Everyone who knows Debussy's music recognises a distinctive ‘Debussy sound’ that is not a single quality but many; the sound of Debussy's style in most of his works is harmony, instrumentation, texture, timbre, all to a greater or lesser extent.

Even such wide-ranging elements as melody, rhythm, and microform affect Debussy's quality of sound. The composer Jean Barraqué, an astute analyst, spoke of Debussy's habit of repeating phrases and phrase fragments in immediate succession as ‘the sole weakness that one might find in Debussy's scores’, without suggesting that this kind of repetition is a fundamental aspect of Debussy's sense of form; paired repetition, like breathing (which as a marker of time it somewhat resembles), is a trait of many composers from Vivaldi to Mozart to Rossini to Debussy; but in combination with others that we think of as characteristically sonorous, it is a trait that makes Debussy's style instantly recognisable even on first hearing.

Here we will discuss the sonorous rather than the temporal aspects of Debussy's music, focusing particularly on orchestral and piano style, texture, and colour, recognising that these aspects often penetrate each other as much as they are components of overall form.

Debussy's earliest instrumental style

Debussy's earliest piano pieces and songs include a variety of different piano styles and textures, but nothing that is markedly different from those of his French contemporaries or from his Parisian predecessor Chopin, for whose music he always had a special understanding and regard. Accompanimental textures in Debussy's songs of his Conservatoire years are more economical than in Fauré's of the same time, and for that reason they are often more effective. The Piano Trio of 1880, which Debussy did not publish, is the first of his works in which we can glimpse an instrumental style in addition to that already developing for the piano, but even though the ensemble always works well, again there is no notably original pianism.

Creating a balanced picture of such a deliberately enigmatic character as Claude Debussy is no easy task. But so great is the fascination that his life and music have exerted that ‘performers, writers and analysts have been peeling away the layers of the onion that is Debussy’ ever since Louise Liebich first approached the chopping board way back in 1907. And as Roger Nichols aptly continues: ‘I think it is some measure of his greatness that the more we peel, the more we find.’ Coincidentally, both Liebich and Nichols ninety years on begin by quoting Debussy's veiled warning to future biographers that ‘Another man's soul is a thick forest in which one must walk with circumspection’, and I make no excuse for reusing this ideal quotation here, or for assuming that readers will refer to the accompanying chronology on pp. xiv–xviii above for the well-known landmarks in Debussy's career.

Debussy very rarely bared his own secretive soul, and if he was hardly a model of circumspection himself, he disliked its absence in others. The thick forest in which his shadowy operatic masterpiece Pelléas et Mélisande begins can be seen to have parallels with his own life, for it surrounded a dream-world controlled by destiny in which happiness was rare, and from which there was no escape except in death. If Maeterlinck's Symbolist play provided Debussy with a musical way forward in 1893 and eventually brought him the fame he had dreamed of when it was staged in 1902, it nevertheless did not satisfy the cravings of the ‘happiness addict’ who, for a variety of reasons, became increasingly reclusive and miserable during his final years.

Debussy as a tonal composer: reception and stylistic evolution

There are many possible ways to approach the question of Debussy's tonality, which over the last fifty years has inspired an unusually diverse range of critical and analytical viewpoints. The focus here will be on tonality's relationship with other aspects of formal process (especially thematic):how the nature of this relationship serves both to connect Debussy's music with earlier traditions of tonal composition and to set it apart from such traditions. First, though, we must consider the more fundamental issue of the music's status as tonal music: how Debussy adapted his inheritance of late Romantic chromatic tonality to the service of a modernist musical outlook and how the music expresses tonal function in an idiomatically Debussyan way.

As a preliminary observation we could note a striking divergence of perception Between musical scholars (especially analysts) on the one hand and the listening public on the other, regarding Debussy's harmonic language or tonal practice in a general sense. While analysts have usually considered this aspect of Debussy's art to be rather problematic in the sense of abstruse, elusive or otherwise difficult to grasp (and hence to explain through analysis), it would be fair to say that this perception has not been shared by concert audiences; on the contrary, Debussy remains one of the most enduringly popular composers of the post-Romantic era. Although there are many reasons for his music's evident accessibility, not least among them is surely its instantly identifiable tonal idiom or ‘accent’. Debussy’s tonality, while perennially new and exotic-sounding, yet retains powerful and familiar resonances from the tonal language of his predecessors; it exhibits a strong sense of tonal centre, expressed through vividly projected attributes of tonal function both melodically and harmonically.

