In this essay, I explore how lyric readers make sense of poetry at a plain level.¹ Through a schematic history of lyricism in textual practice, I elaborate the intellective desiderata for lyric reading practices, positing that as we extend the post-New Critical psychologization of lyric parameters to theorize the broader conditions of lyric intellection, topologies of lyric lucidity become available independently of tone and voice as such. As an experiment, I propose cogency, addressivity, and sententiality as instruments for registering and discoursing on what I call poetic intellection. Through readings of three poems that probe the limits of lyric perception, I argue that such an account of lyric as an intellective textuality helps us understand and elaborate the conditions that sustain textual thinking.

1) Textuality and Intellection: Envoicement Beyond the Verbal Icon

The lyric tradition is often characterized by, even defined by, “the phenomenalization of the poetic voice”.² The entry on “voice” in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics stresses its metaphoricity as applied to written texts, while conceding that it “foregrounds fundamental distinctions underpinning Western culture: orality and literacy, speaking and writing”.³ Even then, it is not clear what makes up a voice. An alternative tradition has stressed the essential textuality of poetry. Herbert Tucker, however, rightly argues that “to insist that textuality is all … is to turn back at the threshold of interpretation, stopping our ears to both lyric cries and historical imperatives, and from our studious cells overhearing nothing.”⁴ Arguing for a dialogic approach that acknowledges that “[texts] do not come from speakers, speakers come from texts,” he notes that textuality “as the basis for the Western written character” may be important, but it is just the beginning.⁵ Here, I take up this thread and consider how these beginnings might help us theorize how readers encounter lyrics in new terms.

The performance of lyric textualities in their modern form has clearly recognizable lineages deep into the Middle Ages. Schematically, it can be seen as the envoicement of the more textually contingent heirs to rhetorical practices that often resided within commentary traditions such as the exhaustive exegesis of the Biblical and Aristotelian corpuses, a task that, around the turn of the second millennium, had become unmanageable and were eventually marginalized by summae that addressed its predecessors as equals.⁶ The intellectual result of this synthesis, which carved a theory of the rational soul (psukhe) out of questions of epistemology and ontology, eventually comes to be the background for the lyric hermeneutic practices we now take for granted from the textual communities born out of the cultivation of intimacy and intellection in the later lyric tradition.⁷ In short, by the late Middle Ages, practices such as encyclopedism and lyricism could be construed as speculative varieties of intellection that variously elaborated, historiated, and envoiced knowledges peripheral to the syntax of the rational soul.⁸ This voicing often took literal form in these textual transactions, since silent visual reading was not yet possible for vernacular languages without reliable word separation.⁹ Grounded in their shared genesis from deploying practices of textual invention and manipulation, such as compilatio, figura, glossa, ekphrasis, and ordinatio, these practices shared substantial common ground and continue to occasion similar critical and exegetical apparatuses to this day.¹⁰ Encyclopedism and lyricism can thus be understood as discourses of historiation, peripheral to knowledge structures whose more historiographically visible articulations (such as the summa, the disputatio, and the quaestione) are largely morphosyntactic. Often, they became agents of rhetorical transformation.¹¹

Today, the definition of poetry by scholars variously as language “[projecting] the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” or as “language that seeks to happen all at once” might as well apply to a contemporary encyclopedia, even if its reader is expected to quickly learn distant reading practices: to scan articles schematically, to follow diagrammatic semantic cues, and to explore hypertextual connections.¹² In the classroom, lyric poems, unlike encyclopedias, exist to be taken apart, but is rarely addressed in parts. The assumption that, read lyrically, no part of a poem is self-same, can make it difficult to theorize about lyricism at levels below the poem. That parts of a poem appear to us immanently is unquestionable, but such perceptions are deemed preliminary in textual communities oriented around poems and poets. This has diminished our vocabulary for understanding how, in contemporary textualities, reading for textual ideality circuits our capacities at increasingly minute levels. Lyric readers take much more seriously the critical fiction of textual ideality that the encyclopedia also sells. Lyric reading is taking this promise at face value to an unusual degree. But poems, in turn, also teach us how this kind of reading really works.

