuity of a system of signs. It gives a sensible appearance to continuities and radical ruptures, exactly the way the earth’s surface does with geological time. This is the philosophy of history to which Benjamin alludes in different forms: the same vision of history underpins his accounts of long durations, from his thesis on the baroque origin of German tragic drama⁴ to The Arcades Project.⁵ Aesthetic materials give us an essential version of what takes place; their synthetizing, representational nature predisposes them to becoming “a philosophical sundial telling the time of history,” as Adorno wrote when speaking about the art that I will be dealing with here: modern poetry.⁶ Thus, the age-old persistence of a hierarchical scale of styles, genres, actions, and characters narrates in an admirably synoptic way the persistence of a hierarchical vision of life in European society;⁷ the evolution of tragic drama in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shows the impoverishment of human relations in an era when public action in the midst of others seemed less and less significant;⁸ and the history of contemporary architecture, ahead of the history of mentality, announces the beginning of the postmodern condition⁹ or the cultural contradictions of democracy.¹⁰ The forms of art register the history of humanity with more justice than do historical documents.¹¹

Models for a History of Culture

This way of understanding the becoming of art and culture has an illustrious genealogy. It grew out of a long tradition that began with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics and philosophy of history and was propagated in two different versions, one that was faithful to the original texts and another that broadened out. The first includes works that refer more or less directly to Hegel, such as those cited by Peter Szondi at the end of Theory of the Modern Drama when he makes explicit his own references: immediately after Hegel’s Aesthetics, he names György Lukács’s “The Sociology of Modern Drama” and Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. The second includes Kulturgeschichte in all its variants, from Karl Lamprecht’s history of mentalities to Wilhelm Dilthey’s Geistesgeschichte.¹² Such diverse works are founded on a few shared assumptions that are easy to criticize today: faith in the cultural unity of an epoch; the conviction that there exist significant discontinuities between different historical periods; faith in the representative value of works that have stood the test of time by entering into our canons; the idea that diverse works can be grouped by origin, aim, and function into unified sets like styles, periods, and genres; and, finally, as far as the history of the arts is concerned, faith in the representative value of aesthetic experiences. Using the history of epic forms as a seismograph means taking for granted convictions that are anything but givens: for example, that works which have stood the test of time represent something broader than the particular interests that generated them and made them canonical; that it is possible to overlook differences between texts so as to talk about a singular literary genre, style, or epoch; that the forms of art tell the history of human beings in a profound and meaningful way; that it makes sense to distinguish a few unified stations in the flux of time or to think in terms of epochs. Today, all these assumptions have become questionable: positivist research, the sociology of culture, poststructuralism, feminist theory, new historicism, and cultural studies have contributed in various ways to undermining the apparatus of certainties on which they rested, destabilizing the “diluted Hegelianism” on which, according to Pierre Bourdieu, many philosophies of cultural history are based, from Hegel’s to Michel Foucault’s.¹³

Because the book I’ve written descends in part from this tradition, and since I agree with some of the criticisms that have been raised against them, I have preferred to avoid the sort of reticence that normally surrounds many intellectual constructions and make the assumptions of my discourse clear. I certainly cannot refound the critical tradition that the book draws from: I wouldn’t be able to, and, in any case, I would have to write another book. However, I would like to at least explain which aspects of this tradition still seem defendable to me so that my readers can know where they find themselves and what they are reading. I will therefore attempt to frame, apodictically, a few of this book’s implicit assumptions.

1. Ernst Gombrich noted contentiously that it is mainly cultural historians who interpret epochs as unified entities. By doing so they end up assuming, in a more or less conscious form, a cohesiveness to historical periods and the existence of a spirit of the times that manifests in works of the same era. Political and economic historians serenely abandon any such idea:

The cultural historian was much worse off than any other historian. His colleagues working on political or economic history had at least a … restricted subject-matter. They could trace the history of the reform of Parliament, of Anglo-Irish relations, without explicit reference to an all-embracing philosophy of history. But the history of culture as such … could never be undertaken without some ordering principle …, some hub on which the wheel of Hegel’s diagram can be pivoted. Thus the subsequent history of historiography of culture can perhaps best be interpreted as a succession of attempts to salvage the Hegelian assumption without accepting Hegelian metaphysics.¹⁴

Certainly, the frequency with which cultural historians, especially art historians, have appealed to some sort of form to replace Zeitgeist is quite striking: in addition to the names mentioned by Gombrich (Jacob Burckhardt, Lamprecht, Dilthey, Max Dvořák, Erwin Panofsky, and Johan Huizinga), we could cite Erich Auerbach, Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Mikhail Bakhtin, Szondi, Arnold Gehlen (Zeit-Bilder), Foucault, Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, Fredric Jameson, and many others. But it would be reductive to show that all these thinkers remained imprisoned by what Gombrich represents as merely an error of perspective, unless we reflect on the reasons that led intellectuals so different in training, ideology, and interests to rediscover a unifying principle similar in every way to Zeitgeist—renaming it, for example, “mentality,” episteme, or “the cultural logic of late capitalism.”

The way Marcel Proust reflects on the concept of epoch in In Search of Lost Time is quite interesting. Few people have been able to show so ably that the culture and social life of a particular historical period are torn apart by conflicts and differences; that values, tastes, and canons clash continuously; that contemporaries can inhabit very different mental worlds. In this respect, Benjamin’s idea that one should examine history against the grain to rediscover the defeated traditions¹⁵ and Bourdieu’s idea that every epoch is above all a field of conflicting forces are anticipated in In Search of Lost Time—which, incidentally, both Benjamin and Bourdieu read attentively and Benjamin even translated. And, yet, in Proust’s work we also find one of the strongest defenses of the concept of epoch:

Better still now, the perfect conformity in appearance between a man of business from Combray of his generation and the Duc de Bouillon reminded me of what had already struck me so forcibly when I had seen Saint-Loup’s maternal grandfather, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in a daguerreotype in which he was exactly similar, in dress, air and manner, to my great-uncle, that social, and even individual differences are merged when seen from a distance in the uniformity of an epoch. The truth is that the similarity of dress, and also the reflexion, from a person’s face, of the spirit of his age [l’esprit de l’époque] occupy so much more space than his caste, which bulks largely only in his own self-esteem and the imagination of other people, that in order to discover that a great nobleman of the time of Louis Philippe differs less from a citizen of the time of Louis Philippe than from a great nobleman of the time of Louis XV, it is not necessary to visit all the galleries of the Louvre.¹⁶

