Introduction: A Great Indelicacy

Summary

‘A work of art in which there are theories is like an object that still has its price-tag,’ wrote Marcel Proust: ‘a great indelicacy’. However, there is a concentration of texts in the recent history of English-language poetry which make much of their intellectual price tags. They are eager to interact with ‘poetics’, using this umbrella term in its sense of the theory and commentary of poetry, the parallel discipline whose practitioners are often poets themselves. At times the line between the art and the study of its practice becomes blurred in a way that may be ‘indelicate’, but that indelicacy is one of the main distinguishing features of poetry – especially experimental poetry – of the recent past.

The critical voice of Roland Barthes has proved all but impossible to ignore over the last half-century. This applies not only to literary scholars, but to creative writers as well, and never more than when these two categories overlap. My principal goal here is to see how poets responded to Barthes in the first decades after he began to be read in English. I begin with poems and critical work by the Scottish poet-critic Veronica Forrest- Thomson published from 1970, and move through a range of poets who have engaged with Barthes for a variety of reasons: because he helps support their philosophies of poetry (‘poetics’), as with Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and others; because he binds together diverse tendencies, as with language poetry in general; and because his work offers a theoretical framework to understand the role of the emotional life in poetic writing. I continue until the end of the 1990s, when Barthes's writing has been so widely read, and opinion about it (at least, beyond the specialist field of ‘Barthes studies’) so often already settled, that there is little remarkable about including Barthes in one's poetic practice.2 Indeed, by the 1990s many writers had come to reject Barthes as part of a theoretical orthodoxy, in sharp contrast to the combative way in which Forrest-Thomson and Silliman wave him as a banner of rebellion and innovation. The range of dates I consider is intended to cover, with a little room to spare, a sea change in how Barthes is regarded and the uses to which his œuvre is put.