CHAPTER THREE

A History of Forms

Theories of Style

We already have some familiarity with the theory of style that developed during the second half of the eighteenth century. One of the first memorable expressions of it in a text is Wordsworth’s preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. True poetry starts with the language “really spoken by men” and infuses it with passion, writes Wordsworth. What transforms style and makes the form of poetry different from the form of prose is a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Poetry is at the same time subjective and universal, unique and democratic, because poets do not differ from other people “in kind” but only “in degree”—the “degree” indicating greater expressive force. Fundamentally, the passions, thoughts, and feelings possessed by writers are the “passions and thoughts and feelings of men.”¹ During periods of decadence, this natural creative process is supplanted by a cold-blooded replica that Wordsworth calls poetic diction.

With Wordsworth’s preface, the great poetry of European Romanticism adopted an idea of style that had become widespread at the end of the eighteenth century, after gaining authoritative philosophical expression in theories on the nature of language by Giambattista Vico, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Johann Gottfried Herder.² When Wordsworth opposes spontaneous poetry to poetic diction, he defines a crucial shift in an admirably concise way. I will try to describe it using a passage equally admirable for its concision, written by Roland Barthes. In Writing Degree Zero, Barthes tells the story of how French poetry was transformed in the second half of the nineteenth century:

In the classical period, prose and poetry are quantities, their difference can be measured; they are neither more nor less separated than two different numbers, contiguous like them, but dissimilar because of the very difference in their magnitude. If I use the word prose for a minimal form of speech, the most economical vehicle for thought, and if I use the letters a, b, c for certain attributes of languages, which are useless but decorative, such as metre, rhyme or the ritual of images, all the linguistic surface will be accounted for in M. Jourdain’s double equation:

Poetry = Prose + a + b + c

Prose = Poetry – a – b – c

whence it clearly follows that Poetry is always different from Prose. But this difference is not one of essence: it is one of quantity.… Classical poetry is felt to be merely an ornamental variation of prose, the fruit of an art (that is, a technique), never a different language, or the product of a particular sensibility.³

The vocabularies of Wordsworth and Barthes are very different, but the underlying paradigm is similar: the poetic diction of the former coincides with the poésie classique of the latter, that is, with the poetry of the French âge classique and, broadly speaking, all premodern classicist poetry. Poetic diction and poésie classique differ from ordinary language because they superimpose an ornatus, a series of decorative attributes, onto the minimal form of speech, the “most economical vehicle for thought.” This type of verse writing is opposed to a completely different form: for Wordsworth, primitive lyric and Lyrical Ballads; for Barthes, fully modern poetry, which, according to his philosophy of literary history, was born with Rimbaud and the Symbolists. The style of poésie classique is “an ornamental variation” of prose, since the poet uses embellishments to ennoble degree-zero writing; the style of modern poetry is not mere veneer, but “the product of a particular sensibility.” What does this difference imply?

Wordsworth and Barthes reflect on the same problem starting from the same premise. According to this schema, style arises either from subjective difference or ritual convention. In the case of subjective difference, the rhetorical departure from degree-zero writing reflects a lived experience that alters the ordinary way of saying things; in the case of ritual convention, figures are added deliberately without the impulse of genuine passion, using conventional devices. These ornaments have an origin and meaning that are collective: by rejecting poetic diction, Wordsworth knows that he has “cut [himself] off from a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets”;⁴ Barthes knows that the ornatus of classical writing reflects a specific ritual of society.⁵ The style of the primitive or modern poet is personal, whereas poetic diction is a group code. This antithesis opposes nature and culture, spontaneity and mediation, originality and habit, the self and society, individual talent and tradition, along the same lines as a two-part schema belonging today to what Theodor Adorno called “the specifically lyric spirit familiar to us.”⁶

It must be noted that the essential texts of ancient poetics contain the ideas that the Romantic aesthetic would transform into commonplaces: that rhetorical figures express the passions, and that the poet is spoken by enthusiasm, divine folly, nature, and furor. In a well-known passage from Plato’s Ion, the character of Socrates asserts that poets lose their wits when inspired by the divinity.⁷ A controversial passage in Aristotle’s Poetics states that since the imitator is more credible when he identifies with the passions he imitates, poetic art belongs to those who are gifted with (euphues) or given to madness (manikos), because the former are malleable (euplastoi) and the latter are able to go outside themselves, in an ecstatic trance (ekstatikoi).⁸ The passage is not clear in every point but its overall meaning is as follows: for Aristotle, artistic creation includes a natural, irrational, and ecstatic element that not everyone possesses but which the imitator has received as a gift; as also stated in a passage from Rhetoric in which poetic speech is defined as entheon—inspired or, literally, inhabited by a god.⁹ In Horace’s Odes and Ars Poetica, we find references to the theory of enthusiasm, for example, when the lyric poet is described as an adept of Bacchus,¹⁰ or when Democritus is reported to believe that poetic ingenium is superior to ars, and that those of sound mind should be excluded from Mount Helicon.¹¹ In the Satires we read that the ability to compose poetry is not enough to earn the title of poet, since the true poet needs not just ars but also ingenium, divine inspiration, and an eloquence capable of singing great deeds.¹²

As far as the relationship between style and pathos is concerned, Aristotle believed that the poet would do better by truly feeling the passions he attributed to his characters, taking for granted that natural feeling was superior to feelings re-created through artifice.¹³ Horace applied a similar principle to dramatic poetry in a famous passage from Ars Poetica: if the actor wants the audience to cry when watching a tragedy, he must be the first to suffer, because language expresses the passions that nature forms inside us.¹⁴ This theory would be taken up in Pseudo-Longinus’s On the Sublime, a treatise almost completely unknown to ancient culture, which was rediscovered in the second half of the sixteenth century after the first printed edition by Francesco Robortello (1554) and transformed into a work of reference by pre-Romantic aesthetics.¹⁵

The ideas that passion influences the style of speech and that poetry contains an irrational element are thus well represented in ancient texts on poetics and rhetoric. The theorists of the eighteenth century, still suspended between classicism and pre-Romanticism, often refer to the expressivist passages in Plato, Aristotle, and Horace.¹⁶ Nevertheless, this interpretation of poetry and form remains largely a minority view compared to the opposite interpretation. For Aristotle, the main element of poetic art, in logical and chronological order, is the mimesis of actions: the lexis is just one of the means by which the poet imitates. First come the things to be imitated and then only afterward comes the diction, which is chosen “according to appropriateness” (kata to harmotton), so that the quality of the content matches the quality of the form, following a specific system of implicit or explicit conventions that correspond to the Stiltrennung.¹⁷ Since poets imitate people who are better than us, just like us, or worse than us, the style should conform to the nature of the characters. The form is an ornament to be superimposed on the degree-zero content in observance of a public codifiable ritual, and the difference between poetry and prose comes down to the kind of ornatus that one chooses. Aristotle addresses this subject in book three of Rhetoric while critiquing Gorgias’s overly poetic style, in the name of the principle that “the language of prose is distinct from that of poetry.”¹⁸ Since the primary virtue of oratory is clarity, the rhetorician’s prose must be neither inflated nor pedestrian but appropriate; conversely, the poet’s language should not be too fitting (prepousa) to the speech or it loses its effect.¹⁹ Although eloquence makes use of poetic ornaments in appropriate circumstances, it cannot afford to ignore norms; poetry, on the other hand, can stray further from common linguistic usage. Interestingly, when Aristotle distinguishes between poetry and prose, he assumes that they are contiguous: while differing in the purpose they serve and in the kind of rhetorical figures appropriate to each, both conceive of style as a sort of clothing to dress the content and, to borrow from Barthes, they deviate in the quantity of ornaments but not in their essence.²⁰ We find this notion of style again in Horace: although there are plenty of passages in his works that mention lyrical rapture, his praises of ingenium are framed within a work that handed down to Western literature a hard-and-fast model of closely monitored classicism, attentive to the rules of the art, to customs, and to the weight of tradition. No wonder that in his Ars poetica, immediately after citing the opinion of Democritus, Horace feels the need to ironically dismiss poets who go so far as to allow their nails and beards to grow out in order to flaunt their ecstatic folly.²¹

The theory of style as ornament, which dominated classical and classicist poetics, respects the equation that Barthes attributes to Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain—the bourgeois gentleman instructed by his master of philosophy that “everything that is not prose is verse, and everything that is not verse is prose.”²² “Antiquity did not conceive of poetry and prose as two forms of expression differing in essence and origin. On the contrary, both fall within the inclusive concept ‘discourse.’ ”²³ They are distinguished by the quantity and quality of the ornatus, the choice of “a,” “b,” and “c” being governed by specific customs: the conventions of genre, the aptum, the norms of the Stiltrennung. Like a ritual garment that one adds to preexisting content, the form observes public measures and codified rules. The continuous exchange of concepts and words between the spheres of poetics and rhetoric, especially with regard to the theory and technique of lexis, or elocutio, is symptomatic. Even more symptomatic are certain ideas about poetry that modern culture would criticize. Verse writing is before anything else a techne, an ars, a technique that can be taught like oratory: consequently, if style in poetry is decoration added to degree-zero writing, the colores that compose it can be studied and reproduced. This is why paraphrasing poetry is viewed as an obvious practice: starting in the first century BCE, the schools of rhetoric made it an exercise, combining it with translation into verse;²⁴ Quintilian recommends it in his Institutio oratoria.²⁵ This means that Greek and Roman literature tended to view poetry and prose as commensurate languages separated by a different quality of ornatus, different in quantity but not in essence. One of the ideas that accompanied the rise of the modern lyric is that poetry is supposedly impossible to translate or paraphrase. Not that classical poetics ignores the distance separating the text to be translated from the translated text, or between a poem and its paraphrase, but the emphasis given to the difficulties of this transformation by twentieth-century critics is completely foreign to ancient culture.

