marxism and lyric

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Notes on Marxism and the LyricAuthor(s): Hugh H. GradySource: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 22, No. 4, Marxism and the Crisis of the World(Autumn, 1981), pp. 544-555Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207882 .

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NOTES ON MARXISM AND THE LYRIC

Hugh H. Grady

Marxist literary criticism has been largely concerned with drama and the novel since the days when Marx planned his unwritten work on Balzac's Comidie humaine. Lyric poetry, with its traditional pre- occupation with love, death, nature, and transcendence, has seemed resistant to critical methods seeking to discover in the literary work the reflection of specific social conflicts and historical conjunctures; it has seemed more amenable to purely formalist approaches. The New Criticism, the triumphant countercurrent to the Marxist criticism of the twenties and thirties, developed its power most convinc- ingly in close and subtle readings of lyric poems that Marxism seemed powerless to confront as deeply. Marxists who have under- taken the analysis of lyric poetry have often attempted to import the techniques of novel and drama theory to the realm of the lyric and sought to find in individual poems the reflection of sociohistoric forces and conflicts. In what follows, I will examine the pitfalls of this procedure and then counterpose what I believe is a more fruitful Marxist approach to the lyric.

A good illustration of what might be termed the "novelistic" or "realist" approach to poetry is Norman Rudich's article, "Cole- ridge's 'Kubla Khan': His Anti-Political Vision," which argues that Coleridge's celebrated lyric-often taken as an early example of symbolist podsie pure-is actually "an adequate expression of Cole- ridge's estimate of his relation to his time."' Through the association of Kubla Khan with Napoleon-a link that Rudich attempts to

'Norman Rudich, "Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan': His Anti-Political Vision," in Weapons of Criticism: Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition, ed. Nor- man Rudich (Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1976), p. 236.

Contemporary Literature XXII, 4 0010-7484/81/0004-0544 $1.00/0 ? 1981 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System



demonstrate through a straightforward examination of Coleridgean prose sources-Rudich asserts that "the most concrete meaning of the poem" is "its critique of the institution of the State" (p. 236) and that the poem crystallizes a general "anti-political vision" at which Coleridge had arrived in response to the disappointing out- come of the French Revolution.

The details of Rudich's argument, however, are less important here than the general method he employs in his attempt to forge a Marxist approach to the lyric. The method is essentially indis- tinguishable from old-school historical and biographical criticism, with a few reversals of evaluation and a difference in what Rudich calls "point of view." It is as if the hallmark of a Marxist approach to the lyric were sensitivity to hidden political allusions, all the more so in the case of a poem that Coleridge passed off to the world as the fragments of an opium dream. But Rudich's approach is wholly de- pendent on the contingencies of a particular poem's thematics. If we cannot find similar hidden politics in, say, Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," we are presumably unable to provide a "Marxist" reading. In addition, the method of reading poems as reflecting de- terminate historical and biographical currents is open to the line of attack that formalism so successfully mounted against the old historical scholarship in our century. If we are really interested in that sort of thing, we are better off reading biographies and diaries, where "political content" is so much clearer. Most poetry readers, including Marxists, are looking for something else.

Behind this particular reading of Coleridge lies a more basic aesthetic theory sketched in a brief paragraph near the beginning of the article:

The aesthetic is a specific mode of ideology, which simultaneously reflects, interprets, evaluates and generalizes through mimetic structures of discourse, the real world of concrete human activity; the artist shapes an imaginative version of human action out of a particular form of matter; he creates objects which embody and reveal in their contours typical situations of life, particular actions endowed with visible and potential meanings which transcend their particularity. (p. 217)

Rudich is assuming that the work of art achieves significance because it is a "model" of reality, a mimetic structure of "types" in the sense defined by LukAcs in his middle-period writings on

