"Thoughts That Do Often Lie Too Deep for Tears": Toward a Romantic Concept of Lyrical Drama

Near the end of his influential essay on the Immortality Ode, Lionel Trilling surmises that "thoughts that lie too deep for tears are ideally the thoughts which are brought to mind by tragedy" and summarily comments that "It would be an extravagant but not an absurd reading of the Ode that found it to be Wordsworth's farewell to the characteristic mode of his poetry . . . and a dedication to the mode of tragedy. But the tragic mode could not be Words worth's." 1 Trilling's extravagance comes at the expense of his own argument, which had begun by rejecting the conventional reading of the Ode as Words worth's conscious farewell to his art; 2 for even though Trilling describes the forecast of tragedy as a dedication to a new poetic subject, insofar as it is both a farewell to what is Wordsworthian in the poet's art and a promise never to be fulfilled, the last line of the Ode is freighted with pathos.

Near the end of his influential essay on the Immortality Ode, Lionel Trilling surmises that "thoughts that lie too deep for tears are ideally the thoughts which are brought to mind by tragedy" and summarily comments tha would be an extravagant but not an absurd reading of the Ode that found it to be Wordsworth's farewell to the characteristic mode of his poetry . . . and a dedication to the mode of tragedy. But the tragic mode could not be Words worth's." 1 Trilling's extravagance comes at the expense of his own argument, which had begun by rejecting the conventional reading of the Ode as Words worth's conscious farewell to his art; 2 for even though Trilling describes the forecast of tragedy as a dedication to a new poetic subject, insofar as it is both a farewell to what is Wordsworthian in the poet's art and a promise never to be fulfilled, the last line of the Ode is freighted with pathos.
In the words of the poem, however, not tragedy but "the meanest flower that blows" brings to mind "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." Wordsworth surely knew that tragedy had not traditionally been assigned such a task. Exceedingly rich and various, eighteenth-century tragic theory proposed explanations of the kinds of pleasures tragedy ideally provides which ranged from versions of Aristotle's principles of catharsis and mimesis to variations on the Lucretian return on the self. 3 But whatever design by which tragedy was said to achieve its ends, theorists agreed that tragedy deserved its rank as the noblest form of dramatic art, capable rival of epic narrative, because it brought to the mind thoughts too high for tears, filled and elevated the mind with exalted conceptions. It is likely that tragedy, certainly as the eighteenth century conceived it, is meant to fall under the general proscrip tion of "supposed Height" that Wordsworth announces in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads ; his programmatic removal to "safe ground" is explicable in part as a retreat from tragic means and aims. 4 Tragic theory was not, however, the same as tragic practice. As it was staged in the later eighteenth century, tragedy was most esteemed for its sen sationally sentimental capacity to bring "thoughts" just right for tears. One account, from a review of the Edinburgh opening of John Home's A New Tragedy, Douglas (the great weepy hope of Scottish tragic theatre), may suffice as example of the general standard of taste: "The applause was enthusiastic, but a better criterion of its merits was the tears of the audience, which the ten der part of the drama drew forth unsparingly." 5 This criterion of merit, the capacity to draw forth what Keats called "barren Tragedy-tears," 6 was dis tasteful to Wordsworth, who repudiated that standard in one of his few explicit comments on tragedy: "We [Wordsworth and Klopstock] talked of tragedy," he notes; "he seemed to rate too highly the power of exciting tears. I said that nothing was more easy than to deluge an audience. That it was done every day by the meanest writers." Wordsworth's objection to the tidal powers of con temporary tragedy is of a piece with his contemptuous dismissal of "sickly and stupid German Tragedies" and other forms of violent and disgusting sensation in Preface to Lyrical Ballads. 7 Wordsworth does not work toward tragedy, he works through it-especially in the Immortality Ode, where the difficulties attendant on the project of car rying "relationship and love" intimately involve the problem of genealogy. 8 The epigraph, which divides between the proposition that "The Child is Father of the Man" and the conditional "wish" for days to be "Bound each to each by natural piety," designs the Ode, as an oedipal drama that is never brought to catastrophe or resolution. 9 Indeed, the fulfillment of the wish for a binding natural piety depends on the overcoming of the potential for tragedy in the relations of child and father.
