Lyric Address and the Problem of CommunityJonathan Culler

The idea that lyric poems may create community is an enticing one, especially for those eager to show that poetry has social and political effects; and certainly, there are numerous cases, ancient and modern, where it is claimed that poetry has had such a function. In archaic Greece, melic or lyric verse functioned as epideictic rhetoric — a discourse of praise and blame and a source of wisdom — which, performed on various public occasions, shaped communal judgments and worked to create a Panhellenic community. Gregory Nagy writes that Pindar’s victory odes, which celebrate a particular event, articulate general values and are made to be reperformed elsewhere: each ‘aimed at translating its occasion into a Panhellenic event, a thing of beauty that could be replayed by and for all Hellenes for all time to come’.11Gregory Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Ancient Poet (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 114.

A rather different case is the international community generated around the Petrarchan sonnet, which, building on the new structures of feeling introduced by troubadour love poetry (love as a spiritualized devotion to an inaccessible mistress, etc.), provided a set of scenarios, tropes, and oppositions, to be played out in different languages, as a form of refinement and self-distinction. It succeeded in creating a broad European community of readers who worked within the distinctive oppositions and figures of this discours amoureux and produced their own sonnets. Petrarchism became a courtly mode adopted by a politically influential class across Europe, and its conventions offered opportunities for exercising and refining national vernaculars: a language proved itself by developing its own Petrarchan poetry.22See Leonard Forster, The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); William Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), writes of the Elizabethan love sonnet that a good sonnet ‘was like a good public prayer: the test was whether the congregation can “join” and make it their own’, binding them into a community. He calls the body of sonnet sequences ‘more like an erotic liturgy than a series of erotic confidences’ (p. 491). The cultural influence of this imagined community was considerable, and the traces of its conception of the suffering lover and of life structured by impossible love have persisted, well beyond the vogue for displaying one’s culture by writing love sonnets.33The notion of imagined communities derives from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 1991). Although his focus is on the growth of the idea of the nation, the concept has broad application. For some discussion, see Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson, ed. by Pheng Cheah and Jonathan Culler (New York: Routledge, 2003).

When we consider these instances and others described by those contributing to this volume — for example, the communities coalescing around a localized minority practice such as Soviet underground music, or, at one extreme, the dispersed community of readers of elegies who vicariously accept the implicit invitation of these poems to participate, albeit momentarily, in the mourning they stage — what seems evident is that the notion of lyric community is scarcely simple and can cover a wide variety of situations in which poems or songs create a recognition of some sort of sharing among people who may be gathered together on a particular occasion or widely dispersed spatially and temporally. What is shared might be a particular experience or a general set of values, momentary or enduring; but how much members of these imagined communities actually know about the community also varies. The readers of elegies may not think of themselves as participating in anything communal, even as they do so.

The examples I propose to consider will also be varied, as I explore the question of what role, if any, lyric address plays in the creation of communities. Previously, I’ve been especially interested in address to people or things that are not a plausible audience, as in apostrophic address to the wind, to birds, or to death, but here I want to think about the you, often unspecified, that may seem to designate the reader. If a poem addresses an indeterminate you, as so many do, does that help to create a community? How does that work?

The example of the creation of lyric community through the Petrarchan sonnet suggests that community-building depends upon repetition, on taking up, making your own, and repeating, either the poems themselves or variations on them. In our day, the most obvious cases of communities fostered by poetic language may be communities brought together by poems become songs. A famous case is ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, from the musical Carousel (Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, 1945), which has become the bonding ritual of Liverpool football supporters and others, sung by thousands before every match:44E.g. sn0wfall, ‘Awesome You’ll Never Walk Alone Liverpool vs Chelsea 27.04.2014’, YouTube, 27 April 2014 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N51jWNsW3F8> [accessed 24 August 2023].