Building on this intuition, I extend Tucker’s insight that voice and textuality are mutually constitutive problematics. It is not necessarily important what voice is, especially versions of it we can no longer hear, just that it is available as a heuristic to clarify the more general desideratum for lyric reading. In this essay, rather than euhemeristic characterizations of poetic voice, I will seek to develop our understanding the historically substantiated phenomenon in post-medieval cultures of textuality where the ideality of language is confirmed through the eventualization and envoicement of the word.¹³ In this sense, we can elucidate the “historically effected event” of sense or understanding by developing instruments to register moments of an elemental poetic intellection.¹⁴ This essay seeks to ground the persistent perception of such possibility within a post-iconic theory of poetic envoicement and sensation, as an intellective desire. The deep historical connections between the lyric tradition and theories of optics, sensation, and perspective make this particularly germane. Envoicement and addressability thus represent sites of contestation intrinsic to the articulation of operative reading practices as such. In this view, lyric reading happens whenever poems textually make contact on a spatial, temporal, and perceptual scale available to us.

Voice itself could not have been understood as a poetic phenomenon without an instrument to register it on the page. The most prominent among these is the notion of “tone” popularized during the New Criticism. As Reuben Brower famously writes, “To show exactly who is speaking in a poem it is necessary to consider how he speaks. In other words, it is necessary to define his tone.”¹⁵ Tone here functions as a seismograph for the speaker’s position in a dramatic situation, which in turn clarifies the “dramatic design and constitutive ironies of a poem.”¹⁶ The fraught relationship of poetic textuality with the imprimatur of (often dramatic) speakers is illustrated by Tucker, who writes, “What is poetry? Textuality a speaker owns.”¹⁷ His theory, the Princeton Encyclopedia remarks, exhibits “the fear that the reader will be lost in a sea of unmotivated verbiage if he or she cannot organize reading experiences around a familiar model of individualized psychology”.¹⁸ Such fears of “unmotivated verbiage” are not completely unfounded under the assumption of textual ideality, for which the felicity of lyric depends on flashes where such distinctions between the visible and the invisible are sustained. I do not believe, however, that Tucker’s “model of individual psychology” remains familiar for how lyric reading practices continue into our time, as its metrics, instruments, and practices are far from culturally axiomatic today. We are increasingly aware that “interpenetrations of complex human systems with cognitive technical systems form larger techno-epistemo-ontological structures that determine our sense of how the world works.”¹⁹ The experience of lyric intellection is most broadly defined by the persistence of the promise of textual ideality and must be apprehended and elucidated as such.

In the rest of this essay, I supplement a New Critical vocabulary for practical criticism, such as “tone” and “voice”, that treats the lyric poem as a psychologized “verbal icon”, with terms adapted to elucidate the perceptual temporalities and capacities that create ironies, situations, and horizons for eventuality within particular conditions of textuality.²⁰ If “tone” and “style”, for instance, each provide parametric accounts of poems, the terminology I propose here resists taking poetic manifolds as noetic objects, as the synthetic unities of Kantian apperception (as in accounts of poetic form), but rather posits textual events as topologically constituted and phenomenologically experienced.²¹ These are not parameters for a programmatic lyric poetics, but rather terms that describe pre-psychological aspects of poetic apperception where explanation is unavailable within a poetics of the verbal icon. In short, these instruments teach us how to theorize the pre-shocks and after-shocks of the main shock that the New Criticism has long taught us to notice: the recognition that the text we read could be that of a voice. Cogency, addressivity, and sententiality are, I suggest, elemental “senses” of a textual event available in our time.²²

2) Cogency: How We Read Sensuous Manifolds (Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso”)