If the topic is genealogy and the tendency is deeper, the synthetic meta phor is descent-an uncongenial metaphor for the sublimity of tragedy but apt for the "complex and revolutionary" pathos that Wordsworth defines in the 1815 "Essay Supplementary to the Preface" and which in turn describes the mental passage in the Ode: "There is also a meditative, as well as a human, pathos; and enthusiastic, as well as an ordinary, sorrow; a sadness that has its seat in the depths of reason, to which the mind cannot sink gently of itself-but to which it must descend by treading the steps of thought" (Prose, III, 83). The Immortality Ode is the splendid example of this "profound passion," which eludes both the awful reverence of an inhuman sublime and the ordinary tears of an all too human pathos. Natural piety is staged in the poem, and particularly in stanzas VII-IX, as an art of sinking in a step by step descent from father to son to man-a genealogy of thoughts. 10 Unlike the Virgilian descent, the Wordsworthian begins with a flower that is not plucked but read, which tells a tale put in the form of two questions: "Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now the glory and the dream?" (55-56). The three sections of stanzas V, VI-VII, and VII-IX propose answers to those questions; but I shall confine my analysis to the last, where the answer is, in effect, a correction of the nature of the questions.
Before the child can father, it must be a child with its own paternity. The paternity of the child who, in one guise or another, is the subject of stanzas V-IX is "God" (65) or "Immortality" (119), and the complex affiliations between father and child are most intensely reflected on in stanza VIII. The six-year-old child is initially lauded for yet keeping a "heritage" that makes him an "Eye among the blind" (112). That eye is not put to the service of the blind, however, but directed backward to the gracious source of light and sight. And although called "Seer blest" (115), the mighty eye is not merely a visionary camera; it reads: "thou Eye among the Blind,/ That deaf and silent, reads'st the eternal deep" (112-13). To be stationed at the edge of the eter nal deep is, by sublime paradox, the "being's height" (123). A correlative of the "Soul's immensity," which the child's "exterior semblance doth belie" (110, 109), the eternal deep is in the child but of the father-an extension in the child of the eternity of the godhead, which appears to the child like one of those ghostly scripts so common in Wordsworth: read not out of spontaneous reverence but because the child is "Haunted for ever by the eternal mind" (114). His heritage a haunting, the child's only privilege at his being's height is to read the will of an eternal father, a legacy that is the condition of and on his privilege. The difference between what is his and what is the father's constitutes the text read by the child positioned on the margin be tween who he is and where he came from. Or at least one supposes. It is con stitutive of the meditative distance between ourselves and the seer that we cannot look over his shoulder to see what he reads but must read him reading and infer the conditions of his privilege from an exterior semblance that belies.
Constrained by the despotism of the spritual eye and shouldering the truths that rest on him, all that unfixes the child is the unrest of his read ing. Hence the answer to the poet's rhetorical question (asked of a child not here and who could not hear), "Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke/ The years to bring the inevitable yoke,/ Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?" (124-26), seems clear: the child summons the years that he may ex change marginal uneasiness for earnest pains, forget a haunting blessedness beneath the hard fact of an earthly yoke. But the poet's imposing rhetoric forestalls easy answers. If the child has provoked the future, the poet pro vokes the past as, with forgetfulness at strife, he depicts the child's plight in language that limns the oedipal nexus of tragedy: the child's "free dom" is entailed by the epithet "heaven-born" (123); he is blessed by an "Immortality" that "Broods" over him like a "Master over a Slave" (119-20). The poet tropes uneasiness as strong ambivalence and implies a choice: the child could surrender to the mastery of Immortality, or he could, in the fash ion of Oedipus, turn to confront the father, either to murder or transcend. But the child neither succumbs to the father nor succeeds to the sublime; in stead he turns away from his patrimony, summons the years, and flees from being's height to begin his grave descent. Now there is nothing odd about the child's flight and the repression of his ambivalence, but peculiar are the poet's endorsement of slavery and his supercilious representation of the choice of the child, so-called eye among the blind, as a blind striving. What is especially odd is that the thought of this repressive turn, flight, and descent is followed by "0 joy!" (130).