The success of this model surpassed the confines of Greek and Latin literature, for Monsieur Jourdain’s equation actually describes the way Western poetry understood the difference between poetry and prose until at least the second half of the eighteenth century. Although the system of ancient rhetoric outlived the collapse of the culture that spawned it, poetics as an autonomous discipline disappeared for over a thousand years in the West, and its field of expertise was split between the disciplines of grammar and rhetoric. The oratorical interpretation of poetry was consolidated in the theoretical texts of the Early Middle Ages, which present poetry and prose as two variants of the same discourse, often indistinguishable even in their word choices. Later, the theory of their complementarity was strengthened even further, starting from the second half of the eleventh century, with the development of the ars dictaminis and a rhetoric that applied the idea of ornament to every form of diction, equally to prose and rhythmic prose, to rhythmic poetry and accentuated poetry.²⁶ In Brunetto Latini’s Tresor, poetry is submitted to the teachings of rhetoric in the same way as prose;²⁷ in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, the rhetorical model from which prose writers are expected to draw their inspiration comes from poets.²⁸

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the poetics of European classicism reintroduced the schema of ancient poetics in a pure form:

According to the most fundamental neo-classic frame of reference, language is the ‘dress’ of thought, and figures are the ‘ornaments’ of language, for the sake of the pleasurable emotion which distinguishes a poetic from a merely didactic discourse. These elements must be joined to form a consistent whole according to the basic neo-classic unifying principle of the decorum or proportionableness of parts—a complex requirement, involving adjustment to the poetic kind, and the matter signified, as well as the character and emotional state of the speaker depicted.²⁹

This theory lost prestige over the course of the eighteenth century. Little by little, after a transformation lasting a century, the idea prevailed that the rhetorical figures distinguishing a literary text from degree-zero writing were no longer embellishments chosen deliberately to respect certain customs but rather symptoms of a passion, a way of experiencing, a thought. The only classical author to openly support this position, Pseudo-Longinus, remained almost unknown to ancient culture and, in fact, only came under new consideration in the eighteenth century.³⁰

Poetry and Prose

This change is entwined with another transformation that concerns the entire order of the literary space. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in many of the texts that would converge in the genre that gradually assumed the name of novel, roman, novela, Roman, or romanzo, the idea took hold that the work should be written in a simple style without ornaments. The model suggested was the way of telling things to be found in conversations between educated people.³¹ This idea seems to fall back on the two cornerstones of ancient rhetoric (the assurance that it is possible to define an ordo naturalis and verba propria, that is, a degree-zero syntax and vocabulary;³² and a belief in style as an ornament)—which, however, places degree-zero language outside the tradition of oratory. It is true that classical rhetoric had a place for sermo humilis, used in genres such as epistles and commentarii, but the appeals to naturalness and simplicity we find in the prefaces of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novels were completely unaware of this. Although the ars litteraria was indistinguishable from the art of eloquence during the early modern period,³³ as it had been in ancient poetics and during the long Latin Middle Ages,³⁴ the rise of the novel contributed decisively to the decline of rhetoric in European prose.³⁵ The novel was not the only discursive formation to emancipate itself from the model: early modern scientific prose between Galileo and the Royal Society and a substantial part of French philosophy between Pascal and the Enlightenment sought a new style, unmoored from the culture of eloquence and its rules, habits, and categories.³⁶

Similar changes redefined poetry’s place in the genre system as well, for two reasons. In the first place, with the development of the modern novel there came the idea that a certain kind of prose is the natural medium of speech and narrative. The rise of the novel was accompanied by a decline in the narrative poem and the didactic verse poem. Poe’s verdict, still a prophecy in the 1840s, would come true: very few long poems would ever be popular again. Implicit in this first transformation was a more subtle shift. In the system of ancient poetics and rhetoric, oratio prosa is “speech that proceeds in a straight line,” whereas poetry is versus—a “line” or “row” but also “that which is turned backwards”: prose is degree-zero language; poetry is language dressed up in an ornament. According to ancient poetics and rhetoric, though, when prose speech enters the public sphere, it too is clothed in an ornatus suited to the genre, subject, and occasion. Now, when the idea took root that there existed a natural style unfettered by the rules of rhetoric, this apparatus began to falter. The novel, drame bourgeois, and modern poetry all developed after the ritual conception of ars litteraria came to an end. This conception originated with ancient culture and was embraced by the classicist literature that arose with humanism between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, spreading throughout Europe during the early modern period. With one difference, though: while prose genres had no difficulty appealing to the idea of a natural style, it could not be argued that moderns should use verse in their ordinary writing. The notion of poetry that arose in the second half of the sixteenth century and prevailed in the Romantic era resolved this contradiction by means of a paradigm shift: poetry became identified with lyric poetry, and its style was no longer interpreted as the extension of an ancient ritual but as the expression of an individual—as a personal way of saying things that translates the writer’s inner world into form. According to this model, which remains etched in conventional wisdom, the natural, objective, “realistic” way of saying things is the simple prose style, whereas poetry, by the very fact of breaking to a new line, represents a deviation from degree-zero writing, a form of estrangement no longer originating in a social ritual but in the writer’s subjectivity.

Expressivism

The idea of style as self-expression became established very quickly in Romantic culture and was summed up perfectly in a famous maxim (much quoted although misinterpreted) by Buffon: le style est l’homme même, the style is the man himself.³⁷ At the end of the nineteenth century, Eduard Norden used this topos to underscore the distance between the ancient notion of form and the modern, Romantic, and post-Romantic conception:

what influence did the personality of the ancient writer have on style, or, in other words, what value did Buffon’s saying, le style est l’homme même, have for those times? … Style was once an art that had to be learned, and its rules could not be transgressed in the name of one’s own personality; after all, antiquity, much more than the modern era, has always demanded that the individual submit his or her own originality to the authority of tradition sanctioned by eminent critics—the mortification of genius.³⁸

I would call the theory of style that emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century expressivist. I borrow the adjective from Charles Taylor, who used it to define the Romantic and modern attitude of those who place the meaning of life in the manifestation of their own subjective difference, in the “obligation on each of us to live up to our originality,”³⁹ according to the behaviors that Simmel identified when reflecting on the two forms of modern individualism. Expressivism, according to Taylor, is a framework that establishes an ideal of the good life. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the new moral standard began to gain ground among the cultural elites of the West, overlapping and clashing with other frames of reference that had lasted hundreds or thousands of years: the ancient ethics of honor, focused on the search for glory in the public sphere; the ethics of rational control over the passions, which exalts self-mastery achieved through discipline; the ethics of the ordinary life, for which the production and reproduction of existence, work, and family are absolute values that alone can justify a life. Like all frameworks, expressivism spread equally in the culture of the elites and in common knowledge. We need to distinguish between two versions of this ethos, one passive, the other active, summarized emblematically by two formulas that recur obsessively in contemporary mass communication, almost as if they were moral rules: be yourself and express yourself. The first is limited to proposing the narcissistic ideal of being true to oneself, while the second is an invitation to express one’s individuality in the public sphere; the first is an ethos of individuality and authenticity, while the second requires that this individuality be expressed among other people. Both owe much to the Romantic idea of the work of art as an emanation and mirror of the author, as a sensible trace of a personality. Accordingly, the new theory of style also had individualistic and, literally, egocentric consequences. In fact, we need to distinguish between an expressivism in content—differential autobiographism—and an expressivism in form—the Romantic theory of style as the sensible expression of a self: two symmetrical ways of manifesting personal difference and conveying it into the public space while dispensing with any mediations.

But the poetics of the early nineteenth century often gave a reductive interpretation of formal expressivism, as if showing oneself in style was simply a matter of externalizing one’s passions. In reality, this theory soon took on a much more abstract and less psychological meaning. Rather than looking to a Romantic poet for an exemplary definition of it, we do better to turn to one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century:

For style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain for ever the secret of every individual. Through art alone are we able to emerge ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the first from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.⁴⁰

Style is the product of a particular sensibility not so much because it expresses the passions of the writer but primarily because it embodies a personal way of seeing things: sedimented in form is a difference in outlook that separates individuals, a difference that would remain each person’s eternal secret, writes Proust, were it not for art. As well as corresponding to the person, then, style “is a question not of technique but of vision.” This is a metaphorical statement, since literature is not a visual art, but its meaning is clear: style translates a way of being and of conceiving reality into form; it is the textual equivalent of a worldview. We can situate this statement historically: for ancient culture, form was a question of ars more than anything, an ornament constructed according to codified rules; for post-Romantic culture, it was the trace of a particular sensibility, according to a principle that applied to all the arts and all literary forms but which finds special application in the most expressivist of genres—lyric poetry.

To truly understand the deep meaning of this theory, we need to rid Romantic poetics and Proust’s definition of a few hidden implications that limit its universal scope. The idea of form that prevailed between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remained too closely tied to the psychic life and to the aesthetics of mimesis to develop the possibilities implicit in the triumph of expressivism. It continued to understand style as a reflection of the inner world, taking for granted that art is the representation of something: a subjective and untranslatable representation that is linked nevertheless to a preexisting content made of things, actions, thoughts, and passions. We have come across countless variations of this idea when commenting on some authoritative readings of “The Infinite”: the syntactic order of the central part is said to express the speaker’s astonishment at the sudden appearance of immensity; the enjambments or the polysyllabic words are said to evoke a perception of the infinite, and so on. By choosing the work of a few painters, Proust strips his reference of psychological content. However, he does not depart from Romantic assumptions, since Vermeer certainly does not paint the forces that move the psyche; nor, however, do his paintings depict things as they are, but rather a personal way of seeing them, “the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us.”

In reality, the autonomy to choose one’s style that the Romantic revolution made available allowed both the limits of psychology and the limits of imitation to be transcended. When artists are granted the right to freely choose their own style and to use form to express a vision of the world, they are permitted not only to break written and unwritten customs but also to surpass the aesthetics of mimesis. At one level, expressing oneself without constraints may mean expressing one’s inner life by trespassing on the conventional limits placed on creative anarchy; on another, it may imply a deeper and more general rupture. When taken to heart, the obligation to live and write at the height of one’s originality actually implies the right to ignore the two constraints that opposed creative anomie for thousands of years. The first is what T. S. Eliot or Curtius would have called Tradition: that complex of forms, habits, canons, and topoi that coursed through Western literature until the Romantic era, when “individual talent” (Eliot), the idea of tabula rasa and “creative imagination” (Curtius) began to overwhelm respect for inherited rules and imitation of the ancient model authors.⁴¹ The second is the web of shared meanings that Ortega y Gasset defines as “lived reality” (or “human reality”) and opposes to the dehumanization of art.⁴² It is the set of prereflexive certainties on which we base our linguistic and social understanding with others, the implicit belief that we are perceiving time, space, things, people, and logical processes in a reasonably similar manner—what Husserl would call the “lifeworld” and Freud the “reality principle.” One can debate whether and to what extent the lifeworld and the reality principle have a universal foundation; the fact remains that modern Western culture developed this basis of understanding. By the authority of this conventional wisdom, we distinguish rational thought from magical thought, conscious logic from the logic of the unconscious, the literal from the metaphoric, and reality from imagination. Leopardi’s moderate interpretation of the right to autonomy allowed him to bend the relationship between meter and syntax to mimic the form of experience. A century later, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s and André Breton’s literal and extremist interpretation of the same principle allowed them to proclaim the end of psychology and the triumph of the unfettered imagination,⁴³ the death of logic and the rejection of common sense.⁴⁴ Although what Proust saw in the perfectly mimetic paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt was a revelation of “the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us,” and therefore the appearance of new, original worlds, many of the painters of his age decided to express their difference by filling their canvases with figures, lines, or blots that lacked any relationship with the sensible appearance of the external world. Generally, the culture of the early nineteenth century interpreted expressivism as a rejection of classicist rules and as an expansion of mimesis to include representation of the conscious life of the mind. Nevertheless, when the Romantic idea of style as the product of a particular sensibility was faithfully interpreted, it went beyond the limits of Romanticism and found its own entelechy between the aesthetics of Symbolism and the age of the avant-gardes—in the process that Ortega y Gasset calls the dehumanization of art. This process applied the poetics of expressivism to the full, thereby complicating the relationship with ordinary ways of saying or seeing things that the art of the early nineteenth century psychologized but never relinquished.⁴⁵ Expressing oneself freely can also mean hanging any object whatsoever on the wall of a museum or composing a text by cutting up linguistic materials chosen at random and rearranging them. Although all literary genres went through such a process and experienced the extreme version of modern creative anomie, poetry writing engaged with it the most. The symptoms of this engagement were, first, the emergence of the idea that modern poetry is obscure; and, second, the loss of interest in poetic texts on the part of the average educated audience—in other words, the loss of poetry’s social mandate.⁴⁶

The extreme consequences of creative freedom implicit in the Romantic principle of originality began to show between the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth; this is when the lengthy crisis in formal rules that started in the late eighteenth century and continued throughout the following century finally came to an end. In order to describe its effects in literature, I will turn once again to the equation that Barthes attributes to Monsieur Jourdain. If practice strictly followed theory, and if style really were the product of a particular sensibility, the conventions that for millennia dictated the choice of “a,” “b,” and “c” would no longer make sense. The letters of Barthes’s equation stand for the backbones of poetic form: meter, lexicon, syntax, and tropes. For a long time, these components conformed to a specific collective ritual: poetry was degree-zero writing to which were added a metrical cage, words, turns of phrase, and ornaments established by a public nomos and codified rituals. Then, beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, these rituals began to crumble and the genre entered a phase in which anarchy became the norm.⁴⁷ It is as if modern poetry went through two parallel changes, both tending toward unrestrained individuation: on the side of content, subjective difference entered fully into poetry as the consequence and allegory of a new form of individualism; on the side of form, individual talent was liberated by the right to compose poems without adhering to preestablished rules, and to understand style as an anarchic expression of the self. The first was accomplished early on with the Romantic lyric: purely in terms of its content, “The Infinite” is already a modern poem. The same cannot be said for its style, because Leopardi remains in many ways a classicist, and because the advent of stylistic freedom occurred much later than when it was announced in poetics texts. The spread of subjectivism in the world of form was not a sudden change but a process that unfolded through the nineteenth century in stages, coming to an end only when poets truly had, in the abstract, the opportunity to express their originality, as the Romantic poetics had wanted to but only partly achieved. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the age of the historical avant-gardes, writers of poetry acquired unprecedented possibilities: they could use any word, break to a new line whenever they wanted, violate grammar rules in their sentence construction, and use rhetorical figures that were so original as to be obscure. Each of these movements on its own may seem tortuous, but the change went in only one direction: the triumph of individual talent in the choice of “a,” “b,” “c,” and “d”—lexicon, syntax, meter, and tropes.

