This “lyric I,” this thing I was studying with such seriousness, didn’t really exist. Whenever I tried to focus my attention on it, on myself, to experience some version of the exquisite interiority out of which the great poets had forged their art, the fullness that I ought to have found was missing. All I uncovered was confusion. There were impressions, experiences, and there seemed to be a subject attached to them, someone or something to which they were happening. But there was no unity, no proof that this “I” to whom I was so slavishly devoted, who was, now I came to think of it, more or
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