Dialogism and Monologism in “Song of Myself”

Bakhtin’s critique of poetry as a monologic speech genre has not fared well over the last forty years. 1 Most commentators have found that it contradicts Bakhtin’s own ideas about the dialogic nature of discourse, language, or the utterance. The general contention is that if discourse, language, or the utterance contains degrees and kinds of otherness (that is, if they are intrinsically dialogical), then poetry is dialogical, inasmuch as it can be analyzed as discourse, language, or utterance. Additionally, some critics have pointed to Bakhtin’s dialogic reading of Pushkin’s Romantic lyric “Parting” as evidence of a contradiction between Bakhtin’s theory and practice, while other commentators have proffered dialogic analyses of poetry as a reconsideration of Bakhtin’s perspective on poetry. Even more telling are the recent essays in Jacob Blevins’ anthology Dialogism and Lyric Self-Fashioning: Bakhtin and the Voices of a Genre , which ignore Bakhtin’s monologic assessment of poetry. Blevins himself provides a rationale for this omission: “Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism is an important, thoughtful understanding of the dynamic nature of language, both inside and outside of literary discourse, but Bakhtin simply miscalculated the dialogic potential of poetry” (16). 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.