lexical scapegoating. pure and impure in american poetry

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Lexical Scapegoating: The Pure and Impure of American PoetryAuthor(s): Rob WilsonSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1987), pp. 45-63Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773001 .Accessed: 20/11/2014 10:09

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LEXICAL SCAPEGOATING The Pure and Impure of American Poetry

ROB WILSON English, Hawaii

What need for purists when the demotic is built to last, To outlast us, and no dialect hears us?

-John Ashbery, "Purists Will Object"

The pure poem implicitly remains, by the intrinsic dialogical conditions of language, already impure, already invaded by "foreign" terms from beyond the impossible-to-police boundaries of its lexical community. Founded in the Romantic illusion of reaching some indigenous purity prior to the contaminations of history, the pure poem, in its various historical versions, would define itself differen- tially by adhering to the positive terms of a bipolar opposition. As Geoffrey H. Hartman has suggested in "Purification and Danger 1: American Poetry," "The strength of pure poetry resides, then, like all poetry, in the impure elements it cuts out, elides, covers up, negates, represses . . . depends on."' In diverse national contexts, the pure poem would attempt to purge Europe from America, Asia from Greece, self-consciousness from sensuous perception, high from low, Latinate from vulgar, artificial from natural, sublime from humble, self-ironical from imagistic, native from nonnative, literary from ordinary, all in the futile attempt to essentialize poetic (pure) from non- poetic (impure) language.

As these unstable, easily reversible oppositions of pure/impure should suggest, such a quest for pure poetry enjoins a "puritanical" act of stylistic segregation pursued within the lexical - and arbitrary - boundaries of poetic diction: that is, the purity of a diction usually presupposes some social class (Augustan), literary group (Symbolist) 1. Geoffrey H. Hartman (1980:121). On political implications of quests for "linguistic purism" as a quasi-nationalistic goal in diverse countries such as North and South Korea, Iran, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Australia, I benefit from having participated in a conference on "The Politics of Language Purism" held at the Institute of Culture and Communication, East-West Center, Honolulu, September 8-14, 1985. In "Language Purism As a Type of Language Correction," for example, J.V. Neustupny illuminated RomanJakobson's critique (1932) of "Czech purism" as motivated by a resistance to the "impure" language of western modernization; also see Park (1985).

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or even nationalist allegiance (say, Young America of the 1840's) for whom this lyrical break from the "heteroglossia" of the impure intertext is symbolically enacted. Best illuminated by the material linguistics and contextualizings of M.M. Bakhtin, the poetic quest for purity of diction would affiliate itself with the dominant "mono- logue" of an ideological group whose language sets them apart from (that is, above) the contaminated, actively polyglot language of ordinary usage. Through the symbolic agency of the poem, as I will argue using examples mainly from nineteenth-century American poetry, some version of impurity must be implicitly defined, exorcised and eliminated in a process which will be termed "lexical scapegoating."

I will focus on two formative versions of this quest for "purity" in American poetry, in a contrast between the "pure" language of Poe's "To Helen" (1831) and Whitman's "impure" inscription to Leaves of Grass, "One's-Self I Sing" (1871). For two opposing versions of a "pure" poetic language can be found in American poetry, as perhaps in other national literatures: that pure which moves towards the vernacular as an originary, terminus a quo and that (symbolist) pure which moves away from traces of vernacular diction and syntax - what Ashbery calls above "the demotic" base - as a terminus ad quem or limit of estrangement. (Even the abundantly "impure" Whitman can be seen to pursue some version of a purified "American English" whose "omniverous lines" yet enforce poetic discriminations against sedimentations of a so-called impure, Euro- centric language.)

Indeed quests for purity in poetry are founded in such arbitrary acts of lexical discrimination. As Hartman warns, "Any call for purification or repristination is dangerous. For it is always purity having to come to terms with impurity that drives crazy" (117). This dangerous battle call for authorial authenticity is usually fought out in the loaded terms of diction, as it was on the unpolished Reforma- tion altars of Massachusetts; however, since the first vernacular sal- voes of Dante in De Vulgari Eloquentia to the latter-days of modernism, this battle for purity occurs in what Hartman calls the "religion of language itself, language as a quasireligious object when a new vernacular is developing." If certain poets still seek to "purify the language of the tribe," to use Mallarme's symboliste slogan for the labors of purist Poe, we need to ask just what is being washed away lexically and being whitewashed sociologically if "pure" is to have any critical bite in handling the myriad reifications of poetic diction.

Hence a book like William Carlos Williams' Spring and All (1923) can be rightly read by Hartman as a singular purification rite, a

purging or "spring cleaning" of American poetry of those sediment- ed European (read "Eliotic") echoes, just as almost any poem by Wallace Stevens can be viewed as a struggle with the "impure" Ro- manticism of Keats and Whitman which his chastening intelligence


THE PURE AND IMPURE OF AMERICAN POETRY

must resist. Yet the "pure" is such a historically unstable and am- biguous term, embodying in its poetic freight so many anthropologi- cal, religious, literary, racial, national and even scientific ideals of linguistic betterment, that we inevitably confront what Hartman terms a "purity perplex" (147) whose textual strands are difficult to discriminate in merely semantic bipolar terms. The "various doc- trines of pure poetry" which have been proposed in Anglo-American poetics, as Robert Penn Warren interestingly pointed out in "Pure and Impure Poetry" (1943), often presuppose some foundationalist definition of poetry as an ahistorical essence "that is to be located at some particular place in a poem, or in some particular element" in which the quixotic purity of language is presumed to inhere (Warren 1958:375).

Confronting "Edgar Poe's Significance" in Specimen Days (1882), for example, Walt Whitman commented that Poe's purist and anti- mundane poetry, committed scornfully as it was in its essentialist lyrical symbolism to "the lush and the weird," nevertheless had sprung from a "strange spurning of, and reaction from" specific nineteenth-century circumstances we would have to articulate through a "subtle retracing and retrospect" of Poe's material life (as in, say, Walter Benjamin's materialist reading of Poe's self-alienated drifter in "Man of the Crowd"). Poe's purity, that is, notoriously reeks of impure psychic and historical sources which the poem cannot wholly repress in its lyrical strategies of lexical scapegoating in the will to some supernal sublime of higher ideality.

