POES 38: Not Every 'I' is Me

The title of this book has been taken from the collection of poems On Bunjah by the Australian poet Les Murray. It expresses what Willem G. Weststeijn has tried to argue in a number of essays over the last thirty years: the ‘I’ in a poem is not the poet him/herself, but a textual instance created by the poet for the particular poem in which this ‘I’ occurs. In this respect the lyric ‘I’ can be compared with the I-narrator in a story or a novel. The ‘I’ belongs to the text, the poet/author is a human being who lives or lived outside the text, in the world. Often the lyric ‘I’ seems to resemble the poet and seems to express the poet’s thoughts and feelings, but this does not mean that the ‘I’ and the poet can be identified with each other, what many readers and even literary critics still do. The differences between the ‘I’ (lyric subject or speaker) in the poem and the ‘real’ poet outside the text are most apparent when the poet introduces a lyric ‘I’ into a poem who is clearly another person than he himself, as, for instance in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’, which begins with the lines: “Here I am, an old man in a dry month, / Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.”

The 1960s and 1970s were the time of structuralism in literary theory. The structuralists were mainly interested in prose and developed, on the basis of earlier theories of the Russian Formalists, a new narratology that focused on concepts such as the narrator and the implied author, the difference between fabula and sujet and the structure of the story with ist flashbacks and flashforwards. There was little interest in lyric poetry at that time. This interest has only been revived in the beginning of the twenty-first century and has led to a better understanding of, particularly, the relation between the empiric (extratextual) poet and the speaker or lyric ‘I’ in the poem.

Most of the articles in this book are based on papers presented at international conferences, hence the various languages in which they are written: English, Russian and German. All the articles appear in the form as they were first published; accordingly they reflect more or less the period in which they were written.

CONTENTS

1.‘The Structure of Lyric Communication’. Essays in Poetics, 16, 1, 1991, 49-69.
2. ‘Образ поэта в стихотворениях Н.А. Львова’. М.В. Строганов (Ред.), Гений вкуса. Материалы научной конференции посвященной творчеству Н.А. Львова. Тверь, 2001, 262-271.
3. ‘Лирический герой как прием’. Russian Literature, XXXIV-I, 1993, 95-108.
4. ‘Лирический субъект в поэзии русского авангарда’. Russian Literature, XXIV-II, 1988, 235-257.
5. ‘The Role of the “I” in Chlebnikov’s Poetry (On the typology of the Lyrical Subject)’. Willem G. Weststeijn (Ed.), Velimir Chlebnikov (1885-1922): Myth and Reality. Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1986, 217-242.
6. ‘The Lyric Subject in Kručenych’s Poetry’. Russian Literature, XXXVII-IV, 1995, 659-677.
7. ‘Von der Narratologie zur Lyrikologie’. Peter Geist, Friederike Reents, Hen-rieke Stahl (Hrsg.), Autor und Subjekt im Gedicht. Positionen, Perspektiven und Praktiken heute. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, 2021, 95-109. (Lyrikforschung. Neue Arbeiten zur Theorie und Geschichte der Lyrik. Band 1)
8. ‘Как назвать «говорящего» в стихотворении? («поэт», «лирический субъект», «лирическое “Я”», «лирический герой» и другие термины, применяемые в анализе лирической поэзии)’. Russian Literature, 109-110, 2019, 31-46.
9. ‘О проблеме фиктивности лирического субъекта (на материале стихo-творений Е. Шварц, О. Седаковой, П. Барсковой и С. Кековой)’. Хенрике Шталь, Екатерина Евпрашкина (ред./сост.), Субъект в новейшей рускоязычной поэзии – теория и практика. Peter Lang, Berlin, 2018, 57-65.
10. ‘Das lyrische Ich in der russischen Gegenwartsdichtung’. Henrieke Stahl, Hermann Korte (Hrsg.), Gedichte schreiben in Zeiten der Umbrüche.