BMCR 2009.06.57: Kershner on Blevins, Dialogism and Lyric Self-fashioning: Bakhtin and the Voices of a Genre

Jacob Blevins (ed.), Dialogism and Lyric Self-fashioning: Bakhtin and
the Voices of a Genre.  Selinsgrove, Pa.:  Susquehanna University
Press, 2008.  Pp. 265.  ISBN 9781575911205.  $60.00.

Reviewed by Stephen M. Kershner, Denison University
([email protected])
Word count:  2357 words
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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

Adequately defining lyric subjectivity and lyric consciousness has
always been a thorny task, particularly because of the diversity of
themes, forms, and eras that help constitute lyric poetry. The volume
under review, Dialogism and Lyric Self-Fashioning: Bakhtin and the
Voices of a Genre, edited by Jacob Blevins, makes a valuable and rather
stimulating contribution to the ever-larger body of scholarship on
lyric as a genre, attempting to describe more clearly certain
characteristics of lyric subjectivity and make progress in correcting
certain scholarly misunderstandings about lyric's dynamic and complex
nature.  Blevins and the contributors take as their starting point the
agreeable position that lyric poetry generally manifests its
subjectivity through the use of multiple voices and discourses, in
opposition to the sometimes-held belief that lyric is exclusively
personal or meditative poetry--that is, an expression that inherently
lacks any kind of social or ideological engagement, a kind of
confessional performance.  In making this claim, Blevins and the
contributors turn to Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of dialogism as a way
to reveal the "multi-voiced" discourse found in lyric poetry,
particularly those voices that compete for primacy and/or ideological
control within their respective poem(s). In using Bakhtin's dialogism
as a theoretical platform, Blevins and the volume's contributors are
able to demonstrate the complex relational aspect found in lyric
discourse because of its status as born from, positioned between, or in
response to the voices (both heard and unheard) of others.  The papers
in this volume consequently suggest ways of reading the strategies that
lyric poets use to adapt and attune both their voice(s) and their
poetry to specific social and ideological contexts. In the end, this
volume is decidedly successful in its goal of constructing a
"transhistorical survey of dialogism and the lyric genre"(17). Before
offering short assessments of the individual papers, I would first like
to offer a few comments delineating this volume's particular strengths.

Some readers might find the use of Bakhtin's dialogic model, originally
formulated for use with the novel, a bit surprising since Bakhtin
famously regarded poetry (lyric and epic) to be essentially monologic.
Yet, as Blevins and the contributors continually display throughout the
volume, Bakhtin's assessment of lyric poetry is far too narrow and
theoretically limiting to sufficiently describe its examples (variously
referring to Bakhtin's theory as "disregarding," "miscalculating,"
"misunderstanding," or "vastly underestimating" lyric poetry). Recent
scholarship on lyric subjectivity has indeed begun to move away from
the constrictive conception of lyric as monologic and, thus, the use of
dialogism here is quite natural. In the process of demonstrating the
multi-discursive nature of lyric, Blevins and the contributors are also
able to develop further and extend some of Bakhtin's ideas for use
outside the novel, a benefit that will continue to yield results.

Perhaps thus volume's greatest strength is its careful organization to
present as many of the diverse instantiations of lyric as possible.
Blevins suggests that this volume is intended to be a "transhistorical"
survey of lyric and, indeed, it profitably incorporates essays on
ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern lyric poetry.  But, in many
ways this designation undersells the volume's scope and value as we
find essays exhibiting a broad variety of lyric themes (e.g.
encomiastic, agonistic, sacral, erotic, amorous, bucolic, intellectual,
and activist) as well as the oppositions that animate lyric as a genre
(e.g. male vs. female, active vs. passive, public vs. private,
introspective vs. demonstrative, the individual poem vs. the
collection, intertextual vs. intratextual).  Part of the volume's
success in proving the multi-voiced nature of lyric is its ability to
offer the reader such a broad and sophisticated coverage of lyric
forms.

Another strength is the use of lesser known or at least less thoroughly
examined poets as its body of data. As Blevins notes in the
introduction, some readers might wish that certain canonical poets such
as Catullus, Petrarch, Shakespeare, or Wordsworth had been included.
But, the deliberate inclusion of poets such as a Statius or a Thomas
Edwards allows the contributors' comments on lyric to escape the poetic
canon's cult of personality and make coherent conclusions about the
lyric as a genre of poetry.

As a physical product, this book has been ably edited and suffers from
less than a handful of minor typographical errors. Its aggregated
bibliography is particularly welcome as it offers a good cross-section
of scholarship on lyric poetry from classical, medieval, early modern,
and modern philologists. The volume also includes a surprisingly full
index containing major literary theorists as well as the basic terms of
their approaches to analyzing lyric.