Although Proust does talk about “the spirit of his age,” the way he explains this continuity of signs, customs, and behaviors is purely mechanical, earthly, and contingent. Battles for hegemony, the succession of generations, and the tendency of human beings to simplify and to forget create a uniformity that is revealed from the perspective of distance, as happens in some parts of Time Regained.¹⁷ Perceiving the resemblance between contemporary phenomena does not in itself assume the existence of a unifying principle, an avatar of the Zeitgeist. This is what histories of the longue durée do, for example, by drawing on the synoptic a posteriori power of distance,¹⁸ on its physical, almost optical evidence, just as, when taking off in an airplane, the fields that seem so different when seen from the ground become uniform, united by a single color, while the boundaries that divide them, invisible from the earth, suddenly become much clearer. This mechanical historicism with no subject, this history of spirit with no Spirit, which relies on the synoptic power of the long duration, trusts in the possibility of distinguishing fault lines and large aggregations in the continuous flux of events and local conflicts. When observed in the light of a different cultural logic, the representation of reality in ancient literature and in classicist literature of the early modern age reveals constants lasting hundreds or thousands of years.¹⁹ Although every national literature possesses its own internal history, the major modern European literatures appear to be traversed by the same medium- and long-term phenomena, from the most extensive (the revolution of genres that took place between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) to the less extensive (the spread of new techniques between the late nineteenth century and the period of the historical avant-gardes that enriched narrative, poetry, and theater with previously unthinkable possibilities, such as interior monologue, free verse, and the montage principle). Similarly, although the genres of modern literature each evolve according to their own logic, the novel, poetry, and drama of recent centuries make up a relatively homogeneous system marked by common characteristics. For this reason, we can speak of a porous but visible fault line that divides modern poetry from previous poetry, with chronologies that differ depending on the national literature involved.

2. Cultural histories generally suffer from fetishism: even in the most meticulous books, even in studies that conform to rigid quantitative criteria, the texts that historians take into consideration amount to a very small percentage of the works composed in a certain place during a certain period, especially when the period and place in question are very spread out. Traditionally structured histories are based on a sort of synecdoche: an assumption that the few texts they discuss have the power to represent an entire epoch. Anyone with a more analytical attitude can easily demonstrate that the systematic reconstruction of a circumscribed literary space offers a much more layered panorama than those we are accustomed to reading.²⁰ Traditional histories often have an ingenuous approach to their subject matter: they presuppose an already-established canon and reflect the outcome of a battle over memory and oblivion, but without examining the genealogy of the victories. In their background hovers one of the most discredited ideologemes of our age, impossible to defend in theory but widely used in practice: the belief that the verdicts of history reflect some hypothetical, objective value of the works in question that is bound to emerge over the years thanks to the “judgment of time.” Anyone who reconstructs the genealogy of the canons can easily demonstrate that the “judgment of time” is nothing but the posthumous sanctification of an arbitrary act, the attempt to attribute an unjustified universal value to texts, images of the world, and values that have triumphed at the end of a battle fought in the name of a pure will to power: a writer’s struggle to outshine rival writers; the struggle of one literary circle to gain visibility at the expense of others; the struggle of one social group against competing groups to transform their tastes into everybody else’s tastes. The results of this conflict between opposing wills are devoid of the objective value that traditional histories usually attribute to the consecrated works. From this perspective, the winner of the battle for memory does not embody the Zeitgeist but, rather, the triumph of one contingent interest over another contingent interest, of one egoism over another egoism. If an approach of this sort is accepted, then it becomes arbitrary to view canonical texts as representative of an epoch; rather, one should look for the network of proximate causes that lie behind the consecration of a writer, a movement, a fashion, or a genre, by scrutinizing history against the grain and reconstructing the battlefields as they appeared before the victors planted their insignias on them. In short, to recapture the authentic image of an epoch, one must liberate oneself from the synecdoche that legitimates the established canons, the accomplished facts, give up on the idea that a restricted number of writers can express the spirit of a time in its entirety, and concentrate instead on unearthing the ruptures, dispersions, and frictions that disturb the apparent unity of a historical period.

The myopic gaze of the genealogist, focused on proximate causes and human, all-too-human motives that underlie the formation of a culture, enriches and unravels our idea of the past. There are two versions of this approach—one ingenuous and one sentimental. The first is still more widespread than the second. It embodies the norm of studies that present themselves as “serious” or “scientific” and coincides with the philologically oriented criticism that continues the legacy of late nineteenth-century positivism and proliferates in traditional academic journals. By resorting to a mechanical idea of causality that modern common knowledge takes as natural, the critics who belong to this family ignore the existence of the whole and, with a good dose of conventional wisdom proportional to the myopia that they demonstrate, reconstruct the elementary genealogies that compose the raw material of any historical narrative: the influence of one writer on another, of a historical event on a cultural circle, of a particular milieu on a particular artistic form.²¹ The sentimental version of genealogy is more recent, consisting in attempts to apply to historiography the consequences of philosophies that Paul Ricœur, borrowing from Friedrich Nietzsche, grouped together as “the school of suspicion.”²² The enormous success enjoyed by the thought of Karl Marx, Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud in the twentieth century resulted in many cultural historians concentrating on the material interests underlying the invention of spiritual works—as neo-Marxist histories of art sought to do or poststructuralism, feminist theory, new historicism, cultural studies, and, from a different perspective, Bourdieu’s sociology of culture and Pascale Casanova’s sociology of world literature. Although they appear dissimilar, in reality these approaches share a more or less conscious rejection of the ideas that make an organic philosophy of history possible. By emphasizing difference at the expense of unity, and fragmentation at the expense of cohesiveness, their method ends up interpreting works in the light of proximate causes, as the result of particular interests and local struggles. Behind the cautious and impeccable myopia of the genealogist one detects a disenchanted metaphysics that understands reality as a web of clashes between opposing wills to power, whose outcome does not reflect a teleological design, a Zeitgeist or an episteme, but the contingent victory of one individual over another individual, one group over another group. This is how genealogical wisdom appears to destroy the foundations of a philosophy of history that presumes to think in terms of epochs by ignoring the enormous number of struggles, fault lines, and internal discontinuities of each epoch. But these same foundations reappear under a new light when small conflicts are placed in the perspective of the long duration. If individual victories are the effect of chance or contingent power relations, extended, important, and long-lasting victories and defeats create a new cultural space, a new plane of reality, and, like it or not, actually mean something. It is intriguing that Bourdieu himself, after criticizing the many disguised rewritings of Hegel, surreptitiously reintroduced a form of historicism when he argued that, although internal struggles within a cultural field follow their own independent rationale, the determining factor for establishing the success of a work or an idea is the correspondence between the winning positions and shifts in the relations of force that arise in the field of power:

Internal struggles are somehow arbitrated by external sanctions. More generally, although largely independent of them in principle, the internal struggles always depend, in outcome, on the correspondence that they maintain with the external struggles—whether struggles at the core of the field of power or at the core of the social field as a whole.²³

Nothing describes such an interweaving of contingent struggles and historical necessities as well as the concept of hegemony that Antonio Gramsci borrowed in part from linguistics and in part from the political writings of Lenin. He used it to describe the inextricable nexus of violence and consensus whereby a ruling class or a social group transforms their own ideas into everybody else’s ideas. Criticizing the naive Machiavellianism of those who trace power back to violence alone, Gramsci argues that every stable governing force is based on a variable combination of “dominion” and “intellectual and moral direction,” power and persuasion.²⁴ One can legitimately extend this concept to the sphere of culture and use it to explain the formation of canons: long-term memory, in other words, would not arise out of pure coercion or the “judgment of time” but from the capacity to transform the tastes of one group into shared tastes, by combining the power to impose certain ideas with the ability to interpret or shape the symbolic order of a society in a particular period. In the long run, the result of great battles internal to the cultural system always depends on the correspondence that these conflicts maintain with changes in “the social field as a whole”:²⁵ an author may be included in school curricula thanks to contingent reasons and a genre can never establish itself by chance. When the phenomena being talked about are very widespread, there is no need to resort to the mysticism of masterpieces to assert that, although canons arise from the pure will to power, they do not simply signify a random victory of one faction over another.