What Whitman noted as Poe's "intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess" can be seen to be his strategy of symbolical transcendence, the detoxifying retreat from the language of material commodification into the antilanguage of pure poetry, which indeed resulted in what Whitman saw as "the abnegation of the perennial and democratic concretes at first hand, the body, the earth and sea, sex and the like. ..". Indeed Poe's pursuit of a supernally "pure" poetry effectively repressed the "immense materiality" (Whitman) of the sexual body, of egalitarian democracy and of pedagogical Nature as impure, inferior, grossly tainted with vulgar traces of American middleclass ideology. This unstable opposition of the poetically pure/impure has been finely illuminated by Barbara Johnson in her deconstructive contrast in The Critical Difference (1980) between the cliche-riddled prose version of Baudelaire's Invitation au Voyage (1857) and its purist younger brethren, the repressively original poem wherein "La, tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute,/ Luxe, calme, et volupte" (23-52). As Johnson argues,

The forces of order which guard the poetic frontier are designed not only to repress, but to erase - wipe clean - the very traces of repression, the very

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traces of the cleaning operation. Only then can the poetry - "propre et lui- sant comme une belle conscience" - seem to be "pure," that is, cut off from the very process of its own production, from any history or context that is not Itself; cut off by what Jacques Derrida has called "a pure cut without negativity, a without without negativity and without meaning" (47).

Not as openhanded about their textual cuttings and cleanings as Bar- bara Johnson in "Poetry and Its Double," both Poe and Baudelaire obscure the process by which the "douce langue natale" of the purity-seeking soul is founded in an (arbitrary) repression of the lexically impure and contentious prosaic base.

Poe's antihistorical criterion of lyric purity is epitomized in his comment on Tennyson, whose poetic effect of sublimity he praised as "at all times the most ethereal - the most elevating and the most pure": "No poet is so little of the earth, earthy" ("The Poetic Prin- ciple," 1849). Poe's lyrical pursuit of an unearthly musicality to counter the shocks of modernism enacted a will to ideal abstraction, a semantic abnegation of the real in pursuit of beautified shapes and sounds which was of course ultimately morbid, a melopoeic formal- ism ghoulishly "motivated" (to use the Russian Formalist term for poetic device) by the misogynistic scapegoating of a dying woman whose death engenders a melancholy male lyricism in love with the precious diction of its own voice. However, in the impure materiality and ideological turmoil of what Wallace Stevens termed "The Poems Of Our Climate," the imagistic - that is, poetically "pure" - plentitude of some "Clear water in a brilliant bowl/ Pink and white carnations" can no longer suffice to arrest the lexical flux that is modern consciousness. As almost any Stevens lyric from Ideas of Order (1936) on would show, both lexically and ideologically, "the imperfect is our paradise."2

Walt Whitman, with his omniverous inclination to enrich rather than to purify poetry by wildly supplementing what he proposed

2. Wallace Stevens, "The Poems of Our Climate," The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1974:193-194). The profound attraction toward an American version of "pure poetry" in early Stevens is best revealed in a letter to Ronald Latimer of October 31, 1935, during the decade when Stevens was preoccupied with the social/ideological demands socialist critics were making on his poetry: "... I remembered that when HARMONIUM was in the making [1914-1922] there was a time when I liked the idea of images and images alone, or images and the music of verse together. I. then believed in pure poetry, as it was called. I still have a distinct liking for that sort of thing" (1981:288). Stevens's emerging defense of an impurist poetry which could engage ideology and "actual backgrounds" can be seen in a later letter to Latimer on Dec. 19, 1935: "Imagism was mild rebellion against didacticism. However you will find that any continued reading of pure poetry is rather baffling. Every- thing must go on at once. There must be pure poetry and there must be a certain amount of of didactic poetry, or a certain amount of didacticism in poetry" (302-303). Stevens's struggle in the 1930's not to renounce but to refigure - and mask - a credible position for the "Pure Poet" within Marxist debates defending the mimetic function of literature is deft- ly argued in Milton J. Bates (1985: Chapters 4 and 5). Also see, A. Walton Litz (1977:111- 132).



was "American English" on the intuitive lexical principle that "the best of America is the best cosmopolitanism," notoriously smuggled into American poetry such peculiar foreign expressions as "accou- chez!" (French), "ambulanza" (Italian), "avatara" (sanskrit), "blab" (slang), "eidolon" (Greek), "lambent" (Latin), "Libertad" (Spanish), "mossbonker," "Presidentiad" (his coinage), "barbaric yawp" and so forth. This perpetual opening of the poetic boundaries of American English to ethnic and foreign influxes of modern and politically tumultuous terms during the industrializing era of massive European immigration is what we can term, in contrast to Poe's quest for the supernal Pure, his indiscriminating fearlessness of the Impure. Never- theless, even the linguistically broadminded Whitman had a recurring taste for an Americanized brand of purity, for a nativist English purified of imported terms he found impurely loaded with "feudal" ideology, even if transmitted through Shakespeare or taken as empirical givens on the American scene.

To take one striking example, in An American Primer, a collection of lecture notes from 1855 to 1860 when he was inventing the "language experiment" that came to be Leaves of Grass, Whitman avowed the following on the seemingly neutral nature of American place names:

California is sown thick with the names of all the little and big saints. Chase them away and substitute aboriginal names. What is the fitness - What the strange charm of aboriginal names? - Monongahela - it rolls with venison richness upon the palate. Among names to be revolutionized: that of the city of Baltimore (1970:29-30).

Many of his poems are rife with such "aboriginal" names, as if invoking, in native tongue, some pure poetry from the Edenic mouth of Indians and other primal Americans: words like "Mannahatta" and "Paumanok" (the Indian names for New York and Long Island), "fourth-month" and "fifth-month" (de-monarchized names used by the Quakers), "gab" and "kelson" and "lacy jags" (working class specifics) and so forth. "Starting from Paumanok" (1860, Section 16) voices this Adamic claim to prior purity:

The red aborigines, Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of

birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names, Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez,

Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco, Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla, Leaving such to the States they melt, they depart, charging

the water and the land with names.

