Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 197

196 Milli mála 13/2021
lyric circulation.”53 The musical dimension of early modern lyric
exploded its system of circulation, involving “a mixture of human
and not humans ... the composers, performance, and song books.”54
At the same time, voice was repeatedly theorized as unstable, brit-
tle, and elusive.55
Early modern England, in other words, “may not be accurately
defined as exclusively an oral, manuscript, or print culture.” 56
Rather, it was a pluralistic ecosystem where “the three media of
speech, script, and print infused and interacted with each other in
a myriad ways.”57 My argument is that Elizabethan sonnets re-
sponded to these frictions between reading and writing, fixity and
fluidity, fragment and whole, idea and matter, voice and inscrip-
tion, destruction and making, works and books, by injecting irre-
solvable contradictions into the way they thematised their own ex-
istence. Richards presents a harmonious vision of media polyvalence
in early modern England, suggesting, for example, that “print …
aligned eye, tongue, and ear.” 58 My interest, by contrast, is focused
on the crises of lyric ontology in the sonnets, which I read as symp-
tomatic of the tensions between different instantiation templates
and modes of poetic being.59 These Petrarchan lyrics offer what
Adorno calls “a philosophical sundial telling the time of history”—
in this case, history of book production, of writing, reading, and
speaking, of textual making and unmaking.60
These crises haunt the liminal zone between mental conception
and physical objecthood. As I have suggested, regardless of the spe-
cific technologies of production, poetic imagination needs to be
realized as a material object—an ink-stained page, a carved inscrip-
tion, or a series of air waves. The sonnets I consider below use their
imaginative resources to problematize their actualization as physi-
53 Larson, Matter of Song 35, 38.
54 Trudell, Unwritten Poetry, 13, 19.
55 Bloom, Voice in Motion.
56 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 27.
57 Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 5.
58 Richards, Voices and Books, 10.
59 For a similar approach that focuses on misalignments and incommensurabilities between forms of
ontology in connection with Petrarchism, see Hart, “Bracket and Voice.”
60 Adorno, “Lyric Poetry,” 345.
“PEN, PAPER, INKE, YOU FEEBLE INSTRUMENTS”
10.33112/millimala.13.8