3. Cultural historians tend to think in terms of epochs because the territory that we might call the field of expressive symbolism, borrowing from Ernst Cassirer, is the imaginary space where common knowledge and the collective unconscious of a social group best make themselves seen. More broadly, it is where common knowledge and the collective unconscious, having won the battle for hegemony, transform themselves into recognized cultural capital, into the spirit of the times. Among all the segments of this territory, which extends from the fine arts to religious rituals, the aesthetic is the most expressive, for three reasons.

In the first place, no other component of culture expresses with such immediacy the way a person, a social group, or an epoch interpret the great anthropological constants that form what Edmund Husserl calls the Lebenswelt, the lifeworld, namely, the inner and social life of human beings, the first stages of personal relations, our ways of perceiving space and time, and our relations with words, bodies, and things. If the forms of art register the history of humanity better than do historical documents, it is because they lend a plastic consistency to the primary anthropological structures of life, as we understand when we view their evolution from the perspective of the long duration. The capacity to express an image of the world is united with a representative force that other forms of knowledge do not possess. While the knowledge of philosophy, history, or the human sciences is always specialized, aesthetic culture functions in principle as a system of signs that, theoretically, everybody can understand. The representative power of artistic forms is augmented, at least in recent centuries, by their apparent innocence. The history of modern culture is a series of progressive neutralizations and depoliticizations, at the end of which a unified, theocratic, hierarchical, and censorious culture softens its tablets of law, relaxes its rigid framework of principles into a form of relativism, ideally leaving each individual the right to choose tastes, values, and lifestyles without having to justify them to anyone. Although the time when one could be put to death for a religious opinion, an immoral behavior, or a political idea is not that distant in the West, today a certain degree of relativistic tolerance is part of the written and unwritten laws that regulate life in our societies. Divergences that a few centuries ago led to physical confrontation or heated discussion have cleared out from the public sphere and become a matter of private choice. Hence, the first phase of cultural neutralization involves the aesthetic sphere and can be summed up in the saying de gustibus non est disputandum, “there is no disputing about tastes.” Modern arts criticism has made its primary reason for existence to dispute tastes that are in principle indisputable. This primacy of the aesthetic sphere, for centuries the only partly depoliticized territory in a centripetal and intolerant culture, adds emblematic weight to the works that comprise it, since for a long time the major and minor arts permitted the representation of content that would have been rigorously suppressed in other cultural spheres.²⁶ Briefly stated, then, these are the foundations of my approach.

A Theory of Genres

As stylistic criticism and the “thick description” of the anthropologists teaches us, even a minimal sign can reveal a culture in its entirety; but if we look at the rule rather than the exception, it appears clear that the most complex and long-lasting structures are also the most significant. When Benjamin compared the morphology of narrative forms to the morphology of the earth’s surface, he was thinking about groupings of works as complex as they are undefinable: literary genres. Taking his geological simile further, we would have to say that if the literary space of an epoch corresponds to the earth’s surface, genres are the plates whose movements give form to the planet’s crust.

But if literary histories of the longue durée often end up being genre histories, it is not at all clear what literary genres are. In the continuous semantic flux that characterizes discussions on this subject, it is easy to recognize a constant in any cultural debate. Owing to a primary process of semantic dissemination that is almost physical in origin, whenever a debate involves mass participation, the topics under discussion end up with increasingly frayed senses and lose their specific meanings. There is nothing unusual about the fact that the topic we are talking about has succumbed to the same fate. What is meant by modern poetry? And, before that, what does it mean to talk about modern poetry as a literary genre? What are literary genres?

These questions, it seems to me, bring together three different uncertainties that demand separate responses: the first regards the criteria that allow the boundaries of genres to be marked out; the second concerns the nature of similarities between the texts gathered under the same name; the third is about the meaning of such families. The uncertainty regarding the boundaries of genre was formulated incisively by Goethe in one of the notes accompanying West-East Divan (1819). In his opinion, anyone who reflects on genres realizes immediately that the categories used to define these entities reflect diverse criteria:

Allegory, ballad, cantata, didactic poem, drama, elegy, epigram, epistle, epic, fable, heroic poem, idyll, narrative, novel, ode, parody, romance, satire.

If you wanted to classify methodically these poetical genres, which I have arranged in [German] alphabetical order, and more of the kind, you would encounter great difficulties, not easily put aside. If you look at the rubrics above more closely, you will find that they are labeled in some cases according to external criteria, in others according to the content, but only rarely according to an essential form. You will quickly notice that some of them can be coordinated, others subordinated one to another.²⁷