Blevins sets the table well in the introduction to the volume by first
outlining the basic problems in defining the concept of lyric
subjectivity, particularly because of its status as personal, yet
interpersonal, public, yet private.  After touching on some of the
previous attempts to make this definition (e.g. T.S. Eliot, N. Frye,
M.H. Abrams, W.R. Johnson, and P.A. Miller), Blevins turns to the
concept that lyric poetry is inherently dialogic poetry and, thus,
introduces the relevance of using Bakhtin's theories of Dialogism. In
presenting the introduction this way, Blevins gives the readers a
necessary and appropriate foundation for the theoretical assumptions
that the contributors make, as well as the vision to understand how and
why the volume's varied essays cohere so well.

The first of three essays on Greek and Roman lyric, Ellen Greene's
contribution, "Masculine and Feminine, Public and Private, in the
Poetry of Sappho," looks to revise her previously held position that
Sappho is engaged in a distinctly feminine and private discourse,
instead demonstrating that "desire [is] a profoundly complex experience
that cannot be strictly categorized as either 'masculine' or
'feminine'" (p.25). Through the close readings of several Sapphic poems
and fragments, Greene is able to show that both masculine and feminine
voices share in the Sapphic definition of desire and love with Homeric
and military imagery paralleling an idyllic landscape of female
affiliation.  This new reading is thus able to move beyond the limiting
view of Sappho's poetry as distinctly and solely feminine or a deviant
form (because it is written by a woman) of masculine discourse.

David H.J. Larmour's contribution, "An Agon on the Slopes of Helicon:
Corinna's Dialogues with Pindar and Hesiod," begins with the
observation that lyric poetry is founded on a sense of competitive
dialogue as the real-life poetic agones found at religious festivals
and legendary competitions between canonical poets (e.g. Homer vs.
Hesiod) show us.  He then examines the tradition of references to an
agon between Pindar and his female contemporary (possibly) Corinna as
well as their own poems, focusing on the inherent dialogism at work
here.  Corinna, Larmour argues, constructs her agonistic dialogue with
Pindar "by engaging and adapting Hesiodic myth" to confront the
tensions between male and female, Panhellenic and local voices.  In the
end, we are able to see that Corinna celebrates her poetic prowess by
acknowledging her Boeotian countrymen and uncovering themes that she
can use to distinguish herself as a poet.

Shifting to Roman lyric in "Singing in the Garden: Statius's plein air
Lyric (after Horace)," Diana Spencer makes the observation that Horace
may have purposely embedded a kind of lyric failure in his Odes,
particularly as lyric poetry negotiated its relationship with space
(e.g. gardens).  This failure thus made future emulation of his
approach nearly impossible until Statius's deliberate and
self-conscious re-imagination of Horace's lyric landscape in Silvae
4.5.  She suggests that Statius, through a careful and at times comic
dialogue with Horace's lyric mode, is able to reinvest the rural (or
perhaps even pastoral) landscape with poetic and philosophical distance
from the urban landscape of Rome.  While constructing his parva rura as
a zone of ataraxia and otium, Statius is thus able to negotiate the
social, political, and poetic identities of both himself and his
addressee, Septimius Severus.

Daniel E. O'Sullivan's contribution, "Putting women in their place:
Women's Devotional Songs in the Rosarius (BnF fr. 12483)," posits an
intratextual dialogue between the various lyric poems in the Rosarius,
an Old French collection of devotional songs.  Specifically, he
suggests that the lyric songs in this collection become "juxtaposed to
other texts, opening opportunities for potential dialogue among the
voices contained in its chapters," ultimately leading to a "discourse
in behavioral prescriptivism for medieval women" (p.84). What is
particularly intriguing about this collection is that the female voices
step away from their male author to construct a wholly feminine
approach to a devotion to Mary.

In "Subjective Identity and Collective Conscience in the Songs of Colin
Muset," Christopher Callahan examines the multi-layered discourse of
the medieval French poet, Colin Muset, recognized to have a voice
"forged of, and thriv[ing] on, a tension between the conventional and
the innovative, the lyric and the narrative, the personal and the
collective" (p.97).  Indeed, Colin, in a "quintessentially dialogic"
form, depicts himself in his poems as poet, performer, and character
simultaneously. Ultimately, Callahan shows that Colin's manner of
having the "personal" speak for the "collective" allows us to see how
the poet can be part of a collective awareness of poetic identity.

Using Bakhtin's theory of the stratification of poetic discourse, John
Everett Bird's essay, "Producing (and Reproducing) Poetic Identity in
Thomas Edwards's Narcissus," examines Edwards's epyllion Narcissus for
indications of its self-conscious formation of an identity that is
"professional" and communal.  Bird posits that Edwards's careful
stratification of discourse in his epyllion creates an ambivalence with
its relation to contemporary texts, such as Marlowe's Hero and Leander
and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, with its "status in the
contemporary present" (p.116).  Bird finally suggests that the "status
of poet is ambiguous," in that there is an emerging professionalism in
their endeavors, yet poets also wish to "obscure the motives of their
profession" and distance themselves from the vulnerability of what they
do.