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European realism.2 In other words, categories taken from a theory of realism are being transported wholesale to the realm of the lyric; the result is that a theoretical formula intelligible (but not, in my opinion, finally satisfactory even for the case of realism) with regard to the novel loses its force and explanatory power in confrontation with the lyric. The lyric is assumed to possess the "mirror-of- society" qualities of Balzac's novels, with Procrustean results. That is why Rudich ends up in his article demonstrating so modest a thesis: that Coleridge's allusive poem implies a set of clear, delimited concepts about Napoleon, the French Revolution, and the state; and that these concepts are attributable to Coleridge and not the de- lusions of a left-wing critic. The Marxist framework dissolves into an empirical essay of literary biography, only to emerge at the end as a set of values by which the critic here praises and there chides the revealed Coleridgean "ideology."3

The offhand use of this war horse of the Marxist lexicon, "ideology is to emphasize its systematic, ideational character (as op- "traditional" Marxist criticism of the lyric, for the term, as a number of recent writers have noted, has assumed a bewildering array of meanings both within and without the Marxist tradition, meanings with correspondingly complex connotations. What are we to understand by Rudich's assertion that the aesthetic is "a specific mode of ideology?" In a recent book Raymond Williams discusses several of the basic meanings of the term in the Marxist tradition; the two most prominent are: (1) "a system of illusory beliefs-false ideas or false consciousness-which can be contrasted with true scientific knowledge"; and (2) simply "a system of beliefs character- istic of a particular class."4 Clearly, to view art as a mode of ide-

2I refer to Studies in European Realism, Realism in Our Time, and Writer and Critic; these attempts to humanize a dreary party-line preference for "realism" within the Soviet bloc are milestones in the history of culture in the U. S. S. R. and Eastern Europe but are eclipsed in relevance to the contemporary Western critic by the "early" Luk cs of Theory of the Novel and History and Class Consciousness. For a contrary view, arguing for an essential continuity in Lukdcs' immensely pro- ductive career, see Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 160-206.

'Coleridge's "Tory twaddle" is deprecated (p. 227), and he is praised for fore- shadowing Marx (p. 238).

4Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 55-75.

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Arbitrary disregard of individual differences or special circumstances

ology is to emphasize its systematic, ideational character (as op- posed to its emotions and conceptual tensions) and to posit a deriva- tive relation to the economic infrastructure that is clearly inadequate in explanatory power; and it is to fail to grasp what distinguishes art from other modes of communication and expression. In categorizing literature as a form of (an ultimately class-based) ideology, one courts the danger of reducing subjectivity itself to "an atom of objectivity," in Herbert Marcuse's striking phrase.5 This is precisely what happened in the case of Stalinist literary criticism, in which subjectivity came to be seen as simply a sign of bourgeois decadence.

There is, however, a fruitful alternative within the Marxist tradition to the "poetry-as-ideology" school, and, Marcuse is one of its leading practitioners. Maynard Solomon's massive anthology Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary provides the strongest study in English for this neglected but significant dimension of Marxist aesthetics.6 The work of the Frankfurt school writers is the most important twentieth-century source for a renovated Marxist literary criticism, and I will therefore focus on their contri- bution to aesthetic theory. But many of the basic concepts involved had been developed independently in England in the thirties by Christopher Caudwell, whose book Illusion and Reality, with all its flaws and unevenness, remains the most ambitious attempt at a full Marxist theory of lyric poetry and deserves some mention here. Un- fortunately, in a central section of the book entitled "The English Poets," Caudwell succumbs to the very mechanistic materialism he condemns in the book's opening section. In three disastrous chap- ters,7 a thumbnail literary history is forcibly grafted onto Marx's account of England's economic development in Capital. Poetry is simply the ideology of the bourgeoisie, its evolution nothing but the unmediated expression of bourgeois conciousness as it developed in each era. For example, "Elizabethan poetry in all its grandeur and insurgence is the voice of this princely will, the absolute bourgeois

'Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 4.

6Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (New York: Vintage, 1974). See especially the essay by Solomon, "Marxism and Utopia," pp. 457-67.

'Ironically, these are the most frequently reprinted sections of Caudwell's book, serving well as examples of Marxism's supposed reduction of literature for mainstream literary critical casebooks, such as Robert F. Gleckner and Gerald E. Enscoe, eds., Romanticism: Points of View, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970).

