ABSTRACT
Through its transgressiveness, lyric self-sensation and self-auscultation is also the means of connecting us with our most original and salvific sources. Lyric language was conceived of as essentially theological at the traditionally projected “beginning” of poetic creation in Orpheus. Knowledge, human and divine—ultimately knowledge of the real as a whole—remains the substance of Dante’s lyric experience. The official wedding of lyric rapture to wisdom takes place at the climax of Purgatory in the Earthly Paradise. The numerous modern attempts to recover poetry as a higher, natural/supernatural knowledge, notably among English and German Romantics, are “Orphic” in this broad sense. The lyric poetics of the Paradiso presuppose that the plenum is supremely pleasurable and that it can be obtained in language that exceeds and implodes semiotic structures in the direction of a non-representational immediacy resembling that of music. Lyric opens and reaches toward a dimension of transcendence by virtue of exceeding all merely human conventions.
