Subject definition and general semantics

 i.6.1.“À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien // Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin” (“In the end you are weary of this old world // Shepherdess o Eiffel Tower the herd of bridges is bleating this morning”). Thus opens Guillaume Apollinaire’s (1966, 7) “Zone,” from Alcools [1913], widely regarded as a landmark of literary modernity: it breaks with metrical tradition, discards punctuation, collages heterogeneous images and registers, unsettles chronology through abrupt temporal disjunctions, and installs the urban present at the center of lyric expression. Yet for all its innovations, its opening stanzas each turn on address: first a mysterious “you” (tu), then a slightly humorous use of the vocative ô that hails not a person but one of the most emblematic monuments of modern Paris.

 i.6.2.Indeed, lyric address, often associated with earlier poetic traditions – especially in the form of apostrophe, the trope by which the poem turns its speech an absent or inanimate addressee (examined below as a principal instrument of lyric address) – persists into the self-aware age of modernism and extends beyond it into the present. One might even argue that alongside the central question of the lyric “I,” to which much attention has rightly been devoted (see for instance Rabaté 1996 and Enunciative Instance in Lyric Poetry), stands the lyric “you” – merely one among many possible textual and contextual markers of address – raising an equally intricate constellation of critical issues. To grasp why these issues matter, it is worth pausing on what “address” in lyric actually entails.

 i.6.3.Address in a poem occurs when the lyric subject directs a message to an addressee: whomever or whatever is designated by the pronouns of address and/or the person primarily meant to hear or read the poem. In practice, it is often marked by the use of certain pronouns – most prominently the second person singular or plural, but also the first person plural, or even some third person phrases (e.g. “the reader”) – together with verbal forms or moods such as the imperative, optative, or hortative, which presuppose or solicit a response from an addressee. Yet address in lyric is more than a matter of grammar or the occasional presence of vocatives and pronouns. As William Waters (2003, 5) has argued, it is “the meridian of all discourse, the plumb line without which pragmatics, and so language, are strictly unthinkable”. Unlike ordinary communication, however, poetry suspends relationship in order to present it: even when a poem appears to approximate daily speech, it becomes an artifact that looks beyond any single hearer (Waters 2012a, 7). This explains why address in poetry is often underspecified, lacking the contextual cues of ordinary discourse and therefore compelling readers to ask who or what is being addressed.

 i.6.4.At its broadest, lyric address spans a range of possible orientations. A poem may speak to a determinate interlocutor – a contemporary such as a lover, friend, or patron – where communication remains imaginable. In some cases, the poem implicitly or explicitly positions the reader as its addressee, whether directly or by positioning them as an implied recipient. It may also become reflexive, the “you” folding back onto the speaker and turning the poem into a form of interior dialogue – a mode of self-address. Finally, lyric frequently turns toward non-responsive or so-called (“impossible” Culler 2015) or “invisible” (Vendler 2005) interlocutors – absent, dead, inanimate, imagined, divine, or abstract entities – foregrounding the act of address itself rather than any prospect of response.

 i.6.5.These orientations are further complicated by the ways in which address is structured. A poem may sustain a more indeterminate or shifting address, in which the identity of the addressee hovers between several possibilities, including the reader, a generalized “you,” or the speaker themselves. In other cases, it operates through a triangulated structure, addressing one figure while ultimately reaching another.

 i.6.6.Let us consider Apollinaire’s opening lines, which each exemplify distinct modalities of lyric address. The in medias res effect of the first one-line stanza, “À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien” (“In the end you are weary of this old world”), leaves the reader wondering whether the second-person pronoun “you” (tu) is used impersonally (as “one”); as a direct address to the reader, or a broader one including the reader; or as a form of self-address. The latter strategy, which poets often adopt to move beyond soliloquy, is formulated in an oft-cited tercet from Antonio Machado’s Nuevas canciones: “Con el tú de mi canción/ no te aludo, compañero;/ ese tú soy yo” (Machado 1924, 120); “With the you in my song/ I’m not referring to you, my friend;/ that you is me”). This dynamic can acquire another dimension if we follow Helen Vendler’s significant claim that reading lyric involves stepping into the position of its first-person speaker. If, as she argues, “the lyric is a script written for performance by the reader – who, as soon as he enters the lyric, is no longer a reader but rather an utterer, saying the words of the poem in propia persona, internally and with proprietary feeling” (Vendler 1995, xi), in that case, self-address becomes a vehicle for guiding the reader through a form of introspection.

