The topic of this special session is the threefold relationship between forms of poetic prosody (meter and intonation), poets’ strategic use of grammatical devices, and the framing of political statements through the medium of a lyric poem. The session’s title, “Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry,” alludes to the multiform ways through which poets negotiate both the potentials and the constraints of linguistic structures in their work. The latter can include everything from patterns of meter and sound, rhetorical schemes, and figurative tropes, to less obvious modes of syntactic parallelism. The panel will treat this topic by focusing attention on the work of three poets who struggled—each in different ways, as well as in different historical, linguistic, and cultural contexts—to articulate their social and political views through the conventions of the lyric form: Gilbert Murray (UK), Tim Dlugos (USA), and Paul Celan (Germany/France).

The rationale for organizing this special session has to do with a convergence of the participants’ scholarly concerns. First, all three of the presenters are currently engaged in research projects that are squarely focused on the linguistic dimension of poets’ productions; specifically, all three are seeking better to understand the relationship (hardly self-evident) between poets’ individual grammatical choices and their broader political aims. They therefore welcome the opportunity to come together to share their work and to strengthen interest in this new field of inquiry among their colleagues. Second, the presenters hope, through their research, to shed light on aspects of the distinctly poetic character of certain types of political statements, which is a latent but frequently overlooked feature of all forms of political discourse. Finally, given the fact that so much of the existing scholarship in the field of poetics has centered on the task of historical explication, the presenters aim to complement and add to this approach by devoting more sustained attention to the linguistic strategies that underlie poets’ verbal art.

The session will thus engage and extend the insights of current scholarship in the field of poetics that explores the general relationship between politics and form. Each of the speakers will be allotted 18 minutes of time for their individual presentations. An open discussion between speakers and audience participants will conclude the final 15 minutes of the special session.

The panel will begin with Gundela Hachmann’s paper, “Mimesis as Communion? Thoughts on Poetic and Social Architecture,” which considers the work of Classics scholar Gilbert Murray (particularly his theory of metrical structure in lyric poetry) and the Modernist poet and critic T. S. Eliot. Hachmann explores how their work focuses on, in her words, “the opportunities and pitfalls of turning metaphors for the poetic into models for the social.” Elaborating her argument on the possible social implications of meter in lyrical poetry, she examines how Eliot and Murray both sought to apply (what they saw as) the fundamental need for “metrical construction or architecture” to the resolution of social crises.

Hachmann’s paper will be followed by Sylvie Thode’s essay, “Frenzy and Grace: Meter in Tim Dlugos’s G-9.” Thode analyzes a 1989 poem by Tim Dlugos, a poet and priest-in-training who died of AIDS-related complications in 1990. Thode’s argument unpacks the poem’s metrical operations in order to develop a working account of how Dlugos’s meter provides the scaffolding for his distinctive affective style, as the poem cycles through political urgency and suspended reflection. Ultimately, she shows how Dlugos’s political urgency subsists on his ability to foster moments of reflective pause, and how both states of being point to the political valences of poetic prosody that make themselves visible through a linguistic-based approach to his poetry.

Finally, William Scott’s paper, “‘Im Quell deiner Augen...’: Anapests, Agency, and V2 Syntax in Paul Celan’s Lob der Ferne,” studies Paul Celan’s 1952 poem, “Lob der Ferne.” Scott, the presider of the session, explores the interactions between the poem’s metrical experiments with enjambed anapestic feet, on one hand, and the V2 (verb-second) word order characteristic of German syntax, on the other. His analysis shows how Celan’s use of enjambment in this poem exploits the possibilities of V2 syntactic structure to challenge commonplace assumptions about how human agency is expressed in language. Celan’s poem, Scott claims, through its attempt to figure and imagine potential new forms of creative expression, marks a resistance, in language, against the deliberate forgetting or “Verschleierung” of the historical and political traumas that Europe had recently experienced.