7 - Wittgenstein and Lyric

Summary

The impact of Wittgenstein’s work on lyric poets, literary critics, and philosophers has been well documented. Philosophers and literary scholars, including Charles Altieri Stanley Cavell, Richard Eldridge, Michael Fischer, Walter Jost, and Joshua Wilner, have drawn on Wittgenstein to consider poetry from the Romantics to the present. Numerous poets from the mid-twentieth century on – among them Barbara Köhler, Marjorie Perloff, Lyn Hejinian, John Koethe, Charles Bernstein, and Ingeborg Bachmann – discuss or reference Wittgenstein, to say nothing of the authors like Perloff, David Rozema, Christopher Norris, or Benjamin Tilghman who contend that Wittgenstein’s writing is itself “poetic.” This chapter takes a different approach: it argues that Wittgenstein’s work illuminates the central questions of the theory of the lyric, namely questions about what lyric poetry is and what it does. As questions of essence and existence, these are the kinds of question Wittgenstein helps us understand – not, primarily, by answering them but by prompting us to consider why and how we ask them. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s attention to the ways poems use language and what we do with them shows how both poetry and the ways we respond to poems rest on his view of language as emerging from and constituting a form of life.