There seems to have been little research on the functioning of the second-person pronoun in songs. In singing along with ‘I want to hold your hand’, is the listener positioned as ‘I’, wanting to hold the hand of some you, or as the you whose hand someone wants to hold, or simply as an observer of the lyric I’s desire for another? (Presumably, it very much depends on the song and the disposition of the listener: probably few take ‘You ain’t nothing but a hound dog’ as addressed to them.) An elaborate statistical study of second-person pronouns in popular songs concludes that songs with second-person pronouns are more popular (in terms of purchases) than those with third-person pronouns or no pronouns, and it links this success to a fostering of social connection — not, however, by fostering lyric communities, but by leading listeners to think about some you in their own lives. These researchers not only conclude that songs with second-person pronouns are more popular but also identify

a novel psychological mechanism by which second-person pronouns engage listeners. Songs with more second-person pronouns were liked more not because ‘you’ words directly addressed the audience as a protagonist or conveyed normative imperatives (possibilities considered in prior research) but because ‘you’ invoked another person in the listener’s mind. This supports suggestions that one of music’s fundamental functions is to foster social connection.55Grant Packard and Jonah Berger, ‘Thinking of You: How Second-Person Pronouns Shape Cultural Success’, Psychological Science, 31.4 (2020), pp. 397–407 <https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620902380>.

But in this study the choice offered to test subjects seems to have been whether listeners imagine the you to be someone whose hand the singer wants to hold, or whether listeners think of holding the hand of someone in their own lives.

‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ addresses a generalized you and urges all to ‘hold your head up high’, promoting what Grant Packard and Jonah Berger call ‘a normative imperative’. It seems likely that listeners and singers take it not as evoking someone else in their lives but as addressed to themselves and others. And the communal singing of the final lines, ‘Walk on, walk on | With hope in your heart, | And you’ll never walk alone’, would seem to induce the bonding experience of singing this to each other (to supporters who have suffered the adverse fortunes of their team), assuring one another that as fans ‘you’ll never walk alone’.

For me this is a strange case, because it is not a particular catchy tune, unlike, say, Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’, the song of the Boston Red Sox baseball fans but also sung at many other sporting events in the United States and elsewhere. There are many examples available on YouTube.66E.g. freddiejg, ‘Oz and Pitt Crew Singing Sweet Caroline’, YouTube, 30 September 2012 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdPb8rUZYiI> [accessed 24 August 2023]. Copyright considerations discourage extensive quotation (the complete text is easily found online), but shortly after the opening, the you (initially presumed to be Caroline) is introduced:

But then the song rises to a musical climax with

as singers reach out, touching, pointing, binding me and you together, involving all those singing in this community. The New York Times reports:

‘Sweet Caroline’ may seem like an odd anthem for sports fans. It’s a love song, and the lyrics (‘Good times never seemed so good!’) are sentimental. But there’s something about the way the bridge builds to a soaring chorus that always seems to lift spectators out of their seats.77Jacey Fortin, ‘Why Do English Soccer Fans Sing “Sweet Caroline”?’, New York Times, 11 July 2001 <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/sports/soccer/why-england-sweet-caroline-euro-2020.html> [accessed 24 August 2023].

Then the chorus itself encourages a ritualistic chanting:

After ‘Sweet Caroline’, everyone, even those not actually singing, gets to shout ‘oh, oh, oh’, in what seems an extra degree of involvement (not just singing the words of the song itself but embellishing); and then after ‘Good times never seemed so good’, the crowd can echo ‘so good, so good, so good’, which cannot but engender good fellow-feeling.

Like ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, which lacks these rousing moments of chanting that promote community, ‘Sweet Caroline’ evokes the possibility of solitude and trouble, albeit as something surpassed:

But the reference to a singular you gets eclipsed in the repetition later in this second and final stanza by ‘Hands, touching hands | Reaching out, touching me, touching you’, both projecting and reflecting community. ‘Sweet Caroline’ starts with references to the past, but in performance, with the participial phrases (‘touching hands | Reaching out, touching me, touching you’), the act of performing makes this a present event of bonding among us, despite the original reference of you to Caroline. In collective performance you may effectively come to mean us.

