Lyric Poetry and Anthropological Reduction

Abstract

Lyric poetry becomes harder to understand and increasingly marginalized due to various forms of anthropological reduction in contemporary culture (the “semanticization” of poetry, the sociologization of the cultural horizon, the neurocognitive interpretation of literature). It is also in an uneasy relationship with the main currents in literary studies, which, by its very nature, tends to establish “fixed” truths and facts about a poem, through description and research of its formal features, as well as its semantics, both “internal” and “external”: its intertextual references, its cultural, social and historical background. While this is undeniably relevant, it leaves aside the overall effect and event-essence of lyric poetry, and thus its ontological horizon. Underlying these difficulties is the incompatibility of the dominant epistemological and cultural paradigms, which rely on objectual consciousness (representations and self-representations), and the direct language of lyric poetry, which operates on the pre-reflective (non-objectual) consciousness by which the self is in relationship with itself and with reality as a whole.