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Article: Notes on lyric poetry; or, at the muse's tomb.
- Article from:
- Chicago Review
- Article date:
- September 22, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 University of Chicago. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Translating the language of things into that of humans entails not only translating silence into audibility; it means translating the nameless into the name.
- Walter Benjamin
One of my close friends, also a worker in the mine fields of the poetic, says to me "the lyric is dead." I cannot but agree, if by lyric we mean that private self-regarding effusion of language, that romantic mea culpa by which a world is nostalgically recalled, privileged and measured against what is. Likewise, I would emphatically add, poetry is dead or at least dying out of a swoon of novelty if it subscribes too closely to those collocations of contemporary thought we call theory or ...