{"id":128,"date":"2016-07-03T18:10:46","date_gmt":"2016-07-03T18:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=128"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:35:59","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:35:59","slug":"benjamin-bennett-the-defective-art-of-poetry-sappho-to-yeats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2016\/07\/03\/benjamin-bennett-the-defective-art-of-poetry-sappho-to-yeats\/","title":{"rendered":"Benjamin Bennett, The Defective Art of Poetry: Sappho to Yeats"},"content":{"rendered":"

Benjamin Bennett. The Defective Art of Poetry: Sappho to Yeats<\/em><\/a>. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. x, 208 p. ISBN 9781137381873. \u00a353.50 (hardcover).<\/p>\n

Benjamin Bennett\u2019s book traces a line, as its subtitle suggests, from Sappho to Yeats, as if to encompass most of the Western European lyric tradition. Its eight chapters discuss a dozen or so poems in extenso<\/em> and allude to a handful of others as supporting evidence.<\/p>\n

Several of the poems Bennett discusses \u2014 Sappho\u2019s invocation to Aphrodite, Goethe\u2019s \u201c\u00dcber allen Gipfeln,\u201d Verlaine\u2019s \u201cChanson d\u2019automne\u201d \u2014 have been held up by one critic or another as examples of perfection. All the exhibits are short: from a few dozen to perhaps three hundred words. With so few moving parts, a reader might expect that little could go wrong. Many poetry addicts will possess several of these poems in memory, and thus be in a position to evaluate their integrity of design. With such examples before us, how can Bennett brand poetry with what the law would call inherent vice or latent defect?<\/p>\n

In its simplest form, the problem around which Bennett builds his case studies is \u201cthe basic defect of poetry\u2014that poetry, in the age of the printed book, always invokes a quasi-musical immediacy and communicativeness that it can never actually deliver\u201d (123; see also p. 2). A reminiscence of music survives in our conventions for reading, writing, and printing poetry (e.g., line breaks and the right-hand margin), but these signs usually amount to no more than relics of a former time. Returning poetry to its home in music is one of the recurrent utopias of Western culture, recognizable through such dissimilar events as the founding of opera in the age of Monteverdi and the prophecies of a future materialistic poetry of action in Rimbaud\u2019s \u201cLettre du voyant.\u201d But Bennett\u2019s interest is not in restoration. It is rather in what the defect produces.<\/p>\n

The absence of melody, a defender may say, merely prompts the compensatory supplement of additional charges of meaning in the words, degrees of meaning which singing might but poorly transmit: necessity proving the mother of invention. Thus lyric\u2019s inadequacy as music is its advantage as language and thought. This counter-argument is one Bennett has already considered, but apparently found too simple and symmetrical. Bennett\u2019s purpose is not to set up a norm, even less to demolish one. It is simply to follow the consequences of poetry\u2019s originating imperfection through some exemplarily brief, taut, and affecting poems.<\/p>\n

The book starts out \u2014 puzzlingly or dialectically \u2014 with the negation of a negation, a move that makes more sense on second reading. Facing \u201cthe silencing opposition between passion and poetic form,\u201d Sappho stands out for \u201cher insistence on the problem as a problem, her refusal to back away from it, her implacable laying bare of a fundamental defect in the very idea of a passionate poetry\u201d (30). For in Sappho\u2019s \u201cPoikilothron\u201d ode, where the lover\u2019s disappointment is shown turning into a call for revenge, there is for Bennett \u201cno gap between the immediate kinesis of passion and the unfolding of language. And precisely the absence of such a gap, I contend, is in Sappho\u2019s practice the aim of poetry, the reason for poetry.\u201d(22)<\/p>\n

