TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

Pound‘s impersonality, to use the term, is different in kind to Weil's, in that it prefers to
understand selfhood as belonging to broader genetic or historic explanations than to just
those immediate environmental particulars that attach themselves in Weil‘s concentrated
attention.
Recently, Virginia Jackson has investigated one of the most powerful form-
making pre-dispositions of the nineteenth century and lends a valuable insight into why
certain aesthetic practices lend themselves to dismantling assumed understandings of
thematic apperception that writers like Weil and Pound, in disparate times and contexts,
find abducting their interest. Jackson focuses on the history of our assumptions governing
what it is that constitutes lyricism and lyric poetry through the work of Emily Dickinson.
The idea of "lyric" poetry has, she argues, seeped so permanently into our consciousness
that our generic predispositions have grown to entirely occlude the actual work of many
of its presumed exemplary avatars like Emily Dickinson. Lyricism, she argues, has come
to stand for any writing that would seem to want to separate itself from historical public
events. Roughly speaking, we think of history as being the story of the public world and
the lyric mode as being precisely not that; the lyric is the ongoing mode of address for all
that remains outside of history, all that is private. Jackson's work, Dickinson's Misery,
upsets this distinction. She finds our too easy assumption that Dickinson wrote lyric
poetry at all an invitation to think more broadly about what we mean by lyric, especially
in its implied relationship to historicity, finding in Dickinson's work a keen awareness of
the world about her and its place in time, and as such, a counterexample to our
assumptions of what it is that determines her work as being the sine qua non of ahistoric
lyricism:
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