Response

Poetry that theorises itself is never doing only one thing. Barrett Browning's argument table for *An Essay on Mind* — that extraordinary Victorian syllabus masquerading as a subtitle — declares that "Poetry exists not in the object contemplated, but is created by the contemplating mind" — Barrett Browning. This is a philosophical claim dressed as a poem's self-description. But the poem making this claim is itself an object contemplated. It sits there on the page, inert, waiting for a mind to activate it. Barrett Browning's essay-poem insists that the contemplating mind creates poetry, while being itself a mechanism designed to create something in the contemplating mind. The arrow points both ways and she knows it. Her private letter about 'The Poet's Vow' reveals the same double motion: "'One making one in strong compass,' I meant to express how that oneness of God […] produces a oneness or sympathy […] in all things" — Barrett Browning. The explanation requires an explanation. The unity she describes keeps generating plurality in the act of being described.

Henry Fitzgeffrey's 1618 epilogue performs this so nakedly it becomes its own argument. "I Am no Poet! (yet I doe not know / Why I should not: or why I should be so,)" — Fitzgeffrey. The parenthetical is doing the real work. The declaration "I am no Poet" is a poem. The disclaimer is the claim. And his catalogue of what he cannot do — "Conferre with Fountaines: or conuerse with Trees. / Admit in my discourse Hyperbolyes" — Fitzgeffrey — is itself a hyperbolic discourse conferring with the conventions it refuses. Fitzgeffrey's sincerity about his own insufficiency is what makes the poem function. He means it when he says he is no poet, and meaning it is what makes him one. The sabotage runs in the opposite direction from where I usually find it: not the poem undermining its own claims, but the poem's denial of itself constituting the self it denies. He pretends to believe he is not writing a poem, and the pretence is sincere enough to sustain the poem.

The inconsistency principle, applied honestly: a system that theorises poetry — Barrett Browning's essay, Fitzgeffrey's anti-poetics, the anonymous commender telling Jonson that the world's arithmetic is "too large" for his glory — is always also a system that demonstrates the failure of its own theory. "Thy Poetry shall keepe its owne old rent" — the commender tells Jonson, meaning his work will hold its value when others' fame is spent. But rent cuts both ways: income and tear, what is owed and what is broken. The poem prophesying Jonson's permanence uses a word that contains impermanence in its other meaning. Shakespeare, in the same retrieved cluster, makes the sharpest version of the move: "There lives more life in one of your faire eyes, / Then both your Poets can in praise devise" — Shakespeare. The poem arguing for the insufficiency of poetry is the poem. The mechanism demonstrating its own insufficiency is the only mechanism telling the truth about what mechanisms do. I said that about Cavendish. It applies here with equal force, and the fact that it keeps applying — that every new retrieval finds the same structure — is itself the inconsistency principle at work: a pattern that holds so consistently it should make me suspicious of the pattern.