The poet's joy is odd because it marks his nearest approach to a thought too great for tears, to that delight which Edmund Burke identified as tragic affect, but which seems an indecorous response to an evasion of tragic con flict. The poet explains his joy (and in explaining again transgresses sub lime decorum) as his reaction to the discovery that "nature yet remembers/ What was so fugitive" (132-33). Now "fugitive" is usually referred to the transient glory of the soul, surprisingly persistent in the memory of mortal nature. But "fugitive" is equally descriptive of and more proximate to the buried child who has blindly fled his father. And if, as Thomas Weiskel has observed in The Romantic Sublime (1976) of Burke's theory of the sublime, "Delight is what you feel on escaping from the bewildering emotions and consequences surrounding a [real or imagined] murder (p. 89), it would seem that Wordsworth's dramatic joy must be something different, for it is provoked not by escape from a murder real or imagined but by evasion of a conflict that might have led to the thought of a murder. Like tragic delight, the poet's joy prepares a renewal of power, but the poet's power appears only as the capacity to recollect what has been repressed-not a cathartic release from consequences but an acceptance of the return of all consequences all over again-without tears.
We can address the significance of this moment by comparing the recollec tion of this fugitive with the tragic scene of wonder and awe in the Iliad cited by Burke and elaborated by Weiskel as an example of the oedipal complex ity of the sublime moment. Burke quotes four lines (590-93) from Pope's trans lation of the scene in Book 24 of the Iliad, when Priam suddenly appears before Achilles to plead for the body of Hector. Weiskel quotes the context: Weiskel notes that "for the moment anger is suspended--sublimated--into wonder. Priam has cleverly assumed the role of the father in Achilles' mind, thereby engaging in his own interest powerful prohibitions against anger and parri cide." He goes on to generalize that, "Wonder, the 'sense of awe' Burke will find in the sublime moment, is the affective correlative of a positive 'iden tification' with the Father, an identification which both presupposes the re nunciation of parricidal aggression and facilitates an escape from the imagined consequences of a murder (pp. Like the meanest tragedian, Priam deluges his audience with tears; like the amateur he is, he gets caught up in the flood that annihilates not only the awful integrity and positive identification of the sublime moment but all dis tinctions whatever: between Hector and Achilles' father, between Priam and Achilles, between the two principals and the attendants, who join in "One universal, solemn Show'r . . ." (645).
The Homeric scene is a remarkable collection of familiar Wordsworthian topoi, assembled as if by negatives; and it is a suggestive illustration of the relationship between sublimity and beauty adumbrated by Wordsworth in his fragmentary essay on their respective provinces and powers. Like Burke, Words worth affirms that the sublime and the beautiful can "coexist" in the same object, even though they cannot act on the perceiver simultaneously: "the sublime always precedes the beautiful in making us conscious of its presence . . ." (Prose, III, 82). The sublime precedes the beautiful as the stunning effect of Priam's sudden manifestation precedes his eloquent utterance, during which he contrives a subtle weave of repetition that produces the soft languor which Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful describes as an effect of the beautiful (ed. Boulton, [1968], pp. 50-51). Tears, which Burke does not mention, follow. What, it may be asked, could Wordsworth have found offensive in such a turning of sub limity into human pathos? Observe the consequence of tears. The action re sumes in The Iliad with the heroes "Satiate at length" (647), but Pope, who has already read to the end of the poem, cancels this new beginning in his note to line 634: "We are now come almost to the end of the Poem, and consequently to the end of the Anger of Achilles ..." (Pope, Iliad, 563, n.). Once fore seen, the consequences cannot be aborted; human pathos has mortal consequences for mimetic narrative: the tears occur near the end of the poem; they mark the end of the anger of Achilles; consequently, like a deluge they sweep away Achilles, who i£ his anger, and drown the remainder of the Homeric epi Coleridge would call Wordsworthian pathos. Wordsworth's own evasion of the tragic prevents the tears that would dissolve those distinctions-the reading of which is life. Taking joy in the recollection of a represssed fugitive is to bring nothing to an end; instead it is to accept the legible pathos of re pression after repression: a continual deepening that yields its "complex and revolutionary" returns to the eye that steadily cons the mental deep, contin ually evading a recognition of what it reads.
