Voice and Possession

Susan Stewart, from Poetry and the Fate of the Senses.

Why do we privilege voice? Because we see it as a vehicle of the soul (personalized to each).

(108) Hearing one's own voice is as horrid/uncanny as viewing one's own corpse-- this reminds me of Riley. Why are lyric poets so afraid of themselves? BOO.

Apparently, it's because the voice contains the seed of its own disappearance (echoing death)-- again, the way Dickinson felt disturbed by seeing her letter at a friend's house or Riley gets spooked every time she sees a poem or whatever.

Stewart outlines two modes of thinking concerning poetry:

one is Diotima's: poets are masters of form

another is Plato's: poets are dangerous because they are mastered by something else; the poetry comes from somewhere else, and worse, poetry sounds good but perverts the ideals-- assuming poetry has power in society (I'm thinking it must have had more immediate societal affect than it does now?)

but paradox! how can poetry be both a mastery of form and mastered by something else?

examining Plath and Brooks (this is the explication I found most useful, more than Keats, Hardy, or Bishop, though she goes more in-depth for them):

(118-9) Both Plath and Brooks employ redundant word choice and exact rhyming as a means of representing the transport or compulsive way-laying of subjective intention. To this extent, they demonstrate that we cannot necessary (sic) conclude that strict form signifies authorial mastery or control, it as readily can signify the submersion of will within convention.

Which brings me to her examination of Keats, Hardy, and Bishop-- which really just felt like a plug for form as sense's little helper-- she concludes this chapter with, "By acknowledging the ways in which our voices are spoken through, we are bound to hear more than we meant to say" (143).

But her entire analyses are based on locating formal matches with semantic pieces-- look at the meter here! or the repetition there! --and this is what it means! Which isn't to dog on meaning. But I guess this gets back to the problem of the paradox-- how much is given/ bequeathed/ ventriloquized/ whatever, and how much control does the poet have? and how often is the poet thinking about all his/her own referents, anyway?