Cogency, as I see it, is the figure of microperceptual transumption, of the lyric reader’s metabolic encounter with the sensuous manifolds of hermeneutic hum encountered along the stream of a poem.²³ I borrow the word from Donovan O. Schaeffer, who uses the term to account for intellective processes that lead to post-secular knowledges characterized by “belief”.²⁴ According to the OED, even in early uses, the noun “cogency” had an unstable imprint: a quality, a force, and a textual event (often in the plural cogencies) all at once.²⁵ While at first glance, it appears to be related to the Latin cogito, it in fact corrals co- (together) and ago (act) in one term.²⁶ This feature allows cogency to serve as a figura for the operative scales of the sensus communis. The identifiable beginnings of this notion are attested in the Aristotelian account of how our senses come into contact with one another (koine aisthesis).²⁷ Through post-Aristotelian commentaries and early modern speculation, it has evolved into contemporary concepts as diverse as consciousness, judgment, taste, or simply common sense.²⁸ Often, its modern theorists have relied on figures of contiguity, such as connection (conjunctio), particularly in time or space, to describe the posited unity of subjective experience.²⁹ But how do things become connected? What does it mean to keep reading? Cogency is the felicitous functioning of microperceptual transumptive processes that transform apperceptual linguistic experience into what we recognize as poetry. In everyday speech, cogency names something well-constructed and compelling. Cogency is what speaking well entails. But cogency on a microperceptual level is a dangling thread at every moment, on the verge of coalescing into sense. By transumption, I mean that these embodied processes constantly seek to metabolize linguistic capta from incommensurate phonetic, syntactic, grammatical, temporal, and cosmological levels.³⁰ This becomes especially noticeable when cogency is thwarted at every turn. For a naïve lyric reader, much of poetics operates at this level, and cogency is available only at high levels of abstraction. In addressing cogency, I seek to circumvent the naïve, appropriative lyric subject and to focus on the intellective process, which allows us to characterize an operative poetics at a level inaccessible to noetic activity, during which the absolute self-sameness of sensuous manifolds is naturalized. Perhaps it is as Nathaniel Mackey describes what he calls “rasp”: “in seriality, rasp is recursive form, a net of echoes; it catches.”³¹

In the example I examine, Gertrude Stein’s “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”, the frustration of cogency is patent on the level of parsing as well as transcription. ³² Describing the poem’s cogencies helps us analyze it in transhistorical and textually ideal terms while avoiding becoming paralyzed by the poem’s active thwarting of an identifiable speaker. As the poem begins, the first two sentences of “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” are eminently readable. They register on the tonal seismograph as anxiously enamored, suggestive of a dramatic situation in which a speaker asks whether a male interlocutor, likely a beloved, would like it if they told him it. In short, they solicit lyric reading. Already, however, the deictic function of the it seems to present an instability. Moving onto the next lines, the poem quickly devolves into something that resembles a stutter. The rest of the poem strains the conventions of lyric, perhaps even to the point of breaking. We become used to the interruptions introduced by the stutter and begin to recognize fragments of various lengths, which introduce microperceptual metastabilities of reference. “Would he like it would Napoleon” (2) could map Napoleon onto he, or not. Our attentional and perceptual lengths are foregrounded and clearly at issue. In line 3, even if “If Napoleon” could be completed as a cogent thought, when followed by “if I told him”, it is nonsense, simply superseded in the stream. The following “If I told him”, followed by “if Napoleon”, could be completed by something grammatical and sensical. This reading is, in other words, locally cogent, but it also goes nowhere. (Stein was very excited by diagramming sentences.³³) A reading of the poem as dramatic situation becomes difficult to sustain, and the original invitation to read lyrically becomes a dawning realization that the poem is toying with lyric reading practices.

Stein’s poem, I suggest, becomes a series of locally sensuous manifolds of intellective cogency, textual events that microperceptually manipulate the seismograph. This cogency suddenly coalesces with the group “If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him” (5-6), which repeats line 1, and the section ends. In this group, the reader experiences the exact same fourteen words entirely differently than from line 1. While courting the impression of aleatoriness and contingency, the poem then subverts that reading by re-introducing cogency. It is difficult for almost any reader to explain in New Critical terms exactly how it is that we have changed from lines 1 to 5, but the poem clearly manages to make the sudden cogency in line 5 into a significant textual event. By describing the processes through which poems tune our perceptual sensibilities through various cogencies, we can study how lyric reading practices become infrastructural for such transformations. One can imagine cogency being applied to schemes such as epistrophes and refrains, which activate embodied processes such as memoria and are common in structuring ritualistic experiences of transformation in earlier lyric poetics.