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will . ... "This is the transition from Milton to Dryden. The idealisation of compromise between rival classes as 'order' and 'measure'-a familiar feature of reaction-leads to the conception of the Augustan age, which passes by an inevitable transition into eighteenth-century nationalism.. ." (pp. 96-97). "The bourgeois trammelled by the restraints of the era of mercantilism is Promethe- us, bringer of fire, fit symbol of the machine-wielding capitalist" (p. 105). "The next phase of bourgeois poetry is therefore that of 'com- modity-fetishism'-or 'art for art's sake'- and is given in the false position ... forced on him by the development of bourgeois econ- omy" (p. 116). The section ends with the assurance that, with the new revolutionary stance adopted by Auden, Lewis, Spender, and Lehman, "the bourgeois contradiction passes into its synthesis" and the new age of poetry is beginning in the era of the "final capitalistic crisis," designated hopefully as the period "1930-?" With the book in press, Caudwell was off to Spain, where he was killed in action February 12, 1937, unable ever to revise his work. In the following account of some other aspects of Caudwell's theory, I concentrate on those features of the theory that appear to me most sound, ignor- ing the many false starts and illusions which time and history have revealed to us. What remains is substantial and valuable.

One of Caudwell's central ideas is that art, including poetry, is a specialized moment of the subject-object relationship that is humanity's relation to reality, a moment opposite and complementary to that of science. Both art and science are "illusions" in Caudwell's terminology since each abstracts a part of the subject-object dialectic in order to reveal aspects of reality otherwise obscured. Science eclipses human subjectivity through its creation of a "phantastic"- the word is Caudwell's--ideal witness capable of observing reality dispassionately, while art renders objectivity into a "phantastic" medium through which human subjectivity is fully expressed (p. 210). In this part of Caudwell's theory, poetry is, so to speak, removed from the superstructure and incorporated into the base:

Thus the developing complex of society, in its struggle with the environ- ment, secretes poetry as it secretes the technique of the harvest, as part of its non-biological and specifically human adaptation to existence. The tool adapts the hand to a new function, without changing the inherited shape of the hands of humanity. The poem adapts the heart to a new purpose, with-

8Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (London, 1937; rpt. New York: International, 1973), p. 86.

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out changing the eternal desires of men's hearts. It does so by projecting man into a world of phantasy which is superior to his present reality precisely because it is a world of superior reality-a world of more important reality not yet realized, whose realisation demands the very poetry which phantastically anticipates it. Here is room for every error, for the poem pro- poses something whose very reason for poetic treatment is that we cannot touch, smell, or taste it yet. But only by means of this illusion can be brought into being a reality which would not otherwise exist. (p. 37)

In his incorporation of Freudian psychology, his attempt to define a uniquely human essence, and his emphasis on art as creation rather than mimesis, Caudwell parallels a branch of the Marxist tradition from which he is otherwise far removed, the critical theory of the Frankfurt school and their followers.9 Caudwell and the Frank- furt school theorists have arrived at their versions of subjective Marxism from opposite poles within the Marxist tradition.1' Work- ing with the scientistic notions that he had encountered in his study of the 1930s Marxist-Leninist classics-and in the general left milieu of the time in Britain-Caudwell discovered the necessity of positing some sort of "species-being""' for humanity, some basic conception of what differentiates the human species from the rest of nature: the genotype, as he calls it. And at this point Caudwell's argument takes

'The fullest account of the history and theories of this remarkable collection of theorists in English can be found in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1925-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).

'oSee Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York: Seabury, 1980), particularly pp. 155-63, for the most recent argument for the existence of two "poles" within the Marxist tradition. Unlike Gouldner, however, I argue here that the "critical" or "subjective" pole is to be preferred over the "scientific."

