The True Forms of Things: Cratylism and American Poetry

Abstract

This book starts from the assumption that poetics are enabling discourses that support intellectual projects in which poetry as such is not always the horizon. For the three poets I discuss in these pages, Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson, poetry is a means to an end; that end includes the Utopian prospect of a renewal of society. In conceiving of poetics as enabling discourses, I mean, then, to discuss the inaccuracies, faulty reasoning, and fantasies of accomplishment that one finds in such writing in terms of the poetry they help to produce and the projects they help to support rather than as weaknesses to be identified, problems to be critiqued, or contradictions to be resolved. In varying degrees, all three of my poets consciously turned away from sophisticated theories of language to embrace a dream of a perfect language; they did so for reasons that had everything to do with their deepest commitments as poets and citizens. In each case, workable descriptions of language as it is actually used and as it actually functions were set aside for (or made subservient to) dreams of how language might be used and should function. Thus, unlike other Whitman scholars, who see ambivalence, conflict, or confusion in Whitman’s writing on words, I see the conscious, meticulous construction of an intellectual position that might validate his poetics philologically.

Socrates: Then, Hermogenes, I should say that this giving of names can be no such light matter as you fancy, or the work of light or chance persons. And Cratylus is right in saying that things have names by nature, and that not every man is an artificer of names, but he only who looks to the name which each thing by nature has, and is able to express the true forms of things in letters and syllables.

Hermogenes: I cannot answer you, Socrates, but I find a difficulty in changing my opinion all in a moment, and I think that I should be more readily persuaded, if you would show me just what this is which you term the natural fitness of names.

Socrates: My good Hermogenes, I have none to show. Was I not telling you just now—but you have forgotten—that I knew nothing, and was I not proposing to share the inquiry with you?

Plato, Cratylus, 390d–391a¹