Contemporary Poetry

32 contemporary poetry

Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ ( 1968 ) challenged any determi-
nate meaning to any text. Barthes’s later identifi cation of what he
termed a ‘writerly text’ can be understood as ‘ourselves writing’,
whose goal he characterises as a desire ‘to make the reader no
longer a consumer, but a producer of the text’.^12 This momentum
towards reconfi guring the concept of the author as the bastion of all
meaning can be traced to a shift in literary criticism from the 1930 s
that increasingly focused on the literary work as an entity in its own
right. Critics such as Jack Stillinger trace the emergence of these
concerns from established philosophical debates:

Literary theorists especially those writing under the infl u-

ence of Barthes and Foucault (and of those earlier writers like

Nietzsche and Freud who infl uenced Barthes and Foucault),

have increasingly treated literary texts and frequently all

writing together, as autonomous, separate from any idea of

determinate meaning.^13

The proposition of literary texts as having no fi nal interpretation
challenges New Criticism’s valorisation of the literary work as the
‘well-wrought urn’, where meaning and structure coalesce.
What does this mean for the personal lyric? The single-speaking
poetic voice is often linked to an impression of intimacy, the
speaker in some essence articulating words that seem at once ‘over-
heard’ by the reader. The prominence of the personal lyric in the
1970 s established an important relationship between intimacy and
the examination of biography. For many poets the relationship
between biography and cultural legacy and inheritance cannot be
differentiated; in effect then the mapping of a life story can become
an enquiry into unvoiced personal, family and national histories.
Paradoxically perhaps, from the 1960 s onward we witness a growth
in the production and reception of autobiographical works. The
critic Philippe Lejeune describes autobiography as a ‘retrospective
prose narrative written by a real person conveying his own exist-
ence where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story
of his personality’.^14 For other critics autobiography is ‘an affi rma-
tion of individual worth’ (p. 140 ). The 1970 s and 1980 s mark an
affi rmation of the personal poem coupled with an examination of