"The standard translation of Gattungswesen, a central term in Marx's Eco- nomic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. For a succinct explication of its meaning, see Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 82-84 etpassim. In the debate over the relationship between the "young" and "mature" Marx, this term, which Marx borrowed from Feuerbach, has been central since, in effect, "species-being" is what the young Marx's alienated man is alienated from. In recent Ma.rxology the proponents of a unified view of Marx's writings, ably repres- ented by Ollman and Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1961), and more succinctly in Tucker's introduction to The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972), had seemed to have driven from the field the party-line proponents who see the young Marx as "pre-scientific" until Louis Althusser revived the Stalinist deprecation of the young Marx in so-




on a subjective coloration in a project constantly threatened-at times quite overcome-by mechanical materialism. For what constitutes the human genotype is basically the capacity for "labor," including its component of imagination (the ability mentally to create forms not "given" in nature), a component Marx had insisted on in one of the many theoretical asides of Capital. And thus does Caud- well arrive at an original version of subjective Marxism, with important implications for literary criticism.

The Frankfurt school had arrived at its version of subjective Marxism (which it calls "Critical Theory") largely through a study of the young Marx and his Hegelian sources, the classical German philosophical tradition in general, and the early writings of Georg Luk~tcs. The philosophical problem of the nature and function of human subjectivity is, of course, a central concern of this tradition; and Marxism, it was argued, belongs in this context, to which it makes specific contributions.

A convenient document that sets forth several basic themes of Critical Theory's approach to art is Marcuse's essay, "The Affirma- tive Character of Culture," originally published the same year as Caudwell's posthumous work in 1937. Marcuse's starting point is an inquiry into the formation of the concept of the beautiful (including the artistic); he argues that the concept is defined in Greek thought in opposition to the "useful" and the "necessary." This particular antinomy, Marcuse argues, replicates the class structure of ancient Greek society, particularly the division between mental and manual labor. But it becomes fundamental to the entire Western cultural tradition: the world of beauty is reserved for a cultural elite, while the majority of humanity is relegated to the cheerless task of the production of a material life increasingly robbed of beauty.

In the capitalist era, Marcuse argues, the fact of division has not fundamentally altered, but the frank Greek acceptance of this state of affairs has been replaced with an uneasy conscience, and culture has been redefined as a universal realm of freedom open to all seg- ments of society. But, of course, the universality has been abstract and unrealizable, in the first place precisely because class differentia- tion remains unassailable. In this new context, high culture is subject to strongly contradictory pressures:

phisticated, neo-structuralist form in such writings as For Marx (New York: Vin- tage, 1970). Althusser has in turn come under fire from the British Marxist human- ist E. P. Thompson in the recent The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978).




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It contains not only the justification of the established form of existence, but also the pain of its establishment: not only quiescence about what is, but also remembrance of what could be. By making suffering and sorrow into eternal, universal forces, great bourgeois art has continually shattered in the hearts of men the facile resignation of everyday life. By painting in the lumi- nous colors of this world the beauty of men and things and transmundane happiness, it has planted real longing alongside poor consolation and false consecration in the soil of bourgeois life.12

The sphere of culture, the realm of art and beauty, at once gives the lie to the idea of the sufficiency of everyday life as it now exists and presents itself as a new rite offering consolation and secret meaning to its devotees. Along with one's personal life of family, friends, and religion, it offers a locus within modern society for the experience of freedom, happiness, beauty, and value. And yet, abstracted from daily life, it has been constantly transformed into mere opiate and consolation.

These notions overcome the one-dimensionality of the art-as- ideology position, and they help bring certain features of lyric poetry into clear focus. In the first place, we can begin to grasp the meaning of lyric poetry's historical specialization as a nonrealist genre. If we recognize in the tradition of the European realist novel in which Lukacs grounded much of his criticism the confrontation of bourgeois society with what it is, we must also recognize that in the lyric, bourgeois society attempts to confront what it is not. Poets confront what Caudwell calls the genotype and the young Marx the human essence: the substratum of human needs and yearnings, unfulfilled and unrealized within historical society. We can recognize this feature of the lyric even in its ironic mode, in, say, Baudelaire's spleen, Eliot's Unreal City, or Plath's cold despair and anger, for all these modes of irony reveal their objects in the light of an implied ideal by which reality is measured and judged. The lyric has become the specialized literary genre for Utopian vision, for the construction of realms of imaginative freedom that would escape the very conditions which have given rise to the necessity of their expression (only) as poetry. We could say that the lyric is a reflection of social conditions, but only as a photographic negative is a reflection. The lyric seeks to reverse the registers of reality as it now exists. It is an expression and formation of the human impulse to Utopia.

