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THE TITLE TO THE POEM, By Anne Ferry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. 314 S39.50.
In his 1965 essay "Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry," Geoffrey Hartman noted that "I have found no study of the titling of poems." Now, at last, Anne Ferry has largely filled that gap, and while she leaves some work for the rest of us, one can hardly imagine a study of poem titles done with a more elegant organization, a more thorough web of connections, and with more insights into individual poems and poets.
The field of poem titles-even if one limits oneself to poetry in English-is so immense that a major problem for any scholar/critic is what to include and how to organize it. There can seem to be no end to types of titles (the entry on titles in the Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms lists scores of them) . Ferry's brilliant but simple solution is based on the fundamental fact that "the title's presence presupposes a reader," and that the title purports to say something about the poem; it claims a presentational, interpretive authority over the poem. Thus, Ferry's punning title: The Title to tie Poem (not The Title of the Poem), which refers notjust to the title's authority over the poem, but to titling as a claim of authority: by someone who owns a copy of the poem, or who possesses information about its authorship or the circumstances of its composition. The first six chapters are based on six kinds of questions "a reader might ask about the poem, which the title anticipates and purports to answer." Part I on "Ownership and Self-Presentation" contains chapters framed by the questions "Who Gives the Title" and "Who Has the Title"; Part II, "Interpretive Fictions," bv "Who 'Says' the Title" and "Who 'Hears' the Title"; Part III, "Authoritative Hierarchies," by "What Kind the Poem Belongs To" and "What the Poem Is `About."' The last part, "Undermining Titles," includes two chapters on titles that seem to deny the title's conventional presentational, interpretive authority, "Quotations in the Title Space" and "Evasions of the Title Space."
The subsections within each chapter are divided by type (e.g., "The 'Supposed' I" and "Proper Names") or, more often, by a combination of type...