Having left such pure poetry tacked on to the landscape, the red (and sublated) Americans must disappear into so many reified nouns, into names such as "Miami" and "Wabash" which have lost their Indian aura to football teams and railway lines.

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When "Song of Myself" sounded its outrageous "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world" in 1855, it certainly contained arbitrary traces of such purist native-American diction, right in there with the impure heteroglossia Whitman forever embodied in "hundreds and hundreds of words, all tangible and clean-lived, all having texture and beauty" (3). Seeing the political implications of naturalized namings, even Whitman wanted to purify American English of lingering papist and feudal traces, an impossible act for any government not to mention for one six-foot poet from Brooklyn: "Californian, Texan, New Mexican, and Arizonian names have the sense of the ecstatic monk, the cloister, the idea of miracles, and of devotees canonized after death - ... What do such names know of democracy [?]" (35). What remained "pure" to Whitman's hybridized poetics were those "ten thousand native idiomatic words" that concretized "that taste of identity and locality which is so dear in literature." A bit of a latter-day Puritan about his clean-smelling body if not about his poetic diction, Whitman nevertheless would forge a poetic idiom from regional and vernacular sources as the rugged poems of our climate generated primarily from a nativist terminus a quo.

By rarified contrast, the "doctrine of purity" central to the symbolist aesthetic of autonomy which developed from "La Poesie pure" of Poe and Baudelaire to its specular reincarnations in modern poets like those gathered in George Moore's An Anthology of Pure Poetry (1924) proscribed all elements of self-reflective ideation from genu- ine ("pure") poetry: poetry in this linguistic estrangement from the actual aspired to a condition of musicality which was implicitly anti- didactic, nonutilitarian, antirepresentational, rendering the poem into the rarified language of "pure feeling" and precious things. Much more mystified and self-indulgent than the Augustan and neo- classical ideal of "purity" as that stylistic norm of "elegance" and "correctness" (which American linguists like Noah Webster and John Pickering adhered to in the 1820's and 1830's), this latter-day Sym- bolist "mystique of purity," as Renato Poggioli argues in The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968), would seek "to abolish the discursive and syntactic element, to liberate art from any connection with psycho- logical and empirical reality, to reduce every work to the intimate laws of its own expressive essence" in the total poetic "hyperbole" of an unprecedented form (201).

Pure poetry like Poe's aspired to the lyrical condition of music on the one hand and to an "ideal logic" of artistic form on the other. That didactic "message" of moral transcendence so dear to Emerson and his poetic heirs, Whitman and Frost, was essentially banished by Poe to Western Union and the vulgar vagaries of so-called ordinary speech which, as many have observed with Stanley Fish, is not so "ordinary" after all. The material weight of historical subject matter was repudiated and instead style (what Fredric Jameson now terms a



distinctive "monadic" language) became the only subject worth pur- suing. In the domain of early modernist American poetry, this largely meant a rigorous privileging of the sensuous image over other more ideologically deconstructive tropes, as if each poet had to reproduce a language of pure presentation, some material embodiment in language of a consciousness immune from irony: purity became not just a lexical but an ontological preoccupation, which of course was covertly at stake in prior versions, too. This modernist version of Pure Poetry which, in effect, took dominion everywhere, furiously abhorred "the impurity of an intellectual style" and thus sought to purge the poem, as Robert Penn Warren lamented in the wartorn 1940's, of "all ironies and self-criticism," those rhetorical tools of poetic demystification which the New Critics wielded in an alterna- tive hegemony.

Any such preciously "monological" poetry aspires to become a special language set apart from the material transactions of everyday speech for, as Mallarme boorishly pronounced: "Speech is no more than a commercial approach to reality." The poet in the wake of lyrical Poe sought "to purify the dialect of the tribe" by creating a special, presentational language coded with sudden images and symbols which functioned as defamiliar tokens, irreal and surreal and antireal but, above all, remote from ordinary speech with its instrumental designs on truth, the struggle of ideology and the intrusions of technological manipulation. Such a willfully symbolic language, partly a romantic response against industrialization if not democrati- zation as is clear in Poe, like Baudelaire "our postmodern contemporary," sought repressively to purify poetry of ideology as the worldly jargon of the middleclass masses when "the 'age demanded' chiefly a mould in plaster/ Made with no loss of time,/ A prose kine- ma ..".

Of course George Moore's purist credo of Modernism was out- rageously imagistic and anti-cerebral, as when he wrote to John Eglinton in 1927: "Ideas are worthless, yours, mine, and everybody else's. Ideas are pernicious: things are the only good" (Brown 1955: 206-208). By Moore's criterion of such ideological laundering, he can astonishingly assert that even "Shakespeare never soiled his songs with thought"; and poems like Shelley's "Hellas" were damnably "impure" (as were Dickens's novels) because based on political ideas like "duty, liberty, and fraternity" that should no longer seriously interest mankind after the age of 30. Needless to say, Poe's ethereal "To Helen" turns up in Moore's anthology (p. 151) as a Romantic example of a musical poem devoid of any vulgar interest in "idea" (or, I might add, in "things" in any ordinary sense).

According to the aristocratic tenets of such "pure poetry," poetry works best as a special language-within-language, a peculiarly indivi- duated diction which perpetuates the "imagination's Latin" as it

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departs from and renews, in Stevens's later formulation, the demotic tongue. As Stevens formulates the problem in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (1942), as he meditated on the vexed nature of poetic language in the impinging context of global war:

The poem goes from the poet's gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.... It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks. He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general, To compound the imagination's Latin with The lingua franca et jocundissima (1974:396-397).

The purity of any "poet's gibberish" repeatedly gets contaminated with the "gibberish of the vulgate" which was its alienated material origin; nevertheless, Whitman-like, Stevens aspires to write inside this potent American vulgate, this "lingua franca," as long as such diction can be vigorously compounded with the lexical purity of "the imagination's Latin." (However, like Dante, Stevens paradoxically advo- cates the poetic uses of the vernacular in rich phrasings from the anti- demotic Latin.)

