'Address'

Handbook of Poetic Forms Edited by Jessica Bundschuh and Irmtraud Huber 2025 Contents Editors’ Preface V Jessica Bundschuh and Irmtraud Huber Introduction 1 Part I: Building Blocks: Foundations of Poetic Form Brian Johnson 1 Doodle 9 Ed Madden 2 Babble 29 Daniela Theinová 3 Address 47 Michael Theune 4 Performance 67 Matthew Kilbane 5 Media & Technology 83 David Nisters 6 Line 101 Ewan Jones 7 Meter & Rhythm David Caplan 8 Rhyme 139 Eugene O’Brien 9 Stanza 155 123 VIII Contents Part II: Edifices: Types of Poetic Form Scott McKendry 10 Ballad 171 Helena Mesa 11 Blank Verse Blas Falconer 12 Couplet 191 213 Gulsin Ciftci 13 Digital Poetry 231 Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl 14 Ekphrastic Poetry 255 John Holmes 15 Epic 275 Leeanne Quinn and Jessica Bundschuh 16 Free Verse 291 Grant Caldwell 17 Haiku 307 James Dowthwaite 18 Hymn 327 Wit Pietrzak 19 Italian Stanza Forms Justin Quinn 20 Lyric 355 Eóin Flannery 21 Ode 371 Jeremy Noel-Tod 22 Prose Poem 389 343 Contents Timo Müller 23 Sonnet 405 Brian Rejack 24 Sonnet Sequence Lars Eckstein 25 Song Lyrics 423 439 Alex Alonso 26 Strict French Forms Irmtraud Huber 27 Verse Novel 455 475 Part III: Dwelling: Realizing Poetic Form Darren Murphy 28 Performing Blank Verse 493 Milena Williamson 29 Reading the Couplet 513 James Little 30 Reading Free Verse 531 Jessica Bundschuh 31 Reading the Prose Poem Thomas Austenfeld 32 Reading the Sestina 547 563 Ruud van den Beuken and Christopher Cusack 33 Reading the Sonnet Sequence 577 Index of Names 593 Index of Subject 611 List of Contributors 629 IX Daniela Theinová 3 Address Abstract: Is lyric communication dependent on the idea of an audience and always already addressed to a “you”? What role does the shady figure of the reader play in the poem’s origin? This chapter explores the insistent mystifications of poetic address, one of the defining, yet most understudied aspects of the lyric mode. It comments on the rhetorical basis of apostrophe and other tropes for turning away, and highlights their associations with particular lyric genres, including the ode, elegy, and the epitaphic tradition. A consideration of the boundless possibilities of poetic address, it argues, can help us recognize that poetic language puts us in touch with diverse public and private others, as well as ourselves. Key Terms: apostrophe, rhetoric, lyric present, lyric communication, voice The power of poetry lies above all in the attention it pays to words – in its constant foregrounding, and temporary healing, of the clash between sense and sound. If “poetry is words” (Bradley 2020, 20; emphasis mine), and if lyric discourse, characterized by its irreducible formality and materiality, is to be considered the site of the beginning rather than the product of a speaking ‘I’ (Blasing 2007, 30–31, 10, 116), then the questions of “who is speaking” and “to whom” are inevitably central to any sense of the poem’s meaning. Yet, even if that much is granted, the answer to these questions is never easy to find. The specific speech situation of the lyric (↗20 Lyric), in which a voice or multiple voices turn to an elusive – often unidentified and generally absent – audience, does not in effect lead to conversation. Since a poem consists in its language, no further words seem to be necessary. While we often think of poems as ‘communicating’ with other poems, it is not as if they were engaged in a dialogue with one another, or with ourselves. This, along with the poem’s tendency to self-referentiality and ventriloquism (devouring and spouting other voices), has led to the conception of poetry as a monologic discourse. Ever since the birth of the idea of a self-engrossed Romantic subject, the prevalent view has been that a lyric is never properly addressed to anyone. Still, without its variably conceived addressee, and without the attention of a reader or listener, the poem (composed in any era) would never come into existence. In some sense, then, we are clearly right to speak of ‘lyric communication,’ despite its obvious limits and contradictions. Adopted from John Stuart Mill (1833) and used to account for lyric’s solipsism, the popular notion that “[e]loquence is heard,” whereas poetry can only be “overheard” by its supposed or actual recipients (Mill 1981, 348), has mostly served to dismiss rather than clarify the questions associated with poetic address (↗18 Hymn). This chapter explores the complex relationship of voices, texts, and audiences that inform a poetic utterance. However, while the heightened materiality of the pohttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783111296371-004 48 Daniela Theinová etic code and the question of its real or imagined audience are common to all poetry, in this chapter I mostly explore their significance for the communication possibilities of the lyric subject and the latter’s instinct to turn to multiple addressees at once. My specific focus, therefore, is lyric address. I argue that it is precisely in the gaps in communication that the lyric ‘I,’ and the poem’s intention to mean, are most palpably present. First, I focus on poetic address as one of lyric’s most unmistakably rhetorical features, while also attempting to discriminate it from the sphere of oratory. Rhetoric is, without doubt, controlled by its presumed audience and is bound up (at least historically) with processes of civic enhancement and identity formation (Crick 2010, 22). But while the public nature of rhetorical elocution does not necessarily distinguish it from lyric discourse, not all aspects of lyric speech can be subsumed by rhetoric. I propose that while poetic address makes audible lyric’s rhetorical structure, the classical theory of rhetoric cannot completely account for the shifting relations between participants in a lyric ‘communication.’ Second, I turn to the different forms of poetic address. I comment on the rhetorical basis of apostrophe and other tropes for turning away, and note their associations with particular genres and lyric modes, including the ode (↗21 Ode), elegy, the epitaphic tradition, and the “ritualistic dimension of lyric” as such (Culler 2017, 7). In the last section, I attend to instances of poetic address in contemporary poetry from Northern Ireland, discussing works by Michael Longley and Colette Bryce. The context of the Troubles and the staggered processes of social transformation and political or individual reconciliation are conducive to endless opportunities of commemoration and mourning. I suggest that that the willed opacity, as well as the verbal excess and emotional intensity of these poems, are best understood through a focus on their multidirectional silences and attempts at communication. 