Poetic Language: Theory and Practice from the Renaissance to the Present
by Tom Jones
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2012
207 pp. Paper, £19.99
ISBN: 9780748656165.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens
This book may not be, as the publisher’s blurb states, “the first study of
poetic language from a historical and philosophical perspective”, but it surely
is one of the most stimulating and useful works in this much-debated field that
I have come across since many years. At the same time, it is also one of the
most modest of them: Tom Jones, who teaches at Saint-Andrews in the English
Faculty, is not an author who claims, but suggests, and it is a permanent
pleasure to follow him through his both synoptic and detailed journey through
the history of English poetry as well as the more or less one century (at
least) of critical thinking on poetry, Anglo-Saxon as well as continental
(Julia Kristeva and Henri Messchonic, for instance, are amply discussed).
The global architecture of this book is quite original and suits perfectly the
needs of several groups of readers (teachers, students, but also the general
audience interested in poetry, and last but not least poets themselves, who may
find here numerous new ideas and challenging analyses). The book opens and ends
with general information: a general introduction that sketches a really helpful
and illuminating overview of theories and methods; a final section with
complementary biographical and bibliographical information, all very clearly
presented and with a keen sense of what can be of interest for the reader and
with a sharp awareness of what is really relevant for advanced reading. In
these chapters, Jones immediately foregrounds the idea or, more precisely, the
ideal of poetry that he will exemplify in the central chapters of the book.
This idea(l) is one of uncertainty, not as a negative or default option, i.e.
the impossibility to produce clear ideas, but as a positive value, if not a
real program, i.e. the willingness to show that poetry can never be reduced to
a specific form, use, theory or practice, but that all forms, uses, theories
and practices of poetry are always double, ambivalent, and therefore charged
with the intensity and power of difference. The doubt that good poetry induces
is, in other words, not crippling but productive and transformative, opening
doors to better ways of analyzing. No reader will be surprised to notice that
the name of Jacques Derrida pops us rather frequently in Poetic Language, but
deconstruction is certainly not the final word of this book, one of the
manifestations of a master’s voice or some strategically used master mind. The
repeated mention of difference is instead a warning system against
overenthusiastic embraces of just one theory, method, or concept. This
thoughtfulness is not a luxury, for poetry is often the victim of one-sided theoretically
inspired analyses that tend to instrumentalize the poetic text, reducing it to
a mere illustration of speculative hypotheses.
The core of the book is organized along three main lines, which are cleverly
intertwined in such a way that several different, no pun intended, reading
paths are possible. The first line may seem very elementary, but it is much less
practiced than it should be in other books on the same topic: a chronological
line, which leads us in twelve chapters from the late 16th till the
late 20th Century, bringing together figures of the British and
American poetical canon. By doing so, Jones proves that he does not select his
examples so that they can fit a given theory or toolbox but indicates that, on
the contrary, he accepts the need to address the whole of the poetic
production, trying to find ways of making sense of the questions poetry is
asking its reader. The second one is conceptual, but deeply rooted in the
history of rhetoric: Jones has chosen a certain number of key concepts (namely:
figure, selection, measure, equivalence, spirit and deviance), which may
summarize the most fundamental stances one can adopt one labeling poetic
language. Each of these six concepts is used twice, in order to allow a
comparison between authors and styles that do not necessarily match, neither
chronologically, nor stylistically. The notion of “figure” (image, metaphor) for
instance is the main entrance that is used to explore the work by Walter Raleigh
and Tom Raworth, and, of course, the reader is invited to expand the insights
gained in these two chapters on the writings of all other poets discussed in
the book. Third and last, there is also a more strictly theoretical line. Each
chapter offers the opportunity to introduce and discuss key theoretical
thinkers and methods on poeticized language. This theoretical broadening and
deepening of each reading (for at the center of each chapter one always finds
the reading of a concrete text). Here as well, Jones’s approach is a perfect
mix of sharpness and caution: concepts and theories are shown to be more or
less useful, but never in such a way that they bring the reading to a close
(and more than often, the reading of the text is used as the starting point of
a critical reading of a theoretical framework).
A particular complement should be given to the very convincing efforts of Jones
to highlight the political potential of poetry. Not through its thematic
preferences or its pragmatic effects (the poem as an historical event,
producing real concrete changes in the world outside), but, more fundamentally,
through an astute reflection on the systemic and dialogic nature of all poetry,
which at the same time follows and disrupts linguistic and discursive rules
while raising questions on mutual understanding and the possibility of
intervening in what is perhaps the thing humans share most: language. Poetic Language avoids the naïve
equivalence of formal rupture and social change, yet does draw our attention to
the societal relevance of the relationships between the poet’s use of language
and the constraints and liberties of language in a given community.
