Invisible Listeners : Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery

當一位詩人寫給一個活著的人 - 無論是朋友還是敵人、情人或姐妹 ，我們都會認識到親密的表達。但是什麼促使詩人跨越時間和空間與隱形聽眾交談，尋求理想的親密關係 - George Herbert與God, Walt Whitman與未來的讀者，John Ashbery與文藝復興時期的畫家Francesco Parmigianino？在Invisible Listeners中，Helen Vendler認為這樣的詩人必明一種語言，在頁面上製定他們在生活中缺乏的親密關係。在三個不同的世紀裡，通過對這三位偉大詩人的精闢洞察和優美的書面閱讀，Vendler繪製出他們與他們所選擇的聽眾的關係。

就他而言，Herbert修改了對God通常的“垂直”地址，贊成以一個“水平”一個地址作為朋友。Whitman徘徊在有時候色情的；有時是準宗教的語言中，構思出民主的攝影師，他將遵循Whitman的榜樣，找到自己的真實自我。然而，在Whitman的詩歌中，攝影師將被最終無形的聽眾“死亡”所取代。

Ashbery尋求一位認為藝術總是扭曲它所代表的藝術家，發現他必須前往遙遠的過去。他以溫柔和懷疑的口氣向Parmigianino致敬，Parmigianino在凸鏡中為自己的發明提供了一個理論和先例，為非凡的自畫像。通過創造理想親密的形式和言語，這些詩人提出了一個更完整和令人滿意的人類交流的可能性 - 一種不被強迫，理解和自由的關係倫理學。

When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend or enemy, lover or sister--we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy--George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life. Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners.

For his part, Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death.

Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions. By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange--an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.

 Helen Vendler  (Autor)

Publisher:Princeton University Press 

ISBN:    978-0691134741 

 原價   US 15.95 台幣價 NT$:558