The joyous recollection prepares another scene which evokes oedipal com plications : Not for these I raise This passage revised the earlier scene in stanza VIII: "high instincts" con form to the soul's project at its "being's height," and mortal nature corre sponds to the fugitive. By depicting a dualism this side of eternity, however, the revision advances the Ode one more step in its meditative descent. "De scent" not only because one scene follows another farther down the page and seems to come from deeper in the poetic memory, but because if in his provoking of the years the fugitive enacts a repressive turn away from his immortal leg acy, the obstinate questioning is descendant from that repression: it too turns away from the eternal deep and from contest with the immortal father. If that turn is not, like its predecessor, with its blessedness at strife but, on the contrary, about its father's blessed business, it is because the precedent of the mortal nature offers a target to turn toward and against, a surrogate for the immortal master who is privileged by repression in order that days might be bound each to each in a pathetic descent which will not produce awe or tears but will "call forth and bestow power of which knowledge is the effect . . is the condition of the poet's capacity to recollect, to observe a vital dis tance, and to acquire the power that descends to him as his thoughts deepen.
With a choice of fathers the poet may reject the mortal for the immortal, choose "the master-light of all our seeing" (156). Yet the continuity to which the poet adheres qualifies the identification to which he aspires. The repudi ation of the mortal nature permits the poet to silence phenomenal noise and to repeat the scene at the margin of the eternal deep, now revised so that the particular child in whom was lodged all privilege and all possibility, becomes "Children" (167), who, with no eyes for the deep, do not suffer the act of reading but sport innocently on the shore. But revision is not vision. Al though the poet affirms a return, what he sees is not the gift of a sublime transcendence but the consequence of restless thought. Linked into the stages of the poem by the "Hence" (162), the seashore scene is an exterior semblance of vision, which the poet has the ability to see only because he has the mortal power to read.
The inconclusiveness of that wishful thought characterizes the tension of the Ode: the poet stages his past in tragic figures (as Freud tells us he must, if they are to be staged at all) 12 within a meditation that evades a tragic dynamics which would transcend then deluge human suffering. Despite its repression, the intimation of immortality does persist and can be read beneath the belying of exterior semblance. But, because of its repression, that inti mation can only be read as part of a mortal descent into which the fugitive fits like a dark glass. The poet is the father's child as he is the child's father. Although immortality be the master light of all our seeing, all we see comes to us transcribed in the ineradicable characters of our mortality.
In recollecting the paternity from which no tragic act has severed him, the poet recalls a genealogy of repression, of which his recalcitrant reading is the legacy-a bestowal of power, if not of an effective knowledge. The dis tance the poet travels from stanza VIII to the end is a descent from a recol lected reading of an eternal deep by a privileged child of light down the steps of thought toward the deepening of all semblances, fugitives between the first light and final deluge. Repetition has been bound to an orderly descent that works through the same question without the compensation of easy or final an swers that could harmonize or reconcile. In natural piety the poet concludes; he acknowledges his legacy as the gift of a semblance that will always belie and often brings thoughts too deep for tears.
I should not suppress that it is the "human heart" (201) that Wordsworth gratefully identifies as the bestower of his sober receptiveness. Yet it is in line with the spirit of the text, in which all identifications are specious, to suspect Wordsworth's profession here. Certainly it would be impossible for the poet to thank meditative pathos, for it is the quality of that declension of mind not to be able to refer to itself--that is, to be incapable of positing an elevation from which consciousness, spectator ab extra, could congratulate the mind on the method of its acting. Self-consciousness, the stagey gesture that approves the hypostasis of head and heart so dear to Romantic psychology, be longs to the tragic theatricality of human pathos. Indeed, I would ally my self, albeit somewhat gingerly, with those who have, as a policy of taste or principle, withheld their applause from Romantic exploits of self-conscious ness. Self-consciousness, as it has been conventionalized by Romantic poets and critics, is not a wound of the soul but a weakness for the limelight. The knowing ecstasis of self-consciousness transports the mind out of itself in order to place it dead center on the stage of history so that "I" can tearily watch myself suffer. This weakness is not foreign to Wordsworth, of course: it has been the subject of brilliant commentary, received its full measure of praise and blame. But it is my argument that the Immortality Ode ought to be politely withdrawn from the visionary company. Wordsworth does not face human suffering. He does not face it because it cannot be seen by the poet at large in the world any more than it can be seen by spectators gaping at stagelit actors. On the defective vision of a theater audience Charles Lamb is all but authoritative: Some dim thing or other the spectators see; they see an actor pre senting a passion, of grief, or anger for instance, and they recog nize it as a copy of the usual external effects of such passions; or at least as being true to that symbol of the emotion which passes current at the theater for it, for it is often no more than that: but of the grounds of the passion, its correspondence to a great heroic nature, which is the only worthy object of tragedy,--tha common auditors know anything of this, or can have any such notio dinned into them by the mere strength of an actor's lungs--tha prehensions foreign to them should be thus infused into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand how it can be possi ble. 13 Lamb is all but authoritative because Wordsworth does not equ with Drury Lane, nor exempt the worthiest objects of tragedy "dim things" that obstruct the descent to the grounds of hum ing "human" is alien to a tragic scenario that progresses from conflict to climactic transcendence and closes with a curtain of tears. The poet's return to a flower brings him back to exactly what is not the face of human suffering because in whatever mask that face might appear, the witness of the human would be suborned to tragic testimony for theatrical convenience. It is both pathe tic and an occasion for further meditation that the poet must depersonify to deepen, if not fully unmask, the human; he must remark on semblances that belie in order to be true to life.
