Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Lyric, Aestheticism and the Later Nineteenth Century
- Part I Time
- Part II Space
- 5 Form and Transaction: Lyric Touch
- 6 Arthur Symons and Decadent Lyric Phenomenology
- 7 ‘Space, the Bound of a Solid’: Alice Meynell and Thomas Hardy
- Part III Subjectivity
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Form and Transaction: Lyric Touch
from Part II - Space
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Lyric, Aestheticism and the Later Nineteenth Century
- Part I Time
- Part II Space
- 5 Form and Transaction: Lyric Touch
- 6 Arthur Symons and Decadent Lyric Phenomenology
- 7 ‘Space, the Bound of a Solid’: Alice Meynell and Thomas Hardy
- Part III Subjectivity
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Touch is the paradigm for the reciprocal open-endedness of all art forms involving the representation of persons […] Touch, like dizziness is a threshold activity – subjectivity and objectivity come quite close to each other.
Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, pp. 168, 178Space is not the setting (real or logical) in which things are arranged, but the means whereby the positing of things becomes possible. This means that instead of imagining it as a sort of ether in which all things fioat, or conceiving it abstractly as a characteristic that they have in common, we must think of it as the universal power enabling them to be connected.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 243Part II explores aspects of lyric's response to modernity that fall under a broad dimension of spatiality. This part responds to two central problems and enables a sensitivity to issues that go to the heart of Decadent and aestheticist poetics. The first is the charge that the fashion for strict verse forms represented an ossification in print of an aural lyric energy, producing a poetry that appealed primarily as spatial patterns on the page. Indeed, the accusations often levelled at aestheticist poetry referred to it killing the music of poetry in the complex rhetoric of those intricate strict verse forms, forms that are themselves more readily appreciated visually. The Scottish scholar John Campbell Shairp, for example, is typical of the more conservative condemnations of this verse (Shairp was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1877 and re-elected in 1882; he was in his sixties when he wrote a piece for the Contemporary Review on ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ in the 1880s). He discusses its primary appeal to the eye, a marker, for him, of a degrading of the imagination in contrast with poetry written for the ear: ‘The ear is a more spiritual sense, and so we find the spiritual poet making sound, not sight, ally itself to the finest beauty.’ The second problem motivating this part is what was outlined in Chapter 1 as the threat of solipsism bequeathed by a Romantic idea of lyric introspection, and connected with the fate of lyric in an age of mass print circulation: a threat to the idea of lyric as a transaction (a reaching out across space) between a framing ‘I’ and ‘you’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Lyric Poem and AestheticismForms of Modernity, pp. 115 - 129Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016