Comment on Karen Simecek, Philosophy of Lyric Voice

Abstract

Karen Simecek’s Philosophy of Lyric Voice aims to explore certain complexities in our ideas about the ‘lyric I’ in lyric poetry, and the relation of the lyric I to notions including expression, perspective, and voice. I discuss some of the connections Simecek draws between these notions, and how she seems to understand them. I also express some doubt or hesitation about certain elements of her position: in particular, her apparent assumption that a perspective, in the relevant sense, must be unified, and hence that lyric poems must also be unified in a certain sense. These topics are connected with the fact that one of the things lyric poetry does is to focus our attention on language itself. I ask just what this might mean, and suggest that it is part of an attempt to undermine a common but naïve view of language that sees language as transparent and, in its essential nature, disembodied.