Poetry's Knowing Ignorance by Joseph Acquisto (review)

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance by Joseph Acquisto
• Samuel Martin

Joseph Acquisto, Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, 213 pp.

The poet and critic Jean-Michel Maulpoix, one of the authors whose work is given close attention in Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance, draws a sharp distinction between the writer and the academic. “The former writes starting from himself, [from] seeking and ignorance taken on,” he says, “whereas the professor requires at every moment sure references and well-established knowledge.” [End Page 219] It is one of the signal features of Joseph Acquisto’s admirable book that the author manages to combine the best traits of both: on the one hand, a searching quality and a wariness of facile or rigid conclusions, and on the other, an evident familiarity with his material that inspires the fullest confidence.

Acquisto sets out to trace a line of thought in and about French poetry over the past two centuries, a line that has its seeds in German Romanticism and that consists in seeing ignorance not as a defect for poetry to overcome, but rather as a generative force, perhaps even a necessary condition for lyric in the modern age. After an introduction that deftly circumscribes a field of inquiry whose very nature is to resist being pinpointed, Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance proceeds with a handful of case studies, most of which are in the form of pairings. Chapter 1 shows how Baudelaire’s writing allows for a more nuanced conception of knowledge—and hence of poetry—than one finds in Hugo’s verse; Chapter 2 probes the unsuspected suggestiveness of Novalis’s claim that “poetry is poetry,” and leans in particular on various assertions by Paul Valéry; Chapter 3 finds Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot advancing kindred notions of poetry as a form of non-savoir that is constantly positing its own impossibility; Chapter 4 takes Philippe Jaccottet and Jean-Michel Maulpoix as exemplars of a distinctly modern poetry that emerges, not in spite of doubt, but within and because of it. The final chapter, meanwhile, opens out onto a broader reflection on the shared precariousness of poetry and community. Here the author mainly relies on the philosophical writings of Jacques Rancière and Jean-Luc Nancy, while also tightening the Bataille-Blanchot knot from two chapters earlier.

Acquisto’s book is based on the premise that since the early 19th century, “poetry” has become an increasingly amorphous concept that has ceased to inhere solely in actual poems, thereby intensifying what he calls poetry’s “definitional impulse.” This accounts for the paradoxical fact that a book whose apparent focus is poetry should contain relatively little in the way of recognizable poetic texts (not to mention traditional verse forms, given that the half-chapter on Baudelaire, for example, concentrates on his prose poems rather than on Les Fleurs du Mal). Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance is less about the substance than about the idea—or, better still, ideas—of poetry. It nonetheless remains firmly grounded in other writers’ texts, even when those texts themselves take the form of commentary. Acquisto is a superb reader throughout, subtle and intuitive, with a knack for clarity that never gives in to oversimplification.

The textual exegeses hold up on their own terms, though one could be forgiven for occasionally wishing that they were framed by a sturdier context. [End Page 220] Emphasizing the affinities between ideas rather than between literary oeuvres or movements need not have precluded a bit more overt historicization, especially in a study that follows a more or less chronological trajectory. The scattering of citations from Valéry’s prose in Chapter 2, for instance, come without any indication of the writings or moments in which they occur, and for them to lead into a discussion in the next chapter of a figure so radically different from Valéry as Georges Bataille is surprising, to say the least. In this regard, one perhaps ought to see the final chapter on the tenuousness of community as, among other things, a metacommentary on what has come before; indeed, Acquisto compellingly unpacks Jean-Luc Nancy’s characterization of community as something that depends, like poetry...