Knowing Language: The Poetics of Epistemology in Jan Zwicky, Paul Muldoon, and Geoffrey Hill

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the poetics of epistemology in the works of Jan Zwicky (1955-), Paul Muldoon (1951-), and Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016), three contemporary poets who engage epistemology by way of diverse interdisciplinary proxies. Principally, my dissertation shows that in Zwicky, Muldoon, and Hill, poetry is not representative as a knowledge-producing discourse but is instead meta-epistemological: as a cultural artefact of language that is exemplary for the way it self-reflexively expresses epistemological themes (thinking, thought, knowledge, etc.), poetry calls into question the stability of linguistic meaning by challenging the epistemological assumptions and rhetorical commonplaces of other discourses on knowing—especially philosophy (Zwicky), history (Muldoon), and theology (Hill)—discourses whose epistemological foundations are based on a language-as-knowledge-producing model.

For Zwicky, the paradigm of “lyric philosophy” informs and is informed by the poem’s capacity as a phenomenological gestalt, where poetry’s knowing occurs in a matrix of linguistic resonances. Gestalt insight in Zwicky’s work relies for its rhetorical force on the lyric integration of linguistic elements rather than on language’s formal logical procedures. Muldoon’s framework for poetic knowing—and not-knowing, and un-knowing—is the result of an aesthetics of encyclopedic reference, etymological punning, and intertextual allusion deployed in the form of riddles. As a locus of facts, data, and information, knowing in Muldoon’s poetry is contingent on the play and ply of both the locally synchronic and the intertextually diachronic aspects of the language used to structure it. These riddling dynamics are indefinitely played out in Muldoon’s work, where reference and ambiguity as competing linguistic forces together constitute an interminable weaving and unweaving of epistemological multiplicities. In Hill’s work, knowing is disclosed negatively through a variety of apophatic tropes: combined with an aesthetics of theological sublimity as well as the ethical demand for responsible language, Hill’s poetry expresses knowing as an apophatic epistemological mystery.

Poems accomplish this interdisciplinary thinking about knowing through their resistance to the rhetorics of representation, thematization, and closure, all of which are central features of epistemological discourses that work to reveal, establish, or reinforce truth claims. In Zwicky, Muldoon, and Hill, poetry complicates, problematizes, and resists the ontological simplifications implied by the language-as-knowledge-producing model of epistemological discourse. By exploring the paradigmatically gestalt, riddling, and apophatic qualities of poetry, this dissertation provides insight into the contingencies of linguistically-derived truth, offering a view of poetry not as an expression of knowledge but as “knowing language”.