Last Looks, Last Books by Vendler Helen

Author:Vendler, Helen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Can this Hamlet-like method—by indirection finding out direction—suffice in the face of death? The “misalliance” that seemed charming and humorous when, by its evasion of literality, the poet could create unexpected revelation now seems disappointing; as he will say despairingly in “Epilogue” (the poem closing Day by Day), “All’s misalliance.” Allying an image to something else—a proposition, a theme—in a “farfetched” way describes the creation of metaphor—that transfer across, or “farfetching,” as Hopkins would have called it, that brings two unlikely things together. Metaphor comes under suspicion at the hour of death: last wills and testaments avoid metaphor in favor of unambiguous statement. In classical rhetoric, metaphor was conventionally praised for its “aptness,” its “fit,” but that was not the style of metaphor that Lowell had favored in his earlier work; there, he used metaphor to shock, to unsettle, to unnerve, to evade the collocation that would strike the reader as confirming a reliable sense of the object of comparison. The English poet Michael Hofmann, in a review of Lowell’s Collected Poems, brilliantly described the effect of Lowell’s original startling conjunctions:

There is a sort of doubling: the more the words work at their mimetic tasks, the more they show themselves as words. . . . There is something quasi-autonomous about this peculiar function; it can only be done in words, but words handled—or purposely mishandled . . . in such a way that they feel physically solid, as they cannon into each other.3

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