CHAPTER FOUR

The Literary Space of Modern Poetry

Poetry as Estrangement

As we have seen, between the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the form of European poetry underwent an extraordinary metamorphosis. In theory, poets gained complete lexical, metrical, syntactic, and rhetorical freedom; expressivism in content was accompanied by expressivism in form; and style could be interpreted as the product of a particular sensibility, or even as a different language. Although many writers tried to limit the ensuing anarchy, choosing to return to order was now a personal choice, no less fragile and arbitrary than choosing not to. We have also seen that modern poetry is a literary space with a center and two main peripheries: the center is occupied by lyric poetry, the outlying areas by two diametrically opposed attempts to surpass its primacy—long narrative or essay poems on nonautobiographical subjects, and poetry that aspires to resolve itself into pure form or pure sound. The main border lies in the relationship with the author’s differential autobiography, but what holds the territory together is the nature of the form.

Poetry is unsuited for mimesis because “imitation has much of the servile about it,” writes Leopardi in the Zibaldone.¹ Contrary to the writer who effaces himself to let facts speak for themselves, the “man of genius … will have his own feelings to express”; “he will be averse to clothing another character, to speaking in the voice of another person, to imitating.” He will want, rather, to be at the text’s center, talking about himself in a style that differs from the degree-zero of prose, which is best suited for representing the external world.² Leopardi is rewriting a commonplace of the Romantic aesthetic—the antithesis between imitation and expression. According to this paradigm, literature has two tasks: to recount the actions of human beings in the external world, and to express—to press out—the writer’s internal world. The first requires the author to focus on the reality that is considered objective by common sense, which requires the medium of prose, as in modern novels; the second allows the writer to express himself or herself and involves versification, as in poetry. On the page preceding the passage just cited, Leopardi wrote that, due to their length, epic poems require a plan set out coldly in advance, distorting the momentary impetus that constitutes the essence and secret of true poetry. This chain of automatic associations, as we have seen, came into being at a specific time: at the same time, in fact, as the development of modern genres, when poetry became specialized toward the lyrical. When poetry was still “prose + a + b + c,” narrating in verse according to the rules of prosody meant following a custom that had become second nature, governed by specific collective norms. However, once prose written in a simple style became perceived as the degree-zero medium, once the modern novel and the bourgeois drama supplanted narrative in verse and theater in verse, and once the expressive theory of style gained hegemony over the Western literary system, the act of breaking to a new line before the typographical end of the page became a form of estrangement, which distanced poetry from the natural way of telling stories or constructing arguments. Once verse writing became divorced from its ritual origin, the very act of starting a new line before its natural end represented a way of detaching from degree-zero communicative writing by shifting the reader’s attention from content to form. More generally, for the conventional wisdom that prevailed when the Romantic paradigm became hegemonic, a text’s form became the creation, expression, and trace of a person: the author. For this reason, all texts that draw attention to a stylistic deviation from the ordinary, that is, the “natural” and prosaic way of saying things, are implicitly egocentric. Although many forms of estranged prose have existed and still exist—beginning with novels that are read for how they are written and not for the story they tell—when it became unnatural to tell stories in poetry, a purely mimetic verse could no longer survive.³ This means that no poems today, even antilyric ones, can escape the subjectivism of style. All types of writing in verse have become opaque: even poems that strive to break out of the confines of the lyric by telling stories and presenting arguments do so in a form that, to our reading habits, appears overtly estranged. This is why the form of modern poetry subsists in a kind of paradox, a double bind: its devices, starting with the idea that it can break to a new line before reaching the natural end of the row, arise from ancient collective conventions whose original meaning has been lost, and which have subsequently been reinterpreted as personal ways of seeing things, as traces of an authorial subjectivity. Something that originated in ritual was reinterpreted (and rewritten) as a sign of self-expression. The appeal of modern poetry derives in part from this ambiguity.

There exists an egocentrism of content and an egocentrism of form: expressly autobiographical poems combine both, whereas texts devised from expressly impersonal poetics, such as Un coup de dés or The Waste Land, reject the former but flaunt the latter. While the mimetic novelist strives to be the mediator of a story that, in theory, speaks for itself, stylistic estrangement is inherent in modern verse writing—a genre in which the author retains absolute dominion over the writing, even while proclaiming the elocutionary disappearance of the poet or pure impersonality. Over the last two centuries, mimetic prose genres have in many ways placed the writer in the forefront of the work once again (with humorous novels, the roman personnel, essay novels, and novels based on style) but all of them leave aside verse. Today, when you walk into a bookstore you know you will find fiction shelves (all written in prose, with very rare exceptions) and the poetry shelf, mostly filled with lyric poetry. The epos, the romance, and novels in verse have disappeared. It may happen in English-speaking countries that Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate (1986) becomes a bestseller, that Derek Walcott writes a postcolonial epic in verse (Omeros, 1990), that John Ashbery publishes the 216-page Flow Chart (1991), and that Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red, 1998), Les Murray (Fredy Neptune, 1998) or Brad Leithauser (Darlington’s Fall, 2002) successfully devote themselves to the novel in verse,⁴ but these are texts that intentionally defy reader expectations. Usually, versified stories are rare and end up stacked in any case with the poetry books, which is to say, mainly lyrical texts, not novels. At least, this is what happened to all the texts in Italian bookstores described as verse novels on their back cover or on the publisher’s sleeve during the period when I was preparing the Italian version of this book.⁵ Besides, novel readers know very well that they will not find what they are looking for in these texts. Amazon’s editorial review advertising Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate in February 2002 is a good example: “Can 690 sonnets, rhyming a-b-a-b-c-d-e-f-e-g-g, be a novel? Definitely!” The question sounds like a blatant denial, betraying a fear that what is so confidently asserted may not be true. Bob Brandeis, the Amazon.com reviewer of Fredy Neptune, puts it candidly: “Despite laudable efforts by Vikram Seth and Anne Carson, the novel in verse isn’t exactly a fashionable genre.”⁶ Although willing to leave some space to the author’s speaking voice, novel readers expect the book to tell a story, and when diction overpowers content, the work might even prove annoying. Poe’s prophecy has come true: epic and didactic poetry are relics from which future readers will extract short lyric poems by cutting out the connecting passages.⁷ When toned down and with some exceptions allowed, this idea continues to be true on the whole, and it signals a momentous change.

Lyrical Romanticism

Although opacity of form ties the currents of modern poetry together, the genre remains a vast forcefield frayed at the edges. So far I have mentioned the difference between the center and the peripheries; now I would like to try to draw a rough map of it. It will be a very approximate attempt, for two reasons. The first stems from the difficulty of writing a literary history of the longue durée. A project of this sort has become problematic over recent decades. The culture of our times is increasingly skeptical of canons and unifying syntheses, whose unilateral, simplifying, and violent character has been deconstructed repeatedly. The rise of new collective subjects that were once silent or treated as a minority, the expansion of geographical spaces, the spread of relativism, the increase in the number of researchers, and the amount of research and empirical data have called into question any confidence one might have in writing a philosophy of literary history that for Bakhtin, Auerbach, Adorno, or Szondi still had a clear path forward. The second reason concerns specifically the genre of modern poetry, which seems more resistant to the claims of a comparative literary history than the novel. There is a “stubbornly national” element in modern poetry:

Poetry has primarily to do with the expression of feeling and emotion: and … feeling and emotion are particular; whereas thought is general. It is easier to think in a foreign language than it is to feel in it. Therefore, no art is more stubbornly national than poetry.⁸

Due to the Curse of Babel, poetry is the most provincial of the arts, but today, when civilization is becoming monotonously the same all the world over, one feels inclined to regard this as a blessing rather than a curse: in poetry, at least, there cannot be an “International Style.”⁹

In poetry, writes Auden, there cannot be an International Style. For this reason, what Hans Magnus Enzensberger called the “world language of modern poetry”¹⁰ does not exist except in rough form. In addition to the bond with the poet’s mother tongue, two other factors serve to keep national traditions locked up inside themselves, making poetry “the most provincial of the arts.” The most obvious is the relationship with the publishing industry. In Western countries, the number of foreign-language poetry books translated, distributed, and read is substantially smaller than the number of foreign-language fiction works: this becomes obvious from a quick look through publisher catalogues. The most important factor lies in the history of poetry itself: each linguistic–literary area has developed versions of modern poetry that are markedly more vernacular than versions of the novel, a genre that more easily and more frequently absorbs international influences. For these reasons, any maps are necessarily approximative and not very detailed on a small scale.

The point of departure for the historical and morphological history I sketch out here is suggested by the internal logic of poetry itself. Since the genre is characteristically egocentric, one can reasonably order the axes of its development on the basis of the weight and role that the first person has in the world depicted by the poem. One could consider the evolution of expressivism separately in terms of content and form, but this would entail adopting a mechanical criterion that does not approximate the real connection of the phenomena. Rather, subject matter and style need to be united in a single examination, focusing on the place that the speaker occupies in the text.

At the center of our literary space we find the subjective genre par excellence: lyric poetry. In the system of literary forms that arose with the Romantic revolution, the modern lyric has a kinship with prose autobiography; however, while the medium used by prose autobiography is associated in our conventional wisdom with mimesis, the determining factor in modern poetry is the weight of style. This means that ever since form was interpreted as reflecting a particular sensibility, the family of modern lyric texts has appeared to be marked by subjectivism. To echo Leopardi’s observation, we could say that if imitation in prose has much of the servile about it, then modern lyric poetry is typically a noble genre—a literary form that, by evoking thoughts or slivers of personal life in a style far removed from the ordinary way of telling things, conveys a doubly egocentric image of the world. The structure of theater and the novel easily transcends the sphere of an individual life: the hero of drama speaks and acts alongside other heroes in the common space of the stage; the narrator can make his or her own words conflict with those of the characters, or shift the action in time and space. Even the most lyrical of novelists has a hard time ignoring the constants of a genre constructed to show simultaneously the truth of the protagonist and the truth of what transcends the protagonist—the external world, the gaze of others, the psychological and social forcefields on which the identity and destiny of individuals depend. Conversely, modern poets find it difficult to step outside the sphere of the self. Whenever they attempt to do so, they seem to trespass beyond the measure that is intrinsic to the logic of the genre, venturing into a territory that our horizon of expectations judges as experimental.