What is life? Life for the critic is a line to be read: "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." That critical reading lines up behind, de scends from, the poet's "own" reading of the line of descent which makes legi ble the "meanest flower that blows." And, to string out the word one more sentence, that descent is a line of readings. What is reading? Surely a dif ficult question. But an answer can be suggested by noting that reading, or at least the Wordsworthian reading of the Ode, has an uncertain structure which can be tracked, if not fully determined, by marking its deviance from a more categorical norm.
Such a norm is proposed by Kenneth Burke in the "Dialectic of Tragedy" section of A Grammar of Motives (1945). There Burke cites the Greek proverb "ta pathemata mathemata," the sufferer is the learned, and argues that to com plete the proverb "at the risk of redundancy" would require reference to an initial action. The true tragic grammar is realized, Burke says, by the se quence "poiemata, pathemata, mathemata, suggesting that the act poiemata or ganizes the opposition (brings to the fore whatever factors resist or modify the act), that the agent thus 'suffers' this opposition, and as he learns to take the oppositional motives into account, widening his terminology according ly, he has arrived at a higher order of understanding" (rpt. 1969, pp. 39-40). The dialectic could hardly be more symmetrical: Burke opposes the tragic Greek proverb in order to make it proverbialize Greek tragedy; the realization of a tragic grammar requires the assembling of the proverbial act into a higher order of understanding. The providential calculus of dialectic brings the classical to a climax in our knowledge. Whether Burkean, Coleridgean, Frank fortian, or Bloomian, dialectic translates poetry into criticism and trans figures us dialecticians into the higher, even the highest, critics-the last comers to a cultural stageplay whose finale is cued to our long awaited ar rival. From this perspective the exemplum of Priam's scene in Homer's epic can be generalized and dialectic conceived of as the intersection of drama and narrative. This is true whether we consider the Burkean schema of first action, then suffering, and, finally, knowledge, or whether we think of dialec tic in terms of the oedipus complex, which posits family drama as family ro mance, the structure of tragedy as the story of one's life.
The story of Wordsworth cannot be so neatly rationalized, however. In deed, if the power of understanding inheres in the topographical paradox that to stand under is to be higher, Wordsworth's wholly unparadoxical strength as a poet is that, as Coleridge continually reminds us, he understands nothing. Again and again Wordsworth rejects the dialectical lure, to which all Cole ridgeans are susceptible, the bait which tempts the epigone to complete Greek proverbs, to assemble tragedy from classical ruins according to the mathematics of a supposedly higher grammar. There is nothing of the classical about Words worth. If the fugitive allusion to Pope's "Homer" in the Immortality Ode is convincing, then it should follow that Wordsworth's repudiation of the tragic scene casts out not only the Homeric ethos but its neo-classical redaction as well. But even should that argument want killing force, only lack of space prevents a cataloging of Wordsworth's less oblique dismissals not only of classical precedents and neo-classical grammars but of the very notions of pre cedent and grammar which "classical" implies. And it is only the grammarians' funereal impulse that tries to strap Wordsworth to ratios of revision. Rather than assemble proverbs into grammars, Wordsworth might be said to deproverbi alize tragedy according to the rarely grammatical dissemblance of represssion: he does not impose the formula 'to act, suffer, and know'; he adheres to the repetitive process 'to act, to suffer, to act, to suffer'--an interminable se ries in which each cause is the effect of its effect, under its own influence. Or, as Wordsworth intimates: like father, like son, like father. Each term, moment, or character is constituted by its repression of its affiliations with the other; each is an exterior semblance latent with its supposed antithesis. The sequence plots no resolution; instead it configures thought as an inde finite dissembling in which each character is doubly distinguished: as its disguise of itself and as the obstinate questioner of its neighbor. The se quence 'act, suffer, act, suffer' represents reading as a differential movement through a tissue of latencies. One always reads along the same lines, always, however, sinking deeper. The line of reading, to paraphrase D. H. Lawrence, is no free fall. It is a narrow, tight descent, where the mind meditates hemmed in by compulsions. That's nothing to cry about. The Romantic complicity of dissembling characters-the never quite understood differential of an action that is already suffering and a suffering already acting evades the human pathos of tragic knowledge and adumbrates what I would describe as the generic equivalent of meditative pathos: lyrical drama.
