Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on December 7, 2007
Literary Imagination 2008 10(1):77-93; doi:10.1093/litimag/imm113
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Stellification: An Essay on Poetry in General
*Stephen Burt, Associate Professor of English, Harvard University.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
I take as my initial text these sentences of W.B. Yeats’, from his 1914 "Reveries over Childhood and Youth":
I followed the career of a certain professional runner for months, buying papers that would tell me if he had won or lost. I had seen him described as "the bright particular star of American athletics," and the wonderful phrase had thrown enchantment over him. Had he been called the particular bright star, I should have cared nothing for him. I did not understand the symptom for years after.1
Of what might Yeats’ attachment have proven a symptom? How might that attachment—as Yeats implies—have predicted his vocation for poetry? What might it say about what poetry, for Yeats or for anyone else, is or does?
A young reader who cares for "bright particular star" but who would not have cared for "particular bright star," cares about the sounds and arrangements of