Lexicon

Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads announces a change that affected all European literature and subverted an age-old custom: for the first time, poetry dispensed with a language different from common vocabulary; for the first time, poetry was no longer written in a separate and anomalous language. Writers and schools that reinstated this distance certainly abounded, but the idea that the vocabulary of poetry must necessarily be distinct from that of prose, in the name of a convention that had become second nature, was no longer valid. Alongside the poetics that restored separateness, there also arose others that praised the mixing of registers.

The process was the same in all European literatures, but each national literature has its own linguistic history. In Italy the lexical revolution transpired slowly and violently. The rule of the division of styles had been applied rigidly for centuries in the Italian poetic system, and the gap between high-style genres, serious but distant from the prose of everyday life, and low-style genres, open to contingency but condemned to remain in the comic register, remained unbridgeable. Lyric poetry written in a high register was influenced for a long time by the Petrarchan lexicon, which was restricted, sublimating, and censorious: at least until the seventeenth century, there were few exceptions to the implicit rule that the register of serious poetry must be detached from the contingent and the ordinary. The first writers to introduce everyday objects copiously into the vocabulary of high lyric poetry were Giovan Battista Marino and the Baroque poets: it is not unusual to find words like pollami (“poultry”), grandine (“hail”), vermi (“worms”), and carbone (“coal”) in their works.⁴⁸ Until then, this sort of vocabulary could never have appeared in the register of serious lyric poetry. The context in which these terms appear, though, is almost never descriptive and flat, as it is for lyric poetry that breaks away from poetic diction, but rather emblematic and estranged. When Montale writes that “acetylene torches throb | from the scattered dories” (dai gozzi sparsi palpita | l’acetilene),⁴⁹ he does nothing more than present a fact of reality with its verba propria. Instead, when Bernardo Morando mentions “silk moths” (bombici), he does so to compare the beauty of a silk spinner to the ugliness of the worms from which she draws out gossamer threads for her weaving. Montale’s scene is realistic; Morando’s is allegorical. In the 1920s one can call objects by their names simply because certain objects exist, whereas Baroque poetry has no notion of contingency as such—the idea of a detail that points only to itself, acting as a reality effect. This impression is reinforced by the way the texts represent prosaic objects, which are sometimes named openly but more often remain concealed behind a veil of periphrasis; or they are ennobled by heightening the literary tone through anastrophes and hyperbatons, epithets, and truncations. To take examples once again from Morando, if the title of a sonnet mentions the poet-lover’s “eyeglasses” (gli occhiali), in the body of the text they become the “spherical crystals” (sferici cristalli) with which the lover arms “the lights [of his eyes]” (i lumi).⁵⁰ The crisis in poetry as a separate language does not correspond to the broadened register. What happens is quite the opposite: the introduction of prosaic elements is compensated for by reinforcing the ritual signs, as if to balance the weight of the unpoetic lexicon by shoring up the literary register.

Eighteenth-century literature imitates these procedures, expands the scope of things that can be written about in a poem, and compensates for the inclusion of prosaic words by increasing the ornatus.⁵¹ The lexicon of Parini’s lyric poems, for example, is remarkably wide-ranging and includes words such as “lung” (polmone), “bitumen” (bitume), and “gain” (guadagno), but only because these prosaic terms are almost always embellished with ornaments that transform the lung into a “capable lung” (polmon capace) (Odes, 2, line 7), the bitumen into a “horrible bitumen” (orribil bitume) (2, line 33), and gain into a “public gain” (pubblico guadagno) (10, line 66).⁵² When not relying on epithets or truncations, difficult metrics and twisted syntax suffice to restore decorum to the form, using a technique to compensate for the prosaic elements that would last for another century, as long as Italian poetic diction continued to exert its influence. We find the same stylistic features in Leopardi, in “Aspasia,” for example, but especially in his “Palinodia al Marchese Gino Capponi” (“Recantation for Marchese Gino Capponi”), in adherence to the classicist conventions from which he had not completely freed himself. Although Foscolo and Leopardi were new poets in terms of their subject matters and syntactic choices, they still believed firmly in poetic diction: not a single passage of their work in verse deviates from the language of tradition. However, it is significant that the author of “The Infinite,” while remaining a classicist, understood classicism as a choice and not a given.⁵³ For Leopardi, the modern world, prosaic and disenchanted, is capable of truth and incapable of beauty: poetry can continue to exist only if it remains a separate language, faithful to the words of the past.⁵⁴ This classicist choice is hardly compatible with the theory of lyricism that Leopardi developed from 1826 on. It is as if his work were caught between two opposing tendencies: one Romantic and subversive, which led him to introduce biographical details into the rituals of poetry, thereby altering them; and another that is classicist and conservative, which prompted him to remain faithful to his inherited norms.

Giosuè Carducci still uses Italian poetic diction in a regular fashion, as do authors such as Emilio Praga and Vittorio Betteloni, who, starting in the 1860s, began to introduce significant amounts of verba propria into the lexicon of the lyric, by referring to trades, foods, and everyday objects by their common names. And yet they do not give up on poetic synonyms, linguistic archaisms, or figures of inversion; nor do they seem to realize that the solemn and everyday registers end up clashing with each other, with unintentionally comic results.⁵⁵

In Italy, the real lexical revolution took place with Giovanni Pascoli’s Myricae (1891–1900). Introducing a huge amount of jargon, pregrammatical, and everyday language into the vocabulary of lyric poetry, Pascoli names contingency with a precision that was unprecedented for Italian poetry written in a high or middle register: “for the first time, there was a shift from the special language of poetry to the poetic use of the language of all, or to the poetic use of all languages”;⁵⁶ for the first time the vocabulary of poetry became indistinguishable from prose. An essential aspect of this critical change remained incomplete, though: Pascoli violates the laws of poetic diction, but he does not discard the poetic vocabulary of tradition altogether. He continues to use prosaic and everyday words alongside the old archaic forms, as if they were still a poetic register of common use and not a linguistic fossil. Examples of such overlapping can be found throughout Myricae. In “O vano sogno” (“O Vain Dream”), for example, mortella (“myrtle”), radicchio, pimpinella (“salad burnet”), and ruminanti (“ruminants”), softened by the epithet dolci (sweet), stand next to the adjective aulente (“fragrant”), referring to fieno (“hay”):

Al camino, dove scoppia la mortella

tra la stipa, o ch’io sogno, o veglio teco:

mangio teco radicchio e pimpinella.

Al soffiar delle raffiche sonanti,

l’aulente fieno sul forcon m’arreco

e visito i miei dolci ruminanti.

In the fireplace, where the myrtle bursts into flame

amid the kindling, I either dream or stay awake with you:

I eat salad burnet and radicchio with you.

When resounding gusts of wind blow,

I fetch fragrant hay on my pitchfork

and visit my sweet ruminants.⁵⁷

In reality, Italian poetic diction only truly dies when the bookish vocabulary of the past becomes archaic sounding, when poets feel that the traditional vocabulary and morphology are a dated code, to be avoided or used only as a deliberate poetic choice. It took until the 1910s for this process to conclude.⁵⁸ Only then would Italian poetry be able to call itself free from premodern poetic diction.

Syntax

In the syntax of sentences and in the syntax of the composition as a whole, premodern poetry adopts a public and regular diction: the text is not constructed as a real soliloquy but as a discourse that respects the grammatical norms of collective communication—as if it were being spoken in front of an invisible audience and was theatrical or oratorical in nature. The literature of the last two centuries has instead taught its readers that the original structure of thought is pregrammatical: it follows a private and irregular syntax, whose extreme forms are the inner monologue and the montage principle. Take Shakespeare’s Sonnet 27:

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,

The dear repose for limbs with travel tired,

But then begins a journey in my head

To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired.

For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,

Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,

And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,

Looking on darkness which the blind do see.

Save that my soul’s imaginary sight

Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,

Which like a jewel hung in ghastly night,

Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.

Lo thus by day my limbs, by night my mind,

For thee, and for myself, no quiet find.⁵⁹

When I read this, the text before me brings an inner process to the page, according to the literary topos of the meditation or nocturnal reverie. Worn out by love, the speaker falls asleep, hoping to be refreshed, but his thoughts return continually to his beloved, preventing him from sleep and keeping his eyes wide open. His soul’s imaginary sight presents him with the shadow of his beloved who, like a jewel, illuminates the black, ghastly night and rejuvenates its appearance. A complex thought process is broken down into parts and adapted into a rational, hypotactic syntax, marked by oppositions (“To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired,” “And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,” “by day my limbs, by night my mind”). Every passage has a grammatical foundation; every junction follows logically in a public and comprehensible way. Contemporary poetry, on the other hand, has accustomed us to reading texts that are estranged from the ordinary rules of collective communication. The spread of private syntax affects both the sentence structure and the structure of the composition as a whole: the first results in an interior monologue; the second in a construction that holds together thanks to the montage principle. In “The hope of even seeing you again” or “Returning a Lost Child” (to cite the texts in Chapter 2), the sentence syntax is shattered but grammatical, while the syntax of the composition follows chains that are partially private and allusive, held together by juxtaposing fragments, through transitions that are not always decipherable.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, private syntax became a permanent feature of the spectrum of possibilities that authors had at their disposal when writing. It was then that interior monologue and the montage principle became grammaticalized, to use a category of linguistics: authors could use them or continue to rely on more traditional forms of syntax when constructing sentences and texts; and yet they perceived these forms as open possibilities, as practicable solutions. The most conspicuous change occurred more in prose than in poetry, since private syntax spread in literature primarily from narrative fiction. One of the first great examples of montage in literature is the scene of the agricultural rallies in Madame Bovary (1857), and one of the first extensive examples of the application of interior monologue is the short novel Les lauriers sont coupés (1887, We’ll to the Woods No More) by Édouard Dujardin. Forgotten for decades, Dujardin’s work reappeared in 1924, after Joyce publicly acknowledged its influence on him. A few years later, Dujardin wrote an essay in which he laid claim to the invention of the interior monologue.⁶⁰ It is true that the expression monologue intérieur preceded Les lauries sont coupés,⁶¹ that the first limited examples of this technique can be found in Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground and his short story “A Gentle Creature”) and in Tolstoy (the monologue of Anna Karenina before her suicide), and that Bettina von Arnim, in Dies Buch gehört dem König (1843, This Book Belongs to the King), had earlier loosened logical and syntactic links.⁶² Nevertheless, there is no precedent in earlier literature of the degree of syntactic deconstruction to be found in Les lauriers sont coupés. Although Dujardin developed the device and claimed it as his own, it is possible that a first embryonic example of interior monologue comes from poetry, namely, from the last texts of a friend of Dujardin, Jules Laforgue,⁶³ to whom Dujardin also attributed the invention of free verse:⁶⁴

Et quoi encore? Oh du génie,

Improvisations aux insomnies!

