Vision and the limits of language: The poetics of Blake and Hoelderlin

Poetry that identifies itself as visionary or inspired imitates forms of discourse originating in Biblical and Classical literature while laying claim to a unique act of communication with the reader. This study examines such poetry, primarily through the examples of William Blake and Friedrich Holderlin, to determine the relations it sets up between speaking subject, audience, and previous texts. The Romantics' interest in the creative potential for the poetic mind makes the account of divine creation in Genesis a popular model for representing a vision of the world-order through language. Book VII of Milton's Paradise Lost, Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Jerusalem, and Holderlin's lyrics "Wie wenn am Feiertage ...," "Patmos," and "Griechenland" implicitly revise Genesis and the mythology of creation while negotiating between the different modes of perception offered by seeing, hearing, and reading. Theories of performative language, as developed by J. L. Austin and John Searle, provide basic terminology for identifying the characteristics of visionary language in these texts. The aims of this study are to clarify the properties of a hitherto vague tradition of visionary poetry, to locate Blake and Holderlin in a continuity extending from Milton to twentieth-century writers such as James Joyce and Hermann Broch, and to suggest a productive avenue for collaboration between speech-act linguistics and literary criticism.