서정시의 시간, 그리고 치유

Temporality and the Healing Power of the Lyric

My essay reads poetry as a site of resuscitation based on the analysis of the relation between temporality and the lyric. I suppose that temporality is the fundamental horizon of meaning in human life and one of the most appropriate perspectives for the investigation of the therapeutic power of the lyric. The traditional view of the lyric as a genre deficient of time is unsuitable to the apparent flexibility of the genre and fails to explain how it conjures up its healing power. Drawing on the methodology of narratology, I propose that the lyric transforms individual incidents and existents into a meaningful sequence from a specific perspective and presents it from a particular point of time. I analyze three lyric poems of William Carlos Williams, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and William Wordsworth as examples of simultaneous mode, prospective mode, and retrospective mode respectively. They demonstrate that the lyric employs a wide variety of temporal forms and constitutes its voice, focus, and events in the act of resuscitating the lyric subject. Its causal and syntagmatic string enables the reader as well as the lyric subject to overcome a crisis and negotiate a necessary transition. For this reason, I conclude that the lyric as a temporal genre provides significant insight into the human psyche and behavior, and enlivens and empowers us who are suffering from various hardships and traumatic experiences in the pandemic era.