Literary Friendship(s), Or, ‘trying, to get closer […]’: On Fiona Sampson's Beyond the Lyric

Introduction: Content of the form

Sampson writes, opening this major work of critical mapping, that she doesn't want to read the gamut of contemporary British verse in a partisan or, as she puts it tartly, glass ‘half- empty’ manner, but rather, with cup- to- lip, glass half- full; with a brief, that is, not of demarcating the good from the bad to the ugly, but ‘seeing’ rather ‘what's actually going on, in all its pleasurable variety’, and concentrating on ‘what a poem does’ (BTL 8). Opening with this welcoming gesture, she is adverting to her critical role as one of ‘critique’ in its traditional sense. According to the distinction I’m adverting to, ‘critique’ is different to ‘criticism’ in the more colloquial sense; ‘critique’ is more an effort to comprehend the ground and base of a sensibility, according to its own terms and/ or context.

Like John Burnside (a poet whose fiercely intelligent poetics ally somewhat with Sampson’s) noted in a later chapter of Beyond the Lyric (significantly titled, ‘The Expanded Lyric’ – expansiveness: tell- tale) for his radically inquisitive rather than teleologically closed and/ or assertive verse (252), Sampson's map is made in an inquisitive mode. Not only is it the case, like Edward Said beginning Beginnings, that she often makes use of the very arms- opened pedagogical or peripatetic gesture of the question followed by teased- out answer, but also that her judgements, which from another perspective are conclusive (not to mention, instantiated), are always as much complimentary as complementary.