But if lyric poetry represents the center around which the genre conglomerates, this core is in its turn so frayed and extended over time that it merits further segmentations. The model of subjective poetry that emerged in recent centuries, as we noted, arose between the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Applying a category of political philosophy to literature, we might call this archetype lyric Romanticism. What I am thinking of is not a specific set of texts but an ideal type that I will try to describe starting with a concrete individual example. In a famous essay, Meyer H. Abrams observed that the literature of Romanticism revamped the genres of poetry by inventing a lyrical form that would become wildly popular in the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, but which did not exist before Romanticism except in embryonic form. For lack of a better definition, Abrams called it the greater Romantic lyric, wanting to emphasize a theoretical continuity between this form and the Pindaric ode, which neoclassical critics called the greater ode to distinguish it from the Horatian lesser ode. The text of a greater Romantic lyric contains the monologue of an individuated poetic speaker who moves through an individuated landscape and holds a conversation with itself, with a silent interlocutor, or with things. Usually the first person begins by describing what it sees, and then delves into a broadly philosophical reflection that prompts it to make a moral decision, resolve an emotional problem, deal with a tragic loss, or reflect on the human condition.¹¹ Some of the most canonical poems of English Romanticism follow this structure: Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp,” “Frost at Midnight,” “Fears in Solitude,” and “Dejection: An Ode”; Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”; Shelley’s “Stanzas Written in Dejection” and “Ode to the West Wind.” But it is not hard to come up with dozens of other canonical examples in other literatures, from Leopardi’s “The Infinite” to Hölderlin’s “The Middle of Life” and Lamartine’s “L’Isolement.”

What distinguishes these Romantic poems from the premodern lyric written in a tragic style is their connection with contingency and individuation: the poetic discourse refers to a specific place and time, the speaker has a proper name, its identity coincides largely with that of the real person whose name appears on the book of poetry. This way of writing presupposes an ethos that is difficult to define in terms of form or content but which contemporary readers grasp easily, especially when they compare these poems to the subjective poems they have become accustomed to by twentieth-century literature. We could say that the greater Romantic lyric arose out of a form of confidence: the confidence with which the I speaks about itself, in the conviction that its personal life has an immediate universal value or, to use Hegel’s expression, a world-historical value—in the dual sense of “recognized by all” but also “essential for our understanding of reality.” This lyrical subject could be described the same way Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads describes the poet: namely, an individual who is not extraordinary in position, prestige, or deeds; a normal person, perhaps a bit more gifted in expressing thoughts and passions but for the most part equal to everyone else.¹² Since every detail of the lyric subject’s life can be known to us, from his or her name to a slew of incidental little anecdotes, readers who identify with the subject do not identify with a transcendental model. Rather, they superimpose their own subjective world onto the subjective world of the lyric speaker, as if the latter’s private idiosyncrasies were collective singularities.

At the level of content, then, this is a pure model of expressivism: differential autobiographism, immediate reader identification with another person, and triumph of the individual over the type. We would expect topics such as these to be accompanied by a corresponding form, one that is entirely subjective; instead, this kind of poetry comes nowhere near the excesses that Symbolism and the avant-garde movements would make familiar. Individual talent has to do battle with two forces: tradition, which would insist on respecting customs handed down from the past; and common sense, which would advise against subverting normal appearances. In theory, Romantic poetry breaks free from both; in actual fact, though, at least until the second half of the nineteenth century, the texts do not completely abandon them, as if this poetry with its strongly subjective content sought a reformist balance between tradition and the lifeworld. When we think of the ideal type of Romantic poetry, we think of this form of self-confident and measured individualism: self-confident in claiming the universal value of a personal experience, and measured in balancing expressivism and anti-expressivism—the rights of individual talent and respect for certain structures of public discourse that are rooted in common sense or tradition. Not surprisingly, although Romantic theory actually legitimized all experiments, only more than half a century later would true experimentalism explode. Apart from the early spread of free verse in pre-Romanticism and German Romanticism, the most important formal novelty in early nineteenth-century European lyricism remains the crisis in poetic diction. This self-confident and measured subject is also quite whole when compared to what would happen to it a century later.¹³ Between the second half of the nineteenth century and the age of the avant-gardes, the speaker in modern lyric poetry became progressively disharmonious, dissonant, and divided, as compared with the first person of Romantic poetry, which generally still possessed the inner hierarchical structures that give order to the flow of consciousness.

But the greater Romantic lyric was not the only major form in the period during and after Romanticism. Differential autobiographism was the new and ultimately hegemonic paradigm, but other first-person models continued to be reinterpreted and blended with the new model. European poetic Romanticism reused and rewrote the apparatus of themes and genres handed down by ancient poetry, creating a form of Romantic classicism. Much of the work of Hölderlin and Novalis, and some of the work of Foscolo, Keats, and Shelley, consists of texts in which, at least in the first instance, the speaker seems to move within the structures of transcendental autobiographism, reinterpreting ancient or medieval genres within the framework of a Romantic aesthetic: the ode, hymn, elegy, ekphrasis, lament, prosopopoeia, sonnet. Reading the entirety of Hölderlin’s poems does not yield many biographical details, and yet one has the sense of a voice that reuses ancient materials in a novel, modern, and wholly personal way to create an absolute lyrical voice. In 1819, while Leopardi was working on his idylls, Keats wrote his six great odes. In none of them do we find specific details from a contingent biography, any more than we do in Petrarch or Shakespeare. Five of the odes appeared in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), a volume containing short narrative poems and other sorts of texts, all still conceived (like the earlier Poems of 1817) according to the principle of separating genres, which Romanticism strove to leave behind. Keats’s six odes seem closer to the greater odes of classicist descent than to the greater Romantic lyric; yet whoever reads them notices an overload of subjectivity that cannot fit into the inherited schemes, partly because one cannot help but overlay them across the Poems of 1817, which offer a wealth of autobiographical details, and partly because the quality of the voice has changed. Behind the matter expressed in schemes descended from the tradition of the ode stands a contingent, unique speaker. It is no accident that Keats—like Novalis, Hölderlin, or Shelley—immediately created a biographical legend, and the first person in his poems overlapped with the person whose name appears on the covers of his books. Their tragic lives facilitated this process, but it never would have happened without the peculiarity of their diction.

Alongside the greater Romantic lyric, the other major tradition of lyrical Romanticism is the modern reinterpretation of forms that, in theory, contain no differential autobiographism and yet are charged with a voice that is singular and individuated but at the same time absolute and vertical. In this case too, the speaker in the text claims a universal value for the particular experience that it seeks to voice. When Adorno imagines lyricism as a genre that “hopes to attain universality through unrestrained individuation,” he is thinking of these first persons,¹⁴ who are thoroughly modern subjects, meaning Romantic and post-Romantic: “the manifestations in earlier periods of the specifically lyric spirit familiar to us are only isolated flashes.”¹⁵

Wholeness, security, and measure are qualities we recognize after the fact, from the vantage point of a later age when these characteristics cease to be obvious, when the individual who possessed them and the social conditions that legitimized them have faded away. From this point of view, Baudelaire’s and Whitman’s stances are quite interesting. Although Baudelaire’s speaker maintains a relatively traditional declarative posture, he was the first author to decry the “lost halo,” a crisis in the poet’s traditional role. He was also the first to introduce forms of experience and discursive constructions into his poetry that would become typical features of modernism, such as the epiphany (“À une passante”), as well as texts composed using associative methods that evade classical forms of narrative or argumentation (“Le Cygne”).¹⁶ Baudelaire was the first European poet to transport lyric poetry of a serious style, traditionally placed in a rural setting, into the city and into a modern physical space. Whitman, on the other hand, never faced the problem of having to legitimize his poetry: no poet has ever shown such confidence in his role, not even Victor Hugo, perhaps, who owed his immense popularity especially to his novels and public figure. The assumption behind Leaves of Grass, repeated constantly in the book, is that there is no gap between I and us: the speaker is a “comrade” to everyone (“these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them”);¹⁷ in singing himself he also writes the epic of a people. This gesture simultaneously embodies the modern lyrical dream (“to attain universality through unrestrained individuation”) while overcoming some of its assumptions. The first is wholeness: Whitman’s speaker seeks to be plural and multiple. In reality, the overall effect is quite different from that of divided modernist subjects: in Leaves of Grass there is a correspondence between self and world; in the end Whitman’s multiplicity has an extraordinarily cohesive tone. The second is the relationship to inherited tradition. Whitman consciously abandons the forms he associates with the literary and political Ancien Régime, with European feudalism, and renews the meter, lexicon, and syntax of English-language poetry. In this regard, he certainly exhibits confidence but not measure—if by measure we mean a balance with the forms of the past. He does not innovate in order to break with the public at large, as the European avant-gardes of the early twentieth century would do, in the name of pure, individual stylistic freedom, a subjectivism to which an indemonstrable political significance is perhaps attributed; instead, he tries to invent another tradition, another language, that is at the same time personal and collective. To this end, he relies on two great cornerstones of general culture: the oratorical tradition and, most of all, the Bible, whose heir he seeks to be, literally.¹⁸ His goal is to give an account of a plural nation that heralds a new world, based on an intermingling. The stylistic correlates of this project are multilingualism, inclusive lists, and the long line.

