Abstract

Taking as its point of departure the thesis of Roland Barthes that ‘culture recurs as an edge: in no matter what form’, this paper considers the post-romantic predicament of poetry summed up thus: that there is no unmediated vision only linguistically-mediated poiesis. Against the radical innocence of ‘Why can’t everything be simple again/Like the first words of the first song as they occurred’ is posed the radical modernist assertion of the ‘Illegibility of this world/All things twice over’. This cultural edge is then viewed from a position in the domain of modernist philosophy, that of Ernest Cassirer, who argued that there is no culture in-itself as such independent of its symbolic encoding. Contrariwise to Cassirer the alternative view is posited – that of Stanley Burnshaw in his The seamless web – that poetry is actually born of a striving against the very restraining nature of culture; it is the result of a need to free the human organism from the burden of cultural constraint. Another cultural edge with this view is the constitution of a mediated second nature, which virtually re-experiences a primary nature through the projection of a third world via the poetic process. The paper will end considering of Paul de Man’s argument in The post-Romantic predicament that the problem of Romanticism – as historical movement and lived project turned on the complexity of poetic consciousness experienced as difficulty.