 i.6.7.It should be noted that such ambiguity in address has become one of poetry’s characteristic resources, one that poets have not merely accepted but actively exploited, as the lyric “you” sustains shifting possibilities of orientation through the interplay of linguistic features and readerly experience. Yet the implications of address can extend beyond a direct relationship between addresser and addressee – even when the identity of that addressee remains shifting or undetermined. In the opening of his chapter on “Lyric Address” in Theory of the Lyric, Jonathan Culler (2015) argues that lyric operates less through direct communication than through indirection. He calls “triangulated address” the way a poet appeals to an audience – the presumed beneficiaries of lyric communication, most often listeners or readers – by addressing or seeming to address someone or something else, and identifies this as “the root-form of presentation for lyric” (Culler 2015, 186). Love poems represent the clearest instance of triangulated address: while ostensibly directed to a beloved, they are in fact performed for an audience. Even when a historical love relationship lies behind them, poets often choose the poem form precisely because it allows for indirection, reorganizing the dynamics of communication. Drawing on the vocabulary of linguistic pragmatics (Levinson 1983, 61–73), Waters (2003, 19n2) has suggested a distinction between the addressee named within the poem and the intended “target” of the utterance; yet lyric address often resists such precision, as its orientation may remain fluid or diffuse.

 i.6.8.The seed for such an idea – that indirection lies at the heart of lyric – can be found in John Stuart Mill’s 1833 essay “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” where he famously claimed that “Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard” (Mill 1981, 348). For Mill, this meant that poetry was not addressed to an audience but constituted a private utterance made public, an utterance whose apparent addressee is incidental. This notion travelled widely and resurfaces a century later in T. S. Eliot’s 1953 essay “The Three Voices of Poetry”, where Eliot argues that even when a poem seems directed to a single person – such as a love poem – it is in fact written to be overheard. He goes so far as to dismiss as an “illusion” (Eliot 1957, 90) the idea that a poet could speak to one person only, insisting that “part of our enjoyment of great poetry is the enjoyment of overhearing words which are not addressed to us” (Eliot 1957, 100). Later critics developed Mill’s account in markedly different ways.

 i.6.9.Jonathan Culler (1977), in his essay “Apostrophe,” shifted the emphasis by arguing that address to unhearing entities, which render the structure of triangulated address most visible, is not a marginal feature but constitutive of lyric itself. This point, however, deserves some qualification. As Burt (2016, 424–25) has noted in a survey of recent lyric theory, critics have proposed a wide range of features as defining of the lyric, among which apostrophe emerges as only one possibility rather than its single defining trait. Waters (2003) noted that both Mill and Culler tend to reduce the complexity of lyric address, since they leave little room to distinguish between the different kinds of addressees a poem may invoke. His work instead points to the need to account for the full range of communicative possibilities in lyric, including those directed toward actual or imaginable hearers, rather than only the absent or impossible, and thus to consider how lyric address may operate across a spectrum ranging from direct interpersonal address to more indeterminate or mediated configurations. This broader perspective resists reducing lyric to a single communicative model and instead foregrounds the variability of its modes of address.

 i.6.10.In her own terminology, Helen Vendler (2005, 1–2) distinguishes between “horizontal” address to “visible” (if absent) listeners – human interlocutors known to the speaker – and “vertical” address to “invisible listeners,” figures – divine, imagined, or dead – that lie beyond ordinary empirical presence. Crucially, however, Vendler (2005, 8) argues that even in such cases poets tend to re-establish a form of “lyric intimacy,” effectively reconverting vertical address into horizontal relation by importing textual markers of closeness into the apostrophic gesture. As she writes: “The intrinsic and constitutive ability of the lyric to create intimacy is perhaps most striking when the object of intimacy can never be humanly seen or known, yet can be humanly addressed. In such a case, the unseen other becomes an unseen listener, anchoring the voice of the poet as it issues into the otherwise vacant air” (Vendler 2005, 4). Furthermore, if we follow another of Vendler’s recurring assertions – that in reading a lyric we assume the role of its first-person speaker (Vendler 1995, xi; 1997b, x–xi) – then any address in the poem (to a “you,” God, the dead, etc.) is not merely received but re-performed: taken on vocally and mentally as the reader inhabits the poem’s “I,” rather than reaching the reader only by ricochet, as in the models proposed by Mill or Culler. Vendler’s account thus complicates models that treat indirection or apostrophe as constitutive of lyric, by showing how even the most seemingly “vertical” forms of address remain oriented toward interpersonal relation.

 i.6.11.This brings us back to Apollinaire’s second one-line stanza, where the poem turns to the Eiffel Tower in direct apostrophe: “Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin” (“Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower the herd of bridges is bleating this morning”). Since the Tower cannot plausibly be taken as an interlocutor, the address inevitably signals another “target,” to use Waters’ terms, or, in Culler’s, the reader as the third vertex of a triangulated structure. From Vendler’s perspective, however, the scene is recast altogether: in performing the poem, the reader assumes the position of the speaking “I” and addresses the Eiffel Tower. In any case, by highlighting the impossibility of standard communication, the apostrophe draws attention to the act of addressing itself. Apollinaire underscores this reflexive dimension through his ironic choice of the vocative ô – already somewhat archaic in 1913 – and through the dissonant use of pastoral imagery in an unmistakably urban, modern setting. But what is gained from this form of mediated address, and from dwelling on a modality of address that is so clearly bound to fail? Does the poet not risk exposing one of the craft’s most obvious limitations, or even courting ridicule by showing that, for all its grandiloquence, poetic speech is powerless to effect response? As Waters (2003, 2–3) has noted, when lyric turns to unhearing entities, the gesture of address, apparently stripped of any efficacy, may seem only marginal to the poem’s true concerns.