'2Herbert Marcuse, "The Affirmative Character of Culture," in his Negations (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 98-99.

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As Maynard Solomon wrote in an essay on the foremost Marxist theorist of Utopian vision, Ernst Bloch, the Utopian vision is not given a priori; it is formed through the confrontation of desire and reality, from the disharmony of "is" and "ought," and as such requires a dialectical interplay between feeling and reason. To understand the specific ways in which the modern lyric fulfills these functions, we need to incorporate its history into the outline of Horkheimer and Adorno's central study, Dialectic of Enlighten- ment. 13

In that work, Horkheimer and Adorno define the centrality to the capitalist organization of society of technical or instrumental reason, the methodology of the natural sciences transformed into scientism, through which human reason is said to arrive at truth only through the suppression of subjectivity, value, and emotion-just as capitalist production generates the best of all possible worlds through the play of the instrumental forces of the market. Modern art and poetry have been decisively shaped through this process of Enlightenment, in which technical reason has been established as the preeminently serious mode of thought in the form of empiricism, logical positivism, and their modern descendants. After the false start of neoclassicism, in which poetry for a while was subjected to the instrumental definitions of the literary criticism of the Age of Reason, romanticism established the characteristically "modern" notion of art as the repository for human values and emotions not available in society as it had come to be organized. (Perhaps ironically, this phenomenon corresponds reasonably well to T. S. Eliot's diagnosis of a "dissociation of sensibility" in the poetry of the bourgeois era in England.) In any case the romantic invention of "art" as we know it has shaped modern art as irrational and otherworldly, at times lacking a mediation through critical reason to reality or, as in Mallarme and the hermetic tradition he founded, seeking through reason to seal off from reality its dazzling displays of freedom and creativity.

This increasing irrationality of poetry, I should emphasize, is not only a matter of changing conceptions of poetry, but also and more importantly an evolution of techniques within poetry itself. The change has been conceptualized in many ways by each of the literary circles, movements, cabals, and "isms" that have proliferated

"Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).




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in literary history since the nineteenth century. We can, however, distinguish two broad streams of modern poetic theory, originating from Baudelaire's two most influential successors, Mallarm6 and Rimbaud.

Rimbaud's tradition, recaptured and developed in surrealism, grounds poetic vision within the desires and capacities of a human subjectivity constantly repressed by history. But in principle the aesthetic is attainable within the historical process. The poet brings the fire back to earth for the rest of humanity (animals as well, says Rimbaud), and he incites a desire for revolutionary change-not through didacticism, but through an imaginative vision. Rimbaud never allows his visionary poetry to be finally captured conceptually; he never finally dissolves the emotion-charged vision born of desire into a delineated mental architecture. He preserves the aesthetic as a privileged realm decisively other than the deplorable banality of bourgeois life, but he does not exclude the historical realization of the vision a priori (as Mallarm6 does). Rimbaud's passionate hope for millennial social change provides the emotional power of some of his finest lyrics.

Mallarme, in contrast, sees the lyric as an eternal, metaphysical moment, always other and always beyond. In the famous image of a late sonnet, the poet is a swan trapped in a frozen lake and beating his wings in vain, unable to achieve "la r6gion oi vivre." We are far from Rimbaud's image of the poet as Prometheus, thief of fire.

Although Rimbaud's aesthetic is obviously more amenable to Marxism, it is important to realize that both of these conceptions follow from the contradictory position and role of art in contemporary society, and the recognition of this dual nature is the starting point of an adequate Marxist theory of the lyric.14 To give some idea of how these theoretical notions might work in explications of specific poems, let us return briefly to Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."