From the vista of more than a century and a half later, such a project seems unattainable. Ben Lerner puts it most aptly: “the Whitmanic program has never been realized in history, and I don’t think it can be.”¹⁹ The explosion of differences, a fundamental trait of the modern world that Whitman wants to sing about, makes it unthinkable for one voice to speak on behalf of everyone else, for a first person to be large enough to contain multitudes without trampling on other points of view.²⁰ But even if such an inclusive work of art could still exist, it is highly unlikely to be a book of poetry. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, “only in rare instances,” writes Benjamin, speaking of Baudelaire, “is lyric poetry in rapport with the experience of its readers”:²¹ it is a niche genre that speaks to a specialized group.

For a long time, twentieth-century poetry and poetics made a certain metaliterary idea habitual: the embarrassment or shame of writing poetry—the development and consequences of that “loss of the halo” that Baudelaire described in one of his Petits Poèmes en prose and, with different emphases, in Mon cœur mis à nu (My Heart Laid Bare).²² More than a static commonplace, this is a family of recurring themes that appear in two versions, one dysphoric and the other euphoric. In Italy, poetry was fully launched into the twentieth-century period of its history by the generation of authors born in the 1880s. Some of them wrote poems expressing their shame at writing poetry, at the loss of its social mandate. One of Aldo Palazzeschi’s most famous poems, “E lasciatemi divertire” (1910, “So Let Me Have My Fun!”), stages an ironic dialogue between a poet and the members of a respectable bourgeois audience. The poet provokes them by writing nonsense verses (“Tri tri tri, | fru fru fru, | ihu ihu ihu, | uhi uhi uhi”); the audience is outraged and questions whether this is poetry. The poem resembles a modern equivalent of a medieval tenson and can be read as a preview or transcription of what happened during “Futurist soirées,” performances that the Futurists held in theaters to provoke their audiences. Palazzeschi, who was one of the first to join Marinetti’s avant-garde, was also among the first to attend these events. “So Let Me Have My Fun!” is written in a comic register, but the intent, revealed in the final stanza, is serious:

Infine io ò pienamente ragione,

i tempi sono molto cambiati,

gli uomini non dimandano

più nulla dai poeti,

e lasciatemi divertire!

In the end I am plenty right,

times have changed,

men don’t ask anything anymore

from poets:

so let me have my fun!²³

We find a similar declaration in a contemporary text, “La signorina Felicita” by Guido Gozzano: “io mi vergogno, | sì, mi vergogno di essere un poeta” (“I’m ashamed to be— yes, I confess, I’m ashamed to be a poet!”).²⁴

From then on, the number of Italian poets who wrote poems expressing their shame at writing poetry only grew. Lyric poetry is the only literary genre to experience such a phenomenon, and it is easy to understand why. Since poets are able to speak in public about their personal experience, they give voice to the embarrassment that intellectuals feel in the face of people who do “real” work: Gozzano explicitly opposes his own “life of dreams, this life of sterility” to the “rude rough” life of the “merchant after cash.”²⁵ There are two sides to this, though: on the one hand, the poets’ shame matches that of all intellectuals; on the other, modern poets are also the most vulnerable to a sense of guilt. In addition to the hubris of creativity, they suffer from the hubris of self-expression: they claim to speak in the first person and to do so in a form charged with subjectivity; they also claim that readers will find a universal truth in the idiosyncrasy of another particular being. Modern poetry harbors an element of exhibitionism, which can be experienced as an aggression or, at any rate, as a gesture destined not to be understood, eliciting boredom, annoyance, or displeasure. In English-language poetry, the text that memorably encapsulates this crisis is Marianne Moore’s “Poetry,” first published in 1919 in the literary magazine Others and rewritten repeatedly. Here are the first lines:

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in

it after all, a place for the genuine.²⁶

What makes it proverbial is the “too,” the naturalness with which it is taken for granted that no one likes poetry and that the important things lie “beyond all this fiddle.” Immediately afterward comes a “however” and a response to the crisis of legitimacy, but the line that expresses the common perception of the literary genre, and that has remained in the memory of many, is the first.²⁷

Legitimizing poetry is an issue for many twentieth-century writers. Grouping their responses around cardinal points, we might say that there are two opposing ways of reacting to the loss of balance that the Romantic archetype was able to preserve. In the first case, those who speak up feel that they do not have the right to give themselves too much importance and tend to deflate the pathos in an ironic, sarcastic, or cynical way; in the second case, expressing oneself means violating the rules of social life, as if the affirmation of oneself and one’s style were an inherently provocative act that takes place against the world, against the norms of public discourse and conventions. Here, then, is where the confidence and measure of Romantic poetry, its harmonious egocentrism, neither excessive nor marginal, acquire a retrospective clarity and historical value—because our primary idea of lyric poetry, as we said, is based on that model, and because it somehow represents the entelechy of a genre that is structurally individualistic, the center of its literary space.

Expressionism and Irony

The forcefield of modern poetry can be described by using lyric Romanticism as the term of comparison, and by studying how the representation of the world and the speaker changed beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it became more difficult for poets to defend the confidence and measure inherent in the idea of confession. The peripheral areas of the forcefield, born out of the crisis in lyric Romanticism, branch out from the center and are almost always defined by negation, as are some of their most famous watchwords (“the elocutionary disappearance of the poet,”²⁸ “the extinction of personality”²⁹), which can easily be read as the reversal of Romantic watchwords.

While the peripheries were taking form, the center of the territory was also being renewed: the first result of the metamorphosis that transformed the style of European lyric poetry between the second half of the nineteenth century and the period of the avant-gardes was precisely the change in subjective poetry. The main direction of this development is easily grasped by rereading some of the texts we have looked at. The fifteen lines of “The Infinite” describe the experience of an empirical individual with absolute seriousness, but although its diction is full of personal elements, it does not disrupt conventional wisdom and tradition. The poems that Rimbaud was writing during the years of “The Star Wept Rose” were very different, even in those days. Compared to the Romantic archetypes, the speaker’s place in the world remains unchanged because, unquestionably, there is a collective meaning in the subjective experience it evokes. What disappears is the balance between self-expression and stylistic composure that Romantic poetry managed to preserve. Rimbaud understands that it is possible to write lyric poetry in verse or in prose, to break to a new line at will, to mix different registers, and to use tropes that subvert the forms generally used to give order to the world through language. In short, he understands that to pursue immediacy, individual talent can now permit itself to ignore every shared constraint.

I would not know how to define this way of making poetry except by using a category that has a long history and many layers, that of expressionism. To avoid misunderstandings, for it is a notion worn out by polysemy, I will draw out the perimeter of its intended meaning. Among the documents generally used to explain the principles of figurative expressionism, there are letters in which Vincent van Gogh explains his idea of painting to his brother, Theo. In one of the most important of them, Vincent contrasts himself with the Impressionists: while the latter try to depict the way things look to human eyes, van Gogh uses “color more arbitrarily in order to express [him]self forcefully.”³⁰ This definition lends itself to a wider use; indeed, we could call expressionist that form of mimesis in which artists give themselves the right to profoundly distort the sensible appearance of reality—the appearance shared by common sense—in order to express themselves more forcefully. Just as painters alter natural colors, so poets alter inherited customs and the ordinary way of saying things, by subverting the laws of meter and public syntax, for example, by rejecting poetic diction, and by using rhetorical figures with absolute freedom, even at the cost of becoming obscure or difficult. To this end, poetic expressionism submits mimesis to a strong subjective estrangement, but it does not erase the reference to reality, to the idea that the text talks about a common world. This is a continuation of Romanticism by other means, in an era in which the centrality of the self is no longer reconciled with respect for inherited norms and with the ordinary way of representing things through language. What remains unchanged is the central value that continues to be attributed to subjective experience, the aura of seriousness of the speaker’s monologue. While it is true that great Romantic poetry already contained some expressionist elements, the new poetics became established primarily in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it became clear that in order for lyric egocentrism to be fulfilled, poetic form needed to be liberated from the boundaries imposed by conventions. This is what took place in English-language poetry after Whitman and in French-language poetry after Rimbaud.

The mirage of absolute authenticity did not act exclusively on form. Although egocentric, Romantic confessions in verse never went beyond a certain threshold of subjectivism in their choice of subject matters: rarely did they allow themselves to be carried away into the unregulated expression of the dark, unconscious, chthonic content that would invade the global language of modern poetry between the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth; nor did they allow their personal lives to overstep the boundaries of dignity and decorum, as happens regularly in twentieth-century literature. From this perspective, some twentieth-century confessional poetry has an aggressive element to it when it tells its story as self-display, intended to challenge common sense and modesty. In talking about an expressionist development in modern subjective poetry, I would like to mention two intertwined processes: the conquest of formal anarchy, which allowed poets to transgress the stylistic limits still adhered to by the greater Romantic lyric, and the possibility of telling about aspects of one’s inner life that early nineteenth-century literature ignored, censored, or restricted to the comic genre.

But this was not the only way for subjective poetry to adapt to a different era. It suffices to see how the “shame of poetry” theme evolved—a sure sign that lyrical Romanticism was in crisis. There are two versions of this topos, as we have said: one, euphoric and expressionistic; the other, dysphoric and ironic. Beginning in the 1880s, French-language literature (Maurice Maeterlinck, Francis Jammes, but especially Jules Laforgue), developed a poetry that was still Romantic in structure (a first person speaks about itself in an expressive style) but anti-Romantic in spirit, with the egocentric genre used to display the limits of the speaker in an ironic or pathetic way. These are poems that claim to speak to everyone solely because they flaunt a marginality that all readers are expected to recognize as their own. In Italy, Maeterlinck, Jammes, and Laforgue influenced the poets that Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, in 1910, called “crepuscolari,” “the twilight poets,” inventing a critical category that would be hugely successful. Guido Gozzano was the most prominent of them. The work of Laforgue influenced English-language modernist poetry, especially Eliot and Pound.³¹ Thanks to the mediation of Arthur Symons and his book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), Eliot discovered Laforgue in 1908, and the effects of his reading are discernible in the texts collected in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). Pound discovered him a few years later, around 1914. Laforgue exerted an influence on the tone of “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” (1919), on Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and on the construction of the poetic persona in the first Cantos.³²

The introduction of an ironic element gave new life to the lyric, in part because the claim to truth made by the traditional Romantic lyric subject would be destroyed by irony. This process could thus mean many things, all of which were difficult to reconcile with the Romantic paradigm: the weakening of the speaker, its splitting into multiple voices, the irruption of a theatrical element, the irruption of a reflective element (“The ironist is one who suggests that the reader should think”).³³ In any case, it is a sign that the balance out of which Romantic poetry arose no longer held, as happens when “men don’t ask anything anymore from poets” (Palazzeschi, “So Let Me Have My Fun!”) or they ask for something other than “obscure reveries | Of the inward gaze” (Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley). In the prosaic years of the second half of the twentieth century, some great poets would incorporate an ironic element into their poetic persona, from Philip Larkin to Montale in his last phase, with which they would streak their desperate and ultimately tragic voices.