Introduction

The evocative title for this essay refers to the sense that in performance music moves – and we with it – in complex and ever-changing ways. The word ‘form’ generally connotes morphological paradigms: familiar tonal schemes such as ‘binary’, or ‘ternary’, or ‘sonata’, or their refashioned derivatives in the twentieth-century post-tonal epoch. However, for Syrinx, the Première rapsodie and ‘Sirènes’ I will discuss only briefly their morphological forms. Instead, this study focuses upon the fluid nature of musical materials and relations, a dynamic and rhythmic aspect of musical form that is more often remarked than examined, and for which static morphological form merely provides a framework.

Among the assumptions that direct the analyses herein, two in particular warrant mention: first, that compositions consist of congeries of diverse musical events, whose concatenations over time convey impressions of vitality to us as listeners and performers; and second, that these impressions are a crucial aspect of musical experience – hence the frequent recourse in conversation about music (albeit less often in its literature) to animate metaphors in paired oppositions such as ‘ebb and flow’, ‘rise and fall’, ‘intensification and relaxation’, ‘approaching towards and receding from’, ‘climax and release’. Sources for this sense of vitality include the pacing over time of changes in musical materials, which imparts a sense of quickening or of slowing, and the varying complexity of musical events over time, which imparts a sense of intensification versus subsidence. Both affective domains convey impressions of tension versus repose and of motion.

Introduction

We love Debussy's music intimately and yet detailed knowledge of it often seems remote and elusive. Doubtless Debussy would have been delighted, for the realisation that he had denied analysts and theorists their quarry and encouraged some writers to assert, metaphorically at least, the unknowable intangibility of his music would have suited him very well, as we know from his dismissive comments about harmonic analysis and so on. One can imagine his pleasure growing at the recognition that one of the most successful pieces of Debussy scholarship – in the analysis of his music – to come in the post-war years is Roy Howat's Debussy in Proportion, a brilliant study that, in revealing a crucial aspect of Debussy's compositional process, raises an inescapable question of what it means for our perception of the music: he takes us into a mysterious domain. Debussy in Proportion proves beyond doubt that Debussy used Golden Section and other ancient proportional devices in his music, for the examples Howat adduces, and others that have come to light since, are too compelling to be coincidence or the result of dark, subcutaneous forces. For example, in ‘Reflets dans l'eau’ the music reaches its loudest level in bar 58; bar 58 out of 94 bars is 0.62 of the piece, which is very close to Golden Section (the golden proportion is 1 : 1.618). Having established this, however, we then have to ask, as Howat and many others have done, how we listen to proportion in music.

Debussy liked to give the impression that he was a reluctant reviewer of concerts. Often, prior to giving his assessment of a particular performance, he writes of the beauty of the day on which the concert took place, unfavourably comparing his delight in nature with his unfortunate obligation to attend the concert. In an article written for La revue blanche in 1901, Debussy wrote of being in the countryside, far from artistic debates, the first performances of new works and everything else associated with the Parisian musical world. He wrote:

Debussy often said that he disliked analytical approaches to music (in common with many composers), and he was quite naturally irritated by uninformed discussion about music. Moreover, his love of nature was coupled with a misanthropic streak. I suspect that he preferred the open spaces and silence of the countryside (a silence broken only by the sounds of wind, water and other natural phenomena) to the company of his fellow human beings.

Later in this article Debussy stresses that he believes the Prix de Rome competition is ridiculous, implying that this competitive approach to composition is unnatural. Music, for him, should be a part of nature, or something sharing its characteristics; on many occasions he expressed his distaste for academic forms and harmonic formulae.

