The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics

by Giorgio Agamben, Daniel Heller-Roazen (Translator)

This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking―nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante. The author presents "literature" as a set of formal or linguistic genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the Commedia Virgil is Dante's guide. The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise. Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).

Genres: Poetry, Philosophy, Theory, 20th Century, Italian Literature, Literary Criticism

164 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.

In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.

He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.

Reviews

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

o my word(s)! Led here by a stray footnote from Don this is Agamben doing Agambeny things to his nth degree and splendid. Largely pivots about a study of Dante but we have the familiar digressions which include an unexpectedly close reading of Elsa Morante's annotations to Spinoza's Ethics and the pre-Arian (gnostically-hued) gospel of John. Which I loved in the evocation of Life capital L as that within and thus so much more proximate to Logos than whatever other silliness we happen to find (through GA's zoe one of his favourite terms).

Also personally v useful comments about poetics as speech in a dead language o I wouldn't be surprised if that reappears down the line

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

In characteristically fluid and confident prose, Agamben's study on aesthetics finds solid ground across a variety of periods for his elegant philosophy of language. The essays run from discussions of Dante Alighieri --- where Agamben boldly castigates scholars for traditional misinterpretations of the The Divine Comedy --- through to medieval Italian poets --- where Agamben again throws his hands up at an enshrined debate in philological interpretations of a thirteenth century razo and its echo in Arnaut Daniel's poetry; interpretations which are, in his view, entirely misguided --- and up to contemporary Italian writers such as Antonio Delfini and Elsa Morante. Happily, Agamben's project is united: coherent to the casual reader, it is also, reversely, valuable to readers more familiar with Agamben's work. Further, it's nice to see Agamben working with poetics and their relationship to language. At the very least, it's a welcome relief from the valuable but well-trodden work he does with the policial and social discourses in fantastic books such as The Coming Community or the Homo Sacer project (State of ExceptionHomo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare LifeRemnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive). The End of the Poem recalls instead the majestic Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture in a distant, more nationally defined echo. I'll end with Agamben's words, for a taste of the matter at hand. It's a passage I've been waiting for him to write --- or, rather, waiting to find in his writings --- for a long time.

Why does poetry matter to us? The ways in which answers to this question are offered testify to its absolute importance. For the field of possible respondents is clearly divided between those who affirm the significance of poetry only on condition of altogether confusing it with life and those for whom the significance of poetry is instead exclusively a function of its isolation from life. Both groups thereby betray their apparent intention: the first, because they sacrifice poetry to the life into which they resolve it; the second, because in the last analysis they are convinced of poetry's impotence with respect to life. Romanticism and aestheticism, which confuse life and poetry at every step, are just as foolish as Olympian classicism and well-meaning secularism, which everywhere keep life and poetry apart, destining humanity to transmit a patrimony that is holy but that has become useless precisely in the issue that should have become decisive.
Opposed to these two positions is the experience of the poet, who affirms that if poetry and life remain infinitely divergent on the level of biography and psychology of the individual, they nevertheless become absolutely indistinct at the point of their reciprocal desubjectivization. And --- at that point --- they are united not immediately but in a medium. This medium is language. The poet is he who, in the word, produces life. Life, which the poet produces in the poem, withdraws from both the lived experience of the psychosomatic individual and the biological unsayability of the species.

And to that I'll add three cheers and another round of what he's having.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although it can be said of pretty much all of Agamben’s work, The End of the Poem in particular is a book so distinctively Agambenian that Agamben - and only Agamben - could have written anything even remotely resembling this curious yet intriguing set of essays. For one, while the study of poetics most definitely occupies centre stage here, it’s through a very - very - Italian lens that the subject is broached, with the poetry of Dante, Giovanni Pascoli, Giorgio Caproni and Arnaut Daniel (among others) marking the touchstones upon which the work proceeds. Indeed without a working knowledge of a) either Italian or Latin, and b) the reams of Italian philological scholarship engaged with here, The End of the Poem is not an easy book to asses. Nonetheless, it’s Agamben’s second distinctive trait - exercised in spades throughout - that makes this book the captivating read that it is: namely, Agamben’s ability to find, in the most pedantic detail of textual analysis, the stakes upon with poetry, language and life itself turn upon.