There are many other ways this poem can be discussed in terms of poetic cogency. In the lines with the stuttering exact resemblances, for instance, the poem challenges us to notice the minute ways that a seeming stutter (exact and resemblance) accompanied by changing prepositions (to, in), conjunctions (and), articles (the, a), and inflections (-ly, -ing) create local cogencies. Words, phrases, clauses, and relationships begin to bleed into one another. Whereas the first lines constructed cogencies of reference, these lines create cogencies of morphosyntax, and in doing so, teach us what it might mean to read where the lexemes are all the same. Continuous with the poem’s critique and satire of a narcissistic and implicitly male culture of lyric reading infused with the search for analogies and resemblances, these lines teach us to read for its inscriptions within textuality by foregrounding cogencies that result from these constraints. This, the poem seems to suggest, is lyric reading – this is what lyric reading has been all along. Stein plays with similar cogencies of sonic transcription as well. The lines beginning “He he he he and he…”, for instance, foregrounds the masculine third-person pronoun’s indistinction from a burst of laughter. Is the poem laughing at us, overwhelming us with male similitude, or both?

Cogency, as one scholar put it, is the click of understanding.³⁴ It is, in effect, when cognitive processes sense that an event has been produced in the operation of pre-cognitive intellective processes. Such operations take place during reading practices all the time, occurring at an unthought, perhaps pre-“reading” level.³⁵ Speaking of cogency allows us to locate lyric reading within textual practices that are utterly incommensurate with the scales of humanistic eloquence (such as distant reading, numismatics, cave art, or epigraphy).³⁶ It allows us to theorize the form-giving power of poetic language at various levels of cogency and clarify how lyric reading works.

3) Addressivity: How We Read Literary Traffic (John Ashbery, “Abstentions”)

Addressivity is how a poem plays with and manipulates our perception through our sense of literary traffic. In lyric theory, address is a central category that foreground the contextual embeddedness we make sense of through the allegory of one-to-one, face-to-face speech to ourselves or others.³⁷ If address takes lyric as speech projected within an understanding of communication between agents as perceptually metastable, I understand addressivity to speak more generally to the perceptual and metabolic coercion available to the poet when in a lyric situation, language is rendered present, whether to our perceptual apparatuses or to another nexus of intellection. Addressivity is the infrastructural sense of a dangling address – it does not require a speaker to explicitly address anyone.³⁸ If the key rhetorical figures of address are apostrophe and deixis, addressivity foregrounds figures such as enargeia and occupatio/apophasis.

Here, I will study John Ashbery’s “Abstentions” as an example. Ashbery criticism has often turned on his dissimulatory use of figure-ground distinctions and deixis. His use of the pronouns it and you (for instance, in “This Room” or “Paradoxes and Oxymorons”) often poses a particularly significant problem.³⁹ How does Ashbery sustain hermeneutic interest if everything in his poems is no more than illusory? “Abstentions”, in particular, courts the reading that it is an allegory of negative theology.⁴⁰ The last line reads: “The clouds sneer but go sailing into the white sky.” (24) The reader, outrageously sneered at by clouds, might as well decide the poem is a waste of time and move on. It may be instructive here to compare this ending with this chorus generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3 text engine: “Oh, the ducks of the Lord / They fly on high, / Splashing in the water, / As they pass us by.”⁴¹ What separates this from Ashbery’s poem? Speaking of addressivity helps us elucidate the desideratum of lyric reading we can find in Ashbery’s work that is unavailable in the cosmically pessimist hymn.

One of the most noticeable words in the Ashbery poem is the Not in lines 1 and 3. In lines 1-2, The concrete images given to us (“shy tourist”, “salty steps of Rome”, “the Piazza Venezia”) are preceded by this Not. Its line of contact is maintained at great cognitive cost. The vividness (enargeia) of the images, which are picturesque and noetically transparent, suggests ekphrasis, if disjunctive, and intensifies the cognitive overhead that is required to hold the increasingly temporally distant fact of their negation, which foregrounds the character of the addressivity in question. If tone established the attitude of the verbal icon, addressivity registers the perceptual tampering of the coercion of linguistic presentation. There is no explicit address, yet we rightly suspect an operator playing with our perceptual apparatus. Without the addressivity of the Not, however, it would be difficult to see these lines as anything more than a list or to connect it to the lyric tradition.

