The object of desire in lyric poetry: some considerations on sublimation
Abstract
Sublimation is an idea often used to give a psychoanalytic interpretation of artistic creativity. Focusing on the lyric speaker within the poem and considering the text as a mise-en-scène of poetic creation, the paper intends to investigate why sublimation could not be the right key to understanding the phenomenon. The subject’s dynamics, in modern poetry, show themselves as a continuous failure in the repeated attempt to possess the object. The speaker’s affective and cognitive desire is produced and constantly renewed by the impossibility of possessing the object (above all in its representation). But it is only in such a gap that the subject can exists. In order to feel desire, there should be an illusion of possession and representation. Subject and object create each other in lyric poem, and the former comes to coincide with the desire for the latter, it does not exist outside that desire.
Since lyric poetry shows itself as the unfolding of a subject that voices itself and is always involved in an object relation, it can be a privileged field of investigation for this kind of phenomena. Two poets will be taken into consideration: Thibaut de Champagne, a late trouvère who summons up the Provençal tradition, and Charles Baudelaire, one of the modern poets that have most deeply investigated the reality lack of sense.
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