Like Michael Riffaterre or Paul de Man, Bennett is a reader who scrutinizes the mimetic surfaces of poems for tell-tale gaps, inconsistencies, impossibilities, and from these draws clues about the ultimate sources of the poem. It is absurd for Goethe to have said so baldly \u201cDie V\u00f6gelein schweigen im Walde,\u201d for in a forest the main way to know whether birds are there or not is to listen for them singing\u2014not \u201cbeing silent.\u201d The slight failure to make sense tips us off, however, to a more consequential structure of perception and awareness that wraps around the poem itself as linguistic event, as \u201chieroglyph\u201d (49). This is obviously not New Critical reading for totality and autonomy, nor is it a biographical reading that would seek to reestablish the transparency of an original experience. It is reading for incoherence\u2014but not the way an enemy of poetry would perform it; rather, the way a Socratic friend of poems might sidle up and through questioning make them uncomfortably self-aware.<\/p>\n

Each chapter trains the reader to recognize new forms of the enabling \u201cdefect.\u201d The chapter on \u201cHyperions Schicksalslied\u201d carries out an intense and subtle questioning of practically every affirmation made in that poem, along with the slightest details of its meter, leading to a recognition of \u201cthe opposition between the poem as artifact and the poem as action\u2026. H\u00f6lderlin \u2026 uses [this] basic defectiveness of poetic form to signify a truth concerning the relation between kinetic reading and intellectual reading, and hence a truth concerning the relation between fate as experience and the knowledge of fate\u201d (101). The chapter on Verlaine\u2019s \u201cChanson d\u2019automne\u201d (\u201cLes sanglots longs \/ Des violons \/ De l\u2019automne\u2026\u201d) derives powerful metapoetic arguments from what sounds to some ears like mere melancholy humming. The chapter on the use of M\u00f6rike\u2019s \u201cAuf eine Lampe\u201d as a speaking platform by Heidegger, Staiger, and Spitzer reserves a fine surprise: that none of the poem\u2019s interpreters have noticed how deftly it undercuts their own pretensions to hermeneutic authority, founded on their claims to have read the poem conclusively. The late poem \u201cLapis Lazuli\u201d by Yeats proposes that we look on present-day political crisis with the \u201cancient, glittering eyes\u201d of two carved Chinese on a chunk of semi-precious stone. Wisdom? Rather a preparation for the point that \u201cboth poetry and politics, when conducted properly, involve the acceptance of a radical, irreparable defect in themselves\u2026. What the two endeavors have in common is in truth nothing but defect\u201d (183).<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s continuous argument occurs through the repeated discovery of an indispensable flaw in the poem\u2019s authority to affirm, to prophesy or to make beautiful. The recurrence of a single motif as the pivot of these various readings may suggest an atemporal poetic. But careful reading revises that impression. Bennett is conscious of differences in the historical situations of the successive poets. He could perhaps have brought out their specific conditions of utterance a little more without seeming to endorse a thorough-going ideology of \u201ccontext\u201d as the background that obviates argument. It does seem to this reviewer, for example, that the dream of a poem as action (quickly set on a collision course with the ideal of a poem as form) is a Romantic invention, the conditions for its emergence set by poetry\u2019s unsure place among the media of a democratizing age.<\/p>\n

Poetry deserves such subtle, relentless and inventive readers as Bennett. His respect for the art is not in the least discomfited by such arguments as de Man\u2019s, that \u201cthe lyric is not a genre, but one name among several to designate the defensive motion of the understanding, the possibility of a future hermeneutics\u201d (\u201cAnthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,\u201d The Rhetoric of Romanticism<\/em><\/a> [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 261). The critique can be admitted without defensiveness. Lyrics like those discussed in this book found \u201cthe possibility of a future hermeneutics\u201d on the knowledge that their contact with \u201cthe understanding\u201d will rarely be smooth\u2014and on the certainty that there is no shame to being found out as defective, if it happens at the end of an investigation like those recounted here.<\/p>\n

Haun Saussy
\nUniversity of Chicago<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Benjamin Bennett. The Defective Art of Poetry: Sappho to Yeats. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. x, 208 p. ISBN 9781137381873. \u00a353.50 (hardcover). Benjamin Bennett\u2019s book traces a line, as its subtitle suggests, from Sappho to Yeats, as if to encompass most of the Western European lyric tradition. Its eight chapters discuss a dozen or so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1948],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-poetry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2509,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions\/2509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}