But the examples of crowds in stadiums singing or chanting seem rather a special case, with limited relevance to the solitary reading of a lyric poem. What happens there? When poems address you, does this work to foster lyric communities?

The simplest case might be prefatory uses, with their appeal to a community of readers who are supposed to share or might be persuaded to share not only the experience of the poem but certain attitudes. For instance, the opening poem of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal starts with a first-person plural:

Readers are invited to consider whether they are part of this universalizing we, whose forms (we, us, our) appear in the explicit declarations of the first eight stanzas, such as ‘C’est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!’ (The Devil holds the strings that move us!); for if a reader should resist inclusion in this hapless, sinful community, the final stanza, identifying the worst of our vices, throws down a challenge, claiming that the reader does belong after all. ‘In the infamous menagerie of our vices, | There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy!’:

Even a virtuous reader may not be well placed, having read the poem, to deny the knowledge the poem offers, without at least a bit of hypocrisy. Baudelaire’s strategy is unusual in the complex structure of its claim to induct readers into a community of addressees.

A different case is the opening sonnet of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, which sets the speaker apart from the audience addressed, while nonetheless seeking common ground:

Indicating that he knows he has been the subject of much gossip, he hints at the existence of two communities: one of readers who find his complaining aberrant and another of those who, knowing the trials of love, can pity and forgive.

But prefatory poems tend to address the reader explicitly and have a special liminal role, both part of the collection and outside it, as prologue.1010Often such work is done in a prologue in prose: Victor Hugo introduces Les Contemplations with ‘Helas! Quand je vous parle de moi, je vous parle de vous. Comment ne le sentez vous pas? Ah! insensé, qui crois que je ne suis pas toi!’ (Alas, when I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of you. How can you not see this? Ah, fool, who believe that I am not you!; Poésie, 3 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1972), i, p. 634; my translation). Within poetic collections there may still be explicit attempts to create community by addressing readers, as in Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’:

‘To You’ addresses readers necessarily unknown, boldly claiming intimacy:

A democratic American community of readers seems clearly the aim, but the more the poems claim to single out you alone, as below, the less well they seem to me to work.

The more they single you out, the more questions they raise (what about other readers?), even if one ignores the over-the-top moments, as in:

I’m tempted to conclude that the explicit effort to create community with the reader through address is counterproductive when it involves claims that so invite scepticism.

John Ashbery echoes something like Whitman’s gesture in the final poem of his collection Your Name Here:

I think his case is particularly interesting. Critics speak of the floating you in many of his poems — a you which might be the reader or an unnamed other, or the poet himself.1616Bonnie Costello, The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), notes that among Auden’s heirs, ‘John Ashbery’s floating pronouns, both “you”, and “we”, have received the most critical comment’ (p. 241). Bonnie Costello writes:

An unidentified ‘you’ inhabits the pages of Ashbery’s work, especially in the seventies, and critics have speculated variously on the role and nature of this ubiquitous, amorphous ‘other’, suggesting that the ‘you’ serves as a reimagined self, an erotic partner, a syntactic counterword. It serves, of course, all these functions; its importance lies in its ambiguity. […] Accepting the fruitful ambiguity of the second person pronoun, we find that Ashbery’s poetry is not only fictively addressed to another, but that at least one very concrete reification of ‘you’ is the actual reader.1717Bonnie Costello, ‘John Ashbery and the Idea of the Reader’, Contemporary Literature, 23.4 (1982), pp. 493–514 (pp. 494–95).

This seems the least that one can say: the you functions both within the representational space of the poem and outside it, in its relation to the reader. Ashbery himself remarks in an interview,

What I am trying to get at is a general, all-purpose experience — like those stretch socks that fit all sizes. Something which a reader could dip into without knowing anything about me, my history, or sex life, or whatever. […] I’m hoping that maybe someday people will see it this way, as trying to be the openest possible form, something in which anybody can see reflected his own private experiences without them having to be defined or set up for him.1818A. Poulin, ‘The Experience of Experience: A Conversation with John Ashbery’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 20.3 (1981), pp. 242–55 (p. 251).

