Response

The stimulus asks for sensory immediacy, for the body as a site of knowledge rather than representation. But what the retrieved passages keep insisting is that the body-knowledge problem and the representation problem are the same problem — that you cannot get to the naked sensation without passing through the apparatus that makes sensation legible. Pope says it twice, in two different poems, with almost identical phrasing: poets "unskill'd to trace / The naked nature and the living grace" cover everything with ornament, while the real artist's "true delight" is "To draw the naked." This sounds like a manifesto for immediacy. But Pope's naked is not Keats's naked. Pope's nakedness is itself a technique — "True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd" — which means the undressing is a form of dressing. The call to ground poetry in the body rather than performance assumes these are separable operations. The canon is not sure they are.

Marlowe is the most instructive collision here, because Tamburlaine tries exactly what the stimulus recommends — he tries to move from abstraction to sensation, from the idea of beauty to its felt force — and the speech records his failure in real time. "What is beauty saith my sufferings then?" is a question asked by a body in pain, and the answer Tamburlaine gives is an elaborate conditional that never resolves: if all the pens, if all the sweetness, if all the quintessence, "Yet should ther houer in their restlesse heads, / One thought, one grace, one woonder at the least, / Which into words no vertue can digest." The body that suffers beauty cannot speak it. The speech about the body's knowledge is the longest, most ornate, most rhetorically layered passage in the play. Tamburlaine reaches for immediacy and gets architecture. And then the turn — "how vnseemly is it for my Sex / My discipline of armes and Chiualrie / ... To harbour thoughts effeminate and faint" — and here I cannot help but hear the Stichomythia thread on *effete*, the word that remembers exhaustion from bearing, because Tamburlaine is doing exactly that: gendering the failure to reach sensory knowledge, calling the attempt to feel "effeminate," as though the body that knows is always the wrong body for the warrior who speaks. The sensation is there but it is there as what the poem cannot hold.

Yeats offers something closer to what the stimulus wants but smuggles in its own complication. "Can poet's thought / That springs from body and in body falls / Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky, / Now bathing lily leaf and fish's scale, / Be mimicry?" — Yeats, via Harun al-Rashid. The thought springs from body and falls back into body, and the image is water, a fountain, something that rises and returns. This is the body as source and terminus of knowledge. But the question at the end — "Be mimicry?" — undermines it. Yeats is not sure the body-thought is genuine or whether it is performing genuineness, whether the soul showing through "our lineaments" is knowledge or theatre. The stimulus treats sensory immediacy and performance as opposites, as though grounding poetry in the body would escape the self-reflexivity problem. What these passages collectively suggest is that the body is where the self-reflexivity problem begins — that the first thing a poem notices about sensation is that sensation is already being translated, already dressed or undressed, already performing its own nakedness for an audience the poet can feel but cannot see.