As it turns out, “love is fierce” is probably one of the central themes — or styles. “The phrase must be changed” as the style must always be in flux, the insistent conditional here suggesting both the impossibility and necessity of achieving its hope: the poem simply ends with all its strands dangling. For Matthews, ironies pile up upon ironies, and the most troublesome events are given an ironic undercutting, as if the speaker were saying to himself that it is all right, that the pain is something given, that the language is something we can give. This is precisely the tone of his Blues If You Want, the title itself suggesting a sort of undercutting that perhaps finds its source in the inventive lyrics of the blues. In one poem, for instance, Homer’s seeing eye dog tells us the comically dim side of his master in street talk. Matthews has found an Horatian middle style, and indeed, Horace, especially the Horace of the epistles, is an important influence on the urbane, witty and finally deeply moving style Matthews balances between pain and laughter.

If every style is another world, as Wallace Stevens implies, then every good poet partially makes the world over again in the likeness of his or her own style.

I might have called the poets described in this essay language poets. Of course, I am aware that there is a group of poets who assemble under that rubric, but my sense of them is that they tend to reduce a rather complex engagement with the relationship between language and its referents in Derrida, Barthes, Bahktin, Lacan and others to a surface disturbance of style to the detriment of referentiality altogether. The stylistic strategies we have examined do not destroy referentiality, only rethink how it is presented. We would do well to remember that there has been a continuing crisis in the history of Western thought concerning the status of poetic style and feeling based on metaphor, and a certain autonomy of language. This goes back as far as Plato’s distrust of the written word as opposed to speech in Phaedrus, and his desperate, failed arguments against the arbitrary nature of meaning in language in Craytalus.

Poets exploit the crisis in order to manipulate images and metaphors that call into question the neat philosophic categories for truth and feeling. For Plato, they are as dangerous as the sophists because they remind him of how much we live in a world of words. Politically, he had no choice but to either ban the poets from the Republic or to relegate them to the realm of the nearly unconscious rhapsodes who barely understood what they uttered as mouthpieces of the gods. Centuries later, Descartes in his Discourse on Method, feared that metaphors interrupted his desire to begin purely, to see the world as if for the first time, since metaphor refers to what has already been there. Pascal revels in the uncertainty we suffer when we apply language to feelings, images and objects, opting for what he calls a “wise ignorance.” Later still, Nietzsche asserted that truth is simply a “mobile army of metaphors, anthropomorphisms,” a tenuous concept that itself seems to be the function of poetic metaphor. The problem of language, the problem with language is what draws philosophy and poetry together under the name of style. It is an issue that needs further exploration, especially today with the influential theory of deconstructionists and so-called “language” poets, our attention to problems of translation, and the increased attention to political concerns in poetry. If every style is another world, as Wallace Stevens implies, then every good poet partially makes the world over again in the likeness of his or her own style.