Loves and Muses I

Abstract

Poetry, T. S. Eliot asserts, is ‘not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.’¹ Wallace Stevens concurs: ‘Poetry is not personal.’² In a different tone, but to similar effect, D. H. Lawrence urges ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.’³ Virginia Woolf asserts that Shakespeare achieved greatness by getting his work ‘expressed completely’:

We are not held up by some ‘revelation’ which reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed.⁴

Literature is a matter of texts, not authors. ‘The death of the poet’, Auden tells us in his celebrated elegy, ‘was kept from his poems’, and Yeats ‘became his admirers’.⁵ With elegant Gallic hyperbole Roland Barthes takes demystification to its furthest point. The author’s plight, he believes, is precisely to have no plight, no unique ‘manner of being’: ‘it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is… to reach that point where only language acts, “performs”, and not “me”.’⁶ The author is textually dead even as he or she writes.