Abstract
The paper is grounded on the historical poetics of oral theories that deal with classical and medieval poetry (e.g., Gregory Nagy, Paul Allen Miller and Paul Zumthor) and Walter Ong's thesis of secondary orality. It focuses on one such situation of poetry where several paradigms meet. However, this type of situation is noteworthy as it forces us to adjust our theoretical apparatus, and also illuminates the deep interdependence between theory and particular poems.
The first person in the poem is often labelled as the "lyric I" or "lyric subject." Regardless of the historical aspects of these designations it is important that the pronoun "I" and also the author's name function relationally. To say or write "I" or use one's own name is an act that not only describes a state of affairs, but can also change it or establish a new one. In ordinary speech, identity is usually uttered conventionally and in poetry, too, several stabilized types of utterance predominate (I = human being, autobiographical projection of the poet); the speaker of the poem is not necessarily problematic. However, in some moments, we encounter utterances of identity (not only in the first person) that disturb established conventions.
We can find many examples in the history of poetry: a celebratory or defamatory poem changes the identity of the person concerned in a straightforward manner. Poets, in these cases, have their role, and their identity is more or less stable. There are two important examples from modern poetry: Rimbaud in a famous letter states the dynamics of the word "I": "Je est un autre." He exploits the fact that to say "I" not a simple fact, but an act; and that in the chronological span of the poem the poet/reader becomes "un autre," that is, accepts an identity constituted by the poem. Also, Walt Whitman, in his "Song of Myself" pronounces his own name: "Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son." In the context of the poem, it is an extension of his identity, allowing him, as he says, to contain multitudes.
I analyse several examples from post World War II Czech poetry. During this period, which was quite exceptional for the Czech tradition, the language's poetry began absorbing motifs especially from German and Anglophone poetry relatively early after the War, but at the same time it was came under political pressure, and the prescribed poetic style of Stalinism provoked reactions, many of which remained unpublished until many years later. It become difficult, indeed, to use the term lyric during this period, since there were strong antipoetic tendencies (Jiří Kolář entitled his collection The Black Lyre, Jan Zábrana likewise The Black Lyric). Poetry after the war was not impossible, but for many poets in this region one of the overriding questions became who speaks or who can speak in a poem. Two crucial questions resulted from this historical situation: "what is a human being?" and "who can speak instead of the poet?"