How to Do Things with Characters: Lyric Poetry (After) Theory

This essay explores the concept of characters in lyric poetry––a textual function for which we still lack a reliable theoretical model tailored to the distinct nature of the genre. Responding to recent approaches that frame lyric characters through narratological and transgeneric lenses, this paper advances a “character-system theory” that locates the authorial book form as the dynamic site were characters are constructed. Within this framework, characters are treated as spatial textual entities defined by property traits, performative acts, and the function(s) they fulfill within the collection. To develop this model, the article first addresses historical and theorical discussions on lyric poetry, characters, authoriality, and the book form, advocating for a transtextual understanding of the lyric genre. Second, it tests this methodology through a close reading of Guido Gozzano’s The Colloquies (1911). Focusing on the characters that appear in opening texts, the analysis examines how their positioning within the collection and their syntagmatic textual relations—with one another and with the lyric subject—shape their overall characterization. On this basis, the essay establishes formal criteria for identifying lyric characters, on the one hand, and demonstrates how they contribute to the lyric subject’s self-fashioning and to the book’s structural and aesthetic coherence, on the other. Finally, while the analysis centers on modern authorial collections, this theory proposes a transtextual model for the study of lyric across literary history, with potential applications to authorial books ranging from classical and medieval up to early modern and (post-)Romantic book forms.