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

As the most formally defined of modern literary genres, the lyric
has been misunderstood as the genre most isolated from history -
indeed, as the exemplary model of literary genre as a category
separable from history. But Dickinson's work may be a model for
an alternative approach in which the reading of genre and the
reading of history are mutually implicated in each other. (55)
In fact, the point to Jackson's work appears not to be the blind overturning of
convention and genre. While she shows how lyric poetry was always already inflected by
a sense of history, especially in the case of Dickinson, her work serves to nuance our
understanding of lyricism. She does this by tracing the roots of reductivist approaches to
the lyric, beginning with the writings of John Stuart Mill. Lyric poetry has been
conditioned to accord itself with the belief in an isolated (Mill used a prison metaphor)
"I" that, as Northrop Frye once said, "pretends to be talking to himself or to someone
else: a spirit of nature, a Muse...a personal friend, a lover, a god, a personified
abstraction, or a natural object" (in Jackson 130). This conceit engenders the bypassing of
any particular addressee or "you" for a universal "we" situated ideally in "a form of
transcendentally apostrophic address" (130).
Lyric poetry gives the reader the vacuous thrill, under this reductivist arch, of
becoming a peeping-tom or a blackguard. We overhear a poet in a moment of affected
confession. For Jackson the benefit for the reader in this act of overhearing is the
confirmation, if not the affirmation, of themselves in their particularity. Lyricism, on
Mill's account, encounters itself very much as that technique borne out of the traditional
definition of impersonality that asserts differences without being able to make any that
matter. Mill's lyricism asserts a general reader that prefers to make distinctions that differ
without suggesting any particular reader who might assert those distinctions in practice.
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