 i.6.12.And yet it is precisely through the seeming futility of address that lyric reveals some of its constitutive features. Baudelaire claimed that “l’hyperbole et l’apostrophe sont des formes de langage qui lui sont non seulement des plus agréables, mais aussi des plus nécessaires” (Baudelaire [1861] 1976, 162; “hyperbole and apostrophe are the two forms of language which are not only most necessary but most pleasing in lyric”). They are both illustrated in Apollinaire’s second line: there is no denying that expecting the Eiffel Tower to listen and potentially respond is a highly hyperbolic demand, nothing less than a demand that the universe hear the speaker. By dramatizing the impossibility of reply, the poem shifts attention to the act of calling itself. Such gestures help fashion a poetic ethos in which the poet appears able to address nature or supernatural forces, and perhaps even expect a response (Culler 2011, 77). Several theorists have suggested that in doing so the poet signals continuity with an older tradition that conceives of poetry as a form of magic and ritual invocation. In Post-Petrarchism, Roland Greene (1991) foregrounds the ritualistic impulse as one of the central forces at work in the lyric sequence. What address and ritual have in common is that their efficacy does not depend on being heard. The sun, the rain, the dead, animals, or any inanimate object, whether the Eiffel Tower or a shoe, cannot respond; as in ritual, the voice in a poem calls above all in order to be calling. As Culler (2015, 186–88) notes, the less ordinary the addressee, the more the ritualistic dimension of the poem is accentuated. Indeed, speaking to a pet may not resonate in quite the same way as calling upon the clouds and begging them for rain. Roman Jakobson described this subcategory of address as “magical,” linking it to the conative function of language – when speech seeks to elicit a response. In his words, the magic or incantatory function of language aims at the “conversion of an absent or inanimate ‘third person’ into an addressee of a conative message” (Jakobson 1987, 68).

 i.6.13.Different etymological traces point to the proximity between lyric and magic – a proximity most clearly evident in the use of address, and especially in the invocation of impossible addressees. In Latin, the word vates designates both poet and prophet, underscoring the ancient association of poetry with inspired or divinatory speech. Likewise, carmen means both “song” and “spell” or “charm,” a reminder that lyric utterance has long been conceived as performative, capable of enchantment as much as of expression. The notion of “charm,” in particular, has retained the attention of critics such as Northrop Frye (1957; "Charms in Riddles" in Frye 1976, 123–147) and Thomas Greene (1991), who treat it as a theoretical hinge between an anthropological account of invocation and a poetics of magic in which address plays a central role. Both see in “charm poetry” one of the principal orientations of the lyric tradition.

 i.6.14.Apostrophe may be thought of as the instrument of address – the figure that allows lyric to perform its calling – and it is no coincidence that it has long been tied to the ritual or incantatory dimension of poetry. Etymologically, apostrophe derives from the Greek apostrephein, “to turn away,” a meaning that has persisted across languages. In classical rhetoric, as Quintilian defines it, apostrophe is a diversion of our words to address “a person other than the judge” (Institutio Oratoria 4.1.63), one of several devices meant to lend an argument greater point and vehemence. The French rhetorical tradition preserves this sense of interruption or diversion. As Nicole Ricalens-Pourchot (2003, 40–41) notes, apostrophe consists in turning away from the main argument to address someone directly – often to admonish, entreat, or exhort. This address may be directed toward real or absent persons, to abstractions or ideas, or, in some cases, to the reader or listener: that is, both possible and impossible interlocutors. When the object of address is an idea or thing, personification – and sometimes prosopopoeia, two tropes closely allied with apostrophe – intervene to make the act of address possible.

 i.6.15.In English literary criticism however, apostrophe has acquired a partly different, and in some respects narrower, meaning. It has come to designate not merely a rhetorical diversion but the figure of address to what is absent, dead, or inanimate. Culler (2015, 212) captures this modern usage when he writes that apostrophe “denotes address to someone or something other than the actual audience,” especially “abstractions, inanimate objects, or persons absent or dead”. Some critics, such as J. Douglas Kneale (1999) and L. M. Findlay (1985), have argued that Culler’s account stretches the term beyond its classical and early modern definitions. Kneale, for instance, maintains that apostrophe always depends on the presence of an original listener, a turning of speech to a new person rather than the originary act of address itself. To call Shelley’s “O wild West Wind” or Blake’s “O Rose, thou art sick!” apostrophes, he suggests, confuses them with exclamation (exclamatio) or personification. Barbara Johnson, however, offers a theoretical synthesis that bridges these positions. For her, apostrophe “involves the direct address of an absent, dead, or inanimate being by a first-person speaker,” and is therefore “both direct and indirect”: it dramatizes the structure of address by turning aside from “straight speech” into a fictionalized I/thou relation (Johnson 1986, 30). Waters similarly cautions against treating apostrophe and address as interchangeable terms. While some critics have used apostrophe broadly to include poetic speech not only to unhearing entities but also to the listening beloved, friend, or patron, he claims that “the narrower term is more useful” (Waters 2012b, 61). Apostrophe, in other words, should designate one specific mode within the larger field of poetic address. Yet Waters also warns against rigid taxonomy, suggesting that it is “best to think in terms of prototypes rather than of sharp-edged categories.”

