The history of lyric hurts

Among the many, many gems in Stewart's book, looking at it again I'm blown away most perhaps by her initial presentation of the function/innovation of lyric, which is just overflowing with amazing formulations. Commenting on Wordsworth's famous (but still always shocking) statement about the intrinsic connection between meter and the alleviation of pain ("There can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose"), Stewart says the following:

In theories of lyric from Vico forward, the enunciation of pain at the origin of lyric must appear before the emergence of a self-conscious sense of one's own subjectivity [...]. To equate pain with subjectivity is to equate the body with subjectivity and so to confuse the most collective with the most individual. Pain has no memory; its expression depends on the intersubjective invention of association and metaphor. The situation of the person resides in the genesis of the memory of action and experience in intersubjective terms--that is, in the articulation and mastery of the originating pain. Coleridge [in Biographia Literaria] explains that in the "frequency of forms and figures of speech," we find "offsprings of passion" who are as well "adopted children of power." Yet the mastery of pain through measures and figures is not merely repressive; it is as well a matter of coming to knowledge and expression. Coleridge's explanation shows a subject coming into activity out of a passive relation to sense experience, memory, and expectation. Here the figures and forms created are those of a subjectivity enunciating itself.

Divergence in lyric is thus not between language and music but between a subject transforming him-or herself from the somatic both toward and against the social. The history of lyric is thereby the history of a relation between pronouns, the genesis of ego-tu and ego-vos in the reciprocity of an imagination posing and composing itself and its audience via the work of time. Lyric conventions of addresser and addressee are the working through on the level of literary genre of the function of linguistic shifters.


[...] First person expression in lyric is related existentially to the context of the poem as a whole; it is the poem that makes first-person expression emerge in its individuality as it engages the reader in the eidetic task of the appearance of the "you." The doubled "I" (authorial intention the expression of first person voice in the text) encounters a doubled "you" (the reader's intention towards reception, the implied addressee in the text).
-Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 46-7.

For what it's worth, I can only agree with everything here, and not just the importance of "intersubjective inventions," over the fashionably oversimple equation of pain with the body, as she nicely puts it, but the unbelievable displacement of the conflict within lyric from a tired opposition (which Wordsworth himself often uses, lacking--unlike Coleridge--a sophisticated critical language to express the deeper things his poetry is indeed up to) to one that is not only more problematic and fresh but, as you can see from where the discussion goes, much more (again, to echo my last post) intuitive. The line on the lyric genre that summarizes this is just unbelievable.