In line 3, after a standalone image, we are connected to a different Not. We are given an unspecific yet highly deictic proposition that proposes the incomplete nature of a speculative analogy that is also mereological, further complicated by a follow-up clause that negates not the proposition itself, but each individual part of the clause. This ultimately nonsense sentence is maximally addressive without having addressed anyone at all. Like a DDoS attack, its barrage of ultra-propositional content wastefully forces us to conjure up substantial cognitive ecological resources to service it. The sentence does nothing other than foreground the perceptual ontology of its addressivity: in presenting its own “negation” it shows its addressive specificity – it was never telling you anything at all, just taking a matrix inverse.⁴² It was never sentential, just a rhetorical tuple.

The next sentence gives us a doubled structure of address characterized by an optative utterance that invokes the lyric tradition: ‘The voice “Please tell me that you love me” said, …’ (4-5). To understand just these ten words requires us to cognitively produce: the voice itself, the previous speech encounter directed at an unidentified perceiver, the connection with lyric tradition, as well as the sense of an open address from this voice. Yet as the sentence goes on, this exorbitantly cognitively taxing invocation of literary traffic is revealed to be incidental and no more than sensuous. The point here is that Ashbery is clearly foregrounding and anatomizing lyric addressivity, the perceptual ontology that the tropes of lyric reading create.

The end of the poem is similarly instructive. The turnings of the “Not” and the “Therefore” of the preceding lines give us the bare minimum of a continuous addressivity that lingers from the lyric tradition. Thus, as the poem concludes, we expect it to exit gracefully. The last two lines of the poem read “He wears a white suit, carries a white newspaper and apple, his hands and face are white; / The clouds sneer but go sailing into the white sky.” (23-4) As line 23 suggests, the successive images do not quite add up to a single imaginary as one might expect. With each image, through an authorial addressivity, we are coerced into reconfiguring and reorganizing what is made present. Each clause reconfigures the parameters of enargeia and cogency. Each pause is a moment of coerced immanence, an exercise in addressive control – as if we sensed a possibly daemonic operator considering their options. While “The bride wore white” (22) is almost a commonplace, metastable within the context of vision, “He wears a white suit” (23) is less common, perhaps suggesting an unidentified conceit or ekphrastic medium. That he “carries a white newspaper and apple” (23) makes even that difficult to imagine, suggesting a black and white cinematic universe. And “his hands and face are white” (23) shifts the medium again, straining visualization except as invoking race.

The last line reads: “The clouds sneer but go sailing into the white sky.” (24) This line sounds almost comical in its emptiness, but it provides something that seems to resolve the cosmic contingency built up in the previous line’s addressive coercion. It unwinds the textual sense of an event characterized by the previous line’s coercive addressivity. The bizarre whiteness of it all also suggests the coerced formlessness that undergirds differentially coercive addressivities created by ontogenetic conceptions of lyric subjectivity.⁴³ What Ashbery does here is foreground the nature of addressivity as a dimension of lyric reading. Ashbery is entirely aware texts acquire addressive license from being read lyrically.⁴⁴ If lyric reading is characterized by a transactional fidelity to textual ideality, Ashbery certainly gives the reader something to chew on, probing a further dimension of our perceptual apparatus.

If critical readings of Ashbery poems have often made all his poems sound the same, it is because critics repeatedly foreground the presence of self-same parts within the poems but lack a vocabulary for taking such parts as clarifying the theoretical desideratum of lyric reading. Whereas the tonal seismograph would perhaps register “Abstentions” as outrageously disrespectful to the lyric reader (i.e. as an abuse of lyric presence), as a troll poem, I have shown that the poem is clearly carefully constructed to respond to a lyric reader’s perception of textual addressivity and to satisfy the desire for specular lyricism. Address and addressivity foreground different issues. “Abstentions” never once addresses the reader and yet is extremely addressive. The specificities of our perceptual capacities foregrounded by Ashbery’s addressivities are, I suggest, proper desiderata of lyric reading.

