Apostrophe, or the lyric art of turning away.(Critical essay)

Turn away no more:

Why wilt thou turn away? (1)

I. Introduction

Lyric, when it works, works on its audience in a peculiar way. Its effects are not exactly "rhetorical." And so when I claim (as I do in this essay) that where there is lyric there is apostrophe, a corollary of my claim is that apostrophe names not a codified rhetorical device or trope, but a demand that lyric poems lay upon their readers. (2) The English poet Geoffrey Hill, mulling over the problem of "poetic voice" in a 1981 interview on BBC Radio, made this remark:

 
    ... those old distinctions that you get in the Victorian and 
  Romantic observers and auditors--the kinds of distinction that they 
  are trying to draw all the time between a dramatic and a lyric voice-- 
  I think in our time inevitably merge. The lyric voice must exist, or 
  must be heard, or has to be heard, or is constrained to be heard, in a 
  dramatic context. (cited in Griffiths, 76)