The previous chapters are all in dialogue, or in debate, with one of the most important studies to appear recently on the nature of the lyric, Jonathan Culler's Theory of the Lyric (2015). In this epilogue I would like to deal with the pivot of these dialogues and debates: the nature of apostrophe as lyric address in terms of its either being read or heard. Rather than reviewing the excellent arguments brought forward in this volume, I would like to take the opportunity to trace the conceptual framework that informs Culler's study and to see whether this may have caused some confusion about the status of his definition of apostrophe as the key marker of the lyric. I would also like to discuss the matter of translation, not unimportant in such a volume as the present one, and how this relates to forms of lyric address. When presented with studies on lyric address in ten famous or important medieval and early modern poems in Dutch, one could of course ask what happens with this address, or with address in general, if one takes into account how they involve different historical forms of self. I would like to consider how the different chapters in this book may have something systematic in common in their responses to Culler's study, due the relation between self and collective. This will also lead me to reconsider the origin of apostrophe as a dramatic or theatrical one. I will do so in the light of a historical difference that cannot be stressed enough, between poetry intended to be performed or to be read. Basically put, my question here is: might it be the case that the lyrical subject, as a self, comes to life only once poetry becomes something that instead of having to be performed turns into something to be published, printed and read? Finally I will ask what happens with modes of address when texts are translated, as they are here.

Structuralism and rhetoric

When in 1943 the German physicist Erwin Schrodinger held his famous series of lectures in Dublin that would later be published as What Is Life?