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

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In the Goods of Day - (F 1203) Jackson's thesis that lyric poetry ought not be disentwined from its historical place of utterance, that "historical determination appears indistinguishable from figurative power," is tested here against preceding readings of poems in which she has found particular empirical addressees. She finds in the figurative language of this poem a similar universe of actual empirical reference. Jackson acknowledges that the usual lyrical affectation of an "I," by-passing any individual "You" in its addressing of a universal "We," is achieved here but, at the same time, argues that if we are truly alert to the silent assumptions that Dickinson could be suggesting we might agree that this poem does have a single empirical addressee in mind. This addressee could distinguish between a general reader of a universal theme, and themselves, as a particularly intended reader interested in some discrete event shared with Dickinson. To paraphrase Jackson's argument, the scene of writing (the poet's work) is intentionally confused with the performance of direct address (Dickinson's message to a particular reader). Jackson reads this poem's eighth line, "Misery, how fair" as plaintively elegiac and as a coded personification available to a specific and intended reader. She writes, "Or is ‗Misery‘ here a figure of address, another name for ‗you?‘ If read as the latter, then this ‗you‘ has slipped from cause to effect or, like the morning, partakes of the qualities of both" (207). For Jackson this doubled referentiality in the poem and the presence of an apostrophe to some particular "You" coded as "Misery" bends the inner timing and sequentiality of the poem's form: "Like the other apostrophes we have remarked in Dickinson's poems, the 119
apostrophe to ‗Misery‘ performatively brings before and after into the present tense, overdetermining the ninth line's ‗Till‘ in the same way that ‗your/ wrinkled Finger‘ appears excessively determinate in the poem's last lines" (207). That authorial ―Finger‖ and the implied pronoun shifts now embody both "you" and "I," the writer and the reader. The finger's undecidable identity, Jackson argues, lends it a paternal, patronizing authority, inasmuch as it positively offers a possible destination for the address of the poem but then passively revokes any determinable agency to enable that transmission. Jackson reads this unhelpful finger as a metaphor for Dickinson's general attitude towards publication and the deleterious effect it had on Dickinson's identity in the moment of her constructing a poem. Publication ignores poets if they are women, which for Dickinson, Jackson argues, is "not a speaker, not an "I," not a consciousness, not a subjectivity, not a voice, not a persona, not a self" (210). To publish, Jackson argues, would have meant for Dickinson to give up her self understanding of her position within the contemporary language of sentimental lyricism and "especially in the discourse of vicarious feeling – of sentimental lyric reading – that developed around that genre" (212). The production of vicarious feelings endemic to sentimental lyricism requires the poet to forgo their identity as poet and to adopt clear positions as ―women who write poetry.‖ The ability of women to produce inauthentic feeling was unsettling; Dickinson was good at it. Publication implied submitting oneself to a kind of confession of identity that made aesthetic construction of feeling a parlor game. The new attention to the way lyricism is always under the torque of empirical circumstance, and the meaning Dickinson's work can be believed to have registered, through Jackson's discovery of empirical readers and ambivalent poetic sequencing, reflects the style or precision-work of the citation of the 120
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TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHET
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Christopher David Chapman practice.
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CONTENTS PREFACE ..................
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objectification, while titles are a
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to ack
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taboo, as the following remark indi
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emind us too hastily only of Benjam
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e renewed in philosophical contempl
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the word “Title.” I do this out
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where fate - the agent of nature‟
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Cantos with Nancy Cunard. The final
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come into their meaning through the
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meaning in the words he appoints to
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―The Role of Language in Trauersp
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God‘s genetic ―pure word,‖ re
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conceived of as a pantomime where t
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ensnared within post-lapsarian syst
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aspects of his linguistic theory th
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decision-making powers, we can demo
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him to transpose arguments about th
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Caesar‖ is an obvious case in poi
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eath of this world, and from it the
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magnanimity wins out in dire and pa
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elegated to the setting in which th
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Notes 1 In an early, unpublished, t
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every locution being, in essence, e
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CHAPTER TWO: LONG SERIES OF TRANSLA
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dramatic monologue, a feat he would
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terms that this chapter wishes to c
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structural factitiousness that the
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is implicit to baroque criticisms o
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meaning of the poems it collects. P
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Pound's fragments as commentary on
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Few critics read these poems in the
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a diorama booth in which his hero a
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the genetic milieu into which it be
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In fact, two complaints can be hear
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while keeping lines that praise Bro
Page 77 and 78: Cantos deliver a poetic condition i
Page 79 and 80: Quia Pauper Amavi, and, after McGan
Page 81 and 82: George Steiner uncovers the ramific
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Page 85 and 86: commitment to past modes of critica
Page 87 and 88: modern poet. Pound exhorted Barry t
Page 89 and 90: the case, is deliberately making ou
Page 91 and 92: Pound's genius was to see Propertiu
Page 93 and 94: delineate Pound's portrayals as fai
Page 95 and 96: presence of a continuous patina of
Page 97 and 98: described by Christine Brooke-Rose.
Page 99 and 100: 10) of their rows over fidelity. Fo
Page 101 and 102: obsessive desire most critics find
Page 103 and 104: passing from hand to hand, becomes
Page 105 and 106: Propertius as Propertius once had C
Page 107 and 108: saw no viable future for his own ex
Page 109 and 110: then, these imaginary aesthetes wer
Page 111 and 112: ‗persona,‘ an impersonation of
Page 113 and 114: difference between his intention an
Page 115 and 116: itself a Western bourgeois assumpti
Page 117 and 118: subject. Deleuze's 1977 discussion
Page 119 and 120: his subjectivity as a blend of fact
Page 121 and 122: eak occurs in the poet's mind as th
Page 123 and 124: dogmatic binding and over which to
Page 125 and 126: Pound‘s impersonality, to use the
Page 127: Mill, Jackson notes, finds the conc
Page 131 and 132: ―Mauberley,‖ the poem‘s narra
Page 133 and 134: to posit a fictional author being n
Page 135 and 136: neither Rainey‘s Institutions of
Page 137 and 138: y Piero della Francesca. Pound was
Page 139 and 140: E gradment li antichi cavaler roman
Page 141 and 142: that have not traditionally been co
Page 143 and 144: The library of the dukes of Milan w
Page 145 and 146: Rainey‘s disdain for bourgeois hi
Page 147 and 148: Bornstein, for example, is interest
Page 149 and 150: the meaning of Pound‘s text by co
Page 151 and 152: Do come, do come. I can see us at B
Page 153 and 154: the political implications of that
Page 155 and 156: the winners of its game (148). Beca
Page 157 and 158: iography and how he can be seen to
Page 159 and 160: to him is plain: ―News of Nancy?
Page 161 and 162: view of Pound‘s political beliefs
Page 163 and 164: which to describe the force of natu
Page 165 and 166: interrogation of that two-word theo
Page 167 and 168: elationships that they believed to
Page 169 and 170: commemoration is to writing (Derrid
Page 171 and 172: knowable “as a combination of ato
Page 173 and 174: new‖ emerges: ―it is a movement
Page 175 and 176: ejects any teleological argument fo
Page 177 and 178: Ontologies, such as those that belo
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this mystery could only be experien
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attention to the way names effect t
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Adorno acknowledges that Kant‘s w
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understanding how de-personalizatio
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Fate becomes a term that Benjamin i
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WORKS CITED Arkins, Bryan. ―Pound
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The New Age. 27.26, 1919. Ovid. The
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