SOBRE LA POESÍA LÍRICA
THE LYRIC POET'S LOSING BATTLE AGAINST THE MARCH OF TIME
Literary Critic Sharon Cameron Uses the Poetry of Emily Dickinson
to Examine Temporal Features of the Lyric Genre
[Johns Hopkins Journal, Vol 13, No.3, Fall 1979)]
"My subject is the short poem in English–usually called the lyric," says Sharon Cameron. That disarmingly simple statement immediately raises a host of questions and, by what it leaves unsaid, shows why critics like Dr. Cameron study literary genres–those conventions or forms which, like landscape paintings or sonatas, have certain characteristics in common. Is it the case, for instance, that everyone who writes a short poem writes a lyric? If not, what distinguishes a lyric from some other type of poetry?; indeed, questions of form and length aside, does the lyric address problems–themes–different from those of a play or a novel, or handle the same ones differently? Finally, if there are structures and concerns common to all lyrics, what are they?Dr. Cameron, professor of English, is interested in such questions, in exploring what is unique about the lyric. To find the underlying concerns and patterns that connect works of literature, placing them in a tradition they may alter and expand, is to enrich our understanding of particular works and the genre to which they belong. So beginning with the most simple, general observation is not a bad idea. Over the years, styles change–rhyme and meter, for instance, give way to free verse. To avoid bogging down at the start one must establish a broad, common ground.
As Dr. Cameron points out, lyrics, narratives, and dramas are all fictions which organize time and space in ways not found in "real life," and it is the way they are conceived or conceive of themselves that distinguishes one literary form from another. In her recently published book, Lyric Time: Emily Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Johns Hopkins University Press), she writes: "All literature attempts to regulate chronology, much literature to defeat it, but the strategic ingenuities of the novel, drama and lyric regale us variously with the dreams they have wrought. Unlike the drama, whose province is conflict, and unlike the novel or narrative, which connects isolated moments of time to create a story peopled and framed by a social context, the lyric voice is solitary and generally speaks out of a single moment in time."
A desire for timelessness in the face of the relentless march of time dominates and distinguishes the lyric. The form–the shortness of the poem—requiring, as it does, density and intensity of language, and a single voice, is well suited to the lyric poet's temporal concerns. Of Emily Dickinson's poems and the genre in general, Dr. Cameron states, "The displacement of speech from a definitive context, the namelessness of the lyric speaker and the gratuitousness of her history, the lyric's travel backwards and forwards over the same ground–all these features that unhinge time from its fixtures and reduce it to a unity–are present in the earliest lyrics we can examine." Not all lyrics are the same, she says, but from medieval times to the present, all are based on the poet's belief that "a verbal sabotage of sequence will trigger a temporal one, that, grown sufficiently desperate, the maneuvers of speech can stop time dead."
Dr. Cameron says that her study centers on Emily Dickinson because her poems are frequently so close to the edge of comprehension, so wrenching in their disruption of ordinary chronology that they allow the critic to examine closely the working of the genre seen in the light of an extreme instance of it. Yet, for Dickinson, as for other lyric poets, the quest for timelessness is ultimately doomed to failure. As. Dr. Cameron states in the conclusion to her book: "The deathless world of no time is a world we lose by merely waking up. Dickinson poems articulate the loss and, like all lyrics, they attempt to reverse it. If she dreamed this reversal bolder than most lyrics do, throwing into relief the shape of the lyric struggle itself, she knew more profoundly the shocking certainty of its disappointment."
Publication of Lyric Time has not marked and end to Dr. Cameron's interest in the lyric and temporal structures in literature. She is currently writing a book on three American "obsessional" novels–Melville's Moby Dick, Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury, and Nabokov's Lolita–which she describes as stranded between the lyric, with its radical interiority (solipsism of the speaker), and the drama, in which everything internal is externalized into action. She plans to talk about how these texts construct boundaries between their characters, and how they break down generic boundaries in their own right, suggesting that the representation of separate selves and the problem of self-representation or generic coherence (how these novels are related to lyric and dramatic possibilities) are connected. After the book is complete, she will begin work on another book about the lyric, a theoretical examination of the genre.
Viewing a work in relationship to a particular genre is not without its pitfalls, but, if properly done, it can prove most rewarding. As Dr. Cameron says, "Conventions overlap. It is important to talk about strains of novels or lyrics and not exclude consideration of genres that are mixed or borderline. One has to ask how a given work imagines the convention in which it was written, how such convention evolved, to ask about its history, and about the relationship between generic questions and historical ones."
To answer those questions is to find the patterns that lie just below the surface of literary works.
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Inés Azar azar@gwu.edu