Expressionism and irony are mirror-image poetics. They are animated by a sort of pathology of self-expression: the idea that talking about oneself has become a gesture charged with latent violence. The expressionist poet experiences it as a provocation, the ironic lyricist as something from which one must shield oneself, either by putting one’s diction in quotation marks, or by introducing an element of shame and passive aggression. For both, the confident and measured individualism of the greater Romantic lyric was irrecuperable.

Modern Lyric Classicism and Subjective Poetry

Although twentieth-century culture and poetry have in many ways distrusted Romantic poetry and Romantic discourse around poetry, “the romantic model of the lyric as an expression of the poet has remained very much in the horizon for poets in the twentieth century,”³⁴ both “as a model to be resisted or rejected”³⁵ and as a paradigm to be readjusted. From this standpoint, a substantial part of modern poetry can be viewed as an attempt to acclimatize a poetic subject that still functions according to a romantically inspired logic to new, more torn and skeptical times. The tendencies that oppose such a model tend to trivialize it by equating it to the most naive mainstream poetry (the “first person meditations | where the meaning of life becomes | visible after 30 lines” detested by Bob Perelman, or the re-poésie detested by Jean-Marie Gleize), but the lyric poetry of the twentieth century that followed in the wake of the Romantic paradigm cannot be reduced to this. Since a great deal of modern poetry continues to preserve a theoretical continuity with the Romantic stance, there are many examples from which to choose.

In February 1922, while Eliot was finishing his revisions to the manuscript of The Waste Land, Rilke completed the project of the Duino Elegies and wrote his Sonnets to Orpheus. The speaker in these works (whether I or we) constructs a dichtende Denken, a poetic thought that proceeds through allegories and figures: the angel, the animal, the hero, the artist, the lover, the mother, the maiden, the marionette (with reference to Heinrich von Kleist), the mask, the acrobat (with reference to Baudelaire and Picasso), the Rose of Contemplation, the inside, the outside, Orpheus, Apollo, and so forth. If the endpoint of both Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus is the acceptance of the world’s transience, it is significant that they contain many reflections on transience but few fragments of it, that is, few anecdotes. The greater Romantic lyric is nowhere to be found, except on occasion, and in any case there are much fewer of them than in Neue Gedichte (New Poems) and especially in the prose of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rather, there is an attempt to acclimatize the high-register lyrical voice that Novalis and Hölderlin had developed—absolute and vertical—by introducing a new philosophical vitality into traditional topics and genres. And it is no coincidence that of all his contemporaries Rilke felt particularly close to Paul Valéry, who, in many of his poems, starting from La Jeune Parque (1917) onward, pursued a poetics that was in some respects similar.

If Baudelaire, as Montale writes, was “the central, normative, entirely nineteenth-century poet”³⁶ of French literature because of his ability to adapt themes and forms of Romantic origin to the new urban world, then the central, normative, entirely twentieth-century poet of Italian literature was Montale himself. What made him so was his ability to adapt the forms of the greater Romantic lyric to the psychological and physical world of the twentieth century. In the poems he wrote between the second edition (1928) of Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) and La bufera (1956, The Storm), his style maintains a bond with the premodern tragic lyric through its meter, syntax, and vocabulary, and the everyday experience of an empirical person still has a world-historical value, just as it did in lyric Romanticism. This is a dynamic and dialectical continuity, which gives a measure of how much poets’ habits changed after the triumph of individual talent, and it salvages the spirit of tradition by retracing it to the letter but without nostalgia. Montale’s language is technical, concrete, and modern, with historical allusions, but it is also precisely chosen and stripped down to the essential: it is multilingual and open to the modern world but also monostylistic and cohesive, as the lexicon of high lyricism has always been. These two components, a vocabulary of literary origin and technical or prosaic terms, are held together by a search for precision, by the ability to convey the particular nuances of a particular experience.³⁷ Meanwhile, the meter recaptures or alludes to traditional verse and schemes without a trace of irony or blatant archaism. Thus, in an age when lyric poetry is subjected to the mimetic force of prose and the anarchic thrust of individual talent, it makes no assumption of an incomprehensible rupture between present and past, and it does not denounce the anachronistic character of prosody, the most ceremonial of rules. The form of experience evolves as well: Montale can attribute a universal value to segments of his life history only because the events he speaks about proceed in a discontinuous, epiphanic fashion. Romantic biographies are potentially continuous, because a personal life can be transformed at any moment into a universally human symbol; by contrast, the densely packed moments to which Montale’s poems give voice are entirely random, surrounded by a time that is empty and senseless, by that “wearing-down | of threadbare facts” that each poem must interrupt in order to come into existence.³⁸ Therefore the continuity of the themes, every bit like that of the style, is not rigid but dialectical: the spirit of the greater Romantic lyric survives, the letter adapts to the times.

Rilke’s and Montale’s poetry are two different forms of modern lyric classicism:³⁹ “classicism” because it presents a continuity with the canonical tradition of high-style poetry, and especially with the entelechy of the greater Romantic lyric, which has become the canonical model of modern subjective poetry written in a tragic tone; “modern” because it adapts tradition to new times without nostalgically preserving the past. But lyric Romanticism becomes a standard even when it does not present a continuity with the tradition of poetry written in a tragic style. During the twentieth century, differential autobiographism broke down any remaining thematic or formal boundaries and became grammaticalized. In American poetry, this process became fixed in the critical category of confessional poetry and in the critical discourse accompanying it. In a review that M. L. Rosenthal dedicates to Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, published in 1959 in The Nation, one page traces a genealogy that starts from the Romantic lyric and arrives at Lowell through Whitman’s “Calamus.”⁴⁰ Lowell distanced himself from what preceded him because he was not afraid to push his confession to the point of shame, and because his speaker did not seek the “cosmic equations and symbols” used by the Romantics to try to link the universal to the particular; he accepted, rather, to be himself, without masks or hidden meanings.⁴¹

Beyond the Lyric: Long Poems and Theatricality

Although the variants of lyric Romanticism differ from one another, they nevertheless retain a kinship because their texts never deviate from the basic form of subjective poetry: monologues by an individuated character that speaks to itself in a style expected to be laden with personal characteristics. But the history of modern poetry also includes attempts to overcome the unrestrained individuation to which lyric poetry seemingly tends. While expressionism, ironic diction, and modern classicism remain tied to the lyric form, the genre’s peripheries arise from attempts to transcend its egocentric core. This overcoming takes place in diametrically opposed directions, producing contrary results. On the one hand, we find the intricate world of texts that recycle narrative, reflective, or broadly theatrical content, thereby overstepping the limits of autobiography; on the other, texts that attempt to shift the reader’s attention from meaning to sound, from an interest in personal content to the play of form. One of these peripheries tends to go beyond the lyric monologue; the other, while proclaiming the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, ends up exacerbating the innate individualism of modern lyricism.

To regain objectivity, one can act on the content, on the form, or, as often happens, on both. Acting on the content means regaining an epic or essay pace that is alien to the lyric measure; acting on the form means escaping from the opacity of modern poetic style by adopting a more discursive diction, but without necessarily giving up on private anecdotes or personal opinions. Sometimes these two movements go together, and sometimes they do not: a work like Wordsworth’s The Prelude adopts a relatively communicative style but tells the story of the author’s life; a work like Pound’s Cantos transcends lyricism in terms of subject matter but does so by adopting a highly personal and idiosyncratic style; Carson’s “The Glass Essay” uses a transparent style to combine autobiographical content with essay writing in verse.

Narrative or essay poetry, an essential part of the modern literary space, is constantly reevaluated by those who strive to show that modern writing in verse does not coincide with the lyric.⁴² Although subjective forms undoubtedly occupy the center of the territory, antilyric poets have earned a place of absolute prominence in the canon of modern literature. Among the many examples that could be cited, I will choose the most representative. T. S. Eliot is perhaps the most famous and influential of the twentieth-century authors who tried to renew verse writing by rejecting the centrality of the speaker. His works changed the way poetry was composed in English-language literature and also in Greece (Giorgos Seferis), Poland (Czesław Miłosz), and Italy (Mario Luzi, Elio Pagliarani). In the 1910s, Eliot exhorted poets to practice “the extinction of personality”⁴³ and search for forms that are foreign to traditional lyrical egocentrism, such as dramatic monologues (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion”). In the 1920s and early 1930s, he devoted himself to narrative poems in which a linear plot is replaced by a multilingual montage of voices, characters, and different situations (The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday), or texts with a theatrical structure (Sweeney Agonistes). Then, in the period of the Four Quartets, he invented a poetry that was classicist in style but antilyric in intention, introducing long passages of philosophical or theological reflection into the verse plot. What remains unchanged in Eliot’s poetry, in both his experimental and classicist phases, is the rejection of poetic egocentrism: in different ways, the montage of voices in The Waste Land and the meditations in the Four Quartets show the reader that what is essential in life never occurs in personal and self-centered experiences.

