Aesthetic Activity in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms

Abstract

Can a poem be dialogic? If we are to follow Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s remarks in “Discourse in the Novel”—his most mature exposition of dialogism—we would likely answer “no.” In that essay, Bakhtin repeatedly insists that, although all language is shaped by the voices of others, prose novels integrate those other voices, while in poetry such voices are “artificially extinguished” (284). In a novel, we encounter the voices of many personalities and social classes, and each group speaks differently. Dialogism, as Bakhtin explains it, is primarily evident in stylistic features such as the “hybrid construction”: a single word, phrase, or sentence that clearly “contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles” (304ff.). In a poem, according to Bakhtin, the voice of the poet is the only authoritative voice. All of the words in a poem have had to pass through the heteroglossia of the poet’s own world, of course, but in the poem itself “the records of the passage remain in the slag of the creative process, which is then cleared away (as scaffolding is cleared away once construction is finished), so that the finished work may rise as unitary speech […]” (331). Other voices may even linger in a poem, as when an author makes an allusion to an earlier work, but in such cases the other voices are clearly subordinated to the point of view of the poet—in effect losing their genuine “otherness.”

O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

An’ foolish notion …

(Robert Burns, “To a Louse”)