Lucan/The Word at War

there is a word — which bears a sword — can pierce an armed man it hurls its barbed syllables — and is mute again where it fell — the saved will tell — on patriotic day some epauletted brother — gave his breath away Dickinson (c. 1858) your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tarnara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts Calvino (1979) 1.1. Since ‘World War War 2’ the study of Lucan's rhetoric has made successful, if sporadic and contested, advances on many fronts; much remains to be done for his poetic. It is likely that the ‘unassuming’ exegetical form of attention traditionally represented in classical scholarship by the former has favoured its development: you may identify a crazy (ab)use of, say, metalepsis without committing yourself to a particular valuation of a text; whereas the axiomatically enthusiastic valuation embodied in the study of poetics must soon come hard up against the trench-lines of hierarchies of sensibility and taste. Just how good is Lucan — I mean, as ‘a poet’? The often unspoken gloss is nearly always the (sub)agenda (The answer is, still: ‘ Quite good: Silver .’). Those who have steadied their sights have made out a poet's design, a fight to achieve a strong identity over against his inheritance, working through and against the traditional battery of schemata.