Mutable and extensive, this antilyric periphery combines with the lyric center in many ways. For example, the works of Wordsworth and Pound mentioned earlier include phenomena of partial contamination, since The Prelude fits the most subjective of content into a transitive form, while the Cantos recount suprapersonal content in a strongly personal form. That said, stylistic expressivism is not something that can be eliminated, unless the poet rediscovers a premodern type of ornamental versification. The style of the modernist long poem incorporates a marked trait of subjective estrangement: The Waste Land, for example, is held together by a montage of parts, following a logic that is partially obscure to readers who lack guidance. The notes that Eliot added at the end of the book edition are a sign and symptom of this.

Another way to expand the boundaries of subjective diction is to introduce a strong theatrical dimension into the lyric monologue. European literature has always been familiar with what German critics call Rollengedicht, role poetry, in which the first person does not correspond to the poet or to the class of people to which the poet belongs but possesses the autonomy of a real character (the lover, the shepherd in love, and so on). After the Romantic turn, this tradition was enriched with new possibilities, the most important of which was the technique of the dramatic monologue. Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning helped to develop and disseminate it in English-language poetry of the nineteenth century, while Mallarmé, Laforgue, and Valéry introduced it into French poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴⁴ The speaker in the dramatic monologue is a historical or fictional character who publicly reveals the meaning of his or her destiny, as in a theatrical soliloquy isolated from the plot of the drama. Somewhat similar to this archetype is a changing, pervasive form that met with extraordinary success in the second half of the twentieth century: the poem for interposed persona,⁴⁵ in which the speaker is a kind of mask, a character who resembles but is not identical to the poet. Fernando Pessoa used it systematically, distributing his work among many figures of authorship, one of whom bears his name, as did John Berryman and Geoffrey Hill, who implicitly or explicitly adopted theatrical forms in most of their major works. From this point of view, the work of Wallace Stevens is extraordinary and unclassifiable. The subjective element is overwhelmed by the multiplication of reflexive and metapoetic parts, by the play of pronouns, by the plurality of personae. On the other hand, Stevens’s work also has a lyric trait, especially his last two collections, The Rock (1954) and Opus Posthumous (1957). It is interesting to see how the theatrical aspect and estrangement that derive from talking about one’s life using grammatical subjects other than the first-person singular allow the emergence of several topical themes of the great lyric tradition: lost time, the vanishing of the world that once was ours, the approach of death. This is the beginning of “Seventy Years Later,” the first section of a long poem entitled “The Rock,” “the most nihilistic in Stevens’s work so far”:⁴⁶

It is an illusion that we were ever alive,

Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves

By our own motions in a freedom of air.

Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.

It is no longer air. The houses still stand,

Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.

The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.

They never were … The sounds of the guitar

Were and are not. Absurd. The words spoken

Were and are not. It is not to be believed.⁴⁷

We find this same ability to reinterpret the themes of lyric poetry through a gaze that goes outside itself, observes itself from outside, and deflates the pathos in one of the poets who learned the most from Stevens, John Ashbery. For example, many poems in A Wave (1984), one of his finest books, are about the most topical of lyrical themes—love—but in this fashion:

To have been loved once by someone—surely

There is a permanent good in that,

Even if we don’t know all the circumstances

Or it happened too long ago to make any difference.

Like almost too much sunlight or an abundance of sweet-sticky,

Caramelized things—who can tell you it’s wrong?

Which of the others on your team could darken the passive

Melody that runs on, that has been running since the world began?

Yet, to be strapped to one’s mindset, which seems

As enormous as a plain, to have to be told

That its horizons are comically confining,

And all the sorrow wells from there, like the slanting

Plume of a waterspout: doesn’t it supplant knowledge

Of the different forms of love, reducing them

To a white indifferent prism, a roofless love standing open

To the elements? And some see in this paradigm of how it rises

Slowly to the indifferent heavens, all that pale glamour?⁴⁸

Beyond the Lyric: Pure Poetry

Another anti-Romantic periphery that has played a significant role in the history of modern poetry is located on the other side of the literary space. It originated with French Symbolism, centered on the utopia of pure poetry, and was disseminated in countless variations during the twentieth century. I describe it starting from the theoretical writings of the poet who contributed more than any other to its diffusion—Stéphane Mallarmé. Ever faithful to the poetics he embraced during his school years, in all his programmatic reflections, from his youthful letters to his writings as an older adult, Mallarmé contradicted the cornerstones of lyric Romanticism. It is pointless for poets to express themselves with immediacy or describe the phenomenal world and visible reality, for all this is meaningless contingency or, in Mallarmé’s vocabulary, brute Matière or Hasard, brute matter or chance. Rather, the authentic vocation of literature is orphic and suprapersonal: to strip language of its everyday use and bring it back to a hypothetical original fullness, by creating an absolute poetic voice, divorced from contingency, by making the form and content of human discourse coincide, and by describing the “pure notion” of things instead of external accidents.⁴⁹ The synthesis and supreme result of literature is Le Livre, “a hymn …, like a pure whole grouped in some dazzling circumstance,”⁵⁰ on which all true poets unconsciously work together, and to whose writing Mallarmé wished to devote himself consciously. Mallarmé’s texts are actually distinguished by their rejection of any mimetic or expressive immediacy, both in content and form, since they ignore or sublimate the fortuitousness of everyday life. Instead, they tell about mythological subjects and recount allegories or emblematic scenes in which the primary conflicts of the human condition find a symbolic representation in a register that is vertical and absolute. Given that these “dazzling circumstances” are, as Mallarmé says, the revelation of an Idea, in both the psychological and metaphysical sense of the word, the style of the work must be the “exact spiritual setting” of this revelation;⁵¹ and since the pure language of the essences, unlike the corrupted language of ordinary communication, does not distinguish between form and content, the true poet must strive to abolish the separation between sound and meaning, constitutive of the common way of speaking, and achieve that perfect correspondence proper to music.⁵² In the practice of writing, a poetics of this kind makes it imperative to reduce referential elements in favor of evocative ones, by choosing words on the basis of the signifier or by following an illogical syntax. The goal is to dissolve the “words of the tribe” into the essential language of poetry, to which Mallarmé attributes orphic and collective meanings, as if it were the nucleus of a future popular religion built around art.⁵³ True poetry presupposes the eclipse of the poet, who yields the initiative to words, allows sound to speak, and relinquishes any claim to expressing his or her own irrelevant contingency.⁵⁴

From this poetics descends, directly or indirectly, a long and frayed critical tradition that emphasizes the primacy of sound over sense, form over content. In addition to his immediate successors, Mallarmé’s poetics has influenced authors very different from him in terms of their background and interests. The idea that the focus of modern poetry is play on language and not the communication of content is a topic we find in the essays of both Valéry and Sartre.⁵⁵ Usually, the reflections that accompany the development of pure lyric insist on the irreconcilable opposition between romantic subjectivism and symbolic depersonalization, between Erlebnislyrik and pure poetry. In reality, this conclusion is valid only if one accepts Mallarmé’s aesthetics. Remaining instead in the realm of common sense affords an interesting perspective. Whoever reads Mallarmé’s poems without knowing his assumptions finds a poetry that is introverted and solipsistic in its choice of subject matter and style. The texts describe the fragments of an individual metaphysics difficult to understand in its entirety; the style is based on a strong subjective estrangement, on the horror of something “said without being put in order (arrangée),” as the young Mallarmé explained to his friend Eugène Lefébure.⁵⁶ As in all art forms that distance themselves from the lifeworld, the text makes sense if reader and writer share the underlying assumptions that make it possible to construct a world remote from the ordinary perception of things. When Mallarmé’s poetry is separated from its legitimizing aesthetics, it takes on a different meaning. The death of the old lyrical attitude does not lead to the birth of an impersonal poetry but to the construction of a poetic super-world divorced from everyday prose—a world where allegories written on paper are shards from a personal forêt de symboles, and the form overturns the ordinary way of saying things, guided by a chain of associations, idiosyncrasies, and personal references. Symbolism is a form of lyricism without a confessional speaker, and in a certain sense it is the triumph of subjectivism in poetry. It communicates an inwardly oriented idea of the world and an egocentrism so strong that it eliminates the last residue of narrative objectification that Romantic and post-Romantic poetry had preserved—a character in the structure of the text who tries to tell or express something by saying “I.” When literary subjectivity is communicated through style, the dominion of the speaker over the represented reality becomes total and imperceptible.⁵⁷

Speaking of this, it may be helpful to revisit two concepts from Ortega y Gasset’s ideas on modern art that Hugo Friedrich adapted to poetry in order to explain the development of lyric poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century: dehumanization (Enthumanisierung) and depersonalization (Entpersönlichung).

