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The Poem as Place: Three Modes of Scenic Rendering in the Lyric

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Brigitte Peucker
Brigitte Peucker*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
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Abstract

There are essentially three orientations toward landscape description in the lyric: the kind that describes an external place that serves as a backdrop, ornament, or illustration for the poet's thinking; the kind that transforms an external scene into a region of the poet's mind; and the kind that claims to be a habitable region in its own right. Each type has its own mode of assertiveness. In the first, the poetry of distance, description is made possible by claiming that it is impossible to enter the scene. The second features the topography of the inner eye, which results when the poet claims to absorb and become a space. The rhetoric of the third makes the text itself a “place.” All three imply a staking out of poetic territory and the rhetorical domination of the scene. Since these modes transcend literary periodization, they furnish a loosely drawn typology of descriptive poetry.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 96 , Issue 5 , October 1981 , pp. 904 - 913
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1981

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References

1. For thorough discussions of English topographical poetry, see Robert Arnold Aubin, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York: MLA, 1936), and J. Wilson Foster, “A Redefinition of Topographical Poetry,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 69 (1970), 294–306.

2. These are Joseph Addison's categories, which were adopted, in modified form, by Bodmer and Breitinger.

3. For more complete discussions of these poems, see my Arcadia to Elysium: Modes of German Preromanticism, Studien zur Germanistik, Anglistik, und Komparatistik, No. 81 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980).

4. See C. C. L. Hirschfeld, Theorie der Gartenkunst, 5 vols. (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1785), and Marie Luise Gothein, A History of Garden Art, 2 vols. (New York: J. M. Dent, 1928), ii.

5. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), p. 90.

6. Lames Thomson, The Seasons, ed. Otto Zippel (Berlin: Mayer und Muller, 1908), p. 97. I have modernized Thomson's spelling.

7. Brockes, Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, ed. Adalbert Elschenbroich (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966), p. 14; my translation.

8. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series, 36 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), p. 321. Curtius explains that this concept, secularized in Germany in the fourteenth century, passed into common usage in the eighteenth, when it was frequently used by descriptive poets. Ernest Lee Tuveson points out, in addition, that before the eighteenth century the Book of Nature could only be interpreted according to the canons of the Book of Revelation (The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1960], p. 57).

9. Friedrich Hölderlin and Eduard Mörike, Selected Poems, trans. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 195.

10. See Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci,” in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 311–36, for a discussion of the spirit of the place.

11. I am referring here to the well-known controversy between Martin Heidegger and Emil Staiger, on the one hand, and Leo Spitzer, on the other, over the meaning of “scheint” in “Auf eine Lampe.” See Heidegger and Staiger, “Zu einem Vers von Mörike,” Trivium, 9 (1951), 1–5, and Spitzer, “Wiederum Mörikes Gedicht ‘Auf eine Lampe,’” Trivium, 9 (1951), 133–47.

12. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1942), p. 125.

13. Both Beda Allemann and Judith Ryan use the term “empty center” in speaking of Rilke's poems, but Allemann and Ryan define “die leere Mitte” only with regard to their own theses. Allemann, for whom the term is integral to the Figur, stresses its existential significance; Ryan sees it “als Ausprägung des Umschlags” ‘as a mark of the reversal’ (Allemann, Zeit und Figur im späten Rilke: Ein Beitrag zur Poetik des modernen Gedichtes [Pfüllingen: Neske, 1961], and Ryan, Umschlag und Verwandlung: Poetische Struktur und Dichtungstheorie in R. M. Rilke's Lyrik der mit-tleren Periode (1907–1914) [Munich: Winkler, 1972], p. 38).

14. Rilke, Possibility of Being: A Selection of Poems, trans. J. B. Leishman (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 10.

15. My own translation of this line, which Leishman translates too loosely for my purposes.

16. Jakob Steiner, Rilke's Duineser Elegien, 2nd ed. (Bonn: Francke, 1969), pp. 73–75. Steiner lists many occurrences of the word Baum throughout Rilke's poetry, not only in the Duino Elegies.

17. The first quotation is from the poem “Klage” (‘Lament’; 1914), in The Later Poems, trans. J. B. Leishman (London: Hogarth, 1938), p. 73. The second is from the first sonnet of the first part of the Sonnets to Orpheus, p. 17.

18. M. D. Herter Norton, Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Norton, 1938), p. 39.

19. “Es winkt zur Fiihlung” (‘Everything beckons to us to perceive it’), Later Poems, p. 128.

20. Sonnets to Orpheus: Written as a Monument to Wera Ouckama Knoop, trans. J. B. Leishman (London: Hogarth, 1946), p. 89.

21. The latter image is from Celan's “Wortaufschuttung” (‘Heap of Words’).

22. See Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953).