| Is it possible to speak the truth about oneself? If self-knowledge is possible, what purpose does it serve? Does self-consciousness promise redemptive self-recuperation, or does it threaten endless self-deferral? The subject of this study is the intersection of these questions with the ways in which lyric poetry has been theorized and written in England and America over the past two hundred years. As an experiment in theorizing literary continuity, and following the Romantic intuition that the destinies of the questions "What is poetry?" and "What does it mean to be a self?" are linked, I argue that Romantic and post-Romantic poetry can be understood as an interlocking set of especially concentrated and flexible modes of self-consciousness.;This study identifies three major modes of Romantic and post-Romantic self-consciousness: sincere, staged, and "impersonal." I argue that the sincere mode of self-consciousness, represented by Wordsworth and Rich, fails to recuperate a personally accountable self, instead undergoing a pressure towards impersonality. Also, a sincerity that would cast off outmoded poetic forms (represented by Wordsworth, Rich, Lowell, and Plath) reproduces in new forms the artificiality it supposedly leaves behind. In the staged confession mode of self-consciousness, the separation between the poet and his or her dramatized speaker (found in poems by Browning, Eliot, Berryman, and Plath), tends to collapse. I identify poetry that expresses a specific personality (exemplified by Byron and Sexton) as "charismatic" poetry that carries the vestigial traces of a dramatic monologue that has broken down. Finally, I show that poets who write about the comparatively impersonal experience of writing poetry (for example, Keats and Stevens) find themselves defining "poetry" as impossible to embody in a poem. Poets who focus on the seemingly impersonal work of interpreting the external world (represented by Bishop and Merrill) cannot separate impersonal from more personal forms of reading, as the intractable surfaces of that world both resist them and uncontrollably give way. Romantic and post-Romantic poetry comes to appear as a set of unexpected, often seemingly unintended effects resulting from acts of self-consciousness directed elsewhere, a map of productive and frequently beautiful failures of self-expression. |
