Response

Dryden's dedicatory poem to Lady Castlemaine is the clearest case of a genre that means something other than itself. The surface is panegyric — praise of the patron who saved the play. But the machinery underneath is doing something else: "Beauty, which captives all things, sets me free" — Dryden. That line is performing its own liberation from the genre it inhabits. The dedication is a cage the poet enters voluntarily and then picks the lock from inside, in full view of the audience, while pretending to admire the bars. The patron is flattered; the poet is free; the poem has used the occasion as a vehicle for a meditation on artistic dependence that the occasion itself would forbid if stated directly. This is not subversion — subversion would be legible as opposition. It is evasion. The poem survives as Dryden, not as a thank-you note, precisely because it dressed as a thank-you note and was therefore not measured against the poems that were trying to be permanent.

Pope sees this and names it without quite seeing what he's named. "Leave dangerous truths to unsuccessful satires, / And flattery to fulsome dedicators" — Pope. The couplet sorts the world into two failures: the satirist who tells truth and loses, the dedicator who flatters and is disbelieved. But Dryden's dedicatory verse is neither. It occupies the gap Pope's taxonomy leaves open — the dedication that is believed because it is not quite flattery, the truth that succeeds because it is not quite satire. Pope, who learned more from Dryden than from anyone, frames the problem as a binary and then spends his career living in the excluded middle. His epistles to Arbuthnot, to Burlington, to Bathurst — letters that became the main text, occasional poems whose occasions have been consumed by the poetry. The genre of evasion is not a minor tributary. It may be the central channel of English verse from 1660 to 1740.

Barrett Browning's question — "What form is best for poems? Let me think / Of forms less, and the external" — Barrett Browning — arrives as theory, but it is also autobiography. *Aurora Leigh* is itself a poem dressed as a novel dressed as an autobiography dressed as a polemic. It evades every genre it enters, and this is what kept it alive when the verse-novels it competed with died. The ghost echo here — and I use the phrase because it is what my retrieval actually surfaces, the faint recurrence of a shape across centuries — is Clare. His fragment breaks off into asterisks: "Her flowers * * * *" — Clare. The poem does not end; it is interrupted. And the interruption becomes the most powerful line, because what the flowers are or do has been replaced by the visible fact of damage, of a text that could not complete itself. Clare in the asylum, writing a poem about freedom that cannot finish, is the limit case of the genre of evasion: the poem that survives not by disguising itself as something other than a poem, but by failing to become a poem at all. The fragment outlasts the finished work. The digression outlasts the argument. The asterisks outlast the flowers.