1 Lyric’s Oratory Whereas most literary tropes have their basis in the art of rhetoric, rhetoric as such is not characterized by any particular figure or device. Yet, being associated with the speaking voice, it assumes the presence of a receiver and is defined by the vocative case, or in other words, the address. Aristotle describes rhetoric as “the faculty of discovering [. . .] the available means of persuasion,” relevant in the specific context (Rhetoric, 1355b25). Contingent on its intended group of listeners, rhetoric represents the “connative function” of language, a term used by Roman Jacobson to stress its behavioral aspects and its aim to effect a reaction and change (Jacobson 1987, 67–68, qtd. in Kneale 1995, 142). Thus, even though classical theories of rhetoric do not recognize the address to the listener as one of the figures of speech or progymnasmata (practice orations) with which they are concerned, it goes without saying that the performative (↗4 Performance) and volitive moment of addressing an audience is crucial 3 Address 49 to the discipline. In the words of J. Douglas Kneale, “[c]lassical rhetoric is fundamentally a vocative form of discourse, always explicitly or implicitly involving a secondperson ‘thou’ or ‘ye’” (Kneale 1995, 150). But can the same be said about a poetic text or speech act? Are these also preconditioned by the idea of an audience and always already addressed to a ‘you’? And does the shady figure of the reader or listener represent a poem’s ultimate, primary, or surrogate addressee? Needless to say, poetic address points us to the principles of rhetorical communication. Although admittedly the association between the lyric and rhetoric has a broader basis than that, a consideration of the nature of their connection will invariably bring up questions related to the address. In her seminal work, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words, Mutlu Konuk Blasing goes so far as to describe lyric as “the most rhetorical of poetic genres,” and she gives two reasons for her assertion. The one undermines the idea of the lyric as essentially unconcerned with the world beyond itself. Not unlike oratory, Blasing writes, lyric is wholly dependent for its effect “on the cultural audibility and credibility of the speaker.” The other, closelyrelated reason returns the focus to poetic language as such: “[lyric’s] truth is neither outside nor inside discourse but lies in the act of a discourse that exploits the emotional power of words” (Blasing 2007, 34; referring to Barilli). A poem’s truth is found in the affective charge of its words and sounds; ‘emotional’ and ‘lyrical,’ after all, are near synonyms. This capacity of lyric language to stir the emotions is, along with its public validity, what aligns it with the structures of rhetoric. Yet regardless of their shared emphasis on techne (skill) and their reliance on “the pleasure of the signifier” (Barilli 1989, ix, x), the relationship of the lyric mode and rhetoric has evolved over time. By dismissing them both, Plato underlined their principal commonalities. While elocution is described as a “knack” in the Gorgias, a “semblance” that may provide “gratification” and “pleasure” but without any sense of value (Gorgias, 463a–b, 501a–b), in the Republic, poets are famously denounced as mere imitators of imitations and as being “by nature third from [. . .] the truth” (Republic, 10.597e). The latter accusation, however, is only secondary to Plato’s disapproval of another of poetry’s features that could well be applied to rhetoric: namely, its capacity to move “a crowd” by encouraging impulses that are “irrational” and therefore mutually exclusive with the imperative of order that is so essential to a functioning polis (Republic, 10.604d–e). In this, Plato affirms the performative aspect of ancient lyric and its links to social celebrations and oratorical situations. Interestingly enough, however, lyric’s engagement with the irrational side of human nature, rather than the logos, which appeals to reason, remained key to the genre, even after its public dimension and obvious links with rhetoric became suppressed by changing context and poetic practice. Although the effectiveness of poetic discourse – and poetic address – depends on the sounds (↗2 Babble) and rhythms of speech (↗7 Meter & Rhythm), much of our interactions with lyric poetry over the past millennia have relied on its written form (↗1 Doodle). Whereas it has grown out of an oral literary culture bound up with ancient 50 Daniela Theinová song cultures and rhetorical practices, the composition and, indeed, preservation of lyric poetry did, from early on, involve a written text (Garner 2011, 415–417) (↗5 Media & Technology). Yet, as Blasing argues, lyric’s shift away from the oratory does not simply coincide with the increased transition of the genre onto the page. Drawing on Tzvetan Todorov and his formalist interpretation of this transmutation, she instead associates it with the much later “aesthetic” turn in Romantic and post-Romantic poetry: The rhetoricity of lyric language and its relation to the audience is obscured with the emergence of ‘aesthetics,’ which registers a ‘modern’ anxiety about how a public audience might be defined or conceived. [. . .] In the romantic opposition of lyric and rhetoric, the lyric comes to be privileged but also purged, as it were, not just of baroque ornament and diction but of its public offices. (2007, 42) With this theoretical rift between lyric and rhetoric, we have returned to Romantic lyric’s desire for solitude. As Blasing notes, however, it by no means follows that the ambiguities surrounding poetic address would have arisen with the removal of lyric communication from the public into the private realm. Rather, she insists that the foregrounding of the aesthetic value of poetic discourse is inextricably tied to concerns about its capacity to leave an impression on the receiving public. Natalie Pollard, in her study on the modes of address in contemporary poetry, reveals that “[t]o read poetic address is to be caught and held by a changing succession of public and personal interlocutors.” In Pollard’s definition, poems are often “at once personal and public,” and turn to “two different yous” (2012, 4, 2). This point is well illustrated by T. S. Eliot’s ironic take on a love poem, “A Dedication to My Wife” (1957), whose last line openly states what the poet has already suggested by his choice of title: “These are private words addressed to you in public” (Eliot 2015, 219). As if to exemplify his claim that a poetic utterance always interweaves several different voices engaged in distinct ways of communication, Eliot situates this late poem not directly in the hands of his beloved but, by way of its title, places it in the long tradition of poetic dedications. In so doing, he not so much aims to subvert the notion of lyric poetry as a “meditative” genre in which the poet is “talking to himself or – to nobody,” (Eliot 1957, 97), as to emphasize two key aspects of how poetry wields its power over us as readers. On the one hand, his lyric thematizes what Susan Stewart has described as “the inherent voyeurism of the reader’s position” (Stewart 2002, 28); on the other, he points out the fact that poetry uses language in the same way that people do normally: to “speak to others [. . .] and take shape with them, in speech” (Pollard 2012, 4). Eliot concludes his consideration of “the problem of poetic communication” in his essay “The Three Voices of Poetry” (1954) by arguing that “a good love poem [. . .] is always meant to be overheard by other people” (Eliot 1957, 90). Though we might take this to confirm lyric’s public, communicable nature, nonetheless we would be wrong to assume that these “other people” refer unequivocally to ‘us,’ the readers. William Waters, in his study of the address and poetry’s capacity of “touch,” insists that “[t]he you that (perhaps) calls to the reader is a wild spot in poetics, a dynamically moving 3 Address 51 gap in whatever secure knowledge about poetry we may think we have” (2003, 18). Simply put, the hesitation with regard to the identity of the poem’s addresser and addressee is not only an intriguing conundrum, but one of the reasons we keep composing and reading poetry. 