A basic feature of modern poetry is its increasingly pronounced divorce from natural life. Together with Rimbaud, Mallarmé brought about a radical withdrawal from personal and confessional poetry, a genre that was still being cultivated on a high level by Verlaine. Older poetry, from the troubadours to the preromantics was hardly ever an experiential or diarylike communication of private feelings; only the misconception of a few literary historians infected by romanticism made it appear as if it were. But, on the other hand, this poetry, stylized and artistically varying the universal, remained within the range of the human and the familiar. Modern poetry excludes not only the private person but also normal humanness. None of the above-mentioned poems by Mallarmé [“Sainte,” “Éventail (de Mme Mallarmé),” and “Surgi de la croupe et du bond”] can be explicated biographically—although for reasons of curiosity or laziness some critics have repeatedly tried to do so. But no poem by Mallarmé can be interpreted as an expression of a joy that we all know or a melancholy that we all experience and therefore comprehend. Mallarmé wrote from a center of gravity that would be difficult to name.… Mallarmé continued along the route that Novalis and Poe had recommended, the road leading the poetic “I” to a suprapersonal neutrality.⁵⁸

Mallarmé, writes Friedrich, “perfects the view, current since Baudelaire, that by imitating reality, the artistic imagination does not idealize it but deforms it,”⁵⁹ thereby eliminating the speaker and allowing language to speak. Indeed, restored to their basic structure, Mallarmé’s poems are nothing more than emblematic scenes represented in an estranged style and devoid of references to a recognizable lived experience; and yet the skeptical reader cannot help but distinguish between what the scenes are objectively and what they should be according to the aesthetics of Symbolism. For Mallarmé, the great orphic poetry, the supreme form of knowledge, communicates an image of the world that has a universal value, because it is not a language but the human Language, removed from its definitional use and brought back to its essence. By contrast, according to the logic of literary history, the works to which Mallarmé ascribes world-historical importance are not the Language but a language—one of the many poetic manners scattered throughout European poetry in the late nineteenth century. The only reason it differs from the others is because of the strong censure and estrangement to which it submits mimesis of the inner and outer worlds. To the eyes of a disenchanted observer who does not take these poetics as a given, the style of Symbolist poetry—so remote from doxa and tradition—is anything but impersonal: writing by circumventing verba propria and the degree-zero of perception actually means introducing an entirely subjective image of the world, which is sedimented in the content and, above all, in the style.⁶⁰ To believe that the dehumanization achieved by this poetry is a form of “suprapersonal neutrality” (Friedrich), that it allows access to a deeper orphic, symbolic dimension, or that it alludes to regaining a utopian communitarian language removed from the equivalence of exchange value (Rancière),⁶¹ one must accept the logic that governs Mallarmé’s reflections, which has an objectively elitist aspect to it.⁶² If, on the other hand, we place Mallarmé’s poetry in its literary space, in the field of poetic possibilities that were practicable in the second half of the nineteenth century, we cannot fail to see that every type of opaque style distant from the lifeworld and based on a system of references shared only by a limited public is an extreme form of subjectivism, because the elocutionary disappearance of the poet at the level of content corresponds to the elocutionary triumph of the poet at the level of form. In this regard, symbolism is the true archetype of obscure poetry.

There are, however, other forms of intransitivity—of egocentrism without individuation—and they have a complex genealogical relationship with Symbolism. In Franco Fortini’s essay “Obscurity and Difficulty,” he had in mind a historical pattern that, although never made explicit, is alluded to more than once. In his opinion, literary writings have always been partially obscure or difficult, but only after Romanticism did the difference between modern and premodern poetry, and that between obscurity and difficulty, become understandable. It was Surrealism that would definitively clarify the terms of the problem:

In the complex of tensions and experiments in the 1920s that united and separated the Symbolist heritage and the break with it, we can now discern a tendency to saturate the figures of diction and rhythm, which press out from within the syntactic units, breaking them up or dissolving them into a continuous flow—in imitation of a consciousness that is inarticulate and therefore obscure to itself, even before being obscure to its intended readers. This tendency moved toward asyntacticism, interior monologue, words in freedom, a secret language, the dominion of the phonosymbolic, and finally to silence. Paradoxically, it brought parts of the poetic discourse that seemed completely irreconcilable into proximity, such as … Futurism, Expressivism, and late Symbolism.⁶³

According to Fortini, a continuity exists between orphic Romanticism, Symbolism (“obscurity as Mallarméan darkness”⁶⁴), Futurism, Surrealism, and certain experiments of the new avant-garde movements of the 1950s and 1960s. While very different on the surface, these tendencies were nevertheless united by the use of a self-referential and intransitive form: the “imitation of a consciousness that was inarticulate, and therefore obscure to itself, even before being obscure to its intended readers.” Albeit motivated by different reasons, and with varying nuances, this schema is widely accepted in French- and German-speaking cultures: it can be found, for example, in the essays of Marcel Raymond, Barthes, Adorno, Friedrich, Hamburger, Stierle, and Rancière.⁶⁵ Certainly, while Symbolism rarefied subject matters and language, drawing them upward, the poetry of the twentieth-century avant-gardes opened poetry to prose, to blends, to antisublime content. But the criterion of openness to prose blunts other differences that are no less important than those it highlights: isolated from the other elements of the text, the inclusion of low or traditionally antipoetic registers is not really sufficient to define a poetics, since the form this inclusion takes must be factored in. When prosaic materials are held together by a totally subjective structure, their presence does not stop the text from being self-centered and impenetrable. Consider, for example, Breton’s collection discussed in Chapter 3, Clair de terre (Earthlight). A few pages before and after the text we read, “The Sun on a Leash,” there are a few poems that report the data of reality with absolute immediacy, as verbal objets trouvés, using the cut-up technique, whose writing is nevertheless as intransitive as the Symbolist compositions. Take the opening of “PSTT”:

Neuilly 1–18	………	Breton, vacherie modèle, r. de l’Ouest, 12, Neuilly.
Nord 13–40	………	Breton (E.), mon. funèbr., av. Cimetière Parisien, 23, Pantin.
Passy 44–15	………	Breton (Eug.), vins restaur., tabacs, r. de la Pompe, 176
Roquette 07–90	………	Breton (François), vétérinaire, r. Trousseau, 21, (11e)
Neuilly 1–18	………	Breton, model dairy, 12 Rue de l’Ouest, Neuilly.
Nord 13–40	………	Breton (E.), fun. Monum., 23 Av. Cimetière Parisien, Pantin.
Passy 44–15	………	Breton (Eug.), wines, rest., cigars, 176 Rue de la Pompe,
Roquette 07–90	………	Breton (François), veterinarian, 21 Rue Trousseau, (11th).66

In this case too, the reader is faced with a partially incomprehensible text: one understands that Breton is reproducing a section of the Paris telephone directory with the names and addresses of people who have his surname, but his reasons for doing so remain indecipherable, especially for readers at the time, who were as yet unfamiliar with this kind of trouvaille. It is worth quoting an excerpt from the notes accompanying the text in the Pléiade edition of Breton’s complete works:

This seemingly gratuitous piece can be looked at from different and noncontradictory points of view. One can see it, as Aragon did, as a manifestation of poets’ mindset in the 1920s, linked to the mental activity of which the work is a sign and not to the result that the work represents. Aragon writes: “André Breton made an exact transcription from an address list of everyone who turned their heads in the street when they heard ‘his’ surname. A mysterious, imposing bond; a reality with more power on us than fine poetry; an expedient of command.”

At the same time, one can read in it a certain aspiration to efface oneself, similar to that of Jacques Vache, who refused to create a work. The 1930 note on the mysterious “Bois et Charbons” that closes Les Champs magnetiques testifies to this by then prevailing will to disappear into the masses, analogous to the will to silence and death.⁶⁷

The flood of interpretations is proportional to the gratuitousness of the text: in this case too, the poet abandons the shared lifeworld and takes refuge in a personal forest of free associations. This is why the currents that Fortini mentions resemble one another to some extent, even when they are not related by a documented genealogy and despite obvious differences in the choice of materials. They share a form of solipsism, which blurs the connection with the public structures of the lifeworld and seeks forms of communication far removed from common sense.

The Egocentric Genre

I have attempted to map out our literary space, using a very large scale that overlooks details and, amid the forest of particulars, to trace out a hypothetical cartography. If the confident, measured egocentrism of Romantic poetry represents the archetype of our symbolic form, the forcefield of modern lyric poetry can be defined in relation to that model. The Romantic stance is prolonged by tendencies that, in different forms, adhere more or less closely to the archetype, others that seek to transcend it, and yet others that exaggerate it. The first maintain the basic structure of subjective poetry but transform the nature and importance of the first person; the second transcend the limits of modern lyricism by recapturing narrative, essay, or theatrical forms alien to the most uncompromising poetic diction; the third reject the logic of the Romantic paradigm but communicate an egocentric worldview through the opacity of the writing. These are not closed groupings but fluid forms that intersect, overlap, and slowly fade into each other, as neighborhoods do in a city. A single work may include opposing elements, as happens when the border between the antilyric and ultralyric parts divides the axis of selection from the axis of combination, and a chain of totally intransitive associations assembles narrative, essay, or brutally mimetic materials: Pound’s Cantos, for example, pursue the project of a new epic, but the structure that holds them together is almost always stream of consciousness; certain typically lyrical themes of the later Stevens enter the text through forms of theatrical estrangement, and so on.

The boundaries of modern poetry are as frayed as those of a city, and a single name defines texts that are very different from one another: lyrical poems, pure poems that work on language, poems that maintain a narrative or argumentative flow, poems of a theatrical nature, poems in prose form, and, in between, a congeries of complex hybrid cases. This swirl of currents and tendencies is held together by a common expressive element. Ever since prose became the natural medium of storytelling, and versification was no longer an ornament superimposed on degree-zero writing but a different language or the product of a particular sensibility, every form of writing in verse and every form of prose that seeks to unabashedly distinguish itself from the ordinary way of saying things appears charged with subjective opacity. While the novel places people in time, space, and in the midst of others, while the theater makes individuals act in the common space of the stage, modern poetry seems to tell us that the interesting, essential aspect of life lies in the estranged representation of reality, in the expression of subjective thoughts, passions, and states of mind, or in a work on language that distances language from its social use. What Adorno said about poetry applies perfectly to modern poetry as a whole: an art that, in the hope of attaining the universal through individuation, ends up in one way or another putting the writer’s self at the center of the represented world.

This is a conclusion that applies to every sphere of our literary space, beginning with its lyric core. If we wanted to introduce an element of abstraction and consider this form in its ideal type, modern poetry seems to be made to censor or estrange the common image of reality, since its average form escapes from the degree-zero writing of prose, obscures the physical, psychological, and verbal presence of others, struggles to describe time as duration and its transcendence with respect to individuals—all things that a novel would have no difficulty putting on paper. We identify with a speaker who gives value to a few fragments of life, known not for what they really were but for how the first person represents them, subjectively employing materials that come from a ritual use. Marked by this double expressivism, modern poetry evokes a personalistic and monadic image of the world: the center of the representation is not staged action between human beings or the telling of stories and their entanglements but the way in which an isolated speaker reports some experiences that are mostly individual, unrelated, intense, and instantaneous. No other genre, not even autobiography, is so egocentric in content and form; no other genre so easily eliminates the levels of reality that transcend the self, nullifying the presence of time, reducing the external world to landscape, separating the first person from the fields of psychic and social forces that traverse it, destroying the constraints that tradition and common sense place on anarchic self-expression. Even more inherently egocentric is the symbolic periphery of modern poetry, composed of works that efface content in order to focus the reader’s attention on the opaque beauty of words—because the moment there ceased to be any tradition limiting the play of individual talent, any style that displays itself and hides things ultimately expresses a vision of the world that is centered on the subject. But the other large periphery of our literary space, that of narrative and essay poems, does not escape lyricism of form either. The only kind of writing that the modern horizon of expectation judges to be servile and transparent is prose written in a simple style—not stories in verse, reflection in verse, or prose filled with figurative language.