Paris: the importance of geography

In 1928 a handful of Debussy supporters formed a committee to raise money to erect a monument to Debussy. Initially the location for the monument was to be in his birthplace, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, but it was soon felt that Debussy's significance and profile were too great and that two statues should be erected, with the main one in Paris in the Bois de Boulogne. The conductor Gabriel Astruc gave a speech entitled ‘Le Monument de “Claude de France”’ at an official concert on 17 June 1932 to celebrate the unveiling of the monument; he revealed that the aim was ‘to honour … the memory of Debussy, who so many times had led the great battle of music’. This shift in the monument's location from the periphery to the centre was symbolic of Debussy's own artistic relocation from the margins of Parisian musical life to the centre as the symbol of French musical identity.

By the time of Debussy's birth in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Paris was consolidating its position as a hub in all aspects of social, political and cultural life. When he came to Paris to enter the Conservatoire in 1872, he experienced a city recently invaded and defeated by the Prussians, and reduced to turmoil by the Commune. Given his father's imprisonment on account of his involvement in the Commune, his memory of these events was painful and personal. In a letter to Jacques Durand at the beginning of the 1914 war he admitted the lasting impact of this time: ‘the memories of 1870 … prevent me from yielding to enthusiasm’.

Practically each word in the title of this chapter has been challenged by thinkers who would mark its fictitious stamp by placing it in quotation marks. Cynthia Ozick is not alone in rejecting the category of “Jewish writer” on the grounds that there is “no Jewish literature,” only writing “on Jewish themes” (Klingenstein, “In Life I Am Not Free,” 49). Given the contradiction between a Nazi propensity to essentialize Jewish traits so as to eradicate the Jewish people and the permeability of Jewish identity, Ozick's proviso remains an important one. Actually, though, the term “Jewish” remains more porous than the words “American” and “women.” For a majority of readers would probably agree that Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Mary Gordon, and Jorie Graham are American women artists (although exactly who Americans are and what constitutes womanhood has certainly been disputed); however, do these authors' Jewish-born relatives make them Jewish American women writers, if (as in these cases) such progenitors alienated themselves from their families, converted, or promoted assimilation in their offspring? Perhaps, as Ozick suggests, the crucial factor that must influence any response to such an inquiry is the extent to which each author concentrates her creative energies on Jewish familial, psychological, ethical, historical, or spiritual issues in her work. Yet the secondariness of women in Judaism – whether it is defined in terms of religious practices or beliefs, Yiddish or Hebrew cultures, Zionism, a commitment to the book or to social justice, ethnic jokes – has transformed Judaism from a background or a theme to a question for women artists. “I've been a problem within a problem,” Adrienne Rich has explained, “'the Jewish Question,' 'the Woman Question' – who the questioner? Who is supposed to answer?” (What Is Found There, 23).

On the morning of 28 August 1833, a thirty-year-old American trekked up a steep road in northwest England. He was on a pilgrimage to the home of the poet who had kindled his belief in the intrinsic value of (Human) Nature. The poet's family bade him enter a 'modest household where comfort and culture were secured without any display'. Here, in a sitting room overlooking a downward-sloping garden, he awaited the master of the house. The young man was somewhat surprised when there appeared a 'plain, elderly, white-haired man . . . disfigured by green goggles', which he wore to soothe and protect his troubled eyes. The Englishman sat down and held forth on one of his favourite topics - America. There, society is 'being enlightened by a superficial tuition, out of all proportion [to the restraint of its] moral culture'. Getting and spending Americans lay waste their power, for 'they are too much given to the making of money; and secondly, to politics . . . they make political distinction the end and not the means'. In a statement that seemed paradoxical to the visitor, his host noted that 'they needed a civil war in America, to teach the necessity of knitting social ties stronger'.

Introduction

Up until quite recently, when the question of Jewish American poetic practice was raised, it was largely in the interest of declaring the enterprise difficult, if not impossible. Twenty-five years ago, Harold Bloom broached the subject in a now-infamous essay entitled “The Sorrows of American-Jewish Poetry.” As the funereal title suggests, Bloom takes a gloomy view of his subject, maintaining that, as a category of analysis, Jewish American poetry has all but withered on the vine before it has even blossomed. Indeed, he argues that the poetic process - which according to Bloom entails an agon, a wrestling, between a would-be poet and his precursor – is fundamentally alien to a Jewish sensibility on at least two counts. To begin with, even the most secularized Jew cannot wholly commit himself to the “pragmatic religion-of-poetry” (251) or to holda precursor poet in “god-like” esteem (253). The objection is predicated on an essentializing link between Christianity and the poetic, basedupon a mutual investment in the “universal” which necessarily precludes Jewishness, a category of being which Bloom sees as bound up with historicity and specificity. Furthermore, Bloom provocatively suggests that a poetic alliance between a Jewish poet anda “Gentile precursor” (such as Milton), a Jewish self mixing with a foreign other, is in some way transgressive –- a violation perhaps of a culture deeply committed to keeping its borders intact.