4) Sententiality: How We Read Motivated Verbiage (John Donne, “The Good-Morrow”)

Sententiality, I propose, is the sense of a thought in poetry. But sententiality need not suggest “textuality a speaker owns”. Thoughts take on shapes as we inhabit them, and sententiality helps us describe those shapes. It need not even be a sentence, just the sense of a complete thought; in fact, it is most interesting when it does not coincide with a sentence. The term, for me, is precisely designed to probe textualities where text and speaker do not presencially reinscribe one another through chiastic crossings but rather inhabit one another in ways that reflect the embodied temporalities of thinking. Working with John Donne’s “The Good-Morrow”, a poem where a lyric voice is distinctively available, my goal is to show that terms like cogency, addressivity, and sententiality can also help us forge new narratives of poems and poets that were instrumental to New Critical efforts to read lyric poems as dramatic monologues.⁴⁵

In “The Good-Morrow”, for instance, Donne’s sentences often teeter on incompleteness. They are almost emptied out of speakerly presence, carrying us along without building up many speakerly cogencies. In our post-Romantic landscape where sententiality is often presumed to reside in propositions and speakerly utterances, a lyric poem like “The Good-Morrow” offers glimpses at the dexterity of how we inhabit our thoughts. Unlike sentences that attach firmly to a speculatively articulated speaker, thoughts in “The Good-Morrow” often do not reflect back on the speaker. The copulas often have no obvious object of contemplation. Often, the sentences fold many sententialities into themselves, and their thrust consists neither in propositional content nor a fictional characterization of the speaker. It is as Claudia Rankine writes, “Sometimes you read something and a thought that was floating around in your veins organizes itself into the sentence that reflects it. This might also be a form of dreaming.”⁴⁶ Donne’s sententialities are experiences onto themselves.

The first four lines of the poem pose consecutive questions, and the conceit continues on for all four lines. Here, the words almost spin out of the speaker’s control, increasingly exteriorized. Like a stray tear that may just be a drop of water, the words, if read as a dramatic monologue, seem almost uncanny.⁴⁷ Soon, the voice concludes, “‘Twas so; but this all pleasures fancies be.” (5) The short clause, just two syllables, expresses fascination with the conceit, and the next six words hyperbatonically contort the syntax, concentrating poetic presence on the deictic and presencial this. Where a New Critic might ask, “what is the tone?” and “what kind of speaker would utter this sentence?”, we can ask, “what kind of thought is this?” and “how would it feel to inhabit this thought?”. If a New Critic might put this on the stage and imagine a self-satisfied speaker admiring his conceit, we might imagine the embodied tactility of the sentence. The imperative of sententiality, the presumed coherence of a thought, here pulls us into the speaker. When we vocalize the poem, the syllables “so” and “this” touch us in their singular sententiality – both are essentially one-syllable thoughts all on their own. Both could be pro-sentences all on their own. The textures of those thoughts seem embedded in the act of vocalizing: the airflow of the fricatives with this draws breath into the thought of amours, the presencial center of the sentence, and the backward drawing of the tongue with so rounds the circle on the long conceit, drawing the voice into the speaker. Many of these sites can be identified in this twenty-one-line poem, such as love, where the reader pauses in line ten, got in line eight, and is in line 14. Donne plays with our sense of sententiality, allowing it to teeter on our tongues as we enunciate entire thoughts in single syllables.

Take the sentence that runs from lines 12 to 14 as an example. The unstable subjunctive addressivity that requires us to hold images and conceits until we reach the end of the stanza draws attention to the uniquely sentential “each hath one” and “and is one” in line 14. Unlike Ashbery’s final lines, the sententialities here build on top of one another and become mutually reinforcing. For instance, the sentential character of the two mutually reinforcing parts of this hemistich draws out the singularity of the “world” earlier in the line. Even with no more than six words, the visceral sense of a thought (sententiality) here is so specific that a reader would find it hard to place the stresses other than on the hath and the is. (It is difficult to imagine someone stressing the ones instead.) The status of the one is curious: is the one in “each hath one” the same one as the “one world” possessed by the “us”? What does the final one mean? It could refer to the worldedness of the two parties separately or together, or it could not refer to “world” at all, naming an absorption into an unspecified oneness. But in any case, we enact the movement of becoming one as we enunciate it. The poetry is able to hold the ambiguity because the language is held together by its sententialities, the sense of a complete thought. We are almost pushed into these last three words. There is an embodied thought to each fragment, which can stand on its own, even as it is also porous enough to allow implicature and reference to add to the semantic and presencial play of the poetry. One could contrast this with Ashbery’s “He wears a white suit, carries a white newspaper and apple, his hands and face are white”, where the sententialities are far less coherent and the enfleshment occurs at the level of our configuration of its addressivity. In contrast, the last lines of Donne’s poem read: “If our two loves be one, or, thou and I / Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.” (20-21) Each component of this sentence, whether those in the hypothetical mood or those that conclude the poem, can be entered into on its own. Yet in all this verbosity, the conclusive sententiality of “none can die”, conditioned by the hypothetical, creates a conspicuously ironic inconclusiveness. As opposed to the addressive irony of Ashbery’s poem, this poem’s last line seems to invite assent even as it falls silent on a definitive note. This irony could not be constituted by an ending any less sentential than “that none do slacken, none can die”.

