The Space of the Litany in Contemporary Poetry

Abstract

In recent research special attention has been paid to theocentric space-time as a cosmological principle that explains the enumerative character of the traditional litany. It is, indeed, no accident that the genre gained popularity during the ascendancy of Neoplatonism, according to which geography of the visible world is misleading as all the diversity of earthly and celestial creations somehow springs up from a divine monad. However, a question arises: to what extent the ancient assumptions are still relevant in the 20th- and 21st-century poetic litanies of different countries? This essay argues that in the poems by Juan-Eduardo Cirlot, Richard Eberhart, Frantiešek Halas, Anna Kamieńska, Desanka Maksimović, Charles Peguy, Giovanni Raboni, Aurelia Thiegi, and others, the litanic enumeration almost automatically implies concentric space-time, a fact which sometimes is additionally highlighted by an anaphoric order of spatial pronouns, such as “here,” “where,” “in,” “over” etc. At the same time, however, the name of God is only sporadically mentioned which means that the space’s dependence on the single source of existence is announced through the genre itself rather than through words. Finally, the essay also seeks to explain the surprising stability and durability of the genre semantics. As it is illustrated by the poems of Anna Kamieńska, Audre Lorde, and Kazimierz Wierzyński, when the divine monad is expelled from the central position of a litany’s universe and replaced by a human being, the genre resists — as it were — the attempts at questioning the theocentric concept of its space-time. Since the litanic semantics is expressed by formal rather than verbal means, a poet turns out to have no tools to contradict the content of the genre and the only way to accentuate one’s particular standpoint is to initiate a dialogue between what is said in words and what is said through the genre.