Et puis? L’observer dans le monde,

Et songer dans les coins:

“Oh, qu’elle est loin! Oh, qu’elle est belle!

“Oh! qui est-elle? A qui est-elle?

“Oh, quelle inconnue! Oh, lui parler! Oh, l’emmener!”

And what else? Oh, some genius,

Improvisations on insomnia!

And then? To observe her in the world

And contemplate in corners:

“Oh, she’s so distant! Oh, she’s so beautiful!

“Oh! who is she? Who is she with?

“Oh, what a mystery woman! Oh, to speak to her! Oh, to take her away!”⁶⁵

Three decades later, the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (1912) would list the deconstruction of syntax as one of Futurism’s technical principles,⁶⁶ while the loosening of dispositio through montage would become a common practice in the founding texts of European poetic modernism. Apollinaire’s “Zone” (1913), for example, is composed in part of unrelated segments with no connections:

Voilà la jeune rue et tu n’es encore qu’un petit enfant […]

Maintenant tu marches dans Paris tout seul parmi la foule […]

Aujourd’hui tu marches dans Paris les femmes sont ensanglantées […]

Maintenant tu es au bord de la Méditerranée […].

Te voici à Marseille au milieu des pastèques

Te voici à Coblence à l’hôtel du Géant

Te voici à Rome assis sous un néflier du Japon

Te voici à Amsterdam avec une jeune fille que tu trouves belle et qui est laide.

Here is the young street and you are still a baby […]

Now you stride alone through the Paris crowds […]

Today in Paris the women are bloodstained […]

By the Mediterranean […].

You in Marseilles among piles of watermelons

You in Coblenz at the Giant’s hotel

In Rome sitting under a Japanese medlar tree

In Amsterdam with a girl you find pretty who is ugly …⁶⁷

In some cases, punctuation is omitted and the associations between ideas and images are unrelated: “Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin” (“Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower whose flock of bridges bleats at the morning”), “Soleil cou coupé” (“Sun slit throat”). A few years later we find the same phenomena in The Waste Land, featured even more prominently in the Cantos. Once this metamorphosis is complete, it becomes clear that poets can use a syntax that is “wholly different from syntax as understood by logicians and grammarians.”⁶⁸

But although the full display of this new model may have taken place during the time of the avant-gardes, the process began in the Romantic age. It followed different timelines depending on the national literature and was based on ancient precedents, starting with Pindar, whose sudden juxtapositions were a model for the ancient and classicist ode. Although Hölderlin translated and commented on Pindar and was influenced by him in many ways, the logical steps in his texts reach a far greater degree of dislocation than in the ancient author. One of the modern and revolutionary aspects of Hölderlin’s poetry is his tendency to deconstruct argumentative connections by means of sudden paratactic juxtapositions, which follow a very different mode of reasoning than that of ordinary speech. This may affect the syntax of the sentence or that of the composition. Take one of his most famous poems, “Hälfte des Lebens” (“The Middle of Life”):

Hälfte des Lebens

Mit gelben Birnen hänget

Und voll mit wilden Rosen

Das Land in den See,

Ihr holden Schwäne,

Und trunken von Küssen

Tunkt ihr das Haupt

Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.

Weh mir, wo nehm’ ich, wenn

Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo

Den Sonnenschein,

Und Schatten der Erde?

Die Mauern stehn

Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde

Klirren die Fahnen.

The Middle of Life

With yellow pears the land,

And full of wild roses,

Hangs down into the lake,

O graceful swans,

And drunk with kisses,

You dip your heads,

Into the hallowed-sober water.

Alas, where shall I find when

Winter comes, flowers, and where

Sunshine,

And the shadows of earth?

The walls stand

Speechless and cold, in the wind

Weathercocks clatter.⁶⁹

Here, the intermediate passage that should connect the two stanzas of the poem is omitted. By doing this, as Adorno writes in his essay on Hölderlin’s parataxis, “the mediation is set within what is mediated instead of bridging it” and “each of the two stanzas … has an inherent need for its opposite.”⁷⁰ Adorno sees in this a sign of the union between form and content in the structure of the text itself, “the antithesis of sensuous love and being cast out, an antithesis of content, breaks the stanzas apart, just as conversely it is only the paratactical form itself that produces the caesura between the halves of life.”⁷¹ The abrupt, enlightening transition that links the two parts of the text is an immediate subjective association, a primary form of montage. It anticipates a way of constructing texts that was still unusual in 1804 when the poem was published by Friedrich Wilmans in the Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1805, but which was destined to create a permanent place for itself on the horizon of possibilities. The history of its reception is interesting and symptomatic: when the Taschenbuch came out, some reviewers panned the nine poems by Hölderlin that composed it, calling them obscure and rambling.⁷² Two centuries later, when the journal Text+Kritik asked a group of German and Austrian poets to compile an anthology of the most important poems of the twentieth century, they opened their anthology with “The Middle of Life,” an early nineteenth-century text that, in their view, already belonged to the lyric poetry of the future.⁷³

Two landmark poets in the history of modern American poetry were also great syntactic innovators. Reflecting on the novelty of Whitman’s enumerative syntax, Leo Spitzer picks up on an idea by Detlev Schumann and develops it in a classic text from the Stilkritik. The chaotic enumeration in Leaves of Grass is a syntactic figure of modern plurality and, at the same time, of the pantheistic unity of the multiple:⁷⁴

Sex contains all, bodies, souls,

Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,

Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk,

All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves, beauties, delights of the earth,

All the governments, judges, gods, follow’d persons of the earth,

These are contain’d in sex as parts of itself and justifications of itself.⁷⁵

This model would set an example: Schumann reconstructed the biblical and Christian genealogy of this syntactic figure and found traces of it in Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Werfel; Spitzer in Paul Claudel, Rubén Darío, Pedro Salinas, and Pablo Neruda:

Los jóvenes homosexuales y las muchachas amorosas,

y las largas viudas que sufren el delirante insomnio,

y las jóvenes señoras preñadas hace treinta horas,

y los roncos gatos que cruzan mi jardin en tinieblas,

como un collar de palpitantes ostras sexuales

rodean mi residencia solitaria,

como enemigos establecidos contra mi alma,

como conspiradores en traje de dormitorio

que cambiaran largos besos espesos por consigna.

The young homosexuals and languishing girls,

the tall widows frantic with sleeplessness,

the matrons still tender in years, now thirty hours pregnant,

the gravel-voiced tomcats that cross in the night of my garden

like a necklace of sexual oysters, atremble,

encircle my lonely environs—

antagonists stalking my soul,

schemers in nightgowns,

exchanging long kisses, packed in like a countersign.⁷⁶

Unlike stream of consciousness or modernist montage, chaotic enumeration does not skip logical steps or break with the rules of grammar, but its overall effect is similar: it leads to a loosening of control and hierarchy. While Whitman plays with lists and the trope of congeries to dissolve syntax, Dickinson works on elision and inversion:

Further in Summer than the Birds

Pathetic from the Grass

A minor Nation Celebrates

Its unobtrusive Mass

No Ordinance be seen

So gradual the Grace

A pensive Custom it becomes

Enlarging Loneliness.

Antiquest felt at Noon

When August burning low

Arise this spectral Canticle

Repose to typify.

Remit as yet no Grace

No Furrow on the Glow,

Yet a Druidic—Difference

Enhances Nature now.⁷⁷

Conjunctions, cuts, anastrophes, and unmarked verbs break the rules of public syntax and create effects of obscurity that, as Cristanne Miller writes, are consubstantial to the architecture of the text:

The unusual use of the opening conjunction, omitted words and phrases, and syntactic inversions help to create a sense of the delicate momentary Grace the speaker finds it so difficult to describe.… In the last two stanzas inverted phrase order, the omission of several words, form / class substitution, and uninflected verbs make the poem even more difficult to decipher.… We might suppose that the poet means something like: “This custom or grace is felt to be oldest at Noon, when the August sun is burning low and this spectral canticle arise(s), typifying repose; up until this moment, no grace has been remitted and the glow remains unfurrowed (unblemished); yet a druidic difference enhances nature now.” There are other ways to reconstruct the syntax here, however, and one must take into account the puzzling “Yet,” Dickinson’s unmarked verbs (arise and remit) and the general lack of connections regardless of how one finally reconstructs it. There is no causal or temporal relation, for example, between the August noon and the verb “Arise,” and there is no clear subject or agent for “Remit.”⁷⁸

To my knowledge, no examples of private syntax exist in Italy before the time of Foscolo and Leopardi. Strongly paratactic texts or texts with rough and approximate connections can be found, but there are no poems built on an associative logic that strays from the rules of public speech, whether this involves the form of the sentences or the form of the composition. The only writings that approach the aesthetic of words in freedom—some of Burchiello’s sonnets, for example—fall under the separate domains of comic or nonsense poems and do not constitute true exceptions. An early change took place during the period when the poetics of Romanticism gained full hegemony.⁷⁹ Foscolo and Leopardi remain faithful to poetic diction, but they modernize the dispositio and sentence structure of lyric poetry. Some readers of On Sepulchres were struck by the freedom of its transitions: the connections could appear unfounded to the eyes of its contemporaries. Fo-scolo himself felt the need to justify the boldness of certain logical transitions by recalling the freedom to frame arguments that classicist literature recognized in lyric poetry, following Pindar’s example.⁸⁰ Leopardi was perhaps the first Italian poet to exhibit a syntax that, in his most innovative texts, partly follows associative waves of thought.

These changes were destined to evolve much further. Once again, Pascoli proved to be a revolutionary poet. Consider “Mezzanotte” (“Midnight”), in Myricae:

Otto … Nove … anche un tocco: e lenta scorre

l’ora; ed un altro … un altro. Uggiola un cane.

Un chiù singhiozza da non so qual torre.

È mezzanotte. Un doppio suon di pesta

s’ode, che passa. C’è per vie lontane

un rotolìo di carri che s’arresta

di colpo. Tutto è chiuso, senza forme,

senza colori, senza vita. Brilla,

sola nel mezzo alla città che dorme,

una finestra, come una pupilla.⁸¹

Eight . . Nine … one more stroke: and slowly passes

the hour; and another … another. A dog yelps.

An owl cries out from who knows which tower.

It’s midnight. A double sound of footsteps

can be heard, which passes by. From distant roads there’s

a rolling of wagons that stops

suddenly. Everything is shut down, formless,

colorless, lifeless. Shining out,

alone amid the city that sleeps

a window, like an iris.