2 Apostrophe: Closing the Void by Turning Away In her analysis of the different kinds of “publicly intimate contact with you” in works by contemporary British poets, Pollard, too, resorts to Mill’s controversial dictum. But she does so in order to offer an anti-subjectivist account of address and accentuate lyric’s outward reach: “[i]f as readers, we feel we eavesdrop on a private conversation directed to a particular other, we are also aware that [the poem] cannily invites that sense of trespass” (Pollard 2012, 2). Her main purpose, however, is not to determine whether lyric should be predominantly viewed as an expression of a private speaker or a public speech act. Rather, her study shows that, three centuries since the Romantic idea of poetry as a solitary occupation has taken root, the baffling question of poetic address remains a key to understanding lyric forms, and is still most aptly approached through rhetoric. Even if rhetoricians take address for granted, they do distinguish between different types and conditions of the speaker’s interaction with the receiving audience. Most of these figures involve a change of addressee or a dramatic shift in tone. In Chaïm Perelman’s classification of rhetorical techniques, the address – referred to in terms of aversio (change of addressee, known to the Greeks as “apostrophe”) and other tropes of “turning away” – is considered one of the “figures of communion,” which enhance the effectivity of communication and, by that token, the community (Perelman 1969, 317; qtd. in Barilli 1989, 106). That this evocatively termed category remains elusive and only sketchily described in Perelman’s expansive theory is no doubt due to the perplexing ambiguities of rhetorical situations, in which a contact with a diversely defined ‘you’ is being made, implied, or discussed (Graff and Winn 2006). But while all of these tropes – including aporia (deliberation with oneself) or interrogatio (rhetorical interrogation) – are easily found in lyric poems composed since antiquity until today, only apostrophe has been the subject of substantial, though still relatively dispersed, attention among scholars. This follows not just from its abundance and ubiquity, but also from it being often associated with high emotions. Because of the latter, Quintilian considers apostrophe a distraction. In its implied activity of “turning away” as well as through its etymological connection with the Greek verb trepein (to turn), apostrophe is synonymous with tropos, the basic unit of rhetoric and a common device in poetry. In Quintilian’s courtroom context, “apostrophe” refers to the situation in which the speaker turns away from the judge to address 52 Daniela Theinová someone else. It is basically an anomaly, tolerated by some commentators and rejected by others. Quintilian himself concedes that while it would seem natural that we turn directly “to those whose favour we desire to win,” sometimes such diversion can provide the speech with “greater point of vehemence” (Quintilian 1920, 42). In this latter respect, apostrophe is like the other tropes that, technically, fulfill the same function, in rhetoric and in literature, as well. Jonathan Culler, a key voice in the small but lively critical debate on poetic address, admits as much, yet he also argues that “apostrophe is different in that it makes its point by troping not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit or situation of communication itself” (1981, 135). In his seminal eponymous essay, first published in 1977, Culler describes “apostrophe” as “a striking but puzzling feature of the ode and of lyrics generally, the invocation of or address to absent beings and various non-human entities: souls, skylarks, sofas” (1981, x). However, contrary to Quintilian, who suggests that apostrophe is rare in rhetoric, Culler claims that in poetry, it is not only widespread, but that all poetic address is indeed apostrophe. Moreover, he proposes that if we accept “apostrophe as the figure of all that is most radical, embarrassing, pretentious, and mystificatory in the lyric,” we may be justified to “identify apostrophe with lyric itself” (Culler 1981, 137). The importance of Culler’s intervention lies also in his assessment of the reasons for which the trope – and the address in general – has escaped a more systematic critical scrutiny. Either, he speculates, the curiously-sustained oversight of this common yet highly noticeable feature of the ode and poetic language per se is to be attributed to the written culture’s attempt to “always seek to deny or evade the vocative.” Or, he offers, apostrophe has been brushed off because of its unquestioned identification with older forms of the lyric mode, including articulation techniques and aesthetic conventions now considered obsolete among readers and critics (Culler 1981, 136). It seems, therefore, only natural that, since lyric has moved away from these traditions, apostrophe would be seen as anachronism. In the eyes of modern commentators, it is either incongruous, due to its disproportionate formalism, or it signals a histrionic outburst. Yet, we have noted how, already for the ancients, apostrophe was synonymous with disruption and exaggeration. In his own later consideration of the topic in Theory of the Lyric (2017), Culler reminds us that “[r]hetoricians, in the tradition of Quintilian, posit that apostrophes serve as intensifiers, images of invested passion.” “In so doing,” Culler argues, “they draw upon a dubious psychology, treating apostrophic address as the natural result of an unexceptionable cause” (Culler 2017, 212). Obviously, this undeniable cause or impulse behind apostrophes lies in an excess of feeling. Thus, we can say that apostrophe has been perceived as not only disruptive and extraneous but also intrinsic to how poetry communicates emotion and meaning. Still, although apostrophe soon became “a convention,” it nevertheless tends to stand out whenever it appears, as Culler shows (1981, 136). If he repeatedly refers to apostrophe as “embarrassing,” it is to comment on its deliberate conspicuousness and on how others have failed to recognize that lyric itself “is characteristically extravagant,” in consciously “performing unusual speech acts of strange address” (2017, 112). 3 Address 53 Culler mostly focuses on the kind of lyric where the turn to a non-sentient and usually non-human addressee is most striking, namely the type of poetic discourse that is “elevat[ed] to an ode” by a “vertically directed ‘O thou,’” as Helen Vendler puts it in her own examination of the “odal turn” (Vendler 2004, 97–98) (↗18 Hymn). But, as we shall see below, poetic address and apostrophe are still an important feature of lyric poetry today, a feature that by no means pertains just to the ode, and that is “interesting” inasmuch as it remains “problematic” (Culler 1981, 138). By drawing attention to itself, the apostrophe – in the sense of changing the direction of the speaking voice and also in the sense of it turning to an unhearing or improbable addressee – does its work. Whether it is by its exaggerated rhetoricity or quintessential lyricism, it tends to stand out from the rest of the poem. By flagging lyric’s performative nature, apostrophe is, as Culler notes, “marked as voicing”: an emotionally charged yet seemingly “gratuitous” vocal gesture which, nevertheless distinguishes itself from “mundane communication” (Culler 2017, 212). The Romantic ode provides Culler with many examples of apostrophes that are at once “embarrassingly” clichéd and perplexing (↗21 Ode). As a rule, these poems give praise to persons or things that are, in some sense, unreachable, that are absent or remote from the speaker in time, place, status, or nature. Consequently, the tradition is not only a rich reservoir of hyperbolic address, but exemplifies what Culler claims to be the primary mode of lyric, based on epideictic oratory: a ceremonial