 i.6.16.If apostrophe marks one of the most distinctive powers of lyric, it also exposes one of its enduring vulnerabilities: the risk of poetic pretension, or what Culler (2015, 190) calls “a palpable embarrassment, because it is a figure of all that is most radical, pretentious, and mystificatory in the lyric”. The overt theatricality of addressing what cannot respond can make the poem appear self-conscious or inflated, inviting the suspicion that its grandeur conceals an anxiety about authenticity. By presuming to address winds, mountains, gods, or abstractions, the poet assumes a “vatic stance” that both asserts and exposes poetic power. The risk of pretension lies in the uneasy balance between the grandeur of the claim and skepticism about poetry’s efficacy. In one of his most frequently quoted lines, Auden (1940, 108) famously declared that “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Though he immediately complicates that claim in the same poem, addressing the late Yeats with the plea: “With the farming of a verse / Make a vineyard of the curse” (Auden 1940, 109). Auden thereby claims at once, for himself, the ability to speak to the dead (the late Irish poet being here an impossible addressee) and grants Yeats the magic (or vatic or bardic) power to turn evil into good by the sole use of poetry. Far from making nothing happen, poetry – and its quintessential apostrophes – is, as Auden (1940, 108) later adds, “A way of happening”.

 i.6.17.Any transformation the poem enacts takes place within language itself, and lies in the poem’s own verbal construction, not in any literal power to act upon the world. Yet this very awareness has become a productive tension within modern and contemporary lyric, where poets often display self-conscious irony or restraint, turning potential embarrassment into an exploration of lyric power and its limits. French poet Antoine Emaz sums this up in an aphorism that references in passing the title of an early work by Apollinaire: “Le poète n’est pas un enchanteur, même ‘pourrissant.’ Mais il ne confond jamais peu et rien” (Emaz 2016, 46; “The poet is not an enchanter, even a ‘rotting’ one. But they never confuse little with nothing”).

 i.6.18.If the risk inherent in address is embarrassment or pretension, what, then, are its rewards? By reaching toward another, poetry can achieve a genuine form of contact – what Waters (2003) calls “poetry’s touch”– rather than being reduced to a purely rhetorical gesture. This possibility is most literal in poems that speak to plausible addressees – a contemporary of the poet, whether a loved one, friend, peer, or patron – where the utterance is meant to be received and such communication remains conceivable. As we have seen, address not only establishes contact with an intended recipient within the poem but also draws the reader into the poem’s “happening.” The reader may become part of this event either through direct address – taking the poem’s words as meant for him or her – or through triangulated address, by witnessing the lyric subject’s exchange with its addressee. This contact need not be synchronic. As Osip Mandelstam famously wrote in 1913, a poem is like a message in a bottle: it may reach its “secret addressee” long after it was written (Mandelstam 1979, 68). Even when, or perhaps especially when, uttered in solitude, the poet’s words are addressed to someone.

 i.6.19.And yet the possibility of contact persists even when a poem turns to an impossible addressee – when, at its most hyperbolic, it is most exposed to ridicule. As we have seen, for Vendler (2005), the reward of lyric address – of poetry that speaks to what cannot answer – lies precisely in this possibility of relation despite absence, in the presence of “invisible listeners” who sustain the poet’s speech even as they elude response. When, for reasons that vary widely between authors, visible addressees can no longer satisfy the poet’s needs, the poem may imagine new forms of relation that converge, in Vendler’s terms, toward a kind of “lyric Utopia,” in which the unseen is conferred verbal salience and approached with a closeness otherwise unfathomable (Vendler 2005, 79–80).

 i.6.20.Virginia Jackson puts it beautifully in a passage from her study of Emily Dickinson, which draws on Derrida’s (1980) La Carte postale:

The way in which I address you depends upon where you are. If you are very near, I can whisper. If you are across the table, I can speak. If you are upstairs or just outside, I can shout. If you are too distant to hear (even to overhear) my voice, I can write. And in the illusion peculiar to written address, the condition of your absence (the condition of my writing) conjures a presence more intimate than the whisper – more intimate, that is, than the metaphor of the voice, of a speaking presence, would allow (Jackson 2005, 159–60).

 i.6.21.Jackson’s formulation captures what both Vendler and Culler suggest in different registers: that the apparent failure of address – its solitude, its distance – becomes the very means through which lyric affirms relation and presence.