The impressionistic structure of the poem breaks the scene down into multiple fragments, placed side by side: the striking of the clock, the dog, the crying owl, the chiming of the hour, the sound of footsteps, the rolling of the wagons, the perception that everything is shut down, the window that lights up. How are we to classify such a text? The first verses can perhaps come to our aid. Clearly, the sequence “Eight … Nine … one more stroke: and slowly passes | time; and another … another” is a mental soliloquy on the part of the speaker, who is counting the strokes of the belltower. In Leopardi’s poems, the shift from public to private syntax always stops short before the speech becomes a true interior monologue. In “Le ricordanze” (“The Recollections”), lines 50–52, when Leopardi describes a scene similar to Pascoli’s, the sentence structure never becomes impressionistic:

Viene il vento recando il suon dell’ora

Dalla torre del borgo. Era conforto

Questo suon, mi rimembra, alle mie notti […].

The wind comes, with the hour that tolls

from the town tower. This sound, I can recall,

was a comfort to my nights […].⁸²

The broken sentence structure in “A se stesso” (“To Himself”) also recalls the form of soliloquies in Alfieri’s tragedies—a model of theatrical syntax in which the hero must make himself understood by the audience in order to clarify hidden meanings and comment in detail on what he thinks, even though he pretends to speak to himself. In Pascoli’s poems, instead, the speech is privatized: the first two lines of “Midnight” are constructed as a monologue without an audience that notes perceptions while they take place. This practice has no precedent in Italian literature.

This progressive movement toward a mental syntax stops only when poets come to associate words in total autonomy. By that I mean when they can write sentences in the form of stream of consciousness and freely arrange the parts of the text without following an argumentative or narrative order, relying instead on unconscious analogies or on a conscious but entirely subjective montage. Singing the praises of words in freedom and mocking “the ridiculous inanity of the old syntax inherited from Homer,”⁸³ the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” has an emblematic value. In Italy, the crisis of public syntax, like the crisis of the traditional poetic lexicon, came to a peak during the first avant-garde movements.

Meter

In the long run, the most sensational effect of Romantic poetics was the invention of free verse. An essential principle of premodern Western literature is that writing in verse is distinguished from ordinary speech by virtue of metrical rules: even genres most similar to prose in terms of vocabulary and the use of figures were still separated on the basis of this criterion. Nevertheless, the principle that meter did not suffice to make a composition true poetry was well known to ancient culture. As Aristotle argues in the first pages of his Poetics, although Empedocles wrote in verse, his work has nothing in common with Homer’s: if the latter deserves the name of poet, Empedocles should be called, rather, a physiologos, a scholar of nature;⁸⁴ because, as stated in book nine, “the poet must be a maker of stories rather than verses, in so far as it is representation that makes him a poet, and representation is of actions.”⁸⁵ And yet, while admitting that it is possible to use verses for nonpoetic purposes or to write artistic prose, ancient aesthetics did not conceive of a poetry that is “poetic” but not amenable to the laws of meter, to a fixed, public, agreed-upon measure. Whatever the meter, everyone was expected to know how a verse was composed and when to break to the next line. According to this reasoning, the two greatest revolutions of modern prosody—free verse and the prose poem—would be simply inconceivable.

This time-honored principle began to falter as early as the eighteenth century, when the rhythmic prose of The Works of Ossian (1765) changed readers’ and writers’ habits, when a few British poets began to imitate the irregular metrics of the English Bible, and when a few German poets began to adopt fluid prosodic patterns called Freie Rhythmen. In July 1796, Monthly Magazine published an article entitled “Is Verse Essential to Poetry?” It was signed anonymously by someone who called himself “The Enquirer,” probably the Unitarian minister William Enfield—essayist, writer, and author of a treatise on taste. It is a very interesting article, because it shows how much readers’ horizon of expectation had been changed by the aesthetics of the eighteenth century and how new Romantic ideas were altering their perception of metrics. Enfield questions whether verse is necessary for poetry. He first repeats the typical schema of ancient literature, writing that the essence of poetry is imitation, not versification, and then follows with his new ideas. He adds that the work of the poet is above all enthusiasm, inspiration, and “the immediate offspring of a vigorous imagination and a quick sensibility”:⁸⁶ small wonder, he notes, that long before versification was known, primitive people expressed their strong passions in a vehement language that produced “a kind of wild and unfettered melody.”⁸⁷ But because the only criteria of literary value are truth and nature, the rules of art do not state that sophisticated authors are better than primitives, or that poets must write and speak in verse. Enfield stops short of explicitly theorizing free verse, but his essay already contains arguments that will be used in the second half of the nineteenth century to legitimize the dissolution of regular metrics: namely, if poetry is unmediated self-expression, then it is not clear why traditional measures should communicate spontaneous passions any better than the rhythmic prose adopted by Macpherson; or any better than a versification that follows the poet’s internal rhythm by ignoring the external rule of meter.

A significant difference separates modern and classical theories. For Greek and Latin culture, and for the classicist cultures that continued to rewrite ancient concepts until the second half of the eighteenth century, the crucial opposition separates mimesis from metron: the emphatic name of poet is reserved for those who are able to represent people’s actions, speech, and characters while conforming to an apparatus of traditional customs; those who merely set a nonimitative subject matter to regular verse must be called something else. Thus, there may be prose writers who fit the name of poet, but there is no possibility for poets to break up their lines as they please, because the regular norms governing verse composition do not allow for the irregular practice of free verse. In the burgeoning conventional wisdom of the second half of the eighteenth century, on the contrary, anyone capable of original and meaningful self-expression could be called a poet. The thinking behind this new outlook was that meter represents an inherited convention, which artists have the full autonomy to accept or reject according to their personal tastes.⁸⁸

Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads shows that challenging the legitimacy of meter was integral to Romantic poetics. Like Enfield, Wordsworth believed that the essential opposition is not between prose and verse, but between poetry—whether poetic or prosaic—and ordinary language and scientific prose. Following the implications of his argument, Wordsworth cannot avoid asking “an obvious question”: “why, professing these opinions, have I written in verse?”⁸⁹ His answer is rather confused: at first, he argues that once poetic diction has been abolished there is no reason to deprive oneself of the pleasure, universally acknowledged, that meter brings to the reader. Then he adds that the principle of order conveyed by regular verse harmoniously tempers the disorder to which the mind tends when it is excited by passion. Finally, he asserts that feeling is what gives rise to rhetorical figures and produces spontaneous rhythms. One is left with the impression that Wordsworth skirts around a problem without really addressing it. Rhythm may well be judged a natural element, but it is undeniable that meter is a convention: just as poetic phraseology transforms the spontaneous figurativeness of passionate language into a congeries of increasingly cold formulas, so meter rigidifies the natural rhythms of inspired speech, compressing them into a conventional measure. If Wordsworth had been consistent with the principles he professed, he would have reached a conclusion shared by many eighty years later, namely, that meter is the poetic diction of rhythm. Even Leopardi, despite his classicism, was far from believing that meter was a necessity: although lyric poetry is “inspired writing,” metrical schemes arise out of habits that have become second nature: “Usage has established that the poet write in verse.… But in essence, in itself, poetry is not tied to verse.”⁹⁰ Taken literally, Romantic expressivism heralded a metrical revolution, the same revolution that spread into literary practice during the late 1800s, when the two genres accompanying the decline of traditional prosody—the prose poem and poetry in free verse—became established definitively.

It would be wrong to interpret the former as a mere continuation of ancient artistic prose. The prose poem has nothing to do with the tradition of ancient rhetoric: it is a direct consequence of Romantic aesthetics. Starting from the time when lyric poetry gained hegemony over verse writing and being a lyric poet no longer depended on obeying an external metrical norm but on allowing oneself to be carried away by the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” it became difficult to explain why feelings must necessarily overflow into verse. Between the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the popularity of poetic prose—Gessner’s Idylls (1756, 1772) and The Works of Ossian (1765)—shows that the horizon of expectations for writers and readers was ready to accept a revolutionary novelty: the possibility of expressing poetic pathos without having to break up lines, and of creating poetry while writing in prose—as in one of the most influential texts of German Romanticism, Novalis’s “Hymns to the Night,” in the version that appeared in Athenaeum in 1800. It was French literature that developed the idea of poetry in prose most extensively, to the point of exporting the term poème en prose to other languages.⁹¹ In France, the notion of poetic prose was recognized in the Encyclopédie, in the entry “poème en prose” written by Louis de Jaucourt in 1765,⁹² and, before that, in Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699) and Dialogues sur l’éloquence (1718) by Fénelon.⁹³ The genre entered the modern phase of its history in the mid-nineteenth century with Baudelaire, to whom we also owe the rediscovery of Gaspard de la nuit (1842) by Aloysius Bertrand. For the first time, the poet was not defined by mimesis or meter but by subjective feeling, the “lyric motions of the soul” expressed in the choice of content and style, as Baudelaire put it in his dedicatory letter to Arsène Houssaye, which he used as a preface to his Petits Poèmes en prose:

Which of us has not, in his ambitious days, dreamt the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough and striking enough to suit lyrical movements of the soul, undulations of reverie, the flip-flops of consciousness.⁹⁴

The other effect of the modern revolution in metrics was the spread of free verse into literatures that, during the Romantic age, had not experienced a loosening of prosodic patterns comparable to the free rhythms of the Germans. This is what took place in English-language poetry between the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, after Whitman’s first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) had conspicuously renounced any form of metrical regularity, drawing inspiration from the free prosody of biblical translations. In French-language poetry it happened after the magazine La Vogue launched the fashion of vers libre in the second half of the 1880s (earlier, Rimbaud had not followed any predictable line-break patterns in the versified parts of his Illuminations, also published for that matter in La Vogue, in 1886).⁹⁵ In Spanish-speaking literature, the modern metrical revolution is often traced back to “Nocturno” (1894) by José Asunción Silva. One of the first examples of Russian free verse is Aleksandrijskie pesni (Songs of Alexandria) by Mikhail Kuzmin (1908).⁹⁶ The origin of Italian free verse is usually attributed to Gian Pietro Lucini, who made a regular practice of violating metrical rules.⁹⁷ As the practice spread, so did reflection on the momentous value of this new literary fashion. Whitman had a good grasp of the historical and political significance of the phenomenon:

In my opinion, the time has come to essentially break down the barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, etc., and that even if rhyme and those measurements continue to furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes … the truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough,) can never again, in the English language, be express’d in arbitrary and rhyming metre.… While admitting that the venerable and heavenly forms of chiming versification have in their time play’d great and fitting parts—that the pensive complaint, the ballads, wars, amours, legends of Europe, etc., have, many of them, been inimitably render’d in rhyming verse …, it is, notwithstanding, certain to me, that the day of such conventional rhyme is ended.⁹⁸

Today’s Muse, and the American Muse above all, must jettison “the literary, as well as social etiquette of overseas feudalism and caste”⁹⁹ and express itself in prose or in a new poetic form more agile and more open to reality: behind the invention of free verse, we glimpse a philosophy of history. In 1897, Mallarmé published one of his most important writings in poetics, “Crise de vers” (“Crisis in Poetry”), gathering together thoughts that he wrote at different times from 1886 onward. The author of Un coup de dés was one of the first to grasp the significance of what was happening:

But the truly remarkable fact is this: for the first time in the literary history of any nation, along with the general and traditional great organ of orthodox verse which finds its ecstasy on an every-ready keyboard, any poet with an individual technique and ear can build his own instrument.… Each poet has his flute or viol, with which to do so.¹⁰⁰

His response to Jules Huret’s Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (Survey on Literary Evolution), published in Écho de Paris in 1891, is more explicit:

We are witnessing a spectacle, … which is truly extraordinary, unique in the history of poetry: every poet is going off by himself with his own flute, and playing the songs he pleases. For the first time since the beginning of poetry, poets have stopped singing bass. Hitherto, as you know, if they wished to be accompanied, they had to be content with the great organ of official meter. Well, it was simply overplayed and they got tired of it! … [I]n a society without stability, without unity, there can be no stable or definitive art. From that incompletely organized society—which also explains the restlessness of certain minds—the unexplained need for individuality was born. The literary manifestations of today are a direct reflection of that need.¹⁰¹

Until then, the writing of poetry had bowed to the orthodoxy of prosodic rules, which unified the scattering of personal styles into the norm of a collective music. The revolution in metrics to which Mallarmé bore witness liberated the melody in each person. It allowed poets to follow their ear and transform an art governed by ritual into one that was individualistic, designed to give voice to each poet’s “flute or viol” and to display, as Proust would have said, a personal way of seeing things.