Composition and craft

If you consult 'craft' in a Wordsworth concordance or a database, the report is not often cheering. There is much to do with contrivance, debased art, suspect artfulness: the 'dangerous craft of picking phrases out / From languages that want the living voice / To make of them a nature to the heart' (Prel.1805 vi 130-2), the 'craft' of 'gilded sympathies' in affected 'dreams and fictions' (vi 481-3), 'the marvellous craft /Of modern Merlins' (vii 686-7), 'the Wizard's craft' ('The Egyptian Maid' 44), modern 'Life' decked out by 'the mean handywork of craftsman' ('London 1802' 4), assassins led by those 'whose craft holds no consent /With aught that breathes the ethereal element' (Dion 54-5), the 'craft of age, seducing reason' (Borderers 363) or 'the craft / Of a shrewd Counsellor' ('Wars of York and Lancaster' 1-2). About as good as it gets is a rare reverence for 'the painter's true Promethean craft' ('Lines suggested' 24) or the poet's hope that his own 'Imagination' has 'learn'd to ply her craft / By judgement steadied' (Prel.1805 xiii 290-4). Making rigorous inquisition intoWordsworth and poetic craft might even seem perversity, for he is, legendarily, the antithesis. What care for craft can there be in his praise for 'Poets . . . sown / By Nature; Men endowed with highest gifts, / The vision and the faculty divine, / Yet wanting the accomplishment of Verse' (The Excursion i 81-4) - 'wanting' signifying no urgent desire but an unimportant, accidental lack?

On his way through Westmoreland in the 1650s, the Quaker George Fox had a vision:

Nothing so biblical appears either in Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals (1800-3) or in her brother's poems. But the habit of mind shown in Fox's journal lived on in the conviction they shared with him, that epiphanies can take place by the roadside anywhere, and that they change a person's life. The traffic of that idea among what Wordsworth called 'the noble living and the noble dead' (1805 x 969) across two centuries of English history introduces us to the community that matters most in reading The Prelude.

For although Wordsworth’s is a secular vision, this is a deeply Protestant poem. Its roots are embedded in the dissenting tradition of confessional autobiography practised by Fox and John Wesley in their Journals, by John Bunyan in Grace Abounding, as well as by numerous authors of Methodist and Quaker conversion-narratives published throughout the eighteenth century. There are a number of important things to grasp about these narratives. First, they were written in idiomatic prose (what Wordsworth called ‘the ordinary language of men’); often read aloud to a select audience, then later dictated or transcribed; sometimes published only after the author’s death, with a view to converting others. Second, they concerned the private nature of conscience, whose accountability to God wasn’t governed by the prescripts of the Church. And third, they really did originate from the people. In mid-eighteenth-century England they gave workers and criminals, women and dissenters, the poor, the oppressed and the homeless, a medium and a voice.

The existence of a substantial body of Hebrew literature written on American shores is one of the best-kept secrets of Jewish American cultural history. In 1927, there were 110 Hebrew authors living in the United States, according to Daniel Persky, a columnist for the Hebrew-language newspaper Hadoar, which had been published in New York since 1922. Among this large number were at least a dozen Hebrew poets with serious bodies of published work and a smaller yet still substantial number of major prose writers, dramatists, and essayists. There were Hebrew publishing houses, Hebrew literary clubs and writers associations, and many Hebrew periodicals and literary journals that appeared over the course of the twentieth century. Hebrew belles-lettres were allied to a cultural and educational movement that established a network of Hebrew colleges and Hebrew summer camps and exerted enormous influence on the development of Jewish education in America.