What was "impure" for Stevens even in the ideologically demand- ing 1930's was not so much the vernacular but more often prior poetic metaphors, tropes which had been interiorized from the Ro- mantic tradition if not from his own lusher poems in Harmonium. Such moribund or dead metaphors he sought to "decreate" (what we would term "deconstruct," as in Johnson's analysis of Baudelaire's purity) from the language of consciousness in repeated acts of linguistic purification against metaphor itself (as the trope of tropes, the heliotrope): "We seek the poem of pure reality, untouched/ By trope or deviation." However, this dialectical confrontation with the natural "object" was always already tainted with poetic diction, with prior tropes and prior languages he could not wholly purify from his post-Romantic consciousness, not even in the rigorous deconstruc- tions of, say, "The Rock." What was "impure" to Stevens and hence lexically scapegoated from the poem was not so much political ideas per se but those ideological legacies from romanticism which had lost credibility and were invoked only to be decreated: "but poetry is essentially romantic... [and] What one is always doing is keeping the romantic pure: eliminating from it what people speak of as the romantic" (letter to Ronald Latimer, March 12, 1935, Letters, 277). Attracted as he was to the purist strategies of image-making and sonorous presentation - the production of what he early termed "heavenly labials in a world of gutturals" - poetry remained for the tough-minded Stevens intrinsically impure: full of didactic and idea- tional traces, .nfused with diverse language codes in an active flux and mental combat which the poem, then, enacted.



Yet in Stevens's extreme modernist version, the pure poem on any "ordinary evening in New Haven" can become unreadable, an ob- scurantist challenge to any reader's hermeneutic because of the estranged reification of style itself and the very materiality of a poetic language stripped of its utilitarian meaning. At times the result is a precious poetry purified of plain sense, as in Stevens's own antire- ferential lament: "Words, lines, not meanings, not communications." Impossibly enough, such poetry would attempt to originate a break with material history and the polyglot determinations of language itself by means of the singular production of pure imagery and ethereal music. If such "Purity is a forgetting after study" (Apollinaire), then the modernist poem must autonomously forget conventional linguistic procedures of past poems, even of one's own, as always already impure, the stuff of mere prose.

This kind of "pure poem" originates, then, in the illusion of social autonomy, as if the poem can be the byproduct of a superior self generating a verbal "mundo" apart from social mediations other than the verbal constraints of the medium itself. The impersonality sought by the author becomes a mystified way of disappearing into the verbal object, an abnegation of the self in an act of total verbal reification, an effacing of the subjective trace into pure textuality. If language can think and dream inside the man, poetic style becomes not so much the man as his self-effacement, his Cheshire-cat grin in the god- head of an originary form.

Donald Davie, in Purity of Diction In English Poetry (1952), an influential study which later came to be regarded as a manifesto of the "chaste" British Movement poets of the 1950's against the seduc- tions from literary Bohemians and Americanists, defined the criterion of "purity of diction" in neo-Augustan terms as that specialized use of language whose hallmarks remain: "economy in metaphor" (32), a cultivated "tie with conversational usage" (59) of Middle Class London speech, an inclination toward "urbane and momentous statement" (107), a fondness for "nice meanings" (68) as enforced by poets of moderation like Goldsmith, Johnson, Cowper and Davie himself. Even a High Romantic poet like Shelley, despite his strokes of "violent," "impure" and "licentious phrasing" in his spiritual quest to write sublime poetry, nevertheless can be ranged in the camp of the urbane Pure because he is,

a poet of poise and good breeding. Shelley was the only British Romantic poet with the birth and breeding of a gentleman, and that cannot be irrelevant (158).

In his 1966 "Postscript," Davie makes the underlying class basis of his notion of "purity of diction" even more apparent, in positing a crucial contrast between British and American poetics: "... I seem to detect that not only the struggle against Bohemia, but more

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generally an approach to poetry by way of its diction, comes more naturally to British writers and readers than to American."

This is so, Davie goes on to argue, because "among the pressures which a poet must respond to, if he is employing a [poetic] diction, are pressures of class-usage - and of speech-usage, to the extent that all poems are written to be spoken, unless written to be sung. Every- one knows that British society is class-ridden, and that in Britain the badge of class is speech; and that in American society this is not so, or not to the same degree" (200-201). Pure diction cannot white- wash its labor of social affiliation, its aloofness from impure codings and tones. That is, the sensitivity to nuances of poetic diction which Davie brings from the Augustan past into the Movement/Bohemian present, with its castigations of the Impure and its taste for niceties of the Pure, comes from his acculturated sensitivity to ideological, loaded speech. Purity of diction functions as a telegraphic class-sign in poets as in the loaded transactions of ordinary conversation, and Davie would have more of it. If Shelley can commit forgiveable errors, and infelicities of the Impure under the pressures of Roman- tic taste, it is because Shelley after all is a gentleman, born and bred into purity of diction - "and that cannot be irrelevant." This sociological underwriting in Davie's usage of the value term pure should not be ignored, not even in the classless and redneck wilds of Ameri- can poetry, as it struggles toward and away from that conversational base we loosely term, after Dante, the vernacular. In all impurity, it "is built to last,/ to outlast us," as Ashbery claims in embracing his own version of the demotic.

Davie's book is helpful in foregrounding the mix of aesthetic/social motives that go into this prosodic surveillance and moral policing of poetic diction, what Mikhail Bakhtin has termed the threatened in- jection of heteroglossia - "words thrusting to be let into the poem and held out of it by the poet" (Davie p. 5) as the literary site of such struggle. By dialogical strategies, literature (above all, the novel, but also the "novelized" poem of the nineteenth century) "can inject social heteroglossia" into its would-be autonomous genres. For, as the materialist linguistics of Bakhtin remind us, "Every word gives off the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a particular man, a generation, an era, a day, and an hour. Every word smells of the context and contexts in which it has lived its intense social life."3 The Augustan "purity" of Davie or the Sym- bolist "purity" of Poe: both "smell" of the impure social situations and strategies in which such poetic ideals were produced. Purification

3. Mikhail Bakhtin (1981:293). 1 quote and benefit from Tzvetan Todorov (1984:56-76) on formal/dialectical uses of impure "heteroglossia" in literature. On Bakhtin's dialogical undoing of "binary opposition" as a differential structure of language exclusion, also see Paul de Man (1983:102-103) and Michael Davidson (1986:33-45).



movements, whether in poetry or in national linguistic trends to recover some indigenous base prior to foreign infiltration, must confront the intrinsic conditions of language expressed in Bakhtin's impurist maxim: "Polyglossia had always existed (it is more ancient than pure, canonic monoglossia) .. ." (12). No linguistic immersion in the Lethe of pure poetry can wholly abolish this axiomatic linguistic necessity for literature's unconsciously assuming "several 'languages"' (295) in the formal unifying of its "ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds."