In ordinary usage, the concept of genre indicates completely heterogeneous families of texts: allegory, ballad, cantata, didactic poem, drama, elegy, epigram, epistle, epic, fable, heroic poem, idyll, narrative, novel, ode, parody, romance, satire are in reality groups that cannot be compared with each other, that have arisen at various times out of similarities in content or form, or from a fluctuating combination of content and form. In common critical practice, these heteroclite categories lead us to use the same abstract noun “literary genre” to name completely different entities: the sonnet, medieval love poetry, or lyric poetry in general; the science-fiction novel, the romance, or the novel; Greek tragedy, tragedy without adjectives, or the corpus of texts written for the theater—and so forth. To avoid this kind of confusion, Goethe proposes to establish a hierarchy that would follow a more rational order. He suggests that a few ideal categories should be inferred from the logic of literature in order to regroup the congeries of historical categories, distinguishing the mass of poetic genres (Dichtarten) from the three great natural forms (Naturformen) of poetry—epic, lyric, and drama. These natural forms stand in the same relation to poetic genres as the particular does to the universal. The attempt met with success: a century and a half later, repeating Goethe’s thought process, Szondi would oppose the empirical poetics of genres to speculative poetics. Similarly, Tzvetan Todorov would separate “historical genres,” founded on observation of the literary reality, from “theoretical genres,” born of inference; and Gérard Genette would divide historical “small forms” from archetypal large forms, which he would baptize archigenres.²⁸ This is a modern version of a dialectic already familiar to Plato, who in a passage of Laws names the categories that authors and the public used to classify melic poetry (hymns, threnodies, paeans, dithyrambs, and citharode chants); and in book three of Republic he deduces an ideal tripartition of all texts, placing “everything that’s said by poets or storytellers” under the large forms that are either simple narrative (aple diegesis), imitation (mimesis), or a mix of the two, according to a purely philosophical taxonomy that unifies the small empirical genres into abstract categories.²⁹ Today we still use the same word to name both Goethe’s natural forms, which are complex but substantially ahistoric, and the congeries of historical forms, which are concrete but limited. The first category includes, for example, the notions of narrative, drama, and lyric that organize the architecture of our literary histories; the second, the potentially infinite list of categories that various cultures have used to group their works: the hymns, threnodies, paeans, dithyrambs, and citharode chants of ancient Greek lyric; the chivalric, historical, realistic, fantastic, Bildungsroman, or family novels of modern narrative; the neoclassical, reformed, or larmoyante comedy of eighteenth-century theater—and so on. Once these boundaries are set, it is possible to arrange the various families according to a rational order, with a few large theoretical genres at the top that move downward by decreasing degrees of generality to empirical genres at the bottom. This is similar to the hierarchical chain that ties narrative in general to science-fiction novels in particular, passing by way of the intermediate forms of the novel and the romance. The confused congeries of names would thus find its own logic.

But even though some of these categories, those most closely tied to the empirical domain, seem to possess an irrefutable degree of reality, a skeptical nominalist might challenge the existence of the more abstract sets and the possibility of uniting the genres following coherent logical steps. Indeed, the Naturformen, the theoretical genres, the archigenres, only possess the value they claim to have if they truly descend by inference from the logic of literature itself. However, Genette has demonstrated with unassailable arguments that the only true archigenres are the notions of diegesis, mimesis, and mixed narrative already familiar to Plato and Aristotle, and that these three categories are in any case inadequate for establishing a well-structured system. To this is added the fact that the categories of narrative, drama, and lyric on which almost all modern systems are built have almost no absolute logical foundation but simply a relative, historical origin.³⁰ And yet the hierarchical distinction between the various forms seems to preserve a glaring obviousness, because it is undeniable that the families of texts we call genres lie on uneven planes of reality: some of them can be placed in an equal relationship with each other, as Goethe points out; others are in a relationship of subordination. For example, between the science-fiction novel, the romance, the novel, and narrative, there seems to be a relation of increasing generality, since the first is a subset of the second, the second is a subset of the third, and the third a subset of the fourth. Therefore, if we cannot defend Naturformen and the idea of a hierarchy inferred from the logic of literature, it seems reasonable to keep the sense of a progression from the particular to the universal, from the smallest and most contingent forms to the largest and most abstract: the epic, the romance, the novel, comedy, tragedy, and so forth. Modern poetry would be one of these large, expanded genres.

How can we give a solid foundation to a deductive chain of this sort? A rigorous examination of the genre categories reveals that it is very difficult to justify a move like the one Goethe attempts to legitimize, given that the difference between historical and theoretical genres, between small forms and large forms, has no solid foothold in thought. In fact, if we adhere strictly to the data of literary history, not only would we repudiate all foundations for theoretical genres such as narrative, lyric, and drama, but we would even have to challenge the existence of expanded genres such as the epic, the romance, the novel, the modern novel, modern drama, and modern poetry. More than anything, the status of these expanded sets changed after the crisis in European neoclassicism and the end of normative aesthetics: the ancient poetics recognized the existence of a few large synthetic forms (serious epic, comic epic, tragedy, and comedy), whereas modern literary aesthetics struggles to defend the value of such groupings from the attacks of a positivism that recognizes particulars but distrusts universals. Do we not perhaps do violence every time we talk about “modern poetry” in general, forgetting how many profound differences separate the lyric poems of English Romanticism from the texts of French Symbolism, Spanish or Spanish American Modernism, German Expressionism, or the Italian Neo-avant-garde? Furthermore, if we wanted to reflect on the underlying question, we would have to ask ourselves how much reality the data of literary history truly possess, and what marks the transition from a historical genre to a theoretical genre. The only certain distinction for establishing data and legitimizing difference would appear to be one that separates the endogenous categories, used by writers and the public, from the exogenous categories, used by literary theorists.³¹ But when you try to bring this opposition into practice, you realize that the two groups get mixed up time and again. For writers and readers, the theoretical genres coexist with the historical genres in total confusion, something that becomes obvious when you look at bookstore shelves, where large abstract sets of “fiction,” “theater,” and “poetry” live alongside small concrete sets of “detective novels,” “fantasy novels,” or “romance novels,” without any hierarchy taking shape. In reality, the hypothesis of a logical chain that makes it possible to pass from small forms to large expanded forms meets with so many difficulties because it relates to a more or less conscious comparison between literary families and plant or animal species—a comparison that fails to capture the overall logic of literary categories³² and, more generally, the difference between cultural creations and organic forms. To truly understand the meaning of genres, we have to tackle the second problem implicit in the question on the status of modern poetry: its nature.

The Topography of Genres

What type of similarity is referred to in the groupings we are talking about? What are literary genres? In the first part of an essay on this topic, Hans Robert Jauss retrieves the vocabulary that medieval philosophy used for disputations on universals. He distinguishes three stances: for some theorists, genres embody ante rem essences, transcendental structures that precede the empirical existence of texts; for others, they represent post rem taxonomic grids, which readers apply to a confused and dispersed realty; for yet others, they are in re universals: they record the objective historical continuity between works of the same family and therefore represent the traces of an objective link between individual texts. Jauss defends this latter approach: in his view, anyone who wants to build a theory in keeping with our times must move between “the Scylla of nominalistic scepticism … and the Charybdis of regression into timeless typologies,”³³ between the myopia of those who see only the dispersion of small forms, and the naivety of those who too readily dissolve the particular into the universal. Genres do not reflect the essence of literature, as the theory of natural forms claims, nor do they allow themselves to be reduced to a pure flatus vocis, a mere name without a corresponding objective reality, as the skeptics would have it; rather, they designate sets of texts that are historically related to each other by some common traits. But who decides on the kinship relations? Who determines that a bunch of more or less obvious similarities are sufficient to aggregate a mass of texts into a common category?

