Frank Lentricchia on the Poet as a unit of analysis...

Frank Lentricchia on the Poet as a unit of analysis...

“To invoke an agent called "the poet" as creator of a corpus is to invoke a subject who always contained and expressed it all, so that those temporal distinctions of career ("early," "middle," and "late") are truly gratuitous— they make no difference. Not even "career," in this interpretive context, makes much sense since the term suggests a determinate act of will to shape a life, to set an ordered narrative in motion and thereby bring your life into control [into art] by making it a story.  “The poet" so invoked as an originator is a necessary fiction (we have to invoke an individual at some point), yet at some other level he must be real [“Wallace Stevens” after all is the name is the name of a person who was born, went to Harvard, liked his mother better than his father, married, worked for an insurance company and loved it, often took vacations in Florida alone, listened to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera House, did not did not get a divorce, made a lot of money, died of cancer, and maybe converted on his deathbed if you want to believe the nuns who attended him at the end, which I do.” [Ariel and the Police 15-16].