Address in contexts

 i.6.22.The dynamics of risk and reward that define lyric address – its exposure to ridicule and its pursuit of contact – recur throughout the history of poetry in ever-changing forms. Before turning to specific examples, it may be useful to recall the range of possibilities encompassed by poetic address. Some poems speak to contemporaries – friends, lovers, rivals, relatives, colleagues, patrons, and other identifiable interlocutors – where communication seems at least imaginable. Others extend the act of address to absent readers or listeners. Beyond these plausible interlocutors lie more speculative forms of address: to mythic, divine, imagined, or unborn figures, as well as to abstract entities or unhearing objects and elements; to the dead, either to sustain or reanimate their presence, or, in an explicitly memorial or epitaphic mode, to commemorate them, preserving relation through remembrance rather than through dialogue.

 i.6.23.Having devoted some attention to impossible or indeterminate addressees, we can now turn to the case of explicit and contemporary address. When the poem speaks to an actual interlocutor – someone within the poet’s world – the stakes are different: the search for immediacy and sincerity brings with it the risk of banality, of falling into an uninflected or prosaic mode of address – even though conversational address itself is a longstanding and productive mode of lyric, as the next example shows.

 i.6.24.In Frank O’Hara’s 1964 poem “Having a Coke with You,” the title doubles as the poem’s first line, placing the speaker in immediate conversation with his lover: “is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne.” The poem unfolds as a playful catalogue contrasting love’s experience with artistic achievement, claiming that no creation can match the vitality of “having a Coke with you.” It ends as the speaker turns again to his addressee, referring to the artists he has mentioned: “it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience / which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it” (O’Hara 2008, 194). Address and self-reflection converge here: speaking to someone becomes inseparable from staging the act of speaking itself.

 i.6.25.O’Hara frequently “name-drops” in his poems; however, in “Having a Coke with You,” despite the specificity of its circumstances (for instance, the mention that the addressee has not yet been to the Frick Collection), the lover’s name remains concealed behind the pronoun you. Its biographical referent is nevertheless well known: the poem refers to the dancer Vincent Warren and belongs to a series of texts written during their romance (1959–61). Yet for all the biographical particulars that structure it, the poem seems to operate on a wider scope. For an address to a contemporary interlocutor in lyric is rarely confined to that immediate relation. As T. S. Eliot observes in “Dedication to My Wife,” “These are private words addressed to you in public” (Eliot 1974, 234). The theatrical dimension of poetic utterance hints at the inevitable triangulation involved in direct address – the presence of an audience beyond the addressee, implicit in the very act of making private words public. Beyond this general fact, O’Hara’s down-to-earth, spontaneous tone – combined with the title’s deliberately banal “Coke,” which contrasts with the elevated symbols that lyric tradition often associates with love – further expands the poem’s reach. The simplicity of its language and imagery allows the pronoun you to drift beyond its unnamed biographical referent, inviting any reader to project their own circumstances and chosen addressee into the poem. This progressive dynamic is also paradoxical: despite the poem’s dense social and situational specificity – which should in principle prevent it from being “voiceable by anyone reading it” (Vendler 1997a, 2) – the you becomes increasingly available for reappropriation. By the end of the poem, this dynamic takes on a metatextual inflection: “I’m telling you about it” may be heard as addressed not only to the lover but also to the reader, who is implicitly drawn into the position of the poem’s addressee, as the act of address itself becomes part of what is being communicated.

 i.6.26.A similar instance occurs in William Carlos William's ([1934] 1986, 372) “This Is Just to Say,” where an apparently mundane domestic note to his wife – confessing that he has eaten the plums in the icebox – becomes, through its simplicity and form, a widely recognizable act of intimacy. Some critics, however, have warned that what is often described as “relatability” risks flattening the poem’s specific otherness, turning it into a merely projective mirror for the reader (Glavey 2019).

 i.6.27.A converse case occurs in poems where a proper name – often repeated insistently across a sequence – serves less to fix a single, identifiable addressee than to blur its boundaries. The name becomes a talismanic magnet, drawing toward itself meanings and emotions that exceed the figure it ostensibly designates. In Yves Bonnefoy’s 1953 collection Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, the eponymous “Douve” is an elusive entity, described in turn as a “lande résineuse” (“resinous moorland”), a “rivière souterraine” (“underground river”), a “falaise d’ombre” (“shadow cliff”), or as decomposing flesh: “Dans la ville écarlate de l’air, où combattent les branches sur son visage, où des racines trouvent leur chemin dans son corps” (Bonnefoy 2023, 58–61; “In the scarlet city of air, where branches fight on her face, where roots find their way into her body”). As the reader moves through the sequence, it becomes clear that Douve’s only stable defining feature is her role as an eroticized feminine addressee, enabling poetic utterance to unfold. This strategy recalls early modern Petrarchist poetry – given the initial capital D, Maurice Scève's ([1544] 1984) Délie, objet de plus haute vertu comes to mind, with its similar deployment of an enigmatic feminine figure as both muse and poetic pretext. Like Scève’s Délie, Bonnefoy’s Douve functions less as a coherent character than as a linguistic catalyst, her very instability generating the poet’s ontological reflections. The power of these names, their potential when incorporated into lyric address, lies precisely in their irreducible opacity. As W. H. Auden observed in A Certain World: “Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable” (Auden 1970, 267).