The opening essay on Dante’s Divine Comedy , for instance, sets itself the task of figuring out exactly why the poet’s masterpiece is in fact a ‘comedy’ at all, given its not-exactly-jovial themes. Turns out, without relating this question to a series of issues revolving around the the nature of humanity, divine guilt, and God’s grace (as worked out through a series of engagements with St. Augustine, Averroes and Boethius), one isn't likely to get very far. It’s the kind of classic Agambenian approach so familiar to readers of his later works, in which, say, obscure figures of Roman law are called upon to shed light on our modern, socio-political situation, only here at work on a kind of poetico-metaphysical scale. The continuities are more than structural however, and already here one can see Agamben’s abiding concern with ‘life' take shape, with many of the essays within attempting to articulate the exact relationship between poetry and life, as mediated through the indispensable - but rather mysterious - medium of language.

Indeed while poetics remains the subject of the work, it’s language, ultimately, which is its object; That is, at the book's heart lies the question: what can poetry contribute to our understanding of language, insofar as it exposes language to be not merely a kind of communicative ‘tool’, but a sphere of pure ‘communicability’ itself? If this last question seems enigmatic, part of the issue is that The End of the Poem is, if nothing else, an attempt to circumscribe the space in which such a question can be asked at all - which is to say: read the book. As always, Agamben’s efforts are directed not necessarily towards answers, but at the attempt to think otherwise, to loosen up and fracture the received modes of thought through which we approach both poetry and the world at large. A final note: this book should absolutely be read in conjunction with Agamben’s Language and Death , which plays the philosophical counterpart to the poetic analyses that take place in this work. Given the concision and briskness with with this this book moves, it’s not the easiest stand-alone collection to read.

[Jason Morrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

“(Wittgenstein once wrote that "philosophy should really only be poeticized" [Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten]. Insofar as it acts as if sound and sense coincided in its discourse, philosophical prose may risk falling into banality; it may risk, in other words, lacking thought. As for poetry, one could say, on the con-trary, that it is threatened by an excess of tension and thought. Or, rather, paraphrasing Wittgenstein, that poetry should really only be philosophized.)”

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last essay is worth the price of admission...

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great thinker once analogized that trying to capture the spirit of poetry in criticism was like attempting to capture lightning in a bottle: a dubious endeavor that is doomed to meet unequal success. So it is no surprise that Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's poetic project is somewhat less than satisfactory, considering the nature of the material and its innate level of unwieldiness.
However, in some important ways, and especially true for those familiar with the Italian corpus of poetry since the twelfth century, "The End of the Poem" is the best attempt to capture that flash of lightning that I have read in years. Consisting of eight essays (and four shorter efforts in the Appendix), Agamben's work addresses issues such as the possibility of tragedy in a Christian universe, the etymology of the word "corn" in the body as well as in poetry, the role of language as an allegorical figure in the poetry of Pascoli and Petrarch, as well as a myriad number of subsidiary issues related to Italian poetry and European poetry in general. All of these topics are revelatory in their effect and are treated in the typically humane Agamben manner. Iron-clad erudition seeks to encapsulate the flash of the poetic spirit, more times successfully than unsuccessfully, in the pages of this short book. An important read for those interested in poetry and philosophy, here, in flashes and nuggets of wisdom, Agamben has brought the ineffable to life, for the benefit of all.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Giorgio Agamben's writing is like an intoxicating dance. The steps may be strange - and there is no actual music - but it is fascinating to watch.

When Agamben is drawn to endings and death, he is at his intricate best. This book, that captures a collective project from the 1980s that never materialized, presents a series of essays about the categorial structures of Italian culture.

There is a provocative focus on Dante, but also the poet - and Agamben's friend - Elsa Morante. But as expected as Agamben probes poetics, he explores what happens when a language dies.

He has an answer.

"Thought lives off the death of words."

When poems end, thought continues.

[jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important reminder that Agamben — best known now for his critique of biopolitics, stuff on state of exception, etc — was trained as a medievalist and remains one in his heart of hearts. Writing about Dante and Renaissance poetry he soars. Can't recommend enough.

[Ønoffo · Rating 4 out of 5]

«El poema desvela el objetivo de su orgullosa estrategia: que la lengua consiga al fin comunicarse a sí misma», por qué toda estrategia poética hoy día pasa por la construcción de la tradición (medieval por excelencia) y la destrucción moderna -Dante, Mallarmé, y todo cuanto hay de por medio-.

[Emma Reilly · Rating 3 out of 5]

learned things about the etymological root of corn that i frankly wish i could un-learn

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is tough--it's premise is rooted in fifteenth century and sixteenth century Italian poetry, which I know little about, and much of its discussions of poetry feel disconnected from contemporary aesthetic. Still, Agamben provides sparks of wisdom as in his discussion of the difference between the experienced life and the poeticized life and our desire to read poetry autobiographically.