The insistent thrust of Donne’s poetics in bringing disparate components of experience to bear in poetry requires that we extend the vocabulary of lyric to accommodate him. Building on T. S. Eliot’s claim that Donne’s poetics looked more than just “at the heart”, but at “the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts”, we should consider the possibility that Donne gestures at how lyric voice works when the speaker becomes no more than envoicement, that perhaps, in his poetry, he has “thought his way inside changes too swift for human beings to perceive.” ⁴⁸ The verbiage is motivated, but almost never seems willed by the speaker. We can hear the voice, but it’s always on the verge of spinning out of the speaker’s control. Independent of voice, Donne’s sententialities are rooms all on their own.

5) Conclusion: Poetry between Synesthesia and Noise

In this essay, I have presented a view of lyric reading as reading with a desire for intellective events. In poetry, the immanence of lyric, as eventualized by the horizons we construe, supplies them. The poems I have read are not always very lyrical, but they attune us to what lyric makes available. Speaking of cogency, addressivity, and sententiality provides tools to read poetry as clarifying the conditions that make textual thinking possible. Cogency provides language for the proleptic workings of form on a local level. Addressivity elaborates play with perceptual specificity in poetry. Sententiality describes how it feels to have a thought. These instruments forge a practical criticism that builds on and departs from lyric theories that manifest a genre out of an army of tropes.⁴⁹ These terms pose, in their uncomfortable singular forms, the temporal and perceptual instabilities of poetic intellection that go back as far as Aristotle’s distinctions between the “accidental” present and the “absolute” present of sensation.⁵⁰

It is the central assumption of this essay that the desideratum of lyric reading is not only the rhetorical enchantments of the human voice; it is more fundamentally the promise of metastable ontic, psychic, and perceptual intellection. A conception of lyric poetry as fundamentally specular, intellective, and appetitive finds support in the speculum of “life englobed” in John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, where “one would like to stick one’s hand / out of the globe, but its dimension / what carries it, will not allow it.”⁵¹ We find it too in Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, where the entanglements of the liver and the mirror force us to consider if lyricism is no more than recursively metastable structures of quasi-perspectival embodiment.⁵² The lyric reader’s protocol, I suggest, is appetitive rather than noetic.⁵³ Indeed, recent work suggests that tropes such as address, perspective and point of view, which grounds the lyric reader’s desire to find a voice in a stanza or in a mirror, are themselves recursive protocols that construct particular textualities.⁵⁴ The post-Romantic account of the lyric thus needs to be revised as we increasingly come to realize that its metastability cannot be taken for granted. The mythical anti-lyric, were it to exist today, may not be analogical at all.⁵⁵ While “evocative analogs that sensuously capture the epiphanies of first-person subjective experience” have thus far been at the heart of lyric theory, analogical explanation has often unproblematically posited the availability of a transcendent intellective desideratum resides within a self-referential cloud of similitudes.⁵⁶

In a textual condition characterized by the gradual suturing of digitality onto addressability, perhaps lyric reading represents the persistence of the desire to experience a truly analog address.⁵⁷ The promise and enchantment of lyric in our time may be analog experience. In taking perceptual horizons of lyric reading immanently, we can theorize different topologies of lyric perception and produce an account that is more synesthetic and attuned to the conditions that make the various desiderata of lyric reading available, an account that understands lyric textualities not simply as the icons of “ontogenetic pathways”, but also as processes of intellection and transformation.⁵⁸ In short, we need to be able to describe lyric reading practices and textual ideality in terms adequate to scales that post-Romantic lyric theory is unable to imagine, but that we already live with. Cogency, addressivity, and sententiality are instruments that we can use to register and analyze our local encounters with poetry, and, in time, understand the conditions of textual thinking.