Lyric poetry, rooted in ancient hymns, prayers, and incantations, weaves together emotional expression (or evocation) and intellectual reflection. Because personal feeling and imaginative life take precedence, the genre employs techniques highlighting the interconnectedness of varied or dissimilar things, featuring words carrying sacred and/or magical association, and imagery from dreams and nature, particularly metaphors bespeaking its cycles. Such a dynamic interplay of elements serves to explore complex issues and themes, in a highly personal manner.
This engagement encompasses philosophical musings and reflections on society or broader humanity, adding layers of intellectual depth to the emotional landscape or narrative. Yet, at its core, lyric points to what is shared among people in their concealed, interior worlds. Thus, to this end it is necessary to strike a balance between sensuous and intellectual contemplation through the skillful expression (or evocation) of personal feeling, typically in a tone whereby the monumental and the intimate cohere into a voice of “monumental intimacy.” Since a prayer is made aloud or silently, in public or in private, a lyric poem usually leans more toward the monumental or more toward the intimate, but ultimately it blends the two into a form in which impersonality and familiarity, hugeness and smallness, remoteness and intimacy have become one. Monumental intimacy being integral to lyric is arguably the main reason why Antonio Porchia’s aphorisms are regarded as poetry: “When you seem to be listening to my words, they seem to be your words, with me listening.”
Through blending simple and complex speech, vividness (sensory or emotional immediacy) and abstraction, and by arranging words with ritualistic, cyclic repetition (including though not limited to rhyme and meter), usually as would befit a hymn or an incantation, poets cultivate rich, varied experiences, stirring the imagination (the senses), the heart (the passions), and the intellect (the reason). Lyric poetry creates a sense of balance or harmony. It makes the abstract sensuous, and the sensuous abstract. It speaks in concept-images and cyclic repetitions. And it is often polysemous. As a result, it does its work through evocation to a greater degree than ordinary, practical language, and suggests meanings beyond those it denotes. By virtue of such language use, the poet seems to announce, implicitly:
-My senses and emotions express themselves in rhythm, color, and image.
-My reason expresses itself in syllogism, formula, and diagram.
-When I put them together, I am able to speak a language of my whole being.
-Which just happens to be the language of dreams.
It is the faculty of intuition which bridges the reason and senses/passions, via a highly compressed schematic language of concept-images, a sort of hieroglyphics.
The concept-image, or sensuous concept, can only be understood in relation to the mythical image and the theoretical concept.
The pure mythical image can be likened to a spectral or beautiful face appearing out of nowhere if a match happens to be struck in the midst of blackest night. To exist it must eliminate, must become the only thing—it is purely singular. It even replaces the world, so to speak.
The concept is an abstraction which functions and feels as a subway map. It is a diffusely lit molecule of atomic conception. It ultimately implies the entire dimly lit world without sensuous particularity. It implies the whole universe, all other abstract symbols. The concept is a sign whose meaning, while gaining its meaning through its difference from all other signs, has no identity of its own. The purely mythical image, on the other hand, has an irreducible identity, and is truly singular.
The poetic hieroglyph, finally, is a sensuous concept. It contains elements of the pure mythical image as well as those of the rationalistic concept. It predates the concept, of course, while containing within it the potential for its existence. Like a pure mythical image, it has a strong gravitational force, its own intensity. But, like a concept—as a sign—it is only an abstraction, a theoretical symbol.
Like all language, however, which is symbolic, it has the extensive, outward-tending force of science and systematic reason, combined with the immanent, hypnotic, self-reinforcing mechanism of fascination belonging to art and myth. Strong emotion could be said to be the basis of mythical images, and the mythical image the basis of figurative language. Poetry emerges when imagination and language work in tandem to convert the pure, alien “wild nature” of powerful emotion into a possession of “culture.” Hence the concept-image is one of nature’s means of making itself “cultural.” It is through this complex process that our ancestors transformed themselves from beings of wild nature into highly cultural beings, in the way that we have subjected nature continually to a process of cultivation. It is this tendency of course which has led us to a point where too many have forgotten their connection to nature, and hence their connection to poetry, and this effort to become purely cultural and increasingly divorced from nature could prove our undoing.
The poetic hieroglyph, one might say, has the form of a stable molecule as well as the blinding light of an atomic blast. If it wished to, it could obliterate the world. It could also enumerate all which exists under the sun, in the form of an endless poetic catalog. Indeed the catalog (or enumeratio) in its highest expression is a sort of irrational infinity, the flip side of that which appears out of nowhere in the darkness of a wood. It is as much the Abrahamic god’s speech act “Let there be light” as Adam’s bestowal of the (true) names upon God’s creatures.
More than any other art form, poetry focuses on the dialectic of permanence and impermanence. And this tension is expressed in terms of the very basic natural cycles through which birth leads gradually—and inevitably—towards death, only to repeat itself afresh. This primordial mechanism has been at the heart of all world religions, and still governs our lives whether we fully recognize it or not. Lyric is the art which expresses individual subjectivity through this wonderfully ancient, pagan lens.
Such a broad, comprehensive definition as this acknowledges lyric’s capacity for evolution and adaptation over time, while honoring the ritual and ceremonial functions of propitiation and memorialization which are its ancestral bases.
[Michael G. Donkin]