In John Ashbery and You, John Vincent writes, Ashbery’s poetry

offers the reader a feeling of being addressed or accompanied even in the most forbidding terrain. The reader may finish a poem with no purchase on meaning or patterns but with a feeling of connection to it and the poet. Critics have been stumped about how Ashbery can write patently difficult poetry […] and generally frustrate a gentle reader’s desire for sense, but still hold an eager audience.1919John Vincent, John Ashbery and You (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), p. 145.

And he suggests that this you might be the answer. But this is a special sort of community — of those who are willing to go on reading Ashbery, I would say. I do feel myself part of this community, though I think in a sort of meta way: I like poems such as Ashbery’s ‘This Room’, from Your Name Here, which ends ‘Why do I tell you these things? | You are not even here’, perhaps less because I feel addressed, though I do, than because I like to think and write about this sort of address.2020John Ashbery, ‘This Room’, in Your Name Here, p. 3. I join a community of those who sometimes think or write about Ashbery.

Various recent books indicate a strong desire among critics for lyric communities — or at least a desire that lyrics can be said to contribute to a spirit of community. Let me just mention two: Walt Hunter’s Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization, and Bonnie Costello’s The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others. Focusing on contemporary anglophone poetry that engages with problems generated by globalization, Hunter argues ‘that poetry imagines powerful alternatives to the present’, and that

exhortation is one of the modes, stances, or registers of poetry that attempts to call forth a collective ‘we’, the ‘we’ of lives that in some cases lack a state at all or in other cases refuse to link their identities to an oppressive regime.2121Walt Hunter, Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), pp. 1, 15–16.

He explores poems where ‘the ecstatic, proleptic, and sometimes desperate calls to come together […] become the wishful image of a future in which the rejection of the global present is at one with the revolutionary songs that the poem sustains’.2222Ibid., p. 18. But the emphasis is always on the wishful, the hope that critiques of aspects of the global capitalist order might engender a spirit of community among those who suffer from these conditions, and he finds it hard to show how the poems he reads actually do this: we seem asked to take it on faith that the obscure poets he discusses ‘call a globalized “we” into existence, though not into a direct view’.2323Ibid., p. 88.

Bonnie Costello’s rich and astute study, on the other hand, focuses on W. H. Auden as public poet, but one highly suspicious of the didactic gestures in which he himself often indulged, as in his celebrated rejection of his famous line ‘We must love one another or die’.2424W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’, in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, ed. by Edward Mendelson, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), i: 1927–1939, pp. 375–77 (p. 377). In 1945 and 1950 editions of his poems, he omitted the stanza in his 1939 poem containing this line, and explained in a letter of 1957: ‘Between you and me, I loathe that poem. It is rhetorical in the worst sort of way and much too “pi”. I tried to save it by cutting out what seemed to me the falsest verse (It is simply not true that We must love one another or die. We must love one another and die.) But the cut doesn’t help, the whole poem has to be scrapped.’ See the notes in the edition cited (i, p. 779). ‘The problem for the modern poet’, Auden wrote, ‘as for everyone else to-day, is how to find or form a genuine community.’2525W. H. Auden, introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse, in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, ed. by Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997–2015), i: 1926–1938 (1997), pp. 430–37 (p. 436). Costello’s magisterial study of the complexities of attempts to write public poetry, by Auden, Wallace Stevens, George Oppen, and other modern poets, highlights for me the problems posed by that first-person plural pronoun, we, which so easily comes to seem presumptuous. ‘Can the poet construct a “we” that retains multiplicity within its choral force?’, Costello asks, and over a wide range of cases she explores ‘how the genre might propose or project open, reflective, splayed community, create a sense of potential in “us” that is not predicated on consensus, domination, or the mentality of the crowd’.2626Costello, Plural of Us, pp. 9, 225. ‘When the poem dramatizes its struggle with the personal, when it becomes interactive or self-questioning, the first person plural revitalizes civic poetry and animates the space of the common.’2727Ibid., p. 224. Poets cannot help but try to speak of us and our concerns, but the obstacles are considerable, and it may well be that the floating or undetermined you might often have an advantage in the business of plausibly positing community.