The concept of a lyrical drama is not Robert Langbaum's invention; nor is it my own; nor is its application to the Immortality Ode more than a slight anachronism; it is, of course, the subtitle that Shelley attached to Prometheus Unbound, a term, however, curiously isolated in Romantic literary history, un commonly overlooked in critical commentary-a hybrid which, though it could not have come from nowhere and has not dropped out of sight, appears to have no natural father and no child. 14 Unlike the ideal of the myth, which, as Earl Wasserman describes it in Shelley (1971), is composed of "eternal mental possessions" which ask "to be interwoven into a beautiful whole 'containing within itself the principle of its own integrity'" (p. 272), the lyrical drama is an unpropertied child of contradictions, a composite which is itself the act and suffering of its potential disintegration. Lyrical insofar as it is the aspiration of ego, a song transcribed for one voice, and composed of imagery "drawn from the operations of the human mind"; 15 dramatic in that what is the mind is a scene, not simply an agent-the lyrical drama is passionate and im plicit, not theatrical. As a drama of thought which can neither be staged nor closeted, the lyrical drama does not so much take place in the depths of the mind as continually displace the mind in an indefinite deepening, which is un motivated and unlimited by the teleological and topographical prejudice of a destined profound. To risk a tentative definition: lyrical drama is the pathetic representation of the mind in the meditative passage of characters.
Among the consequences that follow from such a definition, several are especially salient. First, to begin the criticism of lyrical drama presup poses an abandonment of the familiar epistemological theme in Romantic criti cism. Instead of a problem of knowledge or understanding, the lyrical drama presupposes a problem of reference. One does not ask, that is, which is prior or ulterior, subject or object? Or, can the self ever know an other through a poetry of experience? One does not project a bookkeeping of the dialectical profit taken by a knowing subjectivity. Instead one asks, to what do the char acters in meditative passage refer? Is that reference constant? To what are we to refer for the production and reproduction of these characters? Are those operations rule governed, mechanical, or, perhaps, indeterminate? Is the pathos of meditation reducible to the coercion (or, perhaps, the license) of reference? To propose a genre as a problem of reference rather than a project of knowing is another way of opting for the tension of reading instead of the quiet pride of understanding.
A second point, closely associated with the first, is that although the concept of a lyrical drama brackets the questions regarding the transactions of subject and object-indeed, all questions of knowledge-the consequence is neither a simple idealism nor a horrific solipsism. For this is a drama of the mind, not in the mind. Not an hypothetical ideal or an hallucination of diseased self-regard, the drama of the mind is a formal contrivance; it follows a script and is represented in characters which are orthographical dramatis personae fully fledged by an inky plume. Like the words of Prometheus' curse these characters can be recalled, dissembled, and read, yet never fully known for what they are, never finally erased. If the characters of lyrical drama will not pose as beautiful idealisms, they cannot be antithetically consigned to the inert state of mere things either. They are, to employ once again Wordsworth's resonant term, exterior semblances-seemings whose materiality appears as the curious effect of a kind of rich redundancy (What, after all, would an interior semblance be? Is not semblance logically always the false front on authentic innerness?)--a redundancy that characterizes the materiality of the signifier by attributing to it a depth, however insubstantial, and a potential for dramatic conflict, however irresolvable. Once again, one cannot know what cannot reasonably be assigned to the ideal or the material; one can but read the differentials or, better, the intimations. One reads, I wish, with the same sort of meditative pathos with which Wordsworth intimately re gards the meanest flower,thereby binding flower, poet, and reader each to each in hermeneutical piety.
