poetic landscape

from "The Flesh of Words"

Jacques Rancière

born 1940

The modern lyric revolution is not a way of experiencing oneself, of experiencing the profundity of one's inner life, or, conversely, of immersing it in the profundity of nature. It is primarily a specific method of utterance, a way of accompanying one's saying, of deploying it in a perceptual space, of giving it rhythm in a walk, a journey, a crossing. Wind, clouds, the path or the wave, which hold a well-known place in Romantic poetry, are not first of all the drunken experience of wild nature; they are first operators of accompaniment—methods that allow the "I" to slip its way throughout the poem until it makes itself the space of the appearance of daffodils* "in person."

...The subjectivity proper to the lyric poem involves the displacement of a body onto a landscape, in a coincidence of vision and word, which constitutes this territory as the space of writing.

*Esme's note: The daffodils referred to here are those in Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"