kind of elocution designed to display value – to praise or denounce a person, deed, or thing at public occasions (Oxford Reference 2024, n. p.). On the one hand, Culler proposes to connect lyric with the declamative and instructive function of epideixis. He does this in order to propose a counterpart to the tendency in “twentieth-century lyric pedagogy [to treat] lyric as a mimetic form and reading poems as if they were minifictions” (Culler 2017, 109). On the other hand, and more importantly, it allows him to argue that lyric poetry occupies a separate time zone, or what he terms the “special apostrophic temporality” of “the lyric present,” which corresponds, in turn, with poetry’s ritualistic properties (Culler 2017, 283–295, 350). To give us an example of how “[a]postrophe resists narrative because its now is not a moment in a temporal sequence but a now of discourse,” Culler reaches for Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) (↗14 Ekphrastic Poetry). Addressed to a series of some more and some less likely objects and entities that evidently do not hear, the poem takes place, Culler argues, in an “apostrophic now,” “a fictional time in which nothing happens but which is the essence of happening” (Culler 1981, 152–154). Culler identifies lyric with the demonstrative powers of epideictic speech. But unlike law-court, epideictic, or any other kind of oratory, poems tend to be “unconstrained by the care for an interlocutor” (Waters 2003, 4). The reason that much apostrophic poetry reads like a riddle is that it often pretends not to do what it is obviously doing, that is, communicating to its reader. Keats’s ode, too, first baffles us with many instances of volatile address before it draws us in with its last two, famously enigmatic lines: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ – that is all / Ye know on 54 Daniela Theinová earth, and all ye need to know” (Keats 2000, 65). Perhaps the main difference between poetry and rhetoric lies in the latter’s more pragmatic conception of truth. Whereas both need to capture their audience’s attention in order to be transformative, “lyric invention is,” according to Jeffery Walker, “in principle constrained to ‘representation’ of existing attitudes and values within the poet’s intended audience” (Walker 2000, 289). Unlike elocution, a poem wants to be at the same time heard and not heard, and it often aims to tell what we have already known about ourselves. Yet, even though, like most poems, Keats’s ode does turn to those probably “already in agreement or in sympathy with the speaker’s projected mood” (Walker 2000, 289), its whole purpose appears to be to convey its own “truth.” Poetry, as many have pointed out, “belongs to the realm of the general truth” (O’Donoghue 2019, 8). Yet, by the use of chiasm and by invoking “ye” twice in the closing line, Keats illustrates not only the ontological power of poetic address, but also the uncertain nature of his message. He, thus, corroborates James Longenbach’s observation that “[p]oets fear wisdom” (Longenbach 2004, 11), being conscious that it would significantly reduce their writings’ interpretative terrain and, by the same token, limit their impact. By confirming a sense of multiplicity, the repeated plural “ye” at the close of Keats’s lyric chimes with the doubt, expressed in the opening stanza, about whether the poem and its object of praise involve “deities or mortals, or both” (Keats 2000, 65). In this way, Keats manages to make the tradition his own in two senses. First, he relieves his verse from the burden of a public ode – as if echoing Horace’s feigned complaint that “the grandeur of your deeds is out of scale / For such poetry as mine” (Horace 2000, 63; qtd. in Longenbach 2004, 3). Second, he instantiates lyric’s capacity to represent a thing or an idea “as a transcendent presence,” and by doing so secures “a sense of his own transcendent continuity” (Culler 1981, 152). Inspired by the vividness of the painted scene from ancient Greece, his voice, like the voices of so many other poets before him and since, is meant to transcend the boundaries of a particular human mind or experience, and to live into posterity. If it is by way of detour and paradox that any poem finds its addressee, it is equally true that most poems do not expect to reach their proclaimed audience. In Smith’s understanding, “apostrophe names not a codified rhetorical device or trope, but a demand that lyric poems lay upon their readers” (Smith 2007, 411). It is in this sense, too, that all address in poetry can be said to be subsumed by apostrophe. Yet, even when a poem is openly addressed to ‘the reader,’ it simultaneously speaks to other recipients as well. Conversely, even if no ‘you’ is explicitly mentioned, there is always, as Culler points out, “an indirect ‘you’ [invoked] in the lyric” (Culler 2017, 243). Therefore, all the conceit and exaggeration that Culler associates with apostrophe are also designed to cover up what has always been going on at the same time in lyric poetry. The moment of address and the confusion it entails is part of poetry’s “urgent need,” as Longenbach puts it, “to communicate [. . .] and not to be found” (Longenbach 2004, 9), namely its tendency to reach across and to speak to us, yet simultaneously turn away. While rhetoric’s main concern is to persuade us by taking us in or carrying us away, lyric, too, is committed to decep- 3 Address 55 tion. Northrop Frye, harking back to both Mill and Eliot, writes that “[t]he lyric poet normally pretends to be talking to himself or to someone else: a spirit of nature, a Muse,” exactly in order to make himself or herself heard (Frye 2020, 249; emphasis mine). If the detachment of the ancient poet from his environment involves “the forging of new bonds” (Snell 1982, 65; qtd. in Stewart 2002, 49), the same is true, of course, for the isolated Romantic poet. Even though, since Hegel at least, the focus in lyric studies has indeed been on the self-involved Romantic subject (Waters 2003, 2), Blasing recognizes the ubiquity of lyric mutuality in Romantic and post-Romantic poetry. Due to this interdependence of ‘I’ and ‘you’ in a textual exchange that constitutes modern poetic experience, questions about the nature of the addressee in a lyric poem inevitably also imply questions about the identity and motivations of the speaker (Blasing 2007, 31, 65–67). That none of this dynamism gets lost with the self-absorbed Romantic subject is perhaps most apparent in Shelley’s proclivity to public communication and his project of enhancing civilization by commending poetry’s intimate involvement with language. He believed that poets’ essential contribution to the humanity’s path to progress and virtue lie in the capacity of poetic language to combine knowledge advancement with aesthetic pleasure: “Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable of receiving” (Shelley 2004, n. p.). Shelley may have named solitary seclusion as the locus of creative imagination. Yet, despite his claim that “the words I, you, they” are “merely marks to denote modifications of the one mind,” his didactic purpose in A Defence of Poetry (1821) still hinges on the idea of lyric as a communion of voices (Shelley 2004). A good example of Shelley’s conception of lyric identity as an actual site of difference within the artistic self is “Ozymandias” (1818), an oracular poem defined by fragmented personal, temporal, and spatial deixis, and one of the best-known sonnets in the English tradition (↗23 Sonnet). It starts with an ‘I’ speaking, but its voice quickly yields to a nameless traveler from the distant past who, by