There are many obvious reasons why Hebrew culture failed to thrive in America, but the reasons why its struggles and achievements have been forgotten are less obvious. This question, which is essentially a question about cultural memory, is entangled with the sad fate of Yiddish in America and the brilliant success of Hebrew in Israel. In contrast to Hebrew, Yiddish had a firm basis in the Jewish immigrant masses – in the music halls and the tabloids, at home and in the streets. When Yiddish declined under the force of galloping Americanization, it was the remembrance of popular culture that became the substance of nostalgia during the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Readers who think of Wordsworth as a visionary poet with his head in the clouds would be surprised to discover that these were his words. Such concern with the minutiae of domestic life as getting, spending, and weighing might not seem Wordsworthian. But these thoughts were on the seventythree-year-old poet's mind when he dictated notes on his poetry to his friend Isabella Fenwick. Ah, the puzzled reader might now say, these are the concerns of the stodgy old poet, not the fiery young man of the 1790s. But I will argue here that from an early age Wordsworth was concerned with home-making and with the dynamics of gender within 'household economy'. While we do see a shift in emphasis from the early to later years (an embracing of Victorian domesticity), the idea of domesticity as the source of family, love, and stability remains a constant in Wordsworth's life and work.

Paradoxically, too, Wordsworth’s critique of housewifery in the quoted passage referred to the popular poet Felicia Hemans, a woman who did not find the kind of domestic happiness in her own life that she praised in her poetry. Hemans might not have managed Minerva’s spear or a nineteenth-century lady’s needle, but she certainly used her pen to praise the idea of domesticity. In fact, she helped usher in the Victorian view of Wordsworth as soother of the soul and family poet: ‘Thine is the strain to read among the hills / . . . Or by some happy hearth where faces meet.’

When the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell learnt that a friend was planning to visit the Lake District, she urged him to pack something by Wordsworth, not, as one might expect, his Guide to the Lakes, but the long, philosophical work in blank verse, The Excursion. The poem is set in the heart of the Lake District and its scenes and characters could have been of interest to any tourist going there; but Gaskell is not recommending The Excursion just for this reason. It is rather that to her mind Wordsworth is the prophet of the mountains and valleys, the best tutor and guide to the spiritual nourishment available from natural beauty, and The Excursion is his inspired word. Four figures occupy the ground of the poem, supposedly in dramatic interaction, but few readers have ever doubted that the most important of them is the Wanderer and that through him speaks Wordsworth the Sage. When the Wanderer declares that 'To every Form of being is assigned . . . / An active Principle' (Excursionix 1-3), his confession of faith recalls 'Tintern Abbey' and the early Prelude and it is no surprise to learn that the discourse of the Wanderer first published in 1814 was actually drafted in the year of 'Tintern Abbey', 1798.

'Wordsworth's name is nothing - to a large number of persons mine stinks', wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798, urging publisher Joseph Cottle to issue the poets' co-authored Lyrical Ballads anonymously (STCL i 412). In the ensuing decade,Wordsworth, the man with the 'nothing name', wrote many of the poems that for later generations established him as the principal poet of his age. The change is from seeing Lyrical Ballads as Coleridge's wife Sara early on described it - 'laughed at and disliked by all with very few excepted' - to what is the current critical consensus: 'Historically considered, it remains the most important volume of verse in English since the Renaissance, for it began modern poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self.' Wordsworth's achievement is all the more remarkable because most of the chief poems published in Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800) and Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) came from a very few bursts of activity, first at Alfoxden in Somerset, then at Goslar in Germany, and eventually at Grasmere.

Lyrical Ballads (1798)

In the aging memories of the one-time collaborators on Lyrical Ballads, the 1798 volume had a straightforward division of labour. Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817) recalled that he was to write on ‘persons and characters supernatural’, while Wordsworth would concentrate on subjects from ‘ordinary life’, giving ‘the charm of novelty to things of every day’ and showing ‘the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us . . .’ (BL ii 5–8). The seventy-three-year-old Wordsworth, in a note dictated to Isabella Fenwick about ‘We Are Seven’, agreed that his task was to write about subjects from common life but to treat them imaginatively. However, Wordsworth’s brief critical statement, or ‘Advertisement’, included in Lyrical Ballads (1798) emphasizes stylistic matters: the majority of the poems were ‘experiments’ written ‘to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure’.

