Poetics, Fictionality, and the Lyric

Benjamin Hrushovski’s important contributions to a systematic poetics make what he calls an “Internal Field of Reference” a necessary feature of a literary work. How does this adaptation of the concept of fictional world work for the genre of the lyric poem? This essay argues that in taking fictionality as a norm, this framework produces a distorted model for the lyric and that one would do better to adopt Käte Hamburger’s distinction between fictional discourse and lyric and to treat lyric as fundamentally a nonmimetic, nonfictional discourse that makes claims about the world. Roland Greene’s conception of a foundational tension between fictional and ritualistic elements in the lyric is a useful corrective, but often in the lyric the ritualistic dominates the fictional and prevents it from being a necessary condition of literariness.