describing an ancient ruin, gives the poet an excuse to ventriloquize a generic, though mysteriously worded ‘truth’ about the world: “Nothing beside remains,” while “The lone and level sands stretch far away” (Shelley 2011, 15). But whereas the lyric famously consists of a voice within a voice, which then turns out to be contained within another voice, the sense of moving closer to an actual source is undermined by the relations among the speakers growing ever more obscure with every passing of the baton. Unsurprisingly, of all the tangled voices in display, the one that comes the closest to communicating a truth or message is the silent work of the other artist with whom the poet at once competes and identifies: the sculptor who endowed the pharaoh’s statue with a telling “frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” (Shelley 2011, 15). When translated into words in the sonnet’s lines, the ambiguous moral carved into the statue’s features is no longer visible just to the occasional passer-by. Thanks to the joint forces of different artistic media (↗5 Media & Technology) – and similarly to Keats’s relic – the monument imparts its cryptic wisdom to a 56 Daniela Theinová plural, changeable audience: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (Shelley 2011, 15). Besides featuring the single instance of direct address in the poem, the famous line allegedly comes from an inscription miraculously preserved on the statue’s pedestal. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” hence also begs to be regarded as part of the epitaphic tradition. Tombstone-like, it turns to the dead as well as the living, while giving voice to a block of stone. It thus involves both apostrophe and prosopopoeia, which are two features typically associated with the memento mori (Culler 1981, 153; Waters 2003, 106–143). Even though in this case all the embarrassing excess associated with apostrophe pertains to the elevated style of a temporally-removed messenger and a culturally-remote subject (the initial ‘I’’s only role being to frame the narrative), Shelley without a doubt expects his poem to provoke his peers and future readers alike. Indeed, as Waters remarks, it would be a mistake “to think of the epitaph as a silent witness.” Through an encounter with the headstone that symbolizes the “demanding generosity of the writing dead,” time seems to turn into timelessness and place becomes irrelevant (Waters 2003, 143). Nonetheless, the “apostrophic now,” here afforded by the epitaphic text (see Culler 1981, 152–154), does not equal emptiness. It is no vague space-time of suspended life and communication. Rather, when it joins its forces with an epitaph or, as in this instance, a monument’s inscription, apostrophe stands for “a sort of presence in absence that cannot be overlooked,” to refer to Barilli one more time (1989, 106). Blasing touches on the temporal aspects of epitaphic apostrophe when she remarks on its capacity to “positio[n] itself as the prehistory of our history, in the poet’s future,” whereby it “insures a kind of literal, empirical ‘immortality’” (2007, 66). In such configurations, apostrophe testifies to its role to preserve in writing the possibilities of spoken address and evidences its behavioral, performative side. In other words, it provides an occasion for the poet’s private motivations – the wish to secure his poem a place in posterity by weaving it out of “things that outlast” its maker (Waters 2003, 137) – that blend with his public aspirations. 3 Poetic Address as a Manifestation of Change: The Northern Irish Case Insofar as the performative aspect of the lyric genre implies that it must have an audience, lyric’s performativity is enhanced by the fluid character of that audience. It rests on the irresolvable tension between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ that underpins the multiple trajectories of a lyrical voice or voices. To follow these tensions means to participate in a poem’s communication structures and processes; it affords us with unique possibilities to interpret its sense, but also to attend to the significance of its form. “Form” is the opening poem in Michael Longley’s collection The Ghost Orchid from 1995. Yet, irrespective of its title, the lyric is perhaps less concerned with poetic form 3 Address 57 as such than with the manner in which it comes into contact with its object, theme, and addressee. Like many poems in the collection, it has just four lines. Yet it achieves its effects by being impenetrable. Like an ancient riddle, its meaning is at once within our reach and incomprehensible: Trying to tell it all to you and cover everything Is like awakening from its grassy form the hare: In that make-shift shelter your hand, then my hand Mislays the hare and the warmth it leaves behind. (Longley 2006, 197) In such a short poem, “every word has to earn its place,” as Longley remarks in an interview (Johnstone 1985, 20). Yet, when invited to comment on the abundance of four-line and two-line lyrics in his work at the time, he chose to speak about the cast of poems as such: I don’t know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don’t impose it. [. . .] Was it Tennyson who said that a perfect lyric inscribes the shape of an S? That sense of a gesture, you know, the way you use your hand if you’re bowing, if you’re reaching out to shake somebody’s hand, [. . .] if you’re holding a woman’s hand to take her on to the dancefloor. (McDonald 1998, n. p.) Here, Longley, whose poetry has been hailed as the work of a “pure lyric artist” and admired for its “[l]ucidity, economy, sincerity” (Hammer 2006, 48), openly acknowledges lyric’s inclination to performativity, like bowing, while ascribing its excesses to an archaic authority. Once again, poetry’s touch is depicted in terms of analogous social gestures that are both intimate and ceremonious (or exaggerated), and that are in accordance with the ambivalences of poetic address. Longley admits that Tennyson’s gesture is “made in a double of sweeps,” which “suggest two stanzas” (McDonald 1998, n. p.). Nonetheless, we find such doubleness in “Form,” too: first an invitation, then a hint of an encounter. Of course, these moves are all tentative and fluid (“trying to,” “make-shift”), yet by no means are they futile as the poem makes its appeal on several fronts at once. With all the double entendres and suggestiveness of intimacy, it is clearly a love lyric. But implied within the quatrain’s single ‘you’ is an “excessive array of you’s” (Waters 2003, 5). The first addressee whose attention is being demanded seems to be the reader into whose hands the stillwarm poem is being entrusted. After all, as W. R. Johnson reminds us, “every human addressee in a poem” and every “figure for you, [represents] the poem’s actual reader” (Johnson 1982, 3; qtd. in Waters 2003, 2). But while that much seems obvious in this particular case, and while it would be tempting to solve the lyric’s enigmas in such an easy way, the countermove of the latter two lines indicates something (or someone) else. To settle for a sense of cozy singularity would, therefore, be like dodging an “extended hand” (Waters 2003, 145). Longley’s unconcealed fascination with secrecy in “Form” corresponds with the riddling tendency of poetry in general, and love poetry in particular. The poem’s eso- 58 Daniela Theinová tericity, nonetheless, has its specific source (or sources) of inspiration. Indeed, the plurality of meaning and relationships at play is well in tune with the poem’s two most obvious intertexts: Keats’s famous fragment “This Living Hand” (1819) and Yeats’s brief