In addition to such social semantics as Bakhtin's, we can under- stand, by invoking the phenomenology of pure/impure lucidly pre- sented in Paul Ricoeur's The Symbolism of Evil (1969), that the use of poetry as a "symbolic language" of defilement (evil) and of ablu- tion (good) enacts "the ambiguity of purity which oscillates between the physical and the ethical" (37). That is, the invocation of a so- called pure language, as some symbolic formula to recover a prior state of purity, is used by poets to ward off the contagion of some morally and biologically dreaded "impure": "a material 'something' that transmits itself by contact and contagion" (28). The terms of the impure can be seen to embody, by what I will here call the process of lexical scapegoating, the "quasi-materiality of defilement" of a dreaded contact with symbolic mechanisms of sex, blood, disease, sin, stain, improper food and so forth.

For the poet, as the symbol-keeper of his linguistic tribe, some "cathartic practices related to defilement" (33) need to be invoked: a symbolic cleansing must be called upon, in mimetic structures of ritual practice, to erase what was in effect already merely a conta- giously symbolic strain: "In truth, defilement was never literally a stain; impurity was never literally filthiness, dirtiness" (35). Classical Greece, which Ricouer and Moulinier agree imparted to the West our aesthetic vocabulary of the pure and impure, had invented the cathartic agency of tragic drama to exorcise the fear of the impure as in the scapegoat figures of Orestes and Oedipus whose victimage can repre- sent "purgation" for the tribe. However, in more general social practices, too, symbolic language plays a crucial part in the collective attempt to ward off, if not eliminate, the impure. What Ricouer formulates as the "formation of a symbolic language" in which the "rite is never mute" and words are given ritual efficacy can be read in the stronger (that is, Burkean and Marxist) terms of Fredric Jameson to enact a social praxis via myriad symbolic imaginings expressing and only fictively resolving historical contradictions which cannot be resolved directly in blood deed.4

4. On language as symbolic praxis, see Fredric Jameson (1981:76-81); and Jameson's post- Althusserean critique of Burke's dramatism (1978:507-523) as well as Burke's crusty re- joinder (1978:401-416).

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The quest to write such a "purity of diction," with its implicit commitment to ward off the impure, enforces a symbolic practice by which poets undertake to scapegoat linguistically some undesirable foreign terms, whether Bohemian (as in Donald Davie) or "feudal" European (as in Whitman) or middleclass ideological (as in Poe's "didactic heresy") as delectably impure, threatening, nonessential for the survival and status of the social group the poet assumes as the barely repressed horizon of the text's political unconscious. In such a reading, the pure poem can be seen to enact a symbolic drama in which the impure is fended off, banished, exiled or condemned to the flux of ordinary speech or the prisonhouse of poetic diction, even though the Impure (like any scapegoated victim) already co- habits with (or, as Burke would say, "is consubstantial with") the very language of the Impure.

A famous example of this is George Orwell's "Politics and the Eng- lish Language" (1946) which - beyond its admirable polemic against political obfuscation - censures the overuse of Latinate, Greek, Ger- manic and abstract terms as impure signs of linguistic and political "degeneration," an argument advanced in a supple English mother- tongue whose vaunted strength comes from the prior assimilation of those "hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English" which Orwell everywhere assumes. For those impure "foreigners" outside the insular boundaries of England have already invaded the Anglo- Saxon tongue.

Regrettably enough, the collective promotion of some indigenous purity of language as a normative standard remains a linguistic illusion which is all too often politically motivated, as in the contemporary South Korean movement to purify Hangul of colonialJapan- ese borrowings - but not of American ones - or the longstanding attempt in Persian poetry to ward off intrusions of Arabic and now of the dreaded West. However, as the broadminded Whitman ac- curately noted in his language lecture, the capacious English language was already so "chock full" of linguistic assimilations and literary hybridizations "that its own sturdy home-dated Angles-bred words have long been outnumbered by the foreigners whom they lead" (30). This attitude seems politically more healthy-minded concerning the policies of language-purism movements, whether inside or outside the domain of pure poetry. Indeed, in lexical terms, there is no such thing as a "pure" poem, just as there is no such thing as "pure" diction, as the naming of the impure threatens to become a bloody, ex- clusionary act of more-than-lexical scapegoating.

In fact Donald Davie later admitted that the "aggressive philistin- ism" (198) that ran through his poetic thinking on "purity of diction" was ultimately his way of doing battle against the literary Bohemians of London who had claimed Dylan Thomas as the tragic victim of an antisocial lifestyle. If Davie came to be labeled a genteel "Puritan" by



his opponents on the Left, many of these impure poets had already defected to the "barbaric yawp" of Ginsberg's Howl (1955) for "re- vivifications" (Davie's word now seems ludicrously tame) of metaphor and diction, as in the striking case of Thom Gunn who left the influence of Yvor Winters for the Hells Angel dust. The battle of academic and beat diction in the American 1950's can similarly be read not only in literary but in sociological terms as an opening of poetry to marginalized dictions (of the street, Blacks, the madhouse, Jews, Gays and so forth) which the Richard Wilburs of more academic bent regarded as poetically toxic and hence scapegoated from the pure prose, as James E.B. Breslin's analysis of the "New Rear Guard" formalist ideology in From Modern to Contemporary: Ameri- can Poetry, 1945-1965 (1984) makes clear.

