Answerable Forms: Poetry, ethics, and public responsibility after Eliot

谢默斯·希尼和杰弗里·希尔都在他们的批评散文中探索了诗歌的伦理和社会价值。由于希尼担心“歌曲构成了对苦难的背叛”，约翰·丹尼森(2010)将他的诗学定义为一种“充分性”：寻求直面并超越人类经验的残酷。与此同时，希尔对“赎罪”的渴望，即语义上的“密度”可能充分认识到使用语言所涉及的“经验罪恶感”，蒂姆肯德尔(2006)将其解读为在他的诗歌中促使伦理上的自我意识，而不是审美上的自我放纵的人道见证行为。然而，在这两种描述中，令我感兴趣的是它们含蓄地承认，诗歌的形式和语言有时必须为道德缺陷负责。我认为，对希尼和希尔来说，诗人责任的“指控”很容易变成指责(或自我指责)的“指控”。我的博士论文将探讨“公众”诗人，特别是希尼和希尔，是如何有意识地承担起“指控”的，他们谨慎地谈判--有时甚至抵制--政治和伦理责任，以开拓出尽责的写作模式。特别是，我将研究诗歌及其公众是如何记录媒介欺骗、引诱和扰乱的力量的，考虑到这样的认识可能造成的焦虑：关于什么构成“好的”--更有趣的是，什么是“坏的”--诗歌语言。

Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill have both probed the ethical and social value of poetry in their critical prose. Heaney'sfear that 'song constituted a betrayal of suffering' leads John Dennison (2010) to define his poetics as one of 'adequacy':seeking to confront, and yet to transcend, the brutality of human experience. Meanwhile, Hill's desire for 'atonement',whereby semantic 'density' might sufficiently recognise the 'empirical guilt' involved in using language, is read by TimKendall (2006) as prompting ethically self-aware, rather than aesthetically self-indulgent, acts of humane witness in hispoetry. What interests me in both these accounts, however, is their implicit admission that poetic form and languagemust at times be answerable for ethical failings. For Heaney and Hill, I am suggesting, the 'charge' of a poet'sresponsibility is liable to become a 'charge' of accusation (or self-accusation). My PhD thesis will explore howconsciously 'public' poets, especially Heaney and Hill, have assumed that 'charge', carefully negotiating-and sometimesresisting-political and ethical responsibilities in order to carve out conscientious modes of writing. In particular, I willexamine how poems and their publics register the medium's power to deceive, seduce, and disturb, considering theanxieties such recognitions can create: about what constitutes 'good'-and, more interestingly, 'bad'-poetic language.