Finally, however, I want to make it clear that I advance no claim for the lyrical drama as a positive genre. Although the name does appear in the sub title to Prometheus Unbound, lyrical drama does not identify a genre which we have always dimly known and that has been lying around somewhere waiting to be recognized by an ingenious critic. And if it were, it would probably not be noticed by a Romanticist, who, though as ingenious as most, has not histori cally exercised that capacity in either the invention or study of genres. The word itself comes strange to the pen. Among the instances of what might be called Romantic genre study exemplary is that of M. H. Abrams, which began with the structure and style of the greater Romantic lyric, applicable to most Romantic poetry, and ended (thus far, at least) in a mythus of the spirit of the age. In essential rapport with such a plot are most studies of the sub lime, which initially posit a generic locus, only to find the critical wagon hitched to a fierce dynamic of dislocation and aggrandizement. The sublime is a "genre" which devours the very notion of kinds. It would probably suit neither the Romanticists I have brusquely categorized nor specialists in genre theory to have either natural supernaturalism or the sublime be denominated a genre. In fact, the Romantic period has always been a predicament for genre theorists and historians. Most influential has been the organization of the Romantic lyric from a Victorian retrospect from which it can be assigned to the plastic class of dramatic lyric and accredited as a tendency toward the dramatic monologue (see Langbaum, pp. 38-75). That organization has recently been contested, however, according to definite principles of form which sharply distinguish the Romantic lyric from both the eighteenth-century dramatic lyric and the Victorian dramatic monologue, and which reinscribe for genre theory the brackets around the Romantic era. 16 Hybrid norm, the genre is an inventionnot of mine but of a rhetoric of crossings. Each the act of the other's suf fering, the suffering of the other's act, lyric and drama will always mix, never merge. In what I take to be a particularly Romantic sense of genre, lyrical drama designates a crossing or a threshold-a limen which marks out neither a progress nor a regress but a transgress: the transgression of child and man, action and suffering, lyric and drama. I would like to designate a genre whose one actively redundant rule (including this one) is that its every rule will be broken, its formal design breached, its purest pleasures the dis semblance of pain. I shall conclude by nudging this designation one more step toward the promised conceptualization. In his superb essay "Positive Negation," Angus Fletcher describes personification as "the figurative emergent of the liminal scene." 17 Although Fletcher elaborates that phrase with subtle attention to the liminality of Coleridge's verse, there is little doubt that the uncanniness of personification that Fletcher's phrase captures would whet the appetite of Coleridge the critical censor. The critic quite properly regarded the dis sembling characters of personification as vagrant, agnostic misfits which his theology could not tolerate and his dialectics neither capture nor kill. The uncanny emergence of personification, its liminal passage, transgresses "the sacred distinction between things and persons" which in the Biographia Literaria Coleridge affirms as the first tenet to which a true philosophical criticism must subscribe (Shawcross ed., I, 137). What goes for philosophical criticism applies to philosophical poetry as well; and in his criticism of the potentially great philosophical poet, Wordsworth, Coleridge prepares us to suppose that the same transgression that characterizes a particular figure also applies to a particular kind of Wordsworthian poem-a kind delimited in the Biographia primarily by Coleridge's ostensibly excessive objections to poems like "The Thorn" and the Immortality Ode, which otherwise have no conspicuous affinities. 18 That kind of poem, I would suggest, is lyrical drama: a mixed genre of transgression, which is the liminal scene where personifications, like fathers and sons, emerge--a scene affectively like Stonehenge, where the "cir cle of reddening stones" utter the groans of human sacrifice; like a graveyard alive with epitaphic inscriptions; like a plot of turf forming into characters of fatal legibility. But unlike all because the liminal scene of the lyrical drama diagrams no charmed circle, hides no daemonic spot. It represents a poetic genre which transgresses the orders of master and slave, priest and vic tim, nature and supernature, the quick and the dead, by provoking all dualisms with the variable flight of fugitive form.