Returning to his American homeland in 1904, after more than twenty years of living abroad, Henry James discovered to his astonishment that the physical and cultural landscape of his “old neighborhood” had been utterly transformed by the palpable signs of immigration. The sounds and smells of the new New York City startled his refined sensibilities. Observing the picturesque urban spectacle of the Lower East Side, James was both fascinated and appalled by the overflowing scene of recently arrived humanity. Walking the ghetto's streets on a “warm June twilight,” James reports in The American Scene (1907) the sensation of “a great swarming, a swarming that had begun to thicken, infinitely, as soon as we had crossed to the East side.” James' response to what he called the “Hebrew conquest of New York” is indeed telling: “the scene here bristled, at every step, with the signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds...where multiplication, multiplication of everything, was the dominant note...here was multiplication with a vengeance” (The American Scene, 131-132).

Most striking about James' views on immigration is his deep consciousness of a profound change looming in American speech, and thus in American culture in general. Taking in the strange sounds issuing from the ghetto streets, James heard, with nervous anticipation, the “Accent of the Future,” the tones of rhetorical newness – the grafting of immigrant speech onto English, the “accent of the very ultimate future, in the States” – which he associates with the realm of the popular.

So many of Coleridge's most fundamental poetic convictions converge on the figure of Wordsworth that, you feel, had he not existed, Coleridge would have had to invent him - which, in a manner of speaking, is what he did. Coleridge's Wordsworth - the great philosophical poet, divinely endowed with 'the vision and the faculty divine' (The Excursion i 79, as quoted by Coleridge, BL ii 60), sublimely solitary inhabitant of '[t]he dread Watch-Tower of man's absolute Self' (To William Wordsworth) - is one of the great creations of the age, one which affected the way Wordsworth's contemporaries perceived him, and continues to influence modern criticism. More importantly for us here, this idea of the poet decisively shaped Wordsworth's conception of himself too: it confirmed in him a colossal awareness of poetic vocation, and established in his mind the shape of that career which would testify to the vocation's successful fulfilment. But Wordsworth, and this Coleridgean figure of Wordsworth, are not a perfect fit; and the visionary ideal to which both men subscribed became increasingly the standard by which they could assess Wordsworth's failure, not his triumph. This sense of a discrepancy between the poet and Coleridge's invention of the poet was personally tragic, instilling in Wordsworth a conviction that, despite some of the language's greatest verse, his poetic life had somehow failed. At the same time, paradoxically, the sense of discrepancy proved thoroughly enabling: Wordsworth absorbed the gap between vocation and achievement and made of it some of his very greatest and most characteristic poetry - a poetry of embarrassed expectations which, if not precisely Coleridgean in its triumphs, still could hardly have achieved the kinds of triumph it did without a Coleridgean calling to frustrate. But then, to complicate the picture a little more, speaking of 'a Coleridgean calling' may imply too single-minded a conception of the poetic good life.

Over the last decades, a large, even astonishing number of Jewish scholars and critics have come to the fore in various fields of literary study. Their writings have played a large part in revolutionizing these fields, not only in the sense of revising (if not shattering) earlier approaches and assumptions, but also in introducing whole new avenues and attitudes toward literary experience. In some sense, it was their special task to pose such questions as what “literary experience” even is, moving literary investigation from critical commentary on particular texts (although they very much continued to do this, too) to questions concerning what critical commentary is and does: critical commentary on critical commentary. Theirs, in short, was the plunge into literary theory, into reflection on the premises and principles that make up literary study and literature itself.

America has a broad, bright crown of Jewish critics in a wide range of areas: Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, M. H. Abrams, Leslie Fiedler, Marjorie Perloff, Stephen Greenblatt, Susan Gubar – to name only a few. I will discuss, however, only a small group of Jewish American scholars, working largely at Yale from the 1950s onwards, whose writings were highly theoretical and concentrated on poetry and poetics: Harold Bloom, John Hollander, and Geoffrey Hartman – and I will extend the discussion to include Sacvan Bercovitch, who taught at Columbia and Harvard, as the major theorist of a poetics of American culture generally. I focus particularly on poetry and poetics because here reflection on language is most explicit and most pure; and it is a particular reflection on language that comprises the very core of these scholars' theories about literature.