Moving beyond a lexical towards a more ontological perspective in The Greeks and the Irrational (1964), E.R. Dodds has illuminated the Orphic religious dynamics of early poetic purification-rites in the "universal fear of pollution (miasma), and its correlate, the universal craving for ritual purification (catharsis)" (35) which was enacted in Homer and, more strongly, in the dramas of Sophocles. Seeking purity of vision and language, Orphic poets had to practice a rigorous askesis of purification to train themselves in psychic power and vision: an occult self of the psyche (or, later, the "daemon"), con- sidered separate from the body, had to be verbally invoked and biologically cultivated. A practice of catharsis was socially enforced: "man must be cleansed not only from specific pollutions, but, so far as might be, from all taint of carnality ... Purity, rather than justice, has become the cardinal means to salvation" (153-154).

Indeed the would-be Orphic poet (whom Harold Bloom has sug- gestively taken as poetic prototype for would-be Emersonians) fasted, ate vegetarian food, shed no blood, cultivated states of dream and daemonic possession through inner purity. Such Greek "puritanism," influenced as it was by Shamanistic practices beyond the Black Sea in the seventh century, imparted to western poetics, even through the later rationalizations of Plato, this visionary sense of "the pure" as providing access to the supernatural, to some godgiven, psychically inspired vision as in Poe's symbolist quest for Helen's purer language of feeling or in Emerson's mandate to "The Poet" (1844): the inspired poet with his god-intoxicated, "ravished" intellect has no need for the "sorceries of opium and wine" because, "The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body." Hence in "Song of Myself," Whitman prefers the pure "intoxication" of clean, odorless air to the impurity of "houses and rooms [which] are full of perfumes" and even smelly shelves, just as Emily Dickenson would become inebriated by the Amherst air.

In this latter-day Puritanism of Emerson, "purity" became an aspect of poetic character, something the poet cultivated as an ap-

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proach to those symbol-making powers which would turn nature into an aura-invested "language" superior to its marketplace commodification in real estate. This literary puritanism found an influential American incarnation in Emerson, especially through his virtually shamanistic influence on Whitman. Such a visionary aspiration to produce dream or god-induced language cannot be ignored in understanding the romatic quest for the pure in nineteenth-century Ameri- can poetry. Xenophon's comment, "It is in sleep that the soul (psyche) best shows its divine nature," could serve as an epigraph to Poe's "To Helen" which makes the fleshly woman an incarnation of Psyche whose dream lantern seemingly transports the poet to a glimpse of the ideal incarnated, in linguistic displacement, in the metrical and adjectival perfections of his verse. His Helen-as-Psyche incarnates for Poe some real estate of the Holy Land, some glimpse of the transcendent which obtained in purified states of dream, reverie and opiate intoxication. The Romantic ideology of the pure entails more than language purification, indeed assumes a purification not so much of the lexicon as of the soul. That is, the "pure" is loaded not only with class implications but also, in nineteenth- century America, with that whole Orphic baggage of "ideality," the magical mutation of the real into the symbolic, an attempt to live within what was increasingly regarded as poetic estrangement under the emerging order of industrial capital. The purity of diction still reeks of such literary puritanism, the antimaterialist purifying of the body into a nervous vehicle of the supernatural, a theme outrageous- ly apparent in "Song of Myself" with its drama of ecstatic possession not only by the Oversoul but also by the diverse polity of the heteroglossic states of the Union.

According to Kenneth Burke's "rhetoric of motives," what moti- vates the pure poet in his antimaterial quest to embody this special essence of "language as symbolic action" is that Poesque will to sheer formal excellence, to a lyrical perfection of utterance which delights in the verbal play of "symbolicity" per se. Man, as symbol-making animal, intrinsically delights in a language beyond the pull of argument and advantage-seeking, a language of "pure persuasion" which would effect a "meta-rhetoric" that is a pure delight in trope-making without any performative responsibility. Poets of pure poetry, of whom Poe is Burke's salient example in "Poetics in Particular, Lan- guage in General," best enact the "poetic motive" of language, that is, the sheer delight in language itself trying to bypasss its overt pro- positional designs: "As for poetics pure and simple: I would take this motivational dimension to involve the sheer exercise of 'symbolicity' or 'symbolic action') for its own sake, purely for the love of the art. If man is characteristically the symbol-using animal, then he should take pleasure in the use of his powers as a symbolizer, just as a bird presumably likes to fly or a fish to swim" (1966:29).



This symbolizing prowess, the poetic making of a poem "for its own sake" (a phrase which recurs in most of Poe's works on the theory of lyrical poetry, as it does later in Baudelaire) nevertheless need not be separated from the divisive tensions of historical predica- tion and conflict. If "Pure persuasion involves the saying of something, not for an extraverbal advantage to be got by the saying, but because of a satisfaction intrinsic to the saying" (269), the pure poem, despite such delight in form per se, secretly is "impure" and must seek advantage and persuasion as a condition of language itself (274). The pure poem cannot get beyond rhetoric-as-persuasion by its mere delight in rhetoric-as-trope. Even if a poet was motivated by formal delight in symbolic language, the audience can still read the poem as symbolic action, that is, in Burke's words, "it becomes so interwoven with the problems you symbolically resolve, [that] people tend to see these problems as the motivating source of your activity." The death of a beautiful woman may be the most poetical topic in the world to Poe, but readers can also suspect some kinky version of misogyny as a deeper motive, too. As Burke puts it, homo semioticus is always already homo dialecticus, at his most "poetic" only when performing as a "symbol-using animal whose symbols simultaneously reflect and transcend the historical 'reality' of the nonsymbolic" (1969:275).5

To turn to two examples of poetic purity/impurity from the mid- nineteenth century where an "American" brand of poetry was effectively invented, Poe's much-admired "To Helen" (1831) can repre- sent the symbolic extreme of la poesie pure in American Poetry, the will to estrange the poem from daily life and ordinary language as a terminus ad quem. Poe's dreamy Helen is never seen as a real woman; the metaphor moves away from Anglo-Saxon diction and American reality towards some transcendent "native shore" of supernal essence:

Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, The weary, way-worn wanderer bore To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long want to roam Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome. Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche

How statue-like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand!