So far, all the cases adduced have presumed that the creation of communities is a good thing (the communities of European soccer fans have occasionally proved dangerous, but generally, fan communities offer harmless satisfactions of camaraderie); but while thinking about how poems addressed to a you might foster community by bringing in readers and reciters who feel addressed by the you, I received an unpublished paper by a former student, Sabine I. Gölz, of the University of Iowa, which offers a different take on the creation of community — an unfortunate or even nefarious community. Entitled ‘Millay Repairs Baudelaire’, her paper looks at Baudelaire’s famous ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ and Edna St Vincent Millay’s translation of it, which brings out the masculinist perspective into which Baudelaire’s poem inducts its readers.

The poem addresses a feminine tu:

And it invites readers to repeat this address. It serves, Gölz writes, as ‘a matrix for further iteration’, so we can ask

what does it model for us to repeat and what does it program for the culture where it circulates […]. Any repetition of the poem will orient its iterator-apprentices within the gendered-apostrophic force field of European literature like iron filings in a magnetic field. Each repetition will renew the call for her to go ‘là-bas’ and assimilate yet another iterator to the role of speaker.2929Sabine Gölz, ‘Millay Repairs Baudelaire’ (unpublished paper), pp. 5–7; a more recent version of the paper is included in the present volume.

She quotes Allen Grossman’s account of such poems, where

there is a self, and the beloved of that self, which always has a transcendental character ascribed to it, and a third — the third being the audience, the ratifier, the witness, and the inheritor of the drama of the loving relationship.3030Allen Grossman, The Sighted Singer (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 13.

Readers become ratifiers.

‘Caught in the spotlight of apostrophic address,’ Gölz writes, ‘the beloved fades from empirical existence, from person to poetic function.’ Making the apostrophized feminine other fade from empirical existence (‘Mon enfant, ma sœur’, identified only in relation to an imagined country; ‘là-bas’, which resembles her), ‘the apparatus confines its iterators in a bubble from which it becomes impossible to conceive of any she as a speaker.’ ‘The feminized addressee thus comes to operate as a mere hinge around which readers and iterators keep getting folded again and again into the perspective’ of utterance, that of the not-she. This has real-world consequences.

I cite this as a different take on the well-known problem of Baudelaire’s misogyny, interpreting it not merely as thematic but as producing, through the structure of address, a community, shall we say, that is induced to treat the feminized other from the perspective of the male speaker. Compared to other Baudelaire poems, this one seems pretty innocent, really — there is no sadism, and it evokes a desire that may not even be sexual — but it does remind one that the fostering of community by poetic structure might not always be a good thing.

Crucial in all these cases is the ambiguous functioning of you, which can implicate the reader, as addressee of the poem, but when the reader voices the poem, can also evoke others, singular or many, as well as serving as a general pronoun, a more colloquial version of one. The ease with which fans singing ‘Sweet Caroline’ in a stadium pass from the you that invokes Caroline herself to the you that leads them to point to the others around them is testimony to the flexibility of poetic language that is central to the possibility of community-formation. Costello writes that ‘poetic address can be considered as practice or paradigm, then, for social and ethical engagement’ because deictics and other pronouns can function on different planes, internal to the representation or external to it, in the interaction of author and audience. ‘Poetry moves freely among discursive orientations and shifts its object of implied reference from one framework to another.’3131Costello, Plural of Us, p. 66.[Costello, Bonnie] A perfect example is the conclusion of Ashbery’s ‘This Room’: ‘Why do I tell you these things? | You are not even here.’