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) 

On this occasion, Hill had in mind the poet's public reading of his own poem, but what he says has broader application. He describes, in fact, the predicament of any reader or listener. Every spoken iteration of a lyric "must be heard" in the dramatic context he refers to. Of course, "dramatic" has some special sense here. A lyric poem is not a script for speaking. Nor is it exactly a staging of speech. Speaking a lyric is only accidentally related to acting. The essay that follows focuses on the figure of apostrophe in order to cast some light on the "dramatic context" that constrains lyric in our time. (3)

My analysis touches on poems from a range of periods over the last four hundred years, including sixteenth- and seventeenth-century, Victorian, and mid-twentieth century works. The examples have been gathered from my own itineraries of reading, and considered through a modernist lens. My thesis has a transhistorical reach, though its assumptions are of a late modernist moment. I come to my guiding conception of lyric apostrophe primarily by way of Pound (via an Olson-related anecdote, and Canto 82). What starts as bare intimation gains inductive and genealogical power in the turn to Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." The example of apostrophe in Whitman's mockingbird passage is remarkably original, to the point of idiosyncrasy. Nevertheless, general principles of lyric can be abstracted from it (and reconfirmed even in much older poems, such as Herbert's "Denial," or those of other traditions, such as Celan's "Sprachgitter").