 i.6.28.Other times a proper name, clearly attributable to an identifiable addressee, serves less to convey information than to sustain poetic utterance, functioning as a paraphrased interlocutor. In his 1558 Regrets, Du Bellay often seems to be replying to his fellow poet Olivier de Magny, as in these lines from Sonnet XII: “Et veu tant de regrets, desquels je me lamente, / Tu t’esbahis souvent comment chanter je puis. // Je ne chante (Magny) je pleure mes ennuys” (Du Bellay 1974, 71; “Given so many regrets, which grieve me, / You often marvel at how I can still sing. // I do not sing (Magny), I weep for my troubles”). By installing a dialogic structure through address, the poem appears prompted by another’s curiosity rather than as a self-celebratory act stemming from the poet’s wish for immortality.

 i.6.29.Around the twelfth century, the troubadours adopted a different strategy with regard to proper names, concealing them behind senhals, or code-names: markers embedded within the poem that both signal and obscure the identities of those alluded to. Traditionally, the envoi or tornada is the place where the speaker produces such a coded signature at the end of the song. Yet several troubadour songs also contain a senhal for their addressee. As Amelia Van Vleck (1991) has shown, the addressee is often charged with transmitting the song, as can be seen in the final tornada of Peire Rogier’s “Ges non puesc…”:

Mon Tort-n’avetz mant, s’a lieys platz
qu’aprenda lo vers, s’el es bos
e puois vol que sia trames
mon Dreit-n'avetz lai en Saves:
Dieu sal e guart lo cors de liey. (Rogier 1976, 89)

“To my You’re-wrong I send instructions that if she likes it
and if it is good, she might learn the song,
and then I wish it to be sent
to my You’re-right there in Savès:
may God save and keep her” (Van Vleck 1991, 53; trans. modified CB)

 i.6.30.Rogier is explicit: hearing and appreciating the song must be followed by memorization and recirculation, as he asks the addressee to learn it and then pass it on to another recipient – both of whom are concealed behind senhals and addressed indirectly in the third person. Here, address and code-naming become inseparable from transmission: the poem is conceived as a relay, moving from one voice to another, and entrusted to the addressee for its continued circulation – an invitation that, within the context of oral performance, extends naturally to the wider audience.

 i.6.31.These variations in the treatment of the addressee’s identity take a striking turn in Paul Celan’s 1961 poem “Psalm,” where the complete effacement of the addressee, far from extinguishing address, transfigures it into a religious form. The poem opens: “Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm, / niemand bespricht unsern Staub. / Niemand. // Gelobt seist du, Niemand. / Dir zulieb wollen / wir blühn. / Dir / entgegen.” (Celan 2020; “NoOne kneads us again of earth and clay, / noOne conjures our dust. / Noone. // Praised be thou, NoOne. / For your sake we / want to flower. / Toward / you”). The transformation of Niemand (“no one”) into a proper name – already signalled by the collection’s title Die Niemandsrose (No One’s Rose) – turns an indefinite pronoun into an addressable name. More crucially, in a collection shaped by both Jewish and Christian mysticism – and written by a Jewish poet after Auschwitz – Niemand becomes the only admissible addressee of a secular prayer. A truly impossible interlocutor in both linguistic and metaphysical terms, this Niemand embodies the absence of God and the collapse of traditional frameworks of address, while at the same time sustaining the poem’s need to speak in a derelict, post-Holocaust world.

 i.6.32.Other twentieth-century poets likewise turned to address as a means of rebuilding prayer. A striking instance appears in John Berryman’s “Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” where periphrases such as “Master of insight & beauty,” “craftsman of the snowflake,” “inimitable contriver,” and “Sole watchman of the flying stars” sustain a dialogue with the divine without naming the Christian God, or any deity explicitly (Berryman 1970, 85–96). A similar periphrastic strategy appears in Philippe Jaccottet’s verse, where expressions such as “Commissaire aux astres” (“Star Commissioner”) and “Maître évasif” (Jaccottet 2014, 736, 764; “Evasive Master”) serve to apostrophize a higher instance – an unnamed presence invoked to question the premature death of his friends – while remaining resolutely non-denominational. Jaccottet pairs these unusual epithets with the informal pronoun tu, further distancing his poetic prayer from the deferential tone traditionally associated with religious address. In contrast, in “i thank You God for most this amazing / day,” from Xaipe (1950), E. E. Cummings retains the classic markers of prayerful address – “God” and a capitalized “You”; contrasted with the lowercase “i” – yet he renews it through syntax: “how should tasting touching hearing seeing / breathing any – lifted from the no / of all nothing – human merely being / doubt unimaginable You?” (Cummings 1991, 663) The result, in each case, is a form of poetic supplication that renews rather than repeats the conventional language of prayer.

