Poiesis, techne and silent writing: Lyric poetry in the destitute time

This dissertation is an exploration of the silencing of the lyric in modernity, as encountered in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, Georg Trakl and d.a.levy. It is also the first critical introduction of levy, avant-garde American poet (1942-1968). Such silencing of the lyric, of poetic song, is a defining feature of the present epoch, in a phenomenological and an historic sense. The former is explored through Heidegger's sense that a poetic hearing affords the sole possibility for the world's turning away from the abyss of the concealment of Being (Poetry, Language, Thought); the latter through articulations of the philosophical, theological and political suppression of lyric poetry in the West, registered, in different ways, by each of the poetic figures. The study is influenced by Heidegger's "The Origin of Art and the Destination of Thought" (my translation is provided), The Question Concerning Technology and his other writings. It also takes up Nietzsche's formulations of nihilism, his critique of Christianity and his sense of the loss of the instinctual life in modernity, as implicated in the works of all three poets. Additional critical figures include Blanchot, Bataille, Levinas, Celan and Nancy. Other poetic figures are Hölderlin, Whitman and Eliot.;The dissertation proceeds through close readings of levy's long poem, Cleveland undercovers, Trakl's "De Profundis" and Rimbaud's Une saison en enfer, which is read in comparison with levy's Suburban Monastery Death Poem. The two poems are compared through the notions of the silencing of the poetic "I" and the disavowal and/or affirmation of the poetic vocation. All the poems are explored through mythological and scriptural soundings, particularly Trakl's "De Profundis," with its expression of a pastoral longing for a lost pagan (Celtic) age. The readings of Rimbaud and levy examine poetic ambiguity through Blanchot's and Levinas's differing notions of the image, and through allusions and fathomings within poetic anamnesis. Other topics include the relationship of poiēsis and physis, the problem of writing as a silencing of song, the notions of poetic sacrifice, poetic freedom and poetic madness, the failure of poetic inspiration in the modern age, and the materiality of writing.