Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Advertisement
- 1 Casting Off
- 2 Reading a Novel
- 3 Reading a Poem
- 4 Drama: An Aside
- 5 The Essay: A Note (On Being Late)
- 6 On Critical and Creative Writing
- 7 The Literary Turn
- 8 Veerer: Where Ghosts Live
- 9 Veerer: Reading Melville's ‘Bartleby’ A Small Case of Civil Disobedience
- 10 Veering with Lawrence
- Appendix: A Note on Nodism
- Index
3 - Reading a Poem
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Advertisement
- 1 Casting Off
- 2 Reading a Novel
- 3 Reading a Poem
- 4 Drama: An Aside
- 5 The Essay: A Note (On Being Late)
- 6 On Critical and Creative Writing
- 7 The Literary Turn
- 8 Veerer: Where Ghosts Live
- 9 Veerer: Reading Melville's ‘Bartleby’ A Small Case of Civil Disobedience
- 10 Veering with Lawrence
- Appendix: A Note on Nodism
- Index
Summary
Every revolution has been born in poetry, has first of all been made with the force of poetry.
It veering
off the path
ravine
(Lisa Fishman)Speaking of eggs (Proust's song-inducing writing), one of the best-known, funniest but also most unsettling laid in literature is Humpty Dumpty, in no small spoonful on account of his theory of language: ‘When I use a word,’ he says, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ He talks about how ‘to be master’ of words: ‘They've a temper, some of them – particularly verbs: they're the proudest – adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs – however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!’ (163). It would be nice to interrupt and ask him about ‘veering’ – about whether it is an adjective or a verb, about how he would manage it and what he would pay when it ‘come[s] round me of a Saturday night … for to get [its] wages’ (164). Happily, Humpty's mastery is a delusion, merely eggomaniacal. One of the curious (or curiouser and curiouser) things about ‘veering’ is that it comports two quite distinct and even opposing senses: it can be a matter of exercising control or of loss of control. You might be veering in a controlled manner, even (so you suppose) masterfully, or you might be veering inadvertently, hopelessly, out of control. ‘Veering’ thus functions in the manner of what Sigmund Freud called primal words: it seems to entail antithetical meanings.
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- Chapter
- Information
- VeeringA Theory of Literature, pp. 34 - 53Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011