Abstract

The paper highlights and reflects on two central themes in Simecek’s book: the role of voice in lyric poetry and the nature of any cognitive value that might arise from the lyric. The paper questions whether too much emphasis is given to the literal spoken voice in the case of page poetry (while acknowledging its centrality in performance poetry). Is perhaps too much weight given to the spoken rendering of a poem by any arbitrary reader? A rather different conception of poetic voice, typical of Modernist poetics, gives priority to rhetorical and linguistic qualities of the language itself in a poem—tone, diction, form, subject, and theme—which, taken across a poet’s oeuvre, can identify a distinctive character in the writing, readily described as the poet’s “voice” but not centred on spoken sounds. On cognitive values, it is useful to emphasise differences in performance and page poetry. The immediacy of the former is more likely to foster solidarity, community, and empathy, in contrast to the more distanced effects possible from reading poems on the page. The idea that reading poems can allow us to encounter perspectives different from our own is clearly right but the view in the book that ultimately this is somehow impossible, given a clash of perspectives, seems unduly pessimistic; but that opens up difficult questions about what exactly these perspectives are.