In the first place, we need to recognize that the historical context in which the poem is written includes the history of poetry itself and that this lyric, as part of the general romantic movement, is helping to define a new mode through its abandonment of explicit metaphor and its cultivation of the device of the romantic symbol-a poetic figure in which the older, clearly defined interplay of vehicle

'4For a fuller treatment of these concepts see my unpublished dissertation, "Unified Sensibility Reconsidered: Reason and Emotion in Metaphysical and Sym- bolist Poetry," University of Texas, 1978.




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and tenor is left undefined: that is, in "Kubla Khan" the images of pleasure dome, enclosed garden, chasm, moon, and woman radiate circles of suggestiveness and allusion without the sharply defined conceptualizations of the traditional metaphor. As readers, we define levels of meaning without sharp boundaries, integrating, say, Rudich's discovery of a level of political allusion into a more general and less specified realm of signification. Poetic language intensifies its traditional quality of multidetermination as it defines itself over and against the discourse of technical reason, with its characteristics of unilinearity and clarity.

Rudich is right in seeing in "Kubla Khan" a kind of antipoliti- cal message, but this is not only a result of Coleridge's own personal evolution. It is, rather, the direction of postromantic poetry in general, part of a larger evolution away from rational discourse of all kinds and towards a newly "pure" cultivation of the nonrationalis- tic resources of language. Henceforth poetry will seek its locus of being in the underside of the dialectic of enlightenment, seeking to found a realm of pure subjectivity where value, emotion, and imagination find their freedom. Thought is not abandoned in this new poetry, but it tends to become self-reflection and self-conceptualiza- tion-aesthetic thought. (The self-reflecting or metalinguistic quality of modern poetic language, I would argue, is not the essence of poetry, but rather a historical feature of the poetry of technical societies.) Thought in "Kubla Khan" is a good example of this tend- ency. This highly allusive poem moves toward a kind of self-con- ceptualization in its conclusion, when the poet's voice declaims that, through the intercession of the "damsel with a dulcimer," he could, "with music loud and long,"

build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes in holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed And drunk the milk of Paradise.

The vision is identified as imagined, created vision, surrounded with the aura of archaic religion and magic and associated with the allied arts of music and dance. There is, indeed, excellent reason for the




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traditional association of the poem with symbolist podsie pure, for such a conception is contained within the poem as self-commentary. What constitutes the created, poetic vision is precisely the "aesthetic" itself: that which is given in vision and transcribed through poetic imagination-a self-designating entity constituted (as Rudich suggested in his brief aesthetic remarks) by images of this world. But these images are fused into an aesthetic form decisively other than the world we know, for here are harmony, beauty, meaning, pas- sion, and depth-a fully human world, in sharp contrast to the reality of the "person on business from Porlock" whose visit de- stroyed the revery, according to the Shandean note of introduction Coleridge appended to the poem. We are at the beginning of the era of art as negative mysticism, as a cultivation of feeling and thought through undefined symbol whose aim is precisely to bypass the "fixities and definites" of technical reason and to establish a new and autonomous category: the aesthetic, an ideal realm which in- habits the place where God had been (rather than abandoning it as Enlightenment thought-and many versions of Marxism-have tended to do), but grounding itself in the human power of imaginative creation rather than in an external, transcendent power.

It is the otherness of the poem that bids for our comprehension; the poem is anything but a mirror of reality. And the question that a renovated Marxist theory of the lyric must seek to answer is: what is this otherness, which strikes us so forcefully with the aura of fa- miliarity and at-homeness?

Ernst Bloch has come closest to the answer with his notion of the Utopian vision, although Shelley and Rimbaud, among others, have offered similar conceptions: unacknowledged legislator, thief of fire. The lyric has become a specialized, though not exclusive, genre of Utopian vision in the modern era, the attempt to symbolize a world not yet attained, though grounded in our deepest human needs, a world of imagination that we encounter with a shock of recognition because it is our own, though always absent. The motto of a renovated Marxist theory of the lyric, then, is not to be found in Marx's problematic base-superstructure schema, but rather in a re- mark found in an 1843 letter to Ruge: "the world has long dreamed of something of which it only has to become conscious in order to possess it in actuality." 5

Austin, Texas

'SQuoted in Solomon, p. 58.




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