To some measure, even when appealing to indisputable similarities, as in the case of genres based on an objective formal element, the perception of a similarity, and, above all, the idea that a certain similarity is relevant enough to justify the existence of a genre, is an issue at stake in conflicts internal to the literary space. Taxonomic activity is continuous and polycentric, so much so that in every epoch new offerings overlap and ignore or clash with each other due to their unpredictable nature and muddled origins: writing habits, proposals for new poetics, publishing categories, educational policies, literary criticism. Study of this restless field full of diverse taxonomies teaches us many things: for example, that the crude geography of literature proposed by publishers or school curricula counts much more than the sophisticated cartographies proposed by authoritative critics. Only a few of the proposed divisions become hegemonies and gain the right to a secure social existence. Today we can challenge the usefulness of theoretical categories like Entwicklungsroman or the “greater Romantic lyric,” but no one can realistically dispute the existence of sets called the “modern novel” or “modern poetry,” because a web of expectations rooted in the unconscious of writers and readers, thousands of critical works, and school curricula make these in re universals substantially unassailable.

No matter what degree of consensus they enjoy, genres are held together by two different factors: an objective similarity of style and subject matter among the texts that comprise them, and a web of concepts that allow readers to perceive the similarity between the works. The kinship arises out of an interweaving between things and words, between a real continuity of forms and content, and a set of categories, terms, and habits thanks to which a group of readers ends up giving the same name to works that, if judged on the basis of other categories, terms, and habits, would seem very different from one another.³⁴ These two factors of proximity appear together in almost all cases, albeit in varying quantities. When we refer to the sonnet as a genre, for example, we are alluding to a metric scheme that is objectively present; when we talk about the novel in the singular, we are pointing to a similarity rooted primarily in common knowledge, which now uses an all-encompassing word to indicate any modern narrative of a certain length that is realistic or fantastic, plausible or implausible, invented or testimonial, in prose but also in verse. A good theory of genres should explain this double genealogical link: a unified interpretation of the novel, for example, should reveal the aspects common to Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, Mme de La Fayette’s La Princesse de Clèves, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. But it should also reconstruct the system of concepts that allow us to grasp the affinities and pass over the differences, perhaps by explaining that many of the works that now converge in the cultural artifact today called novel, roman, Roman, novela, or romanzo have long borne the names of different genres and, precisely for this reason, were not perceived as parts of the same set.³⁵

In Adorno’s lecture “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” to describe the idea of poetry as sedimented in the collective unconscious of modern readers, he appeals to “the specifically lyric spirit familiar to us” and to “our primary conception of the lyric”³⁶—to a perception of affinity among texts that does not arise from the mechanical sum of traits shared by all modern lyric poetry but to a concept that is synthetic, selective, and fluctuating. When we talk about modern poetry in the singular, we allude to two parallel and distinct continuities: the first arises out of similarities between works in verse written during the last two centuries; the second, from the idea of poetry that the Romantic culture passed down to us, from the unconscious expectations with which we browse through poetry collections, or from the very notion of modern poetry.

This transformation of the horizon also entails a change in the schemas we use to think about these issues. It rarely happens that cultural historians define the nature of their objects of study; but it is almost inevitable that when they do talk about their subject as something cohesive (Romanticism, Postmodernism, the Novel), they are referring more or less consciously to a model of unity: an essence that unfolds in phenomena, a body that maintains its own identity in all its parts, a mental construction of the interpreter that gathers and classifies a posteriori a myriad of scattered events. If the essentialist model presupposes ante rem universals, and if the taxonomic model presupposes post rem universals, then the only mental schema that fits in re universals is historical and topographic.

Perhaps the entities that come closest to the objects in question are in re universals that we encounter every day: cities. Our collective imagination does not represent them as natural organisms or as the abstract constructions of a geographer but as miscellaneous groups of buildings held together by spatial proximity, by architectural affinities, and by a proper name. In this case, too, the impression of cohesiveness arises out of structures similar to those that come into play in the formation of genres: the continuity of certain objective components (architecture, urban planning, administration) and a web of expectations, words, and discourses that blur differences, intensify similarities, and create a norm. Paris is not just its objective stylistic cohesion: Paris is also its idea, its name, its image imprinted in the collective imagination and arising out of the fusion of real and phantasmatic elements. This city with its cohesive features is made even more cohesive by our perceptual habits, which distinguish between Parisian stylistic elements and non-Parisian ones, even in areas where the latter are more numerous or significant than the former. This is why the idea of Paris remains unified even though some quarters have little to do with the Gothic, with Louis XIV’s architects, or with Georges Haussmann’s renovations. And Boulevard Raspail, as described in a guidebook, remains a “typical Parisian boulevard” even though one of its most beautiful buildings, Jean Nouvel’s Fondation Cartier, does not reflect the ideas we are used to associating with the city.

If in re universals reflect a continuity that is partly immanent to the res and partly to the idea, this happens in some measure because ideas do not only emphasize norms: they also have the power to produce them. Just as the planning regulations of historical centers require new buildings to adapt to a certain image of the city, in the same way the expectations disseminated among readers and institutions influence writers, who end up adapting their works to the praxis of genres or asserting their identity by disobeying an implicit norm, which they allude to in any case by rejecting it. Simply put, genres relate to a double persistency: real and imagined, inscribed in the form of texts and sedimented in the expectations of writers, critics, institutions, and readers. Immaterial elements are no less important than material ones in forming the image of the whole. Sometimes it is enough to change the name to alter the entire perception of something: Saint Petersburg, Peter, Petrograd, and Leningrad are not the same city. All the major urban agglomerations extend well beyond the administrative boundaries of individual cities, but the perception of spatial unity is disturbed by the awareness of the changing names. The universals of criticism work the same way. Consider, for example, how our idea of the genre to which Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso belongs changes depending on the name we give it: a “chivalric poem,” a “chivalric romance,” and a “chivalric novel” are not the same thing. Or consider a critical category like “twentieth-century novel,” which describes objective phenomena and flattens out inconsistencies—because if it is true that our horizon of expectations is accustomed to narrative styles that did not exist in the nineteenth century, it is also true that it would be difficult to exclude certain works with a nineteenth-century structure that were published in the twentieth century, such as Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, or Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. The recording of an objective change coexists therefore with a shared simplification, and the “twentieth-century novel” refers to an idea in addition to a set of subject matters and techniques.

Like any space, literary genres also have a center and a periphery. The center is occupied by works that the readers’ horizon of expectations views as close to the hypothetical ideal type; the periphery, by texts that are made to fit into the genre even though they lie outside a presumed norm. Once again, the criterion that distinguishes the positions taken in the field is a complex and variable interweaving of quantity and symbolic weight, dissemination and hegemony. We speak of the “twentieth-century novel” because it is likely that the number of novels presenting a variety of innovations objectively increased during the early decades of the twentieth century, but also because innovative novels had such a profound impact that they changed the topography of the genre. After the notion penetrates into common knowledge, some works end up embodying it better than others: at the center of the “twentieth-century novel” we find In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, and The Man Without Qualities, while Buddenbrooks, The Leopard, and Life and Fate occupy the periphery. The spatial categories have no aesthetic value: a work can have an eminent place in the literary canon and occupy a peripheral position in the territory of the genre to which it belongs; The Waste Land is one of the indispensable works of the twentieth century, but it does not embody the most common form of modern poetry, and it continues to be perceived as a canonic but experimental work.