 i.6.33.Such transformations of prayer, however, are not confined to later traditions but go back as far as lyric itself. In Sappho’s invocation to Aphrodite (fr. 1), what begins by following the conventions of prayer – reverential address and the listing of the deity’s attributes – rendered here in Anne Carson’s translation (Sappho 2002, 3–5): “Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind, / child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you / do not break with hard pains, / O lady, my heart,” and followed by an imploration to “come here,” quickly gives way to a striking shift in tone when the goddess is represented as responding. The exchange takes on an unexpectedly colloquial inflection as Aphrodite, smiling, asks: “Whom should I persuade (now again) / to lead you back into her love? Who, O / Sappho, is wronging you?” What is most remarkable here is the abrupt, unmarked transition from reported to direct speech: the addressee not only responds, but momentarily assumes the position of speaker, inverting the pronominal roles of “I” and “you.” While lyric address most often internalizes the absence of response as its very condition of possibility, this foundational example instead stages a reciprocal exchange in which the divine interlocutor answers back. The poem thus anticipates a dynamic that will later reappear, in different forms, most notably in early modern lyric, in the shifting voices and dialogic structures of George Herbert’s devotional poems in The Temple (Herbert [1633] 2017), such as “Heaven,” “Dialogue,” or “Love (III).”

 i.6.34.Finally, no less significant than addressing God or a deity is poetry’s dialogue with the dead, which Giorgio Caproni defines as the poet’s condizione (“condition”) in the eponymous 1970 poem: “Un uomo solo, / chiuso nella sua stanza. / Con tutte le sue ragioni. / Tutti i suoi torti. / Solo in una stanza vuota, / a parlare. Ai morti.” (Caproni 1998. 287; “A lonely man, / locked in his room. / With all his reasons. / All his wrongs. / Alone in an empty room, / talking. To the dead”). A canonical instance of such address appears in Catullus 101: “Mvltas per gentes et multa per aequora Vectus / advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, / ut te postremo donarem munere mortis /et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem”, which Anne Carson, writing out of a comparable experience of loss, renders strikingly in her Nox (Carson 2010, n. pag.) as: “Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed – / I arrive at these poor, brother, burials / so I could give you the last gift owed to death / and talk (why?) with mute ash.” The poet turns to his dead brother only to confront the paradox of speaking to what cannot answer. The poem’s final “ave atque vale” (traditionally rendered as “hail and farewell”) both enacts and acknowledges this impossibility, sustaining the gesture of address even as it recognizes its futility.

 i.6.35.Indeed, the obvious, if cruel, caveat in this endeavor is that those who are addressed could never reply. This irrevocable silence underlies Denise Riley’s elegiac collection for her late son, Say Something Back (Riley [2016] 2020), whose title is drawn from an epigraph quoting W. S. Graham’s “Implements in their Places”: “Do not think you have to say / Anything back. But you do / Say something back which I / Hear by the way I speak to you” (Graham 1979, 244). By isolating and transforming Graham’s declarative statement into a harrowing imperative, Riley reconfigures the poem’s logic of address, turning what in Graham remains descriptive into a demand for response that voices the plea at the heart of mourning. That frustration leads, in Riley’s book, to a shift in the direction of address: from the son – “Oh my dead son you daft bugger / This is one glum mum. Come home I tell you” – to poetry itself and its apparent uselessness – “You principle of song, what are you for now” (Riley 2020, 8, 6). The notion of lyric “embarrassment” hardly applies to a book like Riley’s. Here, the hyperbolic imperatives – “Come home,” “Say something back” – pursue not rhetorical display but a desperate attempt to bridge the unbridgeable. Their ultimate aim is memorial, epitaphic rather than communicative: through the sheer intensity of words that strive to reach the dead, poetry becomes a monument to loss.

State of the art

 i.6.36.The twentieth century alone has seen major theoretical developments around the idea of address in lyric. One of the earliest and most influential reflections comes from a poet: Osip Mandelstam’s 1913 essay “On the Addressee” conceives of the poem as a “sealed bottle” tossed into the ocean by a “seafarer,” destined to reach its “secret addressee” long after it is written (Mandelstam 1979, 68). “Without dialogue,” Mandelstam (1979, 72) insists, “lyric poetry cannot exist” – a claim that anticipates later theories for which the very notion of “lyric address” becomes tautological (van der Haven and Pieters 2018, 7). Paul Celan, a devoted reader and admirer of Mandelstam, quietly reworked this image in his 1958 Bremen Prize acceptance speech: “Gedichte sind auch in dieser Weise unterwegs: sie halten auf etwas zu. / Worauf? Auf etwas Offenstehendes, Besetzbares, auf ein ansprechbares Du vielleicht, auf eine ansprechbare Wirklichkeit” (Celan [1958] 1983, 186): “Poems are en route: they are headed toward. / Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality” (Celan 1986, 35). A subtle reader of both poets, Giorgio Agamben observes in his brief commentary on Mandelstam’s essay that “a poem demands to be read, even if no one reads it,” and that “the addressee of a poem is not a real person but an exigency” (Agamben 2014, 11). Expanding on Mandelstam’s metaphor and echoing Celan’s Bremen formulation, Agamben suggests that poetry must remain perpetually addressed – headed toward, as Celan would say – and that, for this very reason, if a poem ever truly reached its addressee, it would cease to be. The poem’s true addressee, then, is precisely the one who can never receive it: in order to remain addressed, poetry must never arrive – the bottle must stay at sea.