Modern poetry is the literary genre that most closely resembles the figurative arts of recent centuries. Like painting and sculpture, writing in verse has reacted with extremism to the crisis in mimesis and to the dehumanization of art. In spite of the spectacular narrative experiments that dot twentieth-century literature, the average novel for educated readers has remained far more faithful to the common way of seeing things than poetry has. It is no accident that highbrow storytellers sell far more books and are far better known than poets. If a large number of readers understand the experience recounted in novels, even when some experimentation is allowed by the novelist, if irregular punctuation, interior monologues, or the deconstruction of the plot do not prevent those who are not literary professionals from admiring Clarice Lispector, José Saramago, Toni Morrison, Uwe Johnson, Alice Munro, Abraham Yehoshua, Don DeLillo, or Annie Ernaux, then to appreciate poetry one must be well versed in the language of the sector—one must, in other words, know a specialized system of signs. Like all arts that have undergone strong dehumanization, modern poetry divides the audience in two—a restricted niche that understands and a vast mass that does not—following the lines of a dialectic that has been running through the plastic arts since painters and sculptors were able to ignore the ordinary aspect of reality and transgress inherited norms.⁶⁸

Invisible Choirs

Particular sensitivity, self-expression in the form, a qualitative difference in the way the world appears, and individual talent: the words used by Barthes, Eliot, and Proust to imagine the activity of the writer in a regime of stylistic freedom owe much to the Romantic vocabulary. But an overarching look at the history of art after the death of tradition shows us a different landscape from the one we would encounter if the Romantic schema corresponded in full to the reality of things.

I randomly open an anthology, Poesia italiana degli anni Settanta (1979, Italian Poetry of the Seventies), and find the work of Eros Alesi, who in 1971 committed suicide at the age of twenty:

Caro Papà.

Tu che ora sei nei pascoli celesti, nei pascoli terreni, nei pascoli marini

Tu che sei tra i pascoli umani. Tu che vibri nell’aria. Tu che ancora ami il tuo figlio Alesi Eros.

Tu che hai pianto per tuo figlio. Tu che segui la sua vita con le tue vibrazioni passate e presenti.

Tu che sei amato da tuo figlio. Tu che solo eri in lui. Tu che sei chiamato morto, cenere, mondezza.

Tu che per me sei la mia ombra protettrice.

Tu che in questo momento amo e sento vicino più di ogni cosa.

Tu che sei e sarai la fotocopia della mia vita […].

Dear Dad.

You who are now in the heavenly pastures, in the earthly pastures, in the marine pastures.

You who are in the human pastures. You who vibrate in the air. You who still love your son Alesi Eros.

You who have wept for your son. You who follow his life with your vibrations past and present.

You who are loved by your son. You who solely existed in him. You who are called dead, ash, garbage.

You who are for me my protecting shadow.

You who at this moment I love and feel closer than anything else.

You who are and will be my life’s photocopy […].⁶⁹

This is an eminently lyrical poem, in the modern sense of the word: the distance between the speaker and the author seems minimal, the first person imagines speaking to his father and, following the logic of the text, expresses what is most intimate to him and confesses in public; the meter, syntax, lexicon, and figures are free from rigid rules and charged with pathos, supporting this self-expressive intent. However, it is not difficult to understand that this sort of poem, which seems so personal when compared to the ordinary way of saying things, is in itself not personal at all. Eros Alesi blatantly imitates Allen Ginsberg:

O mother

what have I left out

O mother

what have I forgotten

O mother

farewell

with a long black shoe

farewell

with Communist Party and a broken stocking

farewell

with six dark hairs on the wen of your breast

farewell

with your old dress and a long black beard around the vagina.⁷⁰

Ginsberg, in his turn, picks up on a way of making poetry whose distant archetype is Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; and Whitman, in his turn, drew his inspiration from the Bible and the oratorical tradition:

Thou, laving, tempering all, cool-freshing, gently vitalizing

Me, old, alone, sick, weak-down, melted-worn with sweat;

Thou, nestling, folding close and firm yet soft, companion better than talk, book, art,

(Thou hast, O Nature! elements! utterance to my heart beyond the rest—and this is of them,)

So sweet thy primitive taste to breathe within—thy soothing fingers on my face and hands […].⁷¹

This is a rule that applies to any art whose forms have become distanced from conventional wisdom and a heritage of accepted norms: the death of rules is not followed by a monadic swarming of personal styles but by a form of tribalism, as if the victory of individual talent over a centuries-old poetic diction were not resolved in pure subjectivism but in the birth of many small, local dictions. In this respect too, the history of poetry resembles closely the history of painting and sculpture after the crisis of imitation and rules: once the obligatory references to reality had disappeared and the customs inherited from the past had vanished, the theoretically infinite freedom of artists became crystallized and produced schools. It comes as no surprise that the arts which are most expressive and, in theory, most egocentric are also those which produce the most highly cultivated imitative behaviors: precisely because the authors’ anarchy lacks any shared relationship with the lifeworld, it needs to lean on a solid collective support to reduce the anxiety-provoking risk of gratuitousness, a risk that weighs on all unrestrained individuation. What Bakhtin said about lyric poetry applies to the form of modern poetry as a whole:

The authority of the author is the authority of a chorus. Lyrical possessedness is, fundamentally, possessedness by a chorus.… In an atmosphere of absolute silence and emptiness, this [lyrical] voice would be incapable of sounding in such a way. An individual and totally arbitrary violation of absolute silence has a frightening and sinful character; it degenerates into a scream which startles and frightens itself and finds itself hard to bear—finds it hard to bear its own intrusive and bare givenness. A solitary and totally arbitrary breaking of silence imposes an infinite responsibility or it is cynical without justification. The voice can sing only in a warm atmosphere, only in the atmosphere of possible choral support, where solitariness of sound is in principle excluded.⁷²

The more objective limits that custom imposes on the artist’s potential freedom are lifted, the greater the need for choral support; at every level, the subjectivism of modern art is, in reality (to use an oxymoron) a group subjectivism. After obtaining the right to originality, the arts became a competitive field, shaken by continual revolutions and occupied by tribes that fight or negotiate among themselves for the conquest of economic capital or, more often, symbolic capital—precious finite goods such as prestige and memory.⁷³ Anyone who aspires to enter into this territory finds a set of already-fixed possibilities that form a sort of transcendental scaffolding, tracing out the horizon of forms that artists can reasonably adopt if what they desire is the support of a chorus. In other words, artistic fields are not dominated by an individualistic, chaotic anarchy but by a social, organized anarchy composed of tendencies, currents, manners, and schools that divide up the sphere of possibilities available in any given era. As complexity grows, so does the autonomy of each system that makes up the whole, and with it the tendency to develop languages that are distant from the lifeworld and incomprehensible to those who do not know the background that generated them. When we talk about individual talent, we are referring to individuals who associate in groups and remain caught in the internal logic of the space to which they belong. Similarly, when we say that modern poetry differs from premodern poetry because authors have conquered the right to self-expression, this is not to say that poets of the last two centuries imitate no one but themselves, as Leopardi said,⁷⁴ or that they repudiate all conventions so as to write in full autonomy and give voice to their own singularity.

More realistically, self-expression through style is a relative quantity that alludes to three historical changes, thanks to which the anarchic system of the modern arts distinguishes itself from the premodern arts: the theoretical possibility to violate customs inherited from tradition and to break lexical, metrical, syntactical, and figural norms that existed for thousands of years; the possibility to choose between many equal competing tendencies within a system that is no longer uniform, hierarchical, and static but competitive, fluctuating, and chaotic; the possibility to write in order to revolutionize the literary space and etch out an enduring trace of one’s singularity. As will be explained more fully in the Conclusion, the aesthetic of originality has a primarily theoretical and negative value: it does not herald a real autonomy—something unattainable for anyone who depends on the judgment of others—but simply the right to step out of the rut of practices that have been handed down by tradition. In the 1810s, when Leopardi began writing his first adult poems, he knew that the impulse to imitate lived experience that runs through some of his shorter idylls could not go beyond the limits set by centuries-old rules: poetic diction, the laws of meter, the norms of grammar and syntax, an etiquette that governed the choice of rhetorical figures. In the 1910s, when Montale began to write his first adult poems, he could in theory break every limit, choose among many competing poetics to gain prestige and memory in the domain of high-style lyric poetry, and aspire for his work to someday transform the layout of the poetic space. Although the stylistic freedom granted to Montale was markedly greater than that granted to Leopardi, Montale’s poetry still had to pass through the mediation of a social language. Despite living in an age dominated by anarchy, the modern artist remains bound nonetheless to the territory of possibilities. The distance between a claimed autonomy and a real autonomy remains insuperable.

1. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri (1817–1832); English translation, Zibaldone, trans. Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 4357–4358.

2. Ibid.

3. On this shift in functions, see also Dominique Combe, Poésie et Récit: Une rhétorique des genres (Paris: Corti, 1989), especially 151–154. Prose poems incorporate forms of estrangement that perform the same function as the ritual of meter.

4. On the verse novel tradition and its recent developments, see Catherine Addison, A Genealogy of the Verse Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017).