Symbolic Forms

Having clarified the boundaries and nature of genres, there still remains the essential question: What do these enduring entities refer to? What do literary genres mean? If the forms of art tell the history of humanity better than do historical documents, then genres are the signs of a deep cultural continuity. To really grasp the implications of such an idea, we could use a concept that Panofsky picked up from Cassirer and, by rising above differences between works, used to illustrate the essence of perspective in paintings.³⁷ According to Panofsky, perspective would be a symbolic form in which “ ‘spiritual meaning is attached to a concrete, material sign.” Although very different from one another, the works that use this technique remain united by a stylistic trait that puts a certain vision into plastic form, that is, the idea that space is infinite, obeys geometric laws, and exists independently from human beings. The way Cassirer and Panofsky use the concept of symbolic form reworks a fundamental Hegelian principle of aesthetics: “the sensuous aspect of art is spiritualized, since the spirit appears in art as made sensuous.”³⁸ Rethinking this same idea, Adorno will say that the forms of art are sedimented content, and precisely for this reason they tell the history of humanity.³⁹ If this is the case, complex aesthetic constructions like perspective or literary genres represent images of the world condensed into a plastic form and intended for a certain public. Their birth, death, and transformations signify the birth, death, and transformations of a vision of reality and the social groups that identify with it.

To further refine the theory of symbolic form, we can reflect on genres from another point of view, that of the writer. Cassirer’s and Panofsky’s category actually arises from the gaze of the critic, who judges literary history once the history has been concluded, whereas the writer is always preceded by genres, which give form to the domain of literature even before it has arrived, by organizing the perception of reality a priori, like mobile but preexisting scaffolding. If we call literary space the set of works to which it is reasonable to dedicate oneself in a certain epoch, then genres are the transcendental structures that order this space. Choosing one instead of another (composing sonnets or madrigals, writing a novel or a romance) means adopting an image of the world and life, a relationship with the past, a position in the social space, and a readership. Therefore, the historian perceives our universals as symbolic forms, the writer as a prioris: in both cases, from different points of view, genres crystallize the long duration in literature.

What Is Modern Poetry?

The symbolic forms of modern literature emerged during a metamorphosis that lasted many centuries and culminated in a period of sudden changes between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this time, the genres that ancient and classicist poetics considered the most prestigious—the epic and tragedy—died or entered a phase of pure survival and were symbolically replaced by the novel and the drame bourgeois, two absolutely modern forms that tell or stage in a serious and problematic way the stories of ordinary people and the conflicts of everyday life. During the same years, poetry also changed completely. Reading “Literary Designs” and thinking about Leopardi’s place in the history of Italian literature, one cannot help but be startled by how the territory of writing in verse was transformed in a matter of decades. It is surprising, for example, that between 1819 and 1821 the greatest modern Italian poet was still thinking about dedicating himself to a didactic poem on the woods—a genre from the past with no future, completely inconceivable for the modern horizon of expectations. The same can be said about the short satiric poem in ottava rima Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia (The War of the Mice and the Crabs), on which Leopardi began to work in 1831. Today, the function and significance of poetry are different from what the author of the Canti seems to give it in parts of his “Literary Designs” and Paralipomeni. During the century that separates Voltaire’s last verses from Mallarmé’s “Sonnet en -ix,” that divides Thomas Gray from Emily Dickinson, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock from Stefan George, Juan Meléndez Valdés from Rubén Darío, and Giuseppe Parini’s last Odes from Giovanni Pascoli’s Myricae, the art of poetry became something different.

We can start to define this transformation by reflecting on the astonishment that Leopardi’s projects inspire at a distance of two centuries. Why is it that our horizon of expectations, unconsciously tied to a certain image of genres, is disoriented by the idea that, shortly after composing “The Infinite,” Leopardi was thinking of writing a didactic poem about the woods? What surprises us about this? In the first place, we are taken aback by the purpose that Leopardi assigns to poetry when he proposes to write a poem illustrating the usefulness of the woods, by retelling stories that European literature had accumulated over centuries on a topic so conventional and so full of the past; in the second place, by the type of writing that the theme seems to presuppose, that is, an ornamental versification devised to be superimposed on a preexisting content. If we examine in detail what has been crystallized in our surprise, we discover a series of stylistic features and expectations that we normally associate with poetry referred to as modern. But what do we mean by this?

Our intellectual object should not be imagined as an organism or essence but as a complex and inhomogeneous space. The name associates a formal element to a historical epoch: “poetry” means, in the first place, a discourse written in verse; the “modern” epoch of writing in verse is usually said to begin at different times, but they all fall between the Romantic period and that of the first twentieth-century avant-gardes. Modern poetry has also come to encompass works in prose distinguished by their autobiographical content or formal density: prose poems. Like all in re universals, our genre has a periphery and a center, the latter occupied by short- or medium-length compositions, for the most part in verse, which talk about personal themes in a considered personal style—texts that in recent centuries have been called lyric. Today, when we approach a shelf in a bookstore where poetry books are stacked, we expect to find books containing versified, generally short pieces that describe experiences or reflections, voiced subjectively, in a style far from the degree zero of everyday communication. On closer inspection, the project of writing a poem on the woods astonishes us precisely because it contravenes these expectations. It seems premodern to us that Leopardi wants to use verse to speak about a conventional theme that is remote from his lived experience, or that he wants to dress up a prosaic subject matter with the ornaments of metrics and rhetoric. For at least two centuries, didactic poetry has ceased to exist, except in experimental or parodic forms, such as in the work of Wystan Hugh Auden or Raymond Queneau; for some time now the idea of style that poets and readers of poetry go back to is no longer ornamental.

The crisis in verse narrative was less sudden but equally clear. Until the mid-nineteenth century it was thought quite obvious to use verses to embellish a story or an argument. Epic and didactic poetry were part of the system of genres commonly used in classicist literature of the eighteenth century. The pre-Romantic and Romantic culture reinvigorated the tradition of the narrative poem, reinventing the narrative ballad and transforming The Works of Ossian and Byron’s poetry into cult works.⁴⁰ Between 1800 and 1860 French epic poetry had an extraordinary explosion in terms of quantity.⁴¹ In the last half of the nineteenth century some of the major English poets and novelists, such as Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Morris, George Meredith, and George Eliot, dedicated themselves to composing long narrative works in verse. Between 1785 and 1858 many epic poems celebrated the birth and development of a new world power, the United States,⁴² and epic was widely practiced from 1790 to 1910 in Britain by Romantic and Victorian poets.⁴³ One of William Butler Yeats’s first works was a legend in verse, The Wanderings of Oisin (1889). Nevertheless, despite these signs of resistance, the overall prestige of long narrative compositions would decline inexorably over the course of the nineteenth century, during the same period when lyric achieved its hegemony over verse writing.

