Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of Poetry

Donald Wesling

2003
176 pages
ISBN 0-8387-5540-2

Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895-1975) is very likely the most influential theorist of human communication in the past century. Bakhtin is also one of our best defenders of the novel as a literary form. His strong reservation about the single voice of lyric poetry, by comparison with the polyphonic novel, cannot be denied. But his reasons for thinking this can be explained, and his own productive terms (utterance, dialogue, heteroglossia) can be used to reach a more accurate account of the social moorings of poetry.

Donald Wesling finds the social moorings of poetry in the dialogism and clash of inner and outer speech of human discourse, just where Bakhtin finds the social moorings of the novel. His introductory chapter carefully summarizes these topics in Bakhtin's writings over nearly fifty years, and in scholarship on Bakhtin; and shows how Bakhtin's terms may be trans-coded for work with poetry. Wesling's following chapters employ (and on occasion correct) a theory of Russian origin, to give cultural/historical readings of recent Scottish and London-Caribbean dialect poems, inner speech in Northumberland poet Basil Bunting, rhythm in Marina Tsvetaeva, and the clash of discourses in two English Romantic and two 1990s American poets.
This book rescues Bakhtin from his overstatements concerning poetry, and gives the theoretical and practical basis for reading poems with the help of Bakhtin's categories of utterance, heteroglossia, and dialogue. In addition, through this rescue, the book offers a modest but strong foundation for a reading of poetry, and indeed of all literary texts, where a clash of social positions is fought out on the territory of the utterance. To find a believable poetics of social forms is the order of the day, and Donald Wesling's admiring and yet skeptical revision of Bakhtin will be part of the explanation we need.

About the author:

Donald Wesling studied English Literature at Harvard and Cambridge Universities; his Ph.D. is from Harvard. He has taught at the University of Essex in England, and for most of his career at the University of California, San Diego, where he was for three years Chair of the Department of Literature. In 1997-98, he was Otto Salgo Professor of American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and he has also held visiting positions at Leningrad State University and the University of Durham. His interests include English Romanticism, modern English and American poetry, the history of criticism, social theories of poetry and poetic form, Scottish and Russian poetry, and the theories of communication of Mikhail Bakhtin.