New Literary History

Abstract:

When, in an essay on the poet Théodore de Banville, Charles Baudelaire declares that “hyperbole and apostrophe are the forms of language which are not only most agreeable but also most necessary” in lyric, he leaves little room for understatement. Is understatement less necessary, less pleasing in lyric? What should one make of all the various moments in lyric poetry when poets moderate their language and say less then they mean? In recent years and thanks in large part to the work of Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, especially their Lyric Theory Reader, we have begun to question the conflation of poetry and lyric. As they have argued, the collapse of poetry into lyric is a critical invention and comes at the expense of attention to other poetic forms. If Baudelaire aligns lyric with hyperbole—and if lyric comes to stand for all poetry, for better and for worse, after Baudelaire—how dependent on hyperbole is our understanding of poetry, specifically after romanticism? What would it mean to think poetry not through hyperbole or apostrophe but through litotes, a trope that prominently figures poetic restraint? In this essay I track several uses of poetic understatement, specifically litotes, through to what M. H. Abrams names the Greater Romantic Lyric. Alongside a poetic tradition that embraces hyperbole is one that embraces understatement, litotes in particular, where the poet’s minimal affirmation is accomplished through the weak work of double-negation.