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Paper short abstract:

Who is the “I” in poetry? What is its relation with its environment? Izumi Shikibu (c.970-?)’s complex poem sequences as well as many of her poems themselves show that non-Western pre-modern literature can provide valuable insights on questions concerning the lyric enunciation and the lyric subject.

Paper long abstract:

Who is the speaker, the “I” in poetry? This question has been at the very heart of the long-running debate surrounding the nature and the definition of (mostly Western) lyric poetry.

Asking oneself what is the relation between the author and the speaker also implies reflecting upon the engagement of the poet with their environment. Is the outer world an extension, a projection of one’s inner world? On the contrary, is the heart of the poet moved by the objective outside world? From another perspective, if the speaker is akin to a character at the center of a narrative – be it one single poem or a sequence of poems – , is the environment a setting at the service of this very narrative?

Needless to say, I do not have the ambition nor the pretention to give an answer to these questions. That being said, it seems to me that some interesting insight could be gained through the study of Izumi Shikibu’s works (c.970-?). Indeed, her two poem collections Izumi Shikibu-shū and Izumi Shikibu-zokushū include various poem sequences, clearly conceived as structured thematic wholes more or less closely related to Izumi Shikibu’s personal experience. The complexity of these sequences raises the question of the speaker-author relation while also allowing us to reflect upon waka poetry’s representation of nature, which oscillates between literary poetic allusions and first-hand experience.

Furthermore, in numerous Izumi Shikibu’s poems, the “I” depiction is complex, ranging from self-objectivation (Kuboki Toshiko) to the projection of oneself in different times, spaces or even beings. Even when the “I” is one, it is frequent for the outer world to bleed into the inner world and vice-versa. These characteristics also emphasize the potential complexity of the relation between the poet, the lyric subject and their environment.

Through analyses of selected poem sequences and in-depth commentaries of single poems, this presentation aims to highlight the singularities of Izumi Shikibu’s many “I”s and provide a different perspective on questions concerning the lyric subject through the study of a non-Western example.

Keywords: Izumi Shikibu, Heian waka, lyric poetry, lyric subject, lyric enunciation