Clouds, Bubbles, Teardrops: Anne Finch's Poetics of Paraphrase

Abstract: Poetry is like water. This essay explores the workings of what M. H. Abrams calls "archetypal analogies" that organize how we understand poetry. It focuses on Anne Finch, who worked with and against received water figures: classical Parnassean streams, Denham's dream of a mimetic poetry flowing like a river, and expressive celebrations of poems like teardrops (anticipations of Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow"). Finch's "All is Vanity" (a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes) offers a rather unfamiliar account of poetry that makes paraphrase, re-saying, an exemplary practice. The poet is a chastened embodied self who needs to keep those word-sounds ever flowing.