Ah, Psyche, from the regions which Are Holy-Land!

5. And passim on diverse attempts at "Pure Persuasion."

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The alliterative and Anglo-Saxon formulae of this "weary, way-worn wanderer" would journey, via symbolist transformation of such rude poetic diction, to purer realms of classical diction ("Nicean barks ... hyacinth hair.. .Naiad airs") which, as Richard Wilbur has argued, are not so much historical allusions as fictive inventions (133-135). This poetry-inducing Helen is not so much a real woman but a phonemic fetish: as Poe confided to Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, his recurring characters of Helen, Ellen, Elenore and Lenore (not to mention Ulalume, Morella, Eualalie and so on) are anagrammatic variations on one name containing "e" and "1" which circulate, we can speculate, like those pure poetic phonemes of Saussure or of Stevens's beloved "c."

Poe's phonemic muse is at once Helen and Psyche, temptress from some Holy Lands of the dreaming mind; she is the metaphor-engen- dering "bark" and "lantern" of some subconscious journey beyond the "desperate seas" of history into some essentialist realm transmuting the impure real into the pure symbolic. Words like "Nicean," "hyacinth," "Naiad" and "agate" serve as the precious tokens of a remote, "supernal" existence in the timeless Yore of such poetry.

"To Helen" indeed is written in a poetic diction ("thy," "o'er," "yore") and poetic form estranged from mere instrumental language: the poem would enact a language of symbolist magic, transmuting an ordinary woman (there were several Sarah Helen Whitmans in Poe's life) into a purifying goddess who can transport the poet across oceans of worldliness to some sacred realm of symbolic intuition where one woman can equal the whole of Greek and Roman grandeur. By scapegoating in its pure language all traces of "impure" (middleclass) ideology of material embodiment, this would-be monological poem would look away from the daily and modern as sources of toxic "desperation." The woman is not so much flesh and blood, as "statue-like," a creature of aesthetic composure whose function is Psyche, to become a muse of supernal loveliness evoking the poetic effect in Poe of a transport out of American landscape and history. The antihistorical goal of any Poe landscape is that of "Dream-Land":

I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule - From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE - out of TIME.

His "home" and "native shore" is not Whitman's materialist New York City but a poetic "clime" of affective essence which the poem would not only be about but would enact in sublime delicacies of diction and meter. The Poe lyric aspires to that lexically purified condition "so little of the earth, earthy" - as Poe said rather ludicrously in praise of a "supernal" Tennyson lyric.

By "barbaric" contrast - to invoke Santayana's half-censorious



phrase - Whitman's "One's-Self I Sing" (1871) strips away such purity of poetic diction and the trappings of classical allusion. The poet would speak directly in his own voice, with unpredictable rhythms and phrasal forms, his language empowered by the vernacular as a terminus a quo. The poetic form takes shape in the making, as an event of unprecedented prose-like poetry in which each phrase gets repeated and built upon like some agglutinative music of ordinary speech:

Ones-Self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Of physiology from top to toe I sing, Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone if worthy for the

Muse, I say the form complete is worthier far, The Female equally with the Male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.

Whitman's verbs are connected not to flight but to bodily process, "I sing... I utter," as the poet tries to name his own body on the stage of poetry. Local politics enter in, the impurity of foreign terms such as the French Revolutionary slogan "En-masse," sex, the female, passion, all as an immense hybridized compound centered in a lower- class personality of the American nineteenth century nicknamed Walt Whitman. Not the classical and inward and remote but the modern, outward and near are celebrated as the stuff even of epic poetry: "The Modern Man I sing." The heteroglossia and dialogical materiality (Bakhtin) of daily speech are given embodiment and "voice" through the semiotic coding of one democratic "I."

Such a poem is "impure" in its irregular, rhymeless form, its vulgar vocabulary, its singing of the ordinary person as divine. There is no special muse, no realm to flee to, no European baggage of poetic diction and allusion to perpetuate (though of course Whitman's very phrase "One's-Self I sing" would transmute the "impure" epic formula of Greco-Roman battles, "Arms and the man I sing" into a phrase the self can use). Reeking of lexical impurity, of poetic and prosaic indiscrimination, Whitman showed thit American poetry can be made from the here and now, from ideologically loaded images, in an open form which blatantly represents the stuff of history. The "other" which the purist Poe elides and scapegoats is here omniverous- ly included, even ancient Homer and the normally idealized Female physiology "from top to toe."

Written within a pluralistic ideology of the subject, American poetry can incorporate diverse voices and modes, but Whitman and Poe still stand as impure and pure options at its modernist origin. "La poesie pure" with its will to purify the language of the tribe through a process of aesthetic laundering was forever countered by

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the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman building a poetry more naked in form, substance and ideology. For most poets, Whitman's embracing of impurity has become the dominant American mode, as in the heteroglossic vocabularies of Ginsburg, Ron Silliman or Ashbery, who assume that "Purists Will Object" to a lexically incongruous line like "the gonzo (musculature semmingly wired to the stars)." Stevens's embracing of the impure and ideologically inclusive as the dominant mode of American poetry, as in his letter to the Cuban critic Jose Rodriquez Feo (April 6, 1945), has only intensifed after the impurist shocks of Howl and Life Studies: "But no one proposes to practice pure poetry. I think the feeling today is for an abundant poetry, con- cerned with everything and everybody" (1981:495). Nevertheless, a recurring will to purify poetic diction can be seen in poets as diverse as early Stevens or the Poe-loving Wilbur, or even in recent poets of epistemological music and depth images such as Creeley and Merwin or Brad Leithausser, as the essentialist purity of an incantatory imagism which T.S. Eliot saw running "From Poe to Valery" in 1948 still exerts its hold on the mixed modes of the always-heteroglossic American present.6 However, to echo the hardwon moral of Stevens, "Everything [the pure and the impure of language] must go at once."

REFERENCES Ashbery, John, 1984. "Purists Will Object," Grand Street 3, 29. Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1981 [1975]. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emer-

son and Michael Holquist (Austin: Texas UP). Bates, Milton J., 1985. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (Berkeley: California UP). Benjamin, Walter, 1969 [1939]. "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Illuminations, trans.

Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken). Bloom, Harold, 1975. A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford UP). Breslin, James E.B., 1984. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965

(Chicago: Chicago UP). Breslin, Paul, 1978. "How to Read the Contemporary American Poem," The American

Scholar 47, 357-370. Brown, Malcolm, 1955. George Moore: A Reconsideration (Seattle: Washington UP). Burke, Kenneth, 1966. Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: California UP).

1969 A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: California UP). 1978 "Critical Response [to Fredric Jameson on Burke] ," Critical Inquiry 5, 401-416.

6. T.S. Eliot (626-638). For a deconstructive approach to the "rhetoric" of pure imagery in the New Surrealism and the self-therapeutic (or Jungian) assumptions which underwrite much contemporary American poetry, see Paul Breslin (1978:357-370). As an influential and deft instance, Robert Creeley's "puritanical, nearly fanatical plainness" of style and prosodic refinement as "purist" hedge against metaphor is described by Robert Pinsky (8- 12) as part of the postmodern dissatisfaction not only with the Romantic image but also with the lush powers of rhetoric itself: "That dissatisfaction may be expressed by pursuit of the physical image purified of statement, or in other instances by pursuit of an 'allegation' purified of imagistic eloquence" (12). Similarly, a critique of W.S. Merwin's "purist" vocabulary is registered by Robert Peters in the following terms: "I had - and quite rightly - responded to the intense purity of Merwin's diction; everthing is clean, no obscenities, no words from science or technology, no words smeared or bleared with trade (1979:258).



Davidson, Michael, 1986. "'Hey Man, My Wave!': The Authority of Private Language," Poetics Journal 6, 33-45.

Davie, Donald, 1967 [1952].Purity of Diction In English Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

de Man, Paul, 1983. "Dialogue and Dialogism,"Poetics Today 4, 99-107. Dodds, E.R., 1964. The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: California UP). Eliot, T.S., 1962 [1948]. "From Poe to Valery," in: Morton Dauwen Zabel, ed., Literary

Opinion in America, Vol. II (New York: Harper & Row). Hartman, Geoffrey H., 1980. Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today

(New Haven: Yale UP). Jakobson, Roman, 1932. "O dnesnim brusicstvi ceskem," in B. Havranek and M. Weingart,

eds., Cestina a jazykovd kultura (Prague: Melantrich). Jameson, Fredric R., 1978. "The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological

Analysis," Critical Inquiry 4, 507-523. 1981 The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.:

Cornell UP). Johnson, Barbara, 1980. The Critical Difference: Essays In the Contemporary Rhetoric of

Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP). Litz, Walton A., 1977. "Wallace Stevens's Defense of Poetry: La poesie pure, the New Ro-

mantic, and the Pressure of Reality," in: George Borstein, ed., Romantic and Mo- dem (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP).

Neustupny, J.V., 1985. "Language Purism as a Type of Language Correction," paper for "The Politics of Language Purism" conference held at Institute of Culture & Com- munication, East-West Center, Honolulu, Sept. 8-14, 1985.

Orwell, George, 1958 [1946]. "Politics and the English Language," in: Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles and Gordon McKenzie, eds., Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment (New York: Harcourt).

Park, Nahm-Sheik, 1985. "Language Purism in Korea Today," paper for "The Politics of Language Purism" conference, East-West Center, Honolulu, Sept. 8-14, 1985.

Peters, Robert, 1979. The Great American Poetry Bake-Off (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scare- crow Press).

Pinsky, Robert, 1976. The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP).

Poggioli, Renato, 1968 [1962]. The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (New York: Harper).

Ricoeur, Paul, 1967. The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon). Stevens, Wallace, 1974 [1954]. The Collected Poems (New York: Alfred Knopf).

1981 Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Alfred Knopf). Todorov, Tzvetan, 1984 [1981]. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad

Godzich (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP). Warren, Robert Penn, 1958 [1943]. "Pure and Impure Poetry," in: Mark Schorer, Jose-

phine Miles and Gordon McKenzie, eds., Criticism (New York: Harcourt). Wilbur, Richard, 1959. "Introduction," Poe: Complete Poems (New York: Dell). Whitman, Walt, 1961 [1882]. Specimen Days (New York: Signet).

1965 Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition (New York: Norton). 1970 [1904]. An American Primer, ed. Horace Traubel (San Francisco: City Lights).

Williams, William Carlos, 1970 [1923]. Spring and All, in: Webster Schott, ed., Imagina- tions (New York: New Directions).

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Issue Table of ContentsPoetics Today, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1987), pp. 1-216Front Matter [pp. 1 - 188]Poetics of PoetryEternal Stillness: A Linguistic Journey to Bash's Haiku about the Cicada [pp. 5 - 18]Postmodernist Lyric and the Ontology of Poetry [pp. 19 - 44]Lexical Scapegoating: The Pure and Impure of American Poetry [pp. 45 - 63]Authorial Revision and Constraints on the Role of the Reader: Some Examples from Wilfred Owen [pp. 65 - 83]The Poetry of Suggestion: W.B. Yeats and Edward Thomas [pp. 85 - 104]On the Structure and Understanding of Poetic Oxymoron [pp. 105 - 122]

Comparative PoeticsSome Theoretical and Methodological Topics for Comparative Literature [pp. 123 - 140]

Documents: Czech StrucluralismStructure in Folk Theater: Notes regarding Bogatyrev's Book on Czech and Slovak Folk Theater [pp. 141 - 161]

New BooksFrom the Evening School of Versology [pp. 163 - 172]Per Speculum in Aenigmate: Signs of the Word in Modern Semiotics [pp. 173 - 180]Opening the Floodgates [pp. 181 - 187]untitled [pp. 189 - 192]untitled [pp. 192 - 194]untitled [pp. 194 - 196]untitled [pp. 196 - 199]untitled [pp. 199 - 200]untitled [pp. 200 - 202]untitled [pp. 202 - 205]untitled [pp. 205 - 207]untitled [pp. 208 - 209]untitled [pp. 210 - 213]

Back Matter [pp. 214 - 216]