In "That Noble Flame: Literary History and Regenerative Time in
Katherine Philips's Elegies and Society of Friendship," W. Scott Howard
examines the inherently dialogic discourse of friendship in the bucolic
elegies of Katherine Philips. He states that Philips "consistently
posits friendship as a living, worldly principle that paradoxically
celebrates both the union of two individuals and their distinctive
singularities" (p.137).  In constructing such a conception of
friendship, Philips is thus able to use it as a "foundational trope for
literary history." More specifically, Howard argues that Philips's
elegies articulate the bonds of friendship, particularly female, and
present a regenerative and constitutive relationship between her poetry
and the social world outside of that poetry.

Dafydd Wood's essay, "Apollinaire's Late Lyrics," directly questions
the limitation of Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia towards poetry,
suggesting that poetry, more so than prose, allows for a great wealth
of interpretations because of its "saturation" with meaning and symbol.
In Apollinaire's later lyrics, specifically his Poe\mes a\ Lou and
Poe\mes a\ Madeleine, we find three separate dialogues: between
masculine and feminine voices in a single poem, at the level of
tradition in which "the tropes of the religious lyric and love lyric
are blended inseparably" (p.163), and between Apollinaire and literary
tradition.  Ultimately, in examining these three dialogues, we find
that Apollinaire's poetry presents us with a true heteroglossia in
which none of the voices are privileged over the other; indeed, they
rather work symphonically.

In "The Waste Land as a Human Drama Revealed by Eliot's Dialogic
Imagination," Ian Probstein attempts to use Bakhtin against himself,
focusing particularly on the concepts of chronotopos, polyphony, and
parody as they apply to lyric poetry.  In his close reading of The
Waste Land, Probstein finds that Eliot plays extensively with his
poem's subjectivity through the careful allusion to a variety of
tropes, authors, characters, and voices thereby "defamiliarizing
reality." In performing this example of unfettered dialogism, Eliot is
thus able to build a "dialogue with humanity" and exposes his reader to
an open, free (in Bakhtinian terms) human drama.

Amittai Aviram's and Richard Hartnett's contribution, "'The Man with
the Blue Guitar': Dialogism in Lyric Poetry," examine the way that the
lyric subject exists in a kind of game, engaging the reader "in his or
her simultaneous recognition of the subject imitated and (author's
emphasis) of the fact that it really is merely an imitation" (p.205).
Specifically, they examine Wallace Stevens' poem "The Man with the Blue
Guitar" and its way of challenging basic notions of representation as
it references an essence (so to speak) of Picasso's cubist paintings.
In this way, Stevens' poem portrays the comparable struggles that
various artistic media (such as poetry, painting, or the novel) share
in representing reality. In all media, representing reality is a game
about subjectivity and this game thus implies a dialogue between
possibilities.

The final essay, Tom Lavazzi's contribution "Echoes of Dubois: The
Crisis Writings and Jayne Cortez's Earlier Poetry, discusses the
creation of racial identity by examining the conscious construction of
a new African-American voice in Jayne Cortez's poetry as different from
an earlier, insufficiently genuine one.  Further, Lavazzi considers how
W.E.B Dubois's formulations of Black identity influenced or even pushed
Cortez's work.  In the end, he demonstrates how Cortez "restag[es]
earlier ideological concerns" by focusing on a different kind of
discourse, based on the images of jazz and its syntax and a different
kind of audio performance.


Introduction
Jacob Blevins


Masculine and Feminine, Public and Private, in the Poetry of Sappho
Ellen Greene


An Agon on the Slopes of Helicon: Corinna's Dialogues with Pindar and
Hesiod
David H.J. Larmour


Singing in the Garden: Statius's plein air Lyric (after Horace)
Diana Spencer


Putting Women in Their Place: Women's Devotional Songs in the Rosarius
(BnF fr. 12483)
Daniel E. O'Sullivan


Subjective Identity and Collective Conscience in the Songs of Colin
Muset
Christopher Callahan


Producing (and Reproducing) Poetic Identity in Thomas Edwards's
Narcissus
John Everett Bird


That Noble Flame: Literary History and Regenerative Time in Katherine
Philips's Elegies and Society of Friendship
W. Scott Howard


Apollinaire's Late Lyrics
Dafydd Wood


The Waste Land as a Human Drama Revealed by Eliot's Dialogic
Imagination
Ian Probstein


"The Man with the Blue Guitar": Dialogism in Lyric Poetry
Amittai F. Aviram and Richard Hartnett


Echoes of Dubois: The Crisis Writings and Jayne Cortez's Earlier Poetry
Tom Lavazzi