lyric, “Memory” (1919), concerned with age and the loss of beauty. Keats’s eight lines, incomplete in terms of form, yet absolute in their emotional intensity, constitute an alternate tombstone inscription. It is, as Edward Hirsch has argued, Keats’s “last serious gesture in poetry, the final fragment, a terminal point” (Hirsch 2024, n. p.). Longley accepts Keats’s invitation to dance with death; “your hand,” which comes before “my hand” in Longley, does appear in this context to refer us to the Romantic. Still, like Keats, Longley is composing no memento mori, but gives us a confirmation of life and love (for a discussion of Longley’s “Form” as inspired by Yeats’s lyric, see Brian John [1997, 141]). Taking a bow, he invites, and simultaneously dares, his unspecified partner into collaboration. Culler considers Keats’s “This Living Hand” (Keats 2000, 106) to be “the most stunning instance of an address to the reader, which flaunts the poem’s ability to make such address an event” (Culler 2017, 197–198); and I propose that Longley’s text can also be seen in these terms. In both cases, the event consists in the poem itself, based on an imagined encounter and conceived by the poet as a performative occasion of lyric mutuality. Even if one of the ‘yous,’ inevitably invoked by Longley, is the poem itself, lyric’s “pronominal lability,” to use Waters’s terms, serves as a guarantee against solipsism (Waters 2003, 8). In reference to this multiplicity of poetic address, Pollard argues that the “I’s speech takes shape in dialogue with whoever may be listening: elegized friend; desired audience; companionable ghost; stern critic; ideal reader” (Pollard 2012, 2). Indeed, we might say that in Longley’s case, all these figures are often evoked at once, whenever his poems turn to a ‘you’ identifiable as his wife, the critic Edna Longley. As Justin Quinn remarks, [w]hat goes unmentioned in the criticism of Longley’s work is the difference it makes when the addressee possesses a critical voice in her own right. She is at once an object within the poem, and speaking subject on the level where the worth of poems themselves is decided. In a unique way, then, Longley’s love poems are love poems addressed to the tradition and to his wife. (2001, 38) In the buzzing, but tight Northern Irish poetry scene, it would be pointless to try and cover up poetic intimacy between a poet husband and a critic wife. Thus, while it is true that Longley’s love poems are often “addressed to you in public,” they are so in an even more pronounced way than is usual in lyric verse. The poems I discuss in the remaining pages are mostly taken from the context of the violent sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, known as The Troubles, and its aftermath. They attest to the limits that civil conflict and the difficult processes of healing and reconstruction impose on the voices of people, poets, and languages. It comes as no surprise that these official and self-inflicted embargos are often most audible in the necessary, yet often tragically impossible acts of reconciliation. It is no surprise 3 Address 59 either that the occasions for public or personal rituals of commemoration are countless in a situation where, as Belfast poet Stephen Sexton puts it in the poem “For the Birds,” “[i]t’s practically always the anniversary of something terrible” (2021, 78). Another of Longley’s often-cited attempts to simultaneously “tell it all” and, in doing so, “cover everything” is the “The Ice-Cream Man” from his previous collection, Gorse Fires (1992). In many respects this is a different poem altogether: an elegy for a man (an off-duty member of the official police force in Northern Ireland), taken down by two armed men in 1988 when stepping in for his brother-in-law behind the counter of a local ice-cream parlor in a Protestant area in Belfast. But the soft, tranquil tone of Longley’s text and its charged language and imagery afford precisely that: to commemorate a member of the community and refer to the society’s deep-rooted tensions and grievances, while offering a soothing effect. The lyric’s two parts make ample use of the list – a common device in poetry to bring up the unspeakable and to enhance memory through the emotional associations of objects. It starts with the names of icecream flavors as recited by the poem’s singular but manifold ‘you,’ implying that the lyric elegizes also the childhood days of the speaker’s now grown-up daughter and their one-time shared rituals: Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach: You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop. (Longley 2006, 192) There, too, is a duality and a certain symmetry to this poetic gesture. While the first half of the poem, cited above, culminates with the bringing of the somewhat obvious carnations (which nearly rhyme with commemoration) to the site of the shooting; with the latter half, we move to a hopefully more neutral setting: the Burren – a scenic karst landscape in the South of Ireland. What follows the mention of the carnations are five lines composed of the unobtrusively alliterating names of twenty-one “wild flowers [. . .] / I had seen [there] in one day” (2006, 192). An Boireann means ‘a rocky country’ in the Irish language, and it connotes both bareness and barrenness. Yet, Longley offers an image of a resilient, thorny, and an extremely diverse growth. Paul Muldoon has named the older Belfastman’s work an emblem of “[a] future in which we try to make sense of each other and come to terms with each other [. . .] an imaginative domain in which we can all move forward” (Wroe 2004, n. p.). Longley’s offering of flowers that are both hard to find and highly conspicuous in the bleak, craggy place, does indeed suggest an alternative to the official ceremonies (those performed by the collective public ‘you’ that brings carnations). Nonetheless, the image of an assortment of plants that have different medicinal uses, while they can also all be toxic, denotes yet another kind of ambivalence: the dilemma about poetry’s role at the time of conflict, experienced and thematized by most of Longley’s peers as well. Ever cautious of “the temptation to hitch a ride on yesterday’s headlines, to write the poem of the latest atrocity” (Longley 2017, n. p.), Longley’s poetic work has repre- 60 Daniela Theinová sented a middle ground. As long as it has resisted ambitions of social relevance and commentary, it has been a manifestation of poetry’s desire for the liveliness and poignancy of human communication as such, even in contexts where words have proved to be harmful or difficult, or altogether impossible (Blasing 2007, 40). A further example of artists’ civic dilemma, foregrounded as one of poetry’s main themes, may be seen in “Don’t speak to the Brits, just pretend they don’t exist” by Colette Bryce. Included in her 2008 collection Self-Portrait in the Dark, the poem reminiscences about the poet’s childhood in conflict-torn Derry in the 1970s and 80s, and attests to the challenges of forming a sense of self in an environment controlled by nationalist agendas. The lyric brings to the surface a string of associative memories, triggered by objects and names with ironically contrasting connotations, like the living-room display of “[t]wo rubber bullets [. . .] / from Bloody Sunday – mounted in silver, // space rockets docked and ready to go off,” which remind the speaker of “the Sky Ray Lolly that crimsons your lips” and the occasion on which “the orange Quencher your brother gets / attracts a wasp that stings him on the tongue” (2008, 96). The mention of “the tongue” that has been stung calls up the Irish language, which “they call [. . .] / ‘native tongue,’” and the memory of a language summer camp spent in an Irish-speaking district south of the border, which involved an unwanted heteroerotic initiation. It was “there // at the Gaeltacht” that a boy from Dublin talks his tongue right into your mouth, holds you closely in the dark and calls it French kissing (he says this in English). (2008, 96) Relating the speaker’s own story in playful disbelief, the poem gyrates around the figure of the lyric ‘I,’ camouflaged as its variously-construed ‘yous.’ But though it might be taken to substantiate Mill’s claim that “all poetry is self-dialogue” (Mill 1981, 89; italics Pollard 2012, 8), Bryce’s text communicates no private message at all. Due to the consistent use of grammatical present and the ambiguously-intended ‘you,’ the poem’s frequently-addressed interlocutor encompasses not only the speaker’s childhood and subsequent reminiscing selves, but also all the other – actual and hypothetical – participants in similar extreme situations. In the wordplay of tongues and mouths, people’s voices, experiences, and languages are shown to be hijacked by essentialist sectarian agendas. In its tongue-in-cheek heteroglossia, the poem represents the collective experience of imposed silence – a kind of tyranny of an unwritten, omerta-like censorship of speech, famously given away by the title of a poem by Seamus Heaney, “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” (Heaney 1975, 57–60). With these banal everyday details, Bryce smuggles into the poem’s lines the precarious reality of the Troubles that remains unmitigated even by the rapping rhythm and the grotesque rhyme of her instructive or “wisdom” title. As she recalls in the above-cited interview with Alex Pryce, 3 Address 61 That was a piece of advice you’d hear on the streets when I was growing up because the soldiers were physically very present in our area [. . .]. The ‘Don’t speak’ part of that title seems significant to me, and I think that comes into other poems as well. The idea of suppression not only of speech but, by extension, thought. Difficult truths. (Bryce and Pryce 2014, n. p.) The lyric’s defiant chattiness signals a willed act of separation, a route of escape from the constrictions of an intolerant society. Nonetheless, the possibility that, in the poem’s extended “apostrophic now,” all the ‘yous’ refer to ‘us,’ as well, also points us to the contemporary, post-Agreement reality in Northern Ireland. Informed by social injustice and political corruption, it is a situation in which rhetoric’s persuasiveness has lost any sense because, as Bryce sums up, “[c]hange is slow and these things are still being worked out.” In this context, Bryce cites Robert Frost’s well-known comment, made in reference to his own work at a public reading in 1962, that “[p]oetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance” (Bryce and Pryce 2014, n. p.). In poetic responses to The Troubles and their aftermath in the post-Agreement Northern Irish society, the distinction between grief, which is general and potentially cathartic, and the all-too-particular complaint of a grievance, is often replicated on the level of the apostrophic confusion. Attempting to answer the question about such a poem’s addressee exclusively in one way or the other would be like trying to write a “relevant” poem or collection which, according to Bryce, implies another impossible question: “Relevant to whom?” (Bryce and Pryce 2014, n. p.). 4 Conclusion In this necessarily brief and selective discussion of poetic address – probably the most understudied fundamental aspect of lyric speech – we have also touched upon some of the other basic features of poetic language accentuated in the moment of address: its rhetorical structures, its emotional charge, and the special temporality of the lyric present, which makes lyric action “timeless yet permanent, pastlike yet edging toward the future, repeatable yet provisional, urgent yet distant, [and] ceremonious” (Wright 1974, 570). While the question about a poem’s actual or intended addressee is mostly irresolvable and feels even superfluous when asked in a disjunctive manner, it is always worth considering its plural implications. If it often seems the case that the insistent mystifications of poetic address shape the particular poem’s sense, the dynamic relations between pronouns, voices, and diversely absent or otherwise problematic interlocutors in lyric texts is what defines the genre as such. In Culler’s words, “[t]he tension between the lyrical positing of an addressable and potentially responsive universe and skepticism about the efficacy of lyric discourse is a determining feature of a wide range of Western lyrics” (2017, 8). As Pollard succinctly puts it, the ‘you’ invoked in a lyric “is a conversational truant, continually evading the speaker’s attempts at closer contact, refusing to confirm 62 Daniela Theinová that the author is in dialogue with another at all” (Pollard 2012, 1). This suggests several points: firstly, the equivocalness of poetic address encapsulates the dilemma that poetry shares with all art in its representative and ontological functions: “the impossibility to touch what comes up to us without disturbing it” (Thein 2022, 53). Secondly, the diverse, directly or indirectly addressed ‘you’ in the poems I have discussed in this chapter all evoke a reply, famously formulated by Polemarchus in his exchange with Socrates on the limitations of dialogue: “But could you persuade us, if we won’t listen?” (Republic, 1.327e). These uncertainties, as I have shown, are what motivates poetic address and its affective power, as well as the affordances of lyric language as a means of communication. Every poem, even if it has a dedication attached to it, or if it is devoid of the vocative, is also addressed to its readers. A poetic text – and especially an apostrophic poem – invites us to participate in its medley of voices. Yet, once we get involved in the game of hide-and-seek between esoteric speakers and elusive addressees, we are simultaneously pulled out of the “anonymity of readership,” to refer to Culler one last time (2017, 191). We become subsumed within the poem’s special timespace – the lyric present that is both limitless and immediate. In Levinas’s understanding, “[l]anguage in its expressive function is addressed to and invokes the other.” Conversely, he argues that it is “in the distance between the same and the other [that] language occurs” (1987, 41). In an essay from 1980, titled “Dialogue,” Levinas, comments on the above-cited exchange between Socrates and Polemarchus in the Republic. He notes that “the great problem placed on the path of those who expect the end of violence starting from dialogue [. . .] is the difficulty [. . .] of bringing to this dialogue opposed beings inclined to do violence to each other” (1998, 142). The moment of address also comes with a sense of responsibility – partly chosen, partly inevitable – that influences the poem’s tone and interpretation. Conscious of the weight as well as the limits of such a responsibility, Northern Irish poets have been trying to avoid the problem entailed by dialogue by adhering to a primary principle of lyric poetry: the fact that “poems do not necessarily ask to be trusted,” identified by Longenbach. Because “[t]heir language revels in duplicity and disjunction,” poems make it “difficult for us to assume that any particular poetic gesture is inevitably responsible or irresponsible to the culture that gives the language meaning” (Longenbach 2004, 1). We could conclude that it is in this sense that poetry corresponds with one of the basic truths of rhetoric, which Blasing foregrounds in relation to apostrophic poems by John Ashbery: “the recognition that the intention to make sense, the desire to communicate, and the reciprocal desire to understand matter more than what is communicated” (Blasing 2007, 40). Both Blasing and Longenbach engage in an apology of lyric poetry, attempting to disentangle it from the political sphere and the “exaggerated expectations” of its defenders (Blasing 2007, 5). A consideration of the boundless possibilities of poetic address as one of lyric’s vital and most rhetorical features, however, can help us recognize that poetic language puts us in touch with ourselves, as well as with diverse private and public others. 