Today the predominance of short, subjective pieces is so clear that it has become established in the language. Not by chance, the set of texts we call “poetry” is held together by two dissimilar taxonomic criteria: “poetry” is any text written in verse, regardless of its content; but “poetry” is also any brief prose piece with a lyrical orientation, according to a linguistic usage that takes for granted an idea that is anything but self-evident, namely, that the distance between a novel in verse and a novel in prose is greater than the distance between an epic in verse and a collection of prose poems. This idea was inconceivable before the crisis of the classicist literary system destroyed didactic poetry, before the development of the modern novel made prose the natural medium for narrative, and before lyric achieved its hegemony over writings in verse. In certain critical traditions, then, the centrality of subjective poetry is considered so tautological that it creates antonomasias. This is demonstrated by the habit of using words like “prose” and “poetry” as synonyms of “narrative” and “lyric,” or the habit of superimposing the concepts of “modern poetry” and “modern lyric,” according to a usage that Hugo Friedrich has tried to legitimize in a book as well known as it is questionable.⁴⁴ This predominance is further confirmed, unintentionally, by the arguments of those who defend an alternative idea of modern poetry but end up giving their essays a characteristically polemical tone, as if they were writing against a hegemonic opinion whose supremacy they acknowledge by the very act of contesting it. When Charles Bernstein attacked poetry founded on the centrality of “Sovereign Human Self (SHS) as the sole origin of authentic expression and meaning”⁴⁵ or when Bob Perelman attacked texts made of “first-person meditations | where the meaning of life becomes | visible after 30 lines,”⁴⁶ or when Jean-Marie Gleize derides “repoésie,” the “re-poetry” of contemporary lyrics,⁴⁷ their alternative poetics takes the form of a challenge to a mainstream idea. For the same reason, it often happens that someone commenting on a text that falls outside the lyric form feels obliged to explain to readers what the genre is—for instance, when we read that Ezra Pound sought to re-create the modern epic poem, or that Auden rediscovered premodern didactic poetry—whereas it seems quite unnecessary for someone to be concerned about describing the nature of texts written by Eugenio Montale, Jorge Guillén, René Char, Elizabeth Bishop, or Ingeborg Bachmann.

But subjective poetry does not exhaust the entire spectrum of modern poetry: in fact, on the periphery of the genre we find two extended families of texts that cannot be called lyrical. On the one hand, there are texts referred to as “long poems” in English-language criticism, which sometimes go beyond the limits of subjective poetry by taking on narrative or essay-type topics and eschew the generally short, opaque, and egocentric form of the modern lyric to pursue a clearer, more transparent public diction. On the other hand, there are texts that have the pretension of eliminating all subjective or prosaic content to shift attention onto pure form, according to a project first formulated by Stéphane Mallarmé. Naturally, just as in cities, the boundary between center and periphery is hazy: a book like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Le ceneri di Gramsci (1957, The Ashes of Gramsci), for example, can be read either as an attempt to revive narrative in verse on social subjects or as a series of long egocentric, confessional monologs, since, as it turns out, it is both; Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” (1995) is at the same time a reflection on love written in verse, an essay on Emily Brontë, and an autobiographical text; Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) by Claudia Rankine alternates personal experiences with essaylike reflections. But although the genre of poetry does not coincide with the lyric, and some of its most canonical works (Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, or T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, or Pound’s The Cantos, and so forth) lie outside the sphere of subjective poetry, the centrality of the lyric nevertheless remains unscathed.

Moreover, the texts of recent centuries seem to have exasperated the egocentrism immanent in subjective poetry, exhibiting to the public eye personal experiences that in other eras would have been judged uninteresting or unsuitable for a serious work. They are also put in a form that seems governed, at least on the surface, by something T. S. Eliot would have called “the individual talent”: a subjective difference from the collective norm of tradition.⁴⁸ In principle, a modern poet can express any thought and any private passion in such an individualistic form that he or she need never paraphrase, almost as if over the last two centuries the Romantic idea of the lyric as a genre in which the self, by expressing itself, aspires to tell the truth to everyone and to “attain universality through unrestrained individuation” had truly been achieved:

The lyric work hopes to attain universality through unrestrained individuation.… To say that the concept of lyric poetry that is is in some sense second nature to us is a completely modern one is only to express this insight into the social nature of the lyric in different form.… I know that I exaggerate in saying this, that you could adduce many counterexamples.… But the manifestations in earlier periods of the specifically lyric spirit familiar to us are only isolated flashes, just as the backgrounds in older painting occasionally anticipate the idea of landscape painting. They do not establish it as a form. The great poets of the distant past—Pindar and Alcaeus, for instance, but the greater part of Walther von der Vogelweide’s work as well—whom literary history classifies as lyric poets are uncommonly far from our primary conception of the lyric.⁴⁹

This book proposes a unified reading of modern poetry in the Western tradition. It takes a comparative point of view but, inevitably, more space will be given to the national literatures I know best. This asymmetry has no explanation other than my limits. Comparative literature is faced today with an insurmountable task: the opening of horizons, the multiplication of data and research, the skepticism that our epoch nourishes toward master narratives, and the power relations between national literatures and languages⁵⁰ have made it impossible to take everything into account or to simplify unproblematically, as early twentieth-century literary theory did. In my opinion, this objective difficulty cannot be side-stepped by writing a grand encyclopedic treatise arranged to give every single thing some minimal diplomatic representation. Such a treatise would probably be an artificial work of compilation, which makes little sense to write. It seems more reasonable to accept the inevitable partiality of all points of view, starting from the things we know, and to write an essay in the original sense of the word—a text that preserves the author’s traces and particularity but seeks to transcend them as much as possible by broadening the gaze and entrusting the resulting work to the judgment of readers from other histories and traditions. They are the ones who will say if the essay speaks to them too.

I start by reconstructing the genesis of the modern conception of poetry: the idea that writing in verse during recent centuries is different from verse in the premodern period, that it has the genre of the lyric at its center, and that the lyric is what we understand today by this word. I start from concepts and not works, because in this case words change before things do. Although Western poetry experienced its most conspicuous metamorphosis between 1850 and the age of the historical avant-gardes, the modern conception of poetry began to emerge in the late sixteenth century and became prevalent between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the second chapter, I illustrate the novelties of modern poetry using as an example a text that many consider to be the first modern poem in Italian literature: Leopardi’s “The Infinite.” The third chapter is dedicated to the history of forms. In the fourth chapter, I construct a sort of map of the currents and tendencies that intersect and collide to make up the modern poetic space. In the final chapter, I reflect on the sedimented content of modern poetry as a symbolic form: what it means, what image of the world it transmits to us, what it allows us to understand, and what value it has for us today.

