Description:
Why do readers report being powerfully affected by great poetry? What
happens to us when we read a poem? Literary criticism has struggled
to answer these questions because it treats poems as material artifacts
of one kind or another. But readers do not experience literary texts
as lifeless and silent material artifacts. They hear voices in them
and feel moved and altered by them. Plerosis/Kenosis offers
a new way of reading poems by treating poems as dynamic — essentially
as fields of energy — and by focusing on how poetry pushes language
towards two contradictory goals: the desire to say more, to convey universal
truths, and overwhelm the reader with intensity; and the desire to speak
with perfect clarity and precision, to achieve the purity of mathematics
or logic. The pursuit of both goals inevitably ends in failure, but
poetry is most powerful and most affecting as it approaches these two
extremes. Plerosis/Kenosis lays out a theory of poetic language and
applies that theory to a wide range of beloved works by, among others,
Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson,
Eliot, and Stevens. The theory establishes a framework that allows readers
of poetry everywhere to articulate what a poem does to them when they
read it, and the specific readings are original and illuminating. Moreover,
the style throughout is lucid and accessible. Scholars, graduate students,
and sophisticated undergraduates alike will find their understanding
of poetry not only increased but indeed transformed.
A
review:
“Richard
A. Nanian's study of poetic language and its energies is an original
and bold attempt to conceptualize both the anatomy and history of modern
poetry that has the philosophical sweep, critical sophistication, and
elegant clarity of a Northrop Frye or a Kenneth Burke. Dr. Nanian's
rejection of the 'artifactual' model of the poetic text for a dynamic
one of its language acting upon the reader, coupled with his core premise
of the two opposing directions of poetry culminating in the experience
of the sublime at the limits of language, makes for a revisionary mapping
of the landscape of Anglo-American poetry from the Romantics to the
Modernists. The first and theoretical part, his innovative paradigm
of poetic energies in terms of the plerosis/kenosis binary, is clearly
and cogently articulated. The ensuing close readings of individual poems
in support of his thesis of a shift from the plerotic Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and Keats, to the kenotic Dickinson, Eliot, and Stevens, are eye-opening
in their striking combination of probing insight and artful appreciation.
This thoughtful, ambitious, and lucidly written study of the nature
and language of poetry deserves a wide audience.” — Eugene
Stelzig, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English, SUNY Geneseo
