Poetry and Emotion

Abstract

Lyric poetry takes subjective consciousness as a condition of its content, certainly since romanticism, but arguably back to the origins of modernity. In this way, it has served the purposes of a formalist aesthetic in which poetic speech instantiates subjectivity in that larger Hegelian sense of the “ideal becoming the real.” However, this intrinsic conception of lyric presents some obvious difficulties for psychoanalytic interpretation. Pointing to defenses, resistances, and discursive distortions, psychoanalysis exacerbates disparities in the relation of speech and content. It seeks to discover motivations based on unconscious ideas, emotions, and impulses, even if it grants the difficulties of distinguishing various kinds of unconscious articulations. This emphasis on contradictory motivations contrasts with perhaps the most salient generic expectation of lyric: a subjective wholeness in which a speaker reflects on an experience and transforms that reflection into insight, into self-understanding — transforms it, that is, into a lyric “subject.” Put in another way, the pathos of self-presence, of self-understanding, of the subject-who-knowsherself, is central to our generic understanding of lyric, even if that presence is only implicit in the authorial judgment of an objectified speaker of intractable unreliability, as in the dramatic monologue. Hence, vigorously symptomatic readings seem to outrun the subjective closure that formal closure enforces in the lyric. As a result, even though lyric poems present in richly impacted form the deflections and delusions that are the hermeneutic plunder of psychoanalytic interpretation, the interpretation of lyric has lagged behind the kinds of readings suggested by the post-structuralist narrative of fragmentation with which psychoanalysis is so obviously consonant, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its myriad versions of the letter in sufferance.