1. Giacomo Leopardi, “Disegni letterari,” in Leopardi, Prose e poesie, vol. 2, Prose, ed. Rolando Damiani (Milan: Mondadori, 1988), 1204–1220.

2. Ibid.

3. Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows” (1936); English translation, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 88.

4. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928); English translation, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998).

5. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk (1927–1940); English translation, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).

6. Theodor W. Adorno, “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft” (1957); English translation, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 46.

7. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (1946); English translation, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

8. Peter Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas (1956); English translation, Theory of the Modern Drama, trans. Michael Hays (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).

9. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).

10. Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” in Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Köln: Taschen, 2001) and October, vol. 100 (Obsolescence), 2002, 175–190.

11. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949); English translation, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 41.

12. Ernst Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 25–32. See also by Gombrich, “Hegel und die Kunstgeschichte” (1977); English translation, “Hegel and Art History,” in On the Methodology of Architectural History, ed. Demetri Porphyrios (London: Architectural Design; New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1981), 3–9.

13. Pierre Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’art (1992, 1998); English translation, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 199.

14. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History, 25–26.

15. This idea is presented in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). In other pieces, Benjamin uses a more cohesive and unified notion of epoch: in his essay “The Storyteller,” but also in some pages of his unfinished book, The Arcades Project, when, citing Jules Michelet, he writes that “Each epoch dreams the one to follow.” Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 150.

16. Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe (1921–1922); English translation, Sodom and Gomorrah, in In Search of Lost Time, vol. 4, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 110–111.

17. “Survivors of the older generation assured me that society had completely changed and now opened its doors to people who in their day would never have been received, and this comment was both true and untrue. On the one hand it was untrue, because those who made it failed to take into account the curve of time which caused the society of the present to see these newly received people at their point of arrival, whilst they, the older generation, remembered them at their point of departure. And this was nothing new, for in the same way, when they themselves had first entered society, there were people in it who had just arrived and whose lowly origins others remembered. In society as it exists today a single generation suffices for the change which formerly over a period of centuries transformed a middle-class name like Colbert into an aristocratic one. And yet, from another point of view there was a certain truth in the comments; for, if the social position of individuals is liable to change (like the fortunes and the alliances and the hatreds of nations), so too are the most deeply rooted ideas and customs.” Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (1927); English translation, Time Regained, in In Search of Lost Time, vol. 6, trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 393–394.

18. See Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée” (1958); English translation, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” trans. Immanuel Wallerstein, in Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32, no. 2 (2009): 171–203. Among the three books that take a long-term view without presupposing an a priori unity of epochs, Braudel cites a work of literary history, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948) by Ernst Robert Curtius, along with The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (1942) by Lucien Febvre, and Peinture et Société: Naissance et destruction d’un espace plastique. De la Renaissance au cubisme (1951) by Pierre Francastel.

19. Auerbach, Mimesis; and Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948); English translation, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 391–392.

20. See Bourdieu, The Rules of Art; Gisèle Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains: 1940–1953 (1999); English translation, The French Writers’ War 1940–1953, trans. Vanessa Doriott Anderson and Dorrit Cohn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des Lettres (1999, 2008); English translation, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Anna Boschetti, La Poésie partout: Apollinaire, homme-époque (1898–1918) (Paris: Seuil, 2001). From a different point of view, literary history based on quantitative methods and analyzing big data underscores the gap that exists between the image of the literary past preserved by the monumental canons and the image that one arrives at from a statistical analysis of all published works. See Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), and Franco Moretti, ed., Canon / Archive: Studies in Quantitative Formalism from the Stanford Literary Lab (Brooklyn: n+1 Foundation, 2017).

21. On mechanical causality, see Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), chap. 1.

22. Paul Ricœur, De l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud (1965); English translation, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 32–36.

23. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 127.

24. See Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), Quaderno 19, § 24; vol. 3, 2010. See also Quaderno 13 § 37; vol. 3, 1638; partial English translation, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 57–59.

25. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 127.

26. See Francesco Orlando, Per una teoria freudiana della letteratura (1973); English translation, Toward a Freudian Theory of Literature: With an Analysis of Racine’s “Phèdre,” trans. Charmaine Lee (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

27. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-östlicher Divan (1819); English translation, West-East Divan: The Poems, with “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues, trans. Martin Bidney and Peter Anton von Arnim (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 226–227.

28. See Peter Szondi, “Von der normativen zur spekulativen Gattungspoetik,” in Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie II (1974), 7–183; Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970); English translation, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 13–15; and Gérard Genette, Introduction à l’architexte (1979); English translation, The Architext: An Introduction, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 64–71. On this distinction, see also Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 64ff.

29. Plato, Laws, 3.700 a–d; Republic, 3.392 d.

30. See Genette, The Architext.

31. Schaeffer, Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire?, 77.

32. Ibid., chap. 4.

33. Hans Robert Jauss, “Theorie der Gattungen und Literatur des Mittelalters” (1972); English translation, “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature,” in Modern Genre Theory, ed. and with an introd. by David Duff (London: Routledge, 2016), 130.

34. On the importance of names in constructing genres, see Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982).

35. I wrote about this in Guido Mazzoni, Teoria del romanzo (2011); English translation, Theory of the Novel, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 60–64.

36. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 47.

37. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923–1929); English translation, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Erwin Panofsky, Die Perspektive als “symbolische Form” (1927); English translation, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 41. Franco Moretti used the concept of symbolic form to interpret a literary genre in Il romanzo di formazione (1986); English translation, The Way of the World (London: Verso, 1987) 3–14. Curtius had already done so, but without explicitly mentioning Cassirer (Curtius, European Literature, 390).

38. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik; English translation, Aesthetics: Lectures of Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 39.

39. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 32. See also Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (1970); English translation, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002), 144–145.

40. Jean-Louis Backès, Le Poème narratif dans l’Europe romantique (Paris: Puf, 2003).

41. William Calin, A Muse for Heroes: Nine Centuries of the Epic in France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 298.

42. John P. McWilliams, The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

43. Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

44. Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (1956); English translation, The Structure of Modern Poetry: From the Mid-nineteenth to the Mid-twentieth Century, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974). On the superimposition of “poetry” and “lyric,” see Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 84–88; Giuseppe Bernardelli, Il testo lirico: Logica e forma di un tipo letterario (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2002), viii; Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 6–8; and Lucy Alford, Forms of Poetic Attention (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 8–11.

45. Charles Bernstein, “Recantorium,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 341–350.

46. Bob Perelman, “The Marginalization of Poetry,” in Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 9.

47. Jean-Marie Gleize, Sorties (Paris: Questions théoriques, 2009), 57ff.

48. Thomas Stearns Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919),” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920) (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), 27–33.

49. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 38 and 40.

50. On the power relations between national languages and literatures and their effects on the discipline of comparative literature, see Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, chap. 1, especially 17–21, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 9–15.