As profound as it is spectacular, this innovation changed readers’ horizon of expectation: for poets to write poetry without a fixed structure and to begin and end their lines as they pleased was truly an unprecedented novelty. With the fall of the last and most important technical residue of the ancient art of versification, writers could really, at least in theory, express themselves autonomously, as if their style was a matter of pure vision. Conversely, when a poet chose to adhere to the inherited metrical forms, the choice took on a different meaning from what it had before free verse became the norm. It is easy to understand that this metrical triumph of individual talent over tradition points to a profound historical transformation and reflects that “unexplained need for individuality” that distinguishes the modern world. Almost two decades after Mallarmé’s writings, the magazine Poesia, founded and directed by Marinetti during the years leading up to the birth of the Futurist movement, published an Enquête internationale sur le Vers libre (International Investigation into Free Verse). It brings together a number of interesting remarks, including a succinct and incisive contribution by Marie Dauguet.

In literary aesthetics, free verse is the last effort of the individualist evolution started by Romanticism. It is the ultimate fruit of what is most independent in humanity, not just thought … but the way of perceiving [la façon de sentir]. This is precisely why it has provoked such protests. It is the very form of the emancipated inner self.¹⁰²

Dauguet grasps the significance of the phenomenon when she writes that free verse is the last stage of Romantic individualism, the literary equivalent of the most intimate personal life. In the opening comments to the Enquête internationale sur le Vers libre, Gustave Kahn, who at the time was considered to be the main exponent of the new poetics of free verse, makes explicit claim to the historical continuity mentioned by Dauguet: “the Romantics … partly emancipated poetry. We have resumed their laborious effort, picking up at the point where they stopped making technical progress and innovating.”¹⁰³ In this case too, the movement toward unrestrained individuation started by Romanticism ran throughout the nineteenth century and came to maturity in the age of the avant-gardes.

Tropes

The gap between modern poems and a minimal form of speech, the most economical vehicle of thought, is often so great as to make texts indecipherable. This indecipherability is partly new, though, and different from the kind readers were used to. Classical poetics and rhetoric were well aware of the notion of obscuritas, and many verse writers in ancient literature earned the name of ainigmatodes or obscurus. Oracular and mantic poetry is enigmatic, as is that of Orpheus and Epimenides; Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles are judged indecipherable, along with Pindar and Lycophron; Callimachus and Propertius are deliberately difficult poets, while the incomprehensibility of Helvius Cinna and Persius actually becomes the object of irony.¹⁰⁴ The obscurity of ancient poetry usually stems from a specific source: it is a sign that the text communicates elitist or initiatory knowledge, whether in content or form. The oracle speaks in riddles because it safeguards a divine knowledge that humans understand only partially; the philosopher speaks to savants who can understand him fully; Pindar is inspired by a god and addresses an inner circle; the Alexandrian poet writes for a refined audience that shares his tastes. “If we wanted to generalize, [the forms of obscurity in classical poetry] are manifestations of a style that asserts the gap between those who know more and those who know less.”¹⁰⁵ And if we were to continue generalizing, we might say that this also explains the most important manifestation of obscuritas in medieval poetry: the Provençal trobar clus. In these cases, anyone able to decipher or appreciate the text gains access to an elitist knowledge or taste, while anyone incapable of deciphering or appreciating it is excluded from a knowledge that, despite being the privilege of the few, has a universally human value.

In addition to picking up the already-existing forms of obscurity, modern poetry developed new ones. Let us take two very different examples. We have already talked about the first one: if Montale had not explained the events alluded to in “The hope of even seeing you again,” the last stanza would have been incomprehensible in its literal reading. The second is a poem by Rimbaud, “L’étoile a pleuré rose au cœur de tes oreilles” (“The Star Wept Rose into the Heart of Your Ears”), which was written on the same sheet of paper as the vowel sonnet:

L’étoile a pleuré rose au cœur de tes oreilles,

L’infini roulé blanc de ta nuque à tes reins;

La mer a perlé rousse à tes mammes vermeilles

Et l’Homme saigné noir à ton flanc souverain.

The star wept rose into the heart of your ears,

An infinity of white rolled between your nape and hips;

The sea spumed red onto your vermilion breasts,

And Man bled black onto your sovereign side.¹⁰⁶

The overall meaning and choice of genre are easily deciphered: this is a laud of the female body, similar to those found in Renaissance or Baroque poetry, in more or less direct imitation of the Song of Songs. The middle verses can be understood (the second one means that the woman’s white back is like an infinity, the third that her nipples are like drops of a red sea), but the beginning and the end are obscure. What do they allude to? The first line is thought to be a metaphorical description of an earring or part of an ear; the last could mean “the man at your side is like a stain of black blood.” If we were to venture an interpretation, we might imagine that the blood stands for the wound of love suffered by the man, and that the black indicates, by metonymy, the color of his clothes. In this case the verse would mean “the man dressed in black who stands beside you is like a stain of blood, because his heart is metaphorically wounded.” But it is by no means certain that this is right: in fact, there is nothing to prevent the closing from being read in a completely different way, for example, as a sexual metaphor. We easily understand that as long as the author’s commentary is lacking, any literal interpretation would be risky, and that the figures making up this text cannot be reduced univocally to a degree-zero sentence. The reader of Montale’s poem can decipher each segment but remains in the dark about the relationship between the parts; the reader of Rimbaud’s poem easily grasps the sense of the whole but cannot decipher the individual images. And yet the mechanism that makes the two poems partially obscure is in many ways similar. While the pre-Romantic lyric usually refers to a knowledge or style that is public but only comprehensible to a few, the post-Romantic lyric is unintelligible because it exhibits a personal way of seeing, connecting, and deforming things—as does the speaker in Montale’s motet when it associates jackals with the woman it addresses, or the speaker of Rimbaud’s quatrain when he superimposes a play of impenetrable metaphors onto a hypothetical visible reality. We could say that the distinction between ancient and modern indecipherability is a resistance to paraphrase: for ancient poetry it is almost always possible to dissolve the figurative language into a prosaic degree-zero sentence, but for the poetry of the last two centuries this can sometimes prove impossible. As long as the reference code is public, the gap of knowledge separating the text from the reader can always be bridged; when the code is private, however, the reader can only hope for commentary from the poet.

The growing popularity of author notes, especially in the last century, is symptomatic of this need. Some of the most famous author notes are those at the end of the Boni and Liveright edition of The Waste Land. Many years later, Eliot tended to downplay their importance, claiming that he had added them only because the book was too short. Reading his correspondence with Gilbert Seldes and James Sibley Watson, the editors of The Dial, which published The Waste Land in the November 1922 issue, we learn that the notes existed before the Boni and Liveright edition. Clive Bell claims that it was Roger Fry who suggested to Eliot that he add them.¹⁰⁷ In any case, the notes became a permanent part of later editions of the text. The simpler ones provide sources for some of the quotations embedded in the text (Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Tristan and Isolde, Baudelaire, Dante, Shakespeare, and so on); the more complex ones add information that readers would be unlikely to understand on their own, beginning with references to Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. They serve above all to clarify and specify associations between characters and parts of the poem that Eliot himself views as arbitrary:

I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the “crowds of people,” and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.¹⁰⁸

In other words, the notes to The Waste Land primarily have the purpose of unraveling a web of associations that, without notes, would remain indecipherable because they are subjective. Marianne Moore’s “Note on the Notes” that she published in the first edition of The Complete Poems (1967) includes a broader reflection:

A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one’s manner of writing might turn one’s work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation-marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in Observations, and in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgments seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts, could be persuaded to take probity on faith, the will for the deed, the poem as a self-sufficiency, and disregard the notes.¹⁰⁹

Moore justifies the inclusion of her notes by the need to make clear what “is borrowed” in her poems: points of departure and quotations taken from others that inspire the text and with which it dialogues. Allusive poetry has a very long history, but the problem that Eliot, Moore, and many other modern authors face is new. In the twentieth century it became clear that tradition had grown frayed and multiple: no one could take it for granted that other people would understand references that were crucial and obvious to the writer. This also means that ever since the cultural repertory exploded, less canonical references should be considered to all intents and purposes personal associations and private allusions—hence the need for notes to explain them.

The spread of author commentary is a symptom of a new sort of indecipherability. To understand a poem, it is no longer enough to possess a collective, cohesive knowledge of a historical, mythological, political, or broadly cultural nature; one must also know the private anecdotes scattered throughout the text, understand the quotations that only the author and a few others can grasp, or decipher associations that the poet establishes “quite arbitrarily” between parts of the text. Unlike the unintelligibility that occurs in occasional and epistolary rhymes, what we have here goes beyond any shared social life (even the minimal social bond that connects the poet of occasion to his interlocutor, or two poets who correspond with each other). It leaves the reader all alone with purely subjective associations—the impenetrability of another person’s consciousness that only notes can render less impenetrable.

But modern poems are not all indecipherable in the same way. Franco Fortini, who dedicated one of his last essays to this topic, distinguishes two types of resistance to interpretation: obscurity and difficulty:

“Obscurity” is therefore the condition of a text or part of it that does not allow for a quick paraphrase capable of satisfying the needs of the paraphrase; namely, to reduce as many self-referential elements as possible in favor of referential ones. The metaphor “Achilles is a lion” can be translated (understood, clarified) more easily than “Achilles is a fly,” at least for a cultural context that has made the lion into a traditional stereotype.… If we then look at the stylistic–expressive and cognitive function of the (always relative) incomprehensibility or impenetrability of a text or part of it, we can say that the “obscurity” must never (nor can it) be defeated or overcome, because its reason for being, ultimately, is a particular category of figure, such as reticence or euphemism. Unless we want an essential part of the message to disappear, this obscurity must remain; moreover, and as we know, it is a mimesis of the obscurity of relations between human beings.