5. La camera da letto (1984 and 1988) by Attilio Bertolucci, Giovanna d’Arco (1990) by Maria Luisa Spaziani, L’infermiera di Pisa (1991) and Il palazzo e il pazzo (1993) by Ottiero Ottieri, La sorella dell’ave (1992) and Rosabianca e la contessa (1994) by Ludovica Ripa di Meana, La comunione dei beni (1995) by Edoardo Albinati, Suora Carmelitana (1997) by Franco Buffoni.

6. This review is at https://www.amazon.com/Fredy-Neptune-Novel-Verse-Murray-ebook/dp/B013P2ESWA.

7. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle” (1850), in Essays and Reviews, ed. Gary Richard Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 72.

8. Thomas Stearns Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry” (1945), in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), 8.

9. Wystan Hugh Auden, “Writing,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (1962) (New York: Random House, 1989), 23.

10. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Weltsprache der modernen Poesie” (1960–1962); English translation, “World Language of Modern Poetry,” in The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media, selected and with postscript by Michael Roloff (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 42–61.

11. See Meyer H. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Fredrick A. Pottle, ed. F. W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 527–528.

12. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed., ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1991), 261. Wordsworth always has a strong awareness of the universal and social value of the lyric: Jacques Rancière, La Chair des mots: Politiques de l’écriture (1998); English translation, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), chap. 1; and Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 321–331.

13. See Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, “Grande stile e lirica moderna” (1983), in La tradizione del Novecento: Nuova serie (Florence: Vallecchi, 1987), 8–9.

14. 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), 38.

15. Ibid., 40.

16. “À une passante” and “Le Cygne” were published in the second edition (1861) of Les Fleurs du Mal.

17. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: Norton, 2002), 39.

18. Herbert J. Levine, “Song of Myself as Whitman’s American Bible,” Modern Language Quarterly 48 (1987): 145–161; Elisa New, The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 4 (“Crossing Leviticus: Whitman”); William C. Harris, “Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the Writing of a New American Bible,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 16, no. 3 (1999): 172–190.

19. Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 49.

20. Ibid., 49–50.

21. 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), 156.

22. Charles Baudelaire, “Perte d’auréole”; English translation, “Lost Halo,” in Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose, trans. Keith Waldrop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 88; and “Fusées XVII”; English translation, “Squibs XVII,” in Intimate Journals, trans. Christopher Isherwood (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006), 45.

23. Aldo Palazzeschi, “E lasciatemi divertire! (Canzonetta),” in L’Incendiario (1910), reprinted in Tutte le poesie, ed. Adele Dei (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), 238. I am citing from the 1910 edition of L’Incendiario. Some years later, the poem would be slightly revised and titled “Lasciatemi divertire”; the final version is from 1925. English translation “So Let Me Have My Fun! (Pop Song),” in A Selection of Modern Italian Poetry in Translation, trans. and ed. Roberta L. Payne (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 69.

24. Guido Gozzano, “La Signorina Felicita ovvero la Felicità,” in I colloqui (1911), reprinted in Tutte le poesie, ed. Andrea Rocca (Milan: Mondadori, 1980), 178; English translation “Signorina Felicita,” in The Man I Pretend to Be: The Colloquies and Selected Poems of Guido Gozzano, trans. and ed. Michael Palma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 86–87.

25. “Oh! questa vita sterile, di sogno! | Meglio la vita ruvida concreta | del buon mercante inteso alla moneta, | meglio andare sferzati dal bisogno, | ma vivere di vita! Io mi vergogno, | sì, mi vergogno d’essere un poeta” (“This life of dreams, this life of sterility: | better to find a rude rough row and hoe it, | to be a merchant after cash and show it, | better to be lashed by necessity, | but living, but alive! I’m ashamed to be— yes, I confess, I’m ashamed to be a poet!”). Gozzano, La signorina Felicita ovvero La Felicità; English translation “Signorina Felicita,” in The Man I Pretend to Be, 86–87.

26. Marianne Moore, “Poetry,” in Others 5, no. 6 (July 1919): 5.

27. See Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry, 3–5.

28. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crise de vers” (1886–1896) in Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and Georges Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); English translation “Crise de vers’,” in Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 232.

29. Thomas Stearns Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920) (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), 30.

30. Vincent van Gogh, Verzamelde brieven van Vincent van Gogh; English translation, Ever Yours: The Essential Letters, ed. Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), letter dated Arles, August 18, 1888, 572.

31. Ina Dorothea Danzer, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound und der französische Symbolismus (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1992).

32. Scott Hamilton, Ezra Pound and the Symbolist Inheritance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), chap 3. Laforgue is also one of the masters of the idea of poetry that Pound called logopoeia and defined as “the dance of intellect among words.”

33. Ezra Pound, “Irony, Laforgue, and Some Satire” (1917), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. and introd. by Thomas Stearns Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 281.

34. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 85.

35. Ibid.

36. Eugenio Montale, “Variazioni” (1945), in Il secondo mestiere: Prose 1920–1979, vol. 1, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), 620.

37. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, L’opera in versi di Eugenio Montale, in Letteratura italiana: Le opere, vol. 4, Il Novecento, vol. 1, L’età della crisi (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 656.

38. “La vita è questo scialo | di triti fatti, vano | più che crudele” (“Life is this wearing-down | of threadbare facts, | more vain than cruel”)—one reads in “Flussi” (“Flows”) in Ossi di seppia (1925, 1928); English translation in Collected Poems, 1920–1954, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Jonathan Galassi (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 103.

39. It was Montale himself who used the notion of classicism (a classicism considered “sui generis and nearly paradoxical”) when speaking of Saba and, indirectly, of his own poetry. See Eugenio Montale, “Umberto Saba” (1926), in Il secondo mestiere: Prose 1920–1979, vol. 1, 114–128.

40. M. L. Rosenthal, “Poetry as Confession” (1959), in Our Life in Poetry (New York: Persea Books, 1991), 109.

41. Ibid.

42. Peter Baker, Obdurate Brilliance: Exteriority and the Modern Long Poem (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991), “Introduction: Against Interiority”; Alfonso Berardinelli, La poesia verso la prosa: Controversie sulla lirica moderna (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1994); Ronald de Rooy, Il narrativo nella poesia moderna: Proposte teoriche & esercizi di lettura (Florence: Cesati, 1997).

43. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 30.

44. See Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: Random House, 1957); Elisabeth Howe, Stages of the Self: The Dramatic Monologues of Laforgue, Valéry, and Mallarmé (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990) and The Dramatic Monologue (New York: Twayne, 1996); and Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 263–275.

45. Enrico Testa, Per interposta persona: Lingua e poesia nel secondo Novecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1999).

46. Helen Vendler, “Looking at the Worst: Wallace Stevens’s The Rock,” in Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 44.

47. Wallace Stevens, “The Rock,” in The Rock (1954), in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 445.

48. John Ashbery, “When the Sun Went Down,” in A Wave (New York: Viking Press, 1984), 6.

49. 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), 75–76.

50. Stéphane Mallarmé “Quant au Livre (Le Livre, instrument spirituel)” (1895); English translation in Mallarmé, ed. Anthony Hartley (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1965), 189.

51. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Préface” to Un coup de dés (1897); English translation in Mallarmé, 210. See also Stéphane Mallarmé, “La Musique et les Lettres” (1895); English translation, “Music and Letters,” in Mallarmé in Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws, trans. Jill Anderson (New York: New Directions, 2001), 39.

52. See especially Mallarmé, “Music and Letters,” 39.

53. Ibid., 44–45.

54. Mallarmé, “Crise de vers”.

55. Combe, Poésie et Récit, 15–18, 82–85.

56. Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance complète 1862–1871, suivie de Lettres sur la poésie, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 228.

57. See Käte Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung (1957, 1968); English translation, The Logic of Literature, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Marilynn J. Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 242–272.

58. Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (1956); English translation, The Structure of Modern Poetry, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 81.

59. Ibid., 70.

60. Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, 249.

61. Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé: La Politique de la Sirène (1996); English translation, Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2011); and Jacques Rancière, Politique de la littérature (2007); English translation, The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 80–98.

62. On the differing and conflicting political interpretations of this aspect, see Robert Boncardo, Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature: Sartre, Kristeva, Badiou, Rancière (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

63. Franco Fortini, “Oscurità e difficoltà,” L’asino d’oro 2, no. 3 (1991): 84.

64. Ibid., 88.

65. Marcel Raymond, De Baudelaire au Surréalisme (1933, 1947); English translation, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (New York: Methuen, 1970); 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), 41–52; Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”; Friedrich, The Structure of Modern Poetry; Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, 250–272; Karlheinz Stierle, “Möglichkeiten des dunklen Stils in den Anfängen moderner Lyrik in Frankreich,” in Immanente Ästhetik, ästhetische Reflexion: Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne, ed. Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1966), 157–194; Rancière, Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren and The Politics of Literature, 80–98.

66. André Breton, “PSTT,” in Clair de terre (1923); reprinted in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 156; English translation, “PSTT,” in Earthlight, trans. Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow (Copenhagen: Green Integer, 2004), 57–58.

67. Breton, Oeuvres complètes, 1195–1196.

68. See José Ortega y Gasset, La deshumanización del arte (1925); English translation, “The Dehumanization of Art,” trans. Helene Weyl, in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 1–54.

69. Eros Alesi, “Frammenti,” in Poesia italiana degli anni Settanta, ed. Antonio Porta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979), 235; English translation, “Dear Dad,” trans. Cristina Viti, in Modern Poetry in Translation 3, no. 3 (2005): 92.

70. Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish IV,” in Collected Poems 1947–1997 (New York: Harper, 2006), 234–235.

71. Whitman, “To the Sun-Set Breeze,” in Leaves of Grass, 458.

72. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Avtor i geroj v èstetičeskoj dejatel’nosti”; English translation, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” trans. Vadim Liapunov, reprinted in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 169–170.

73. 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).

74. Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri, 4372–4373, September 10, 1828.