3 Address 63 5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Barilli, Renato. Rhetoric. Trans. Giuliana Menozzi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Bradley, A. C. “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake.” Oxford Lectures on Poetry. Frankfurt am Main: Outlook Verlag, 2020. Bryce, Colette. Self-Portrait in the Dark. London: Picador, 2008. Bryce, Colette and Alex Pryce. “Little Windows, Difficult Truths – Colette Bryce talks to Alex Pryce.” Poetry London 79 (Autumn 2014). https://poetrylondon.co.uk/little-windows-difficult-truths-colette-brycetalks-to-alex-pryce/ (15 May 2025). Culler, Jonathan. “Apostrophe.” The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. 135–154. Culler, Jonathan D. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Crick, Nathan. Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Eliot, T. S. The Poems of T. S. Eliot. Vol. I. Eds. Christopher Ricks, Jim McCue. London: Faber and Faber, 2015. Eliot, T. S. “The Three Voices of Poetry.” On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber, 1957. 89–102. “Epideictic.” Oxford Reference. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority. 20110803095754528 (13 March 2025). Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Garner, R. Scott. “Oral Tradition and Sappho.” Oral Tradition 26.2 (2011): 413–444. Graff, Richard and Wendy Winn. “Presencing ‘Communion’ in Chaïm Perelman’s New Rhetoric.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 39.1 (2006): 45–71. Heaney, Seamus. North. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. Hirsch. Edward. “On John Keats’s ‘This living hand.’” Poetry Society of America. 2024. https://poetrysociety. org/poems-essays/old-school/on-john-keatss-this-living-hand (13 March 2025). Horace and David Ferry. “To Augustus (Epistle 2.1).” Trans. David Ferry. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 8.2 (Fall 2000): 63–73. Jakobson. Roman, Language in Literature. Eds. Krystyna Pomorska, Stephen Rudy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. John, Brian. “The Achievement of Michael Longley’s The Ghost Orchid.” Irish University Review 27.1 (Spring/ Summer 1997): 139–151. Johnson, W. R. The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982. Johnstone, Robert and Michael Longley. “The Longley Tapes.” The Honest Ulsterman 78 (Summer 1985): 13–31. Keats, John. Poems Selected by Andrew Motion. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Kneale, J. Douglas. “Romantic Aversions: Apostrophe Reconsidered.” Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature. Eds. Don H. Bialostosky, Lawrence D. Needham. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. 149–168. Levinas, Emmanuel. “The Ego and the Totality.” Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dodrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. 25–46. Lévinas, Emmanuel. “Dialogue: Self-Consciousness and Proximity of the Neighbor.” Of God Who Comes to Mind. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. 137–151. Longenbach, James. The Resistance to Poetry. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. 64 Daniela Theinová Longley, Michael. Collected Poems. London: Cape Poetry, 2006. Longley, Michael. “Songs for Dead Children: The Poetry of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.” The New Statesman. 28 December 2017. https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2017/12/songs-deadchildren-poetry-northern-ireland-s-troubles (13 March 2025). McDonald, Peter. “An Interview with Michael Longley: ‘Au Revoir, Oeuvre.’” Thumbscrew 12 (Winter 1998/ 1989): 5–14. Mill, John Stuart. “What is Poetry?.” Autobiography and Literary Essays. Eds. John M. Robson, Jack Stillinger. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. 341–365. O’Donoghue, Bernard. Poetry: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Plato. Gorgias. Trans. Donald J. Zeyl. Plato: Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1997. 791–869. Plato. Republic. Trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve. Plato: Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1997. 971–1223. Perelman, Chaïm, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Trans. J. Wilkinson and P. Weaver. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969. Pollard, Natalie. Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Quinn, Justin. “Love and Tradition in the Poetry of Michael Longley.” Honest Ulsterman 110 (Summer 2001): 37–44. Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Vol. II. Book IV. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1920. Sexton, Stephen. “For the Birds.” Cheryl’s Destinies. New York, NY: Penguin, 2021. 78. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Poems Selected by Fiona Sampson. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays. Project Gutenberg. April 2004. https://www.gu tenberg.org/ebooks/9097 (13 March 2025). Smith, J. Mark. “Apostrophe, or the Lyric Art of Turning Away.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49. 4 (2007): 411–437. Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature. 1953. New York, NY: Dover, 1982. Stewart, Susan: Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Thein, Karel. Ecphrastic Shields in Graeco-Roman Literature: The World’s Forge. London: Routledge, 2022. Vendler, Helen. Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Walker, Jeffrey. Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Waters, William. Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Wright, George T. “The Lyric Present: Simple Present Verbs in English Poems.” Modern Language Association 89.3 (May 1974): 563–579. Wroe, Nicholas. “Middle Man.” The Guardian. 21 August 2004. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/ aug/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview15 (13 March 2025). 5.2 Further Reading Burr, Zofia. A Poetics of Address: Speech and Dialogue in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson, Josephine Miles, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Costello, Bonnie. The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Culler, Jonathan. “Addressing Nature.” Romantic Ecologies. Selected Papers from the Augsburg Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism (Studien zur Englischen Romantik, 24). Eds. David Kerler, Martin Middeke. Trier: Wissenchaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2023. 171–184. 3 Address 65 Johnson, Barbara. “Apostrophe, Animation and Abortion.” The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness. Ed. Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson Gonzalez, Lili Porten, Keja Valens. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 217–234. Keniston, Ann. Overheard Voices: Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry. London: Routledge, 2006. Macovksi, Michael Steven. Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.