Speech and Writing in Poetry and Its Criticism

Abstract

This paper examines some of the ways in which literary criticism simultaneously exploits and marginalizes the poem as printed artifact. It argues that the author-centered, phonocentric premise of close reading is employed to neutralize the spatial dynamics of poetic language and reduce the material identity of the text to the status of a transparent medium. This relationship between criticism and poetry is maintained from the Eighteenth Century to the Twentieth. The paper examines the tension between the aural and the visual in modernist theory and practice and contends that the appreciation of silent visual form has become one of the conventions of post modernist writing.