The revolution in poetic language entailed the recovery of rudimentary operations of subjectivity that had become distorted: In the experience of a Joyce or a Bataille, for example, literature moves beyond madness and realism in a leap that maintains both "delirium' and "logic".' (RPL, 82)įor Kristeva, the space in which the presymbolic maternal law obtains, which she calls the 'semiotic chora' after the unorganised signifying process of gesture, sound and rhythm (the 'semiotic' itself) which takes place there, will continue to be present as the irrepressible materiality, or signifying substance within the Symbolic order. As such, this transformation inaugurates a new period in what has been called literature: the end of poetry as delirium, which is contemporaneous with its inseparable counterpart-literature as an attempted submission to the logical order. RPL, 83īy the end of the century, she maintains, poetic language had changed 'precisely because it became a practice involving the subject's dialectical state in language. The problem, then, was one of finding practices of expenditure capable of confronting the machine, colonial expansion, banks, science, parliament-those positions of mastery that conceal their violence and pretend to be mere neutral legality. The established bourgeois regime had been consuming this kind of poetry since the Restoration and especially during the Second Empire which began in 1852, reducing it to a decorative uselessness that challenged none of the subjects of its time.
starting with the Renaissance and the brief Romantic celebration of the sacrifices made in the French Revolution, poetry became mere rhetoric, linguistic formalism, a fetishization.
Kristeva's proposition is that 'Literature has always been the most explicit realization of the signifying subject's condition', but that historically it was 'in the first half of the nineteenth century, that the dialectical condition of the subject was made explicit, beginning in France with the work of Nerval, but particularly with Lautréamont and Mallarmé.' (RPL, 82) Her account of French literary history is tied to a wider social history of discourse in France that literature offered to unravel, but though occasionally she suggests that similar characteristics of 'the plural, heterogeneous, and contradictory process of signification encompassing the flow of drives, material discontinuity, political struggle, and the pulverization of language' have belonged to the poetic language of other 'revolutionary periods' (RPL, 88), she alludes only passingly to the effects of (the reactionary aftermath of) the French Revolution:
#William wordsworth we are seven analysis full#
The more significant dates for the full articulation of a new theory of poetic language I take to be 1800, by which date Wordsworth had for certain become the main author and theoriser, and 1802, with the important evolutions of his thought in substantial additions. Accordingly I see the critical prefaces, 1798-1802, as treating issues that increasingly extend beyond the bounds of the successive volumes under the same title that were his only book publications over those years, even to the point of sometimes seeming misapplied to the volumes themselves, to address core problems in Wordsworth's continuous writing. In that way, it might be argued that Lyrical Ballads, 1798, was in effect the first distraction from/substitution for The Recluse project, and that the second edition moved in what was to become the defining direction of oeuvre for opus. As Michael Mason points out, ' Lyrical Ballads was not a single phenomenon but a sequence of four editions spread over seven years its appearance in English literature was not a historical moment but a sequence of moments-1798, 1800, 1802, 1805.' Furthermore, instead of seeing Lyrical Ballads as generically or otherwise distinct from Wordsworth's major preoccupation of the same time-the invention of a new poetic language for 'the first & finest philosophical poem', The Recluse or Views of Nature, Man, and Society (towards which he wrote 1,300 lines from November 1797 to the beginning of March 1798 when most of his contributions for the volume were written)-I view them as in important respects part of one comprehensive project.
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