Into the Looking Glass: Fiona Sampson as Poet and Critic from 2005– 2007

Introduction

The four parts of this writing segue on from each other, but also revolve around their central concern, which is to descry and elaborate on Sampson’s modernist metaphysics (an oxymoron, perhaps). Both in conception and in execution on the page, about and ‘about’, the hope is that the insights, readings, samplings and so on commune in a way which is like the conception of an ‘oceanic logic’ that opens what follows. All this is to say, that the interwoven and interweaving form of the discussion of the communities and the distances in Sampson's critical and poetic oeuvre between, in the main, 2005– 2007, hopefully lives out, embodies, its discursive content, to a certain extent at least. My hope has been, constructively, to mirror the various mirrors in Sampson's poetics, closing distances between only seemingly separate works, genres, modes. What holds is that in Sampson's writing at this time there is indeed a community of viewpoints that close in, but which do so, not like the closing of a circle, but like the spiralling of a spire. The ability to be universal and concrete at the same time seems to be a kind of never- ending project, an insuperable middle. And the purpose of this section is to show that conscientious middle- ness – in what is still the (early-) middle of the Sampson oeuvre to- date.

A possible framework, or, a framework of possibilities

In a recent work, Theories of the Logos, the contemporary philosopher Ermanno Bencivenga allies ‘poetry’ with ‘dialectical logic’. Before this, though, he explains the nature of ‘analytical logic’, the ‘Aristotelian framework’, as that which aims to pin meaning down to one final and irrevocable sense. The next chapter continues by saying how analytic logic does not necessarily mean a kind of meaning obtained by a ‘process of breaking down’ (TL 25).