“Difficulty,” on the other hand, is a characteristic of obscurity that is momentary rather than constitutive, which can be resolved by a certain degree of reader expertise. “Difficulty” is also a stylistic trait; indeed, it is organized and intentional in many literary traditions. But it differs from “obscurity” in that it accepts and even demands interpretation and paraphrasing. Poetic “obscurity” presents itself as insurmountable, … at its height, it escapes expressive language and culminates in the chaos or silence of all hermetic knowledge, which, in our century, has been popularized by avant-garde and surrealist procedures. “Difficulty,” on the other hand, arises as a provisional riddle that can be solved using specific tools and therefore by means of critical exegesis or hermeneusis, manifesting the (typically allegorist) divide between an infinitely translatable linguistic object and its provisional rational–communicative translation.¹¹⁰

Obscurity arises from a purely subjective deformation of the degree-zero discourse based on daytime logic and common sense, as happens when we invent metaphors that bear no correspondence to what the senses perceive or what we are used to associating with a certain thing, person, or situation. If I say “Achilles is a fly” or “this table is an apple,” I replace the commonly accepted semantic fields with a completely intransitive semantic field—a symbolic projection of my subjective difference and the obscurity of relations between human beings. Difficulty is instead a provisional riddle, grounded in a knowledge gap that can be bridged by paraphrase, putting readers in a position to access the information referred to by the poet. When Donne writes “she whom I loved hath paid her last debt” or when Montale closes “The hope of even seeing you again” with an apparently incongruous image, readers can solve the mystery by reading the notes for the missing information. There are two types of difficulties and two types of paraphrases in this regard, because one cannot confuse a text that alludes to public information to which everyone has access with a text that alludes to private anecdotes. Nonetheless, it is true that when explaining the identity of “she whom I loved” and what the jackals on the leash mean, we are solving a provisional riddle, a knowledge gap: the text remains paraphrasable in both forms of difficulty. Obscurity and difficulty are not mutually exclusive conditions but rather relative magnitudes, tied to the reader’s degree of competence; they also communicate with each other, like the extremes of a graduated scale. Both have always existed (difficulty is actually inherent in the language of poetry, given that poetic diction is nothing more than an apparatus of “difficult” synonyms that serve to distance writing in verse from ordinary language), but their nature and incidence have been changed by modern poetry, increasing the number of difficult allusions because they are private, and fueling a search for striking imagery. When reading the line “And Man bled black onto your sovereign side” in Rimbaud’s poem, one might think that the line was produced by altering the minimal form of speech or by defamiliarizing a represented action, event, or object. But one might also believe that Rimbaud transcribed onto paper an obscure mental process that cannot be reduced to our shared language and to the common perception of things. Obscurity became even more profound and irreducible during the age of the historical avant-gardes. Here is the beginning of a poem by André Breton, “Le Soleil en laisse” (“The Sun on a Leash”), taken from Clair de terre (1923, Earthlight):

Le grand frigorifique blanc dans la nuit des temps

Qui distribue les frissons à la ville

Chante pour lui seul

Et le fond de sa chanson ressemble à la nuit

Qui fait bien ce qu’elle fait et pleure de le savoir

Une nuit où j’étais de quart sur un volcan

J’ouvris sans bruit la porte d’une cabine et me jetai aux pieds de la lenteur

Tant je la trouvai belle et prête à m’obéir

Ce n’était qu’un rayon de la roue voilée

Au passage des morts elle s’appuyait sur moi

The big white cold storage room in the mists of time

That sends out shivers to the city

Sings to itself

And the musical background of its song resembles the night

Which does what it does well and weeps because it knows it

One night when I was keeping watch over a volcano

Without a sound I opened the door of a cabin and threw myself at the feet of slowness

I found it that beautiful and that ready to obey me

It was only a spoke of a bent wheel

When the dead passed by it leaned against me.¹¹¹

The style deviates from degree-zero writing so strongly that the text is impenetrable. What is “the big white cold storage room in the mists of time | That sends out shivers to the city”? Is it an image that adorns a verbum proprium or a metaphorical creation that has lost all connection to the natural way of saying things? Regardless of the meaning of the individual passages, it seems clear to me that Breton’s poem does not merely add metaphorical disguises or metonymic cuts to a perceptible datum: it functions according to a different form of reasoning than that of rational discourse. It does not seem as if Breton has a degree-zero sentence, scene, or story in mind, except in a very vague way, that the poem then coats with figures or ornaments. Rather, he seems to let himself be guided by a chain of impenetrable psycho-linguistic associations, the “imitation of a consciousness that is inarticulate and therefore obscure, first to itself and then to its intended audience,”¹¹² creating a subjective chain that is intransitive and therefore obscure, and which eludes paraphrase. It “escapes from articulate language” and expresses “the chaos or silence of all hermetic wisdom,” or more simply “the obscurity of relations between human beings.”¹¹³ Ever since it became grammatical to use tropes freely, modern poetry has accustomed us to a mixed regimen of reading, to alternating the decipherable and the undecipherable: parts, lines, details that the reader interprets according to a referential logic, and portions of text that are impossible to paraphrase. When I read “La aurora” (“Dawn”), a poem by García Lorca from Poeta en Nueva York (1929–1930), from the context and the collection as a whole, I can tell that we are in a specific place:

La aurora de Nueva York tiene

cuatro columnas de cieno

y un huracán de negras palomas

que chapotean las aguas podridas.

La aurora de Nueva York gime

por las inmensas escaleras

buscando entre las aristas

nardos de angustia dibujada.

La aurora llega y nadie la recibe en su boca

porque allí no hay mañana ni esperanza posible.

A veces las monedas en enjambres furiosos

taladran y devoran abandonados niños.

Los primeros que salen comprenden con sus huesos

que no habrá paraíso ni amores deshojados;

saben que van al cieno de números y leyes,

a los juegos sin arte, a sudores sin fruto.

La luz es sepultada por cadenas y ruidos

en impúdico reto de ciencia sin raíces.

Por los barrios hay gentes que vacilan insomnes

como recién salidas de un naufragio de sangre.

Dawn in New York

has four columns of filth

and a hurricane of black doves

splashing in putrid waters.

Dawn in New York whimpers

down the huge stairs

seeking in the chaff

flowers of sketched anguish.

Dawn comes and no one receives it in his mouth

because there is no tomorrow or possibility of hope.

Sometimes furious swarms of coins

drill and devour the abandoned children.

The first to leave understand in their bones

there’ll be no paradise or leafless loves;

they know they go to the filth of numbers and laws,

to artless games, to fruitless sweat.

The light is buried by noises and chains

in the obscene challenge of rootless science.

In the neighborhoods are people who wander unsleeping

like survivors of a shipwreck of blood.¹¹⁴

The dawn he describes probably existed in reality, and the last two lines refer to scenes of poverty and urban conflict that recur in other poems of the book. Everything else obeys a different logic. According to Barthes, modern lyric poetry is no longer an ornamental variation on prose, like poésie classique, but “a different language or the product of a particular sensibility.” Before Symbolism and the avant-gardes gave greater freedom to the use of tropes, style was seen primarily as the product of a particular sensibility; after this turning point, we can understand why and how poetry became, in some cases, a different language.

Although obscurity and difficulty are not mutually exclusive, every text has its dominant: some poems are mainly obscure, some are mainly difficult, and some manage to escape this opposition. One of the hallmarks of obscure texts is the arbitrariness with which metaphors are used. Since metaphor juxtaposes two different semantic fields and eliminates the mediation of the “like,” it is the most risky figure for logic: it unites what rational discourse keeps distinct or approaches with caution.¹¹⁵ Extending metaphorical freedom therefore means reducing the space of daytime communication and distancing art from the shared world, as Ortega y Gasset understood when he defined metaphor as “the most radical instrument of dehumanization.”¹¹⁶ In contrast, difficulty does not completely destroy the logical connections of shared discourse; it leaves the job of restoring them to the paraphrase. If it is true that these two forms of incommunicability have always existed, it is also true that modern lyricism has transfigured them. In little more than a century, the territory that literature conceded to autobiographical content and to the subjectivity of style has expanded out of all proportion. Today, thanks to our reigning idea of lyric poetry, poets can in theory say whatever they want, inventing continually new forms of private incommunicability. Before Romanticism, Symbolism, and the historical avant-gardes, what Fortini calls obscurity was a rare anomaly; today it is part of the horizon of expectation with which we approach books of poetry. Similarly, the difficulty that stems from private sources, something unusual in premodern poetry, is now the norm in post-Romantic lyric poetry. Taken together, these two phenomena mean one thing: the triumph of subjective estrangement over mimesis, of personal diction over public speech, and of individual talent over tradition.

1. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed., ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1991), 261.

2. Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), chap. 4; Paul de Man, “Lyric and Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 166–186.

3. Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953); English translation, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 41–42.

4. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 251.

5. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, 42.

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), 40.

7. Plato, Ion, 533d–534e.

8. Aristotle, Poetics, 17.1455a.29–33.

9. Aristotle, Rhetorics, 1408b.18. When Aristotle speaks about the poet who goes “outside himself,” he is not thinking about the changes that language undergoes when it becomes poetic, but about the plots that poets are able to invent when they transcend their own lives and lose themselves in those of their heroes. For Aristotle, the core of the poetic art is not the style (lexis) but the story (mythos), and the genre of reference is not dithyramb but tragedy. There is no reason, then, to find Romantic or Symbolist tones in the idea of the poet as a madman. Aristotle is not thinking of the Orphic seer who is spoken by language but is simply using the categories of his culture to describe the process of going outside oneself and identifying with characters, the process that makes mythos and mimesis possible. See Guido Morpurgo Tagliabue, Linguistica e stilistica di Aristotele (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1967), 208ff.

10. Horace, Odes, 3, 25.

11. Horace, Epistles, 2, 3, lines 295–302.

12. Horace, Satires, 1, 4, vv. 39–44.

13. Aristotle, Poetics, 17.1455a.31–33.

14. Horace, Epistles, 2, 3, lines 99–111.

15. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 72–78.

16. Ibid., 71.

17. Aristotle, Poetics, 4.1448b.32; 5.1449a.31–36; 6.1450b.13–15; 16.1455a.17–25; 22.1458b.15. See the commentary by Roselyne Dupont-Roc and Jean Lallot in Aristotle, La Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 363.

18. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1404a.28–29.

19. Ibid., 1404b.3–5.

20. Ibid., 1404b.5–17.

21. Horace, Epistles, 2.3, lines 295–302.

22. Molière, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, act 2, scene 4, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 730.

23. 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), 147.

24. Ibid., 148.

25. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 10, 5, 4.

26. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 147–148.

27. “The great division in all discourses (parliers) is in two manners: one in prose and another in rhyme. But the teachings of rhetoric are common to both.…” Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou Tresor, ed. F. J. Carmody (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), 3.10, 327.

28. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, in Opere minori, vol. 2, (Ricciardi: Milan-Naples, 1979), 141–143.

29. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 290.

30. Ibid., 72.

31. I have discussed this more extensively in Guido Mazzoni, Theory of the Novel, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 181–185.

32. See Heinrich Lausberg, Elemente der literarischen Rhetorik (1949); English translation, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, trans. Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton (Boston: Brill, 1998), 213–214.

33. See Marc Fumaroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence (Paris: Droz, 1980).

34. See Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, chaps. 3, 4, 8; and Adrian Marino, The Biography of “The Idea of Literature,” trans. Virgil Stanciu and Charles M. Carlton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 1–5.

35. See Giorgio Manganelli, “Il romanzo” (1963), reprinted in Il rumore sottile della prosa (Milan: Adelphi, 1994), 58.

36. See Fumaroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence, “Introduction”; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (1987) (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 108.

37. Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Discours sur le style (1753, 1777), ed. Felix Hemon (Paris: Delagrave, 1894), 43.

38. Eduard Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa. Vom vi. Jahrhundert v. Chr. bis in die Zeit der Renaissance (1898, 1915) (Stuttgart und Leipzig: Teubner, 1995), 11.

39. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 375. Abrams, as we have seen, called this same theory “expressive.”

40. 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), 299.

41. Thomas Stearns Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” (1919) in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920) (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), 67–88; Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 396, 398. On the concept of tradition in Eliot and Curtius, see Claus Uhlig, “Tradition in Eliot and Curtius,” Comparative Literature 42, no. 3 (January 1990): 193–207.

42. José Ortega y Gasset, La deshumanización del arte (1925); English translation, “The Dehumanization of Art,” in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 17 and 11.

43. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista” (1912); English translation, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” in Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, ed. Robert Willard Flint (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Classics, 1991), 119–125.

44. André Breton, “Manifeste du Surréalisme” (1924); English translation, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 1–48.

45. Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art.

46. See Walter Benjamin, “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” (1939); English translation, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 103–148.

47. On the “institutionalization of anomie” and on the “regime of singularity” of modern and contemporary art, see, respectively, 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), 132 and 214–283; and “L’institutionnalisation de l’anomie” (1987); English translation, “Manet and the Institutionalization of Anomie,” in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 238–253; and Nathalie Heinich, Le triple jeu de l’art contemporain (Paris: Minuit, 1998), 19ff.

48. These citations come from leafing through the Giovanni Getto anthology, Lirici marinisti (1962) (Milan: TEA, 1990), 198, 208, 225, 225, and 412.

49. Eugenio Montale, “Arsenio,” from Ossi di seppia (1925, 1928), in L’opera in versi, ed. Rosanna Bettarini e Gianfranco Contini (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1980), 82; English translation, “Arsenio,” in Collected Poems 1920–1954, 2nd rev. ed., trans. and ed. Jonathan Galassi (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000), 113.

50. Getto, Lirici marinisti, 223, 410, 412.

51. See Vittorio Coletti, Storia dell’italiano letterario (1993) (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 196–201.

52. Giuseppe Parini, Il Giorno e le Odi, ed. Gianna Maria Zuradelli (Turin: UTET, 1965).

53. Developing an idea mentioned in Cesare Beccaria’s treatise Intorno alla natura dello stile (Research on the Nature of Style), Leopardi distinguishes between the “words” (parole) of poetry and the “terms” (termini) of science: words present the bare idea of the object they signify but also communicate accessory images; terms aridly define their objects without leaving any semantic auras. Since beauty is the enemy of precision, poetry will use words, not terms; its language will therefore be ancient, conventional, indeterminate, and distant from the language of everyday use. In Italy, this separate vocabulary had existed for only a few centuries, because the early writers had not yet refined literary language by distancing it from the everyday use of speech. Although this philosophy of literary history came to different conclusions, it is very similar to what we find in Wordsworth: Leopardi ends up justifying poetic diction despite knowing, like Wordsworth, that it is a conventional language. See Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri (1817–1832); English translation Zibaldone, trans. Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 1806–1815, September 30, 1821; 1226, June 26, 1821; 1807, September 30, 1821; 3016–3017, July 23, 1823.

54. Leopardi, Zibaldone, 2945–2946, July 11, 1823.

55. See Antonio Girardi, “La lingua poetica tra Scapigliatura e Verismo,” in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 98 (1981): 581ff.

56. Antonio Girardi, “Nei dintorni di Myricae: Come muore una lingua poetica?,” in Paragone—Letteratura 40, no. 14 (470) (1989): 70.

57. Giovanni Pascoli, Myricae, ed. Giuseppe Nava, 2nd rev. and enl. ed. (Rome: Salerno, 1991), 116.

58. Girardi, Nei dintorni di Myricae, 76.

59. William Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. with analytic commentary by Stephen Booth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 27.

60. Édouard Dujardin, Le Monologue intérieur: Son apparition, ses origines, sa place dans l’œuvre de James Joyce et dans le roman contemporain (Paris: Messein, 1931).

61. They actually appear in La Parole intérieure (1881) by Victor Egger. See Laura Santone, Voci dall’abisso: Nuovi elementi sulla genesi del monologo interiore (Bari: Edipuglia, 1999), 7, 81.

62. See Peter Bürger, Prosa der Moderne (1988), with the collaboration of Christa Bürger (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 312.

63. Anne Holmes, “Laforgue’s Derniers Vers, X: Interior Monologue and ‘Vers libre,’ ” Modern Language Review 108, no. 3 (July 2013): 802–811.

64. Édouard Dujardin, Les Premiers Poètes du vers libre (Paris: Mercure de France, 1922), 56–59.

65. Jules Laforgue, Derniers Vers, 10, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Maryke de Courten, Jean-Louis Debauve, Pierre-Olivier Walzer, and David Arkell (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1995), 330.

66. Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” 119.

67. Apollinaire, “Zone,” from Alcools (1913), in Œuvres poétiques, ed. Marcel Adéma et Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); English translation, “Zone,” in Alcools, trans. Anne Hyde Greet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 2–13.

68. Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London: Routledge and Paul, 1955), 148.

69. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Hälfte des Lebens,” in Sämtliche Werke. Zweiter Band, Gedichte nach 1800, ed. Friedrich Beißner, vol. 1, (Stuttgard: Kohlhammer, 1951), 117; English translation, “The Middle of Life,” in Hölderlin: His Poems Translated by Michael Hamburger (London: Harvill Press, 1952), 159.

70. Theodor W. Adorno, “Parataxis: Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins” (1963–1964); English translation, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 133.

71. Ibid.

72. Henning Bothe, Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos: Die Rezeption Hölderlins von ihren Anfängen bis zu Stefan George (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992), 19ff.

73. “50 Gedichte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” selected by Durs Grünbein, Barbara Köhler, Friederike Mayröcker, Peter Waterhouse, in Lyrik des 20. Jahrhunderts, special issue of Text+Kritik (1999), 5–6.

74. Leo Spitzer, La enumeración caótica en la poesía moderna (Buenos Aires: Imprenta y casa editora Coni, 1945).

75. Walt Whitman, “A Woman Waits for Me” (1856–1867), in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: Norton, 2002), 87–88.

76. Pablo Neruda, “Caballero solo,” in Residencia en la tierra (1925–1931), ed. Hernán Loyola (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997); English translation “Gentleman Alone,” in Five Decades: A Selection (Poems: 1925–1970), ed. and trans. Ben Belitt (New York: Grove Press, 1974), 13.

77. Emily Dickinson, “Further in Summer than the Birds” (1866) in Emily Dickinson Poems as She Preserved Them, ed. Cristanne Miller (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016), 534.

78. Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 88–89. See also John Schmit, “ ‘I Only Said-the Syntax-’: Elision, Recoverability, and Insertion in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry,” Style 27, no. 1 (1993): 106–124.

79. Wolf-Dieter Stempel, Syntax in dunkler Lyrik (Zu Mallarmés “À la nue accablante”), in Immanente Ästhetik, ästhetische Reflexion: Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne, ed. Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1966), 33–46.

80. Ugo Foscolo, “Lettera a Monsieur Guillon” (1807), in Scritti letterari e politici dal 1796 al 1808, ed. Giovanni Gambarin (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1972), 508.

81. Pascoli, “Mezzanotte,” in Myricae, 136.

82. Giacomo Leopardi, “Le ricordanze,” in Canti, ed. Emilio Peruzzi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1981); English translation, “The Recollections,” in Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, ed. and trans. Jonathan Galassi (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 183.

83. Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” 119.

84. Aristotle, Poetics, 1.1447b.17–20.

85. Ibid., 9.1451b.27–29.

86. “Is Verse Essential to Poetry?,” Monthly Magazine 2, no. 6 (July 1796): 454.

87. Ibid.

88. On the history between the opposition between poet and versifier, see Timothy Steele, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990), chap. 3.

89. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 262.

90. Leopardi, Zibaldone, 1695–1697, September 14, 1821.

91. The first extended critical reflections on prose poetry are also about French literature: see Franz Rauhut, Das französische Prosagedicht (Hamburg: Friederichsen, de Gruyter und C., 1929); Vista Clayton, The Prose Poem in French Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936); Albert Cherel, La Prose poétique française (Paris: L’Artisan du livre, 1940); and Suzanne Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Nizet, 1959). For a history of criticism of the poème en prose, see Steven Monte, Invisible Fences: Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 5–6.

92. “Poème en prose,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1780), vol. 12 (Neuchâtel: Samuel Faulche, 1765), 896. The example of a poème en prose that Jaucourt has in mind is Fénelon’s Télémaque.

93. Nathalie Vincent-Munnia, Les Premiers Poèmes en prose: Généalogie d’un genre dans la première moitié du dix-neuvième siècle français (Paris: Champion, 1996), 21ff.

94. Charles Baudelaire, Petits Poèmes en prose or Le Spleen de Paris (1869); English translation, Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose, trans. Keith Waldrop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 5.

95. See Clive Scott, Vers libre: The Emergence of Free Verse in France 1886–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 54ff.; Michel Murat, Le Vers libre (Paris: Champion, 2008), chaps. 1 and 3.

96. See M. L. Gasparov, Ocherk istorii evropeiskogo stikha; English translation, A History of European Versification, trans. G. S. Smith and Marina Tarlinskaja (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 284.

97. See Alberto Bertoni, Dai simbolisti al Novecento: Le origini del verso libero italiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995), 100.

98. Walt Whitman, “Notes Left Over,” in Complete Prose Works (1892), in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1056.

99. Ibid.

100. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crise de vers” (1886–1896); English translation, “Crisis in Poetry,” in Selected Prose Poems, Essays & Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 37.

101. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Sur l’Évolution littéraire” (1891); English translation, “The Evolution of Literature,” in Selected Prose Poems, Essays & Letters, 18–19.

102. Enquête internationale sur le Vers libre et Manifeste du Futurisme par F. T. Marinetti (Milan: Éditions de Poesia, 1909), 39.

103. Ibid., 29.

104. See Manfred Fuhrmann, “Obscuritas: Das Problem der Dunkelheit in der rhetorischen und literarästhetischen Theorie der Antike,” in Immanente Ästhetik, ästhetische Reflexion, 47–72; Franco Montanari, “Appunti per lo studio dell’oscurità nella poesia classica,” L’Asino d’oro 2, no. 3 (1991): 31–52.

105. Montanari, “Appunti per lo studio dell’oscurità nella poesia classica,” 46.

106. Arthur Rimbaud, “L’étoile a pleuré rose au coeur de tes oreilles,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz, 2nd rev. ed., (Paris: Flammarion, 2016); English translation “The Star Wept …,” trans. Wyatt Mason, in Rimbaud Complete (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 101.

107. See Michael North’s commentary to T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ed. Michael North (New York: Norton, 2001), 21.

108. Ibid., 22.

109. Marianne Moore, New Collected Poems, ed. Heather Cass White (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 295.

110. Franco Fortini, “Oscurità e difficoltà,” L’asino d’oro 2, no. 3 (1991): 87.

111. André Breton, “Le Soleil en laisse,” in Clair de terre (1923), in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 188; English translation, “The Sun on a Leash,” in Earthlight, trans. Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow (Copenhagen: Green Integer, 2004), 93.

112. Fortini, “Oscurità e difficoltà,” 87.

113. Ibid.

114. Federico García Lorca, “La aurora,” in Poeta en Nueva York (1929–30), 1st ed. with introd. and notes by Andrew A. Anderson (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2013), 209; English translation “Dawn,” in Poet in New York, trans. Pablo Medina and Mark Statman (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 73.

115. See Francesco Orlando, Illuminismo e retorica freudiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1982).

116. Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art, 35.