 i.6.37.Another major strand of thinking about lyric communication begins with John Stuart Mill’s dictum that “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard,” which established a powerful model for thinking about lyric, one that Northrop Frye famously reaffirmed in Anatomy of Criticism, where he describes the lyric as “preeminently the utterance that is overheard” (Frye 1957, 249). This axiom has long shaped the critical assumption that lyric poetry is essentially solitary, self-enclosed, and indifferent to an audience. Yet, as Virginia Jackson (2005, 9) points out, Mill’s essay is “the most influentially misread” in Anglo-American poetics, precisely because critics have often stripped away the generic complications and nuanced concerns about writing and voice that underlie his metaphor (Jackson 2005, 132).

 i.6.38.In Poetry and Dialogism, Scanlon and Engbers argue that we need to listen to poetry anew, not by “lurking at keyholes and around corners” but by assuming from the outset that it may be dialogic and engaged rather than monologic and private. On this view, poems can accommodate multiple or even conflicting discourses without collapsing them into a single, finalized soliloquy (Scanlon and Engbers 2014, 2). The authors challenge the inherited notion of lyric as closed in upon itself, presenting instead its inherent orientation toward an “Other,” whether a reader, an interlocutor, or a broader cultural discourse. Drawing on figures such as Celan, Bakhtin, Levinas, Buber, Kristeva, Jakobson, and Mandelstam, they frame poetry as not merely expressive but ethically answerable, a medium of exchange and encounter. At the heart of this account lies poetic address: rather than treating apostrophe as mere convention and asking only who the addressee might be, they stress the act of address itself – what it means for a poem to call out to someone within its own space, and how this alters the reader’s experience.

 i.6.39.This debate inevitably returns to Bakhtin’s well-known skepticism about poetry. While he often cast poetry as essentially monologic – contrasting it with the novel’s heteroglossia – later critics have sought to reopen the case. Eskin (2000a), for instance, argues that polyphony can emerge in poetry, but it is more difficult to sustain than in the novel because poetic form tends to pull language toward uniformity. Other critics (Richter 1990; Batstone 2002) contend that Bakhtin’s assumptions about lyric as transparent self-expression were shaped by Romantic definitions, and that the lyric in fact carries within it the voices of others, whether in its consciousness, rhythms, or ethical stance. In this view, poetry is not excluded from dialogism but instead demands a more nuanced account of how its forms negotiate or resist polyphony.

 i.6.40.Another landmark moment for theorizing address unfolded in the mid-twentieth century debate between Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer over Dante’s Commedia. In his 1953 essay, Auerbach framed Dante’s direct appeals to his readers as something radically new in the Western literary tradition: a prophetic mode of speech through which the poet, entrusted with divine truth, addresses his audience as morally and spiritually lesser disciples (see Auerbach 1953). Spitzer, writing in 1955, reoriented the discussion by downplaying this hierarchical dynamic. For him, the addresses do not enforce distance but rather draw poet and reader into imaginative and affective proximity, transforming revelation into a shared act of perception and understanding (see Spitzer 1955).

 i.6.41.Jonathan Culler’s (1977) essay “Apostrophe” remains one of the most influential interventions in lyric theory, to which much of the field’s subsequent development and interest in address can be traced. Several of its central arguments – later revised and expanded in Theory of the Lyric ( Culler 2015) – are examined in Section 1 of this article. In “Apostrophe,” Culler reconceives the trope as a defining operation of lyric address rather than a decorative rhetorical device. Apostrophe, he argues, enacts a deflection from actual communication toward an imagined interlocutor, thereby dramatizing the lyric’s power to create presence through address rather than narrative progression (Culler 1977). In suspending temporal sequence, the apostrophic poem is itself the event, producing immediacy through invocation. Culler also highlights the self-consciousness and embarrassment intrinsic to apostrophe, which reveal lyric’s performative and fictive dimensions. His framework has since prompted substantial debate: critics such as J. Douglas Kneale (1999) and L. M. Findlay (1985) charge that Culler stretches the term beyond its classical bounds, conflating apostrophe with exclamation or personification, while Paul Alpers (2013) defends the historical elasticity of Culler’s approach, testing its limits on Renaissance poetry. Later theorists – most notably Barbara Johnson (1986) and William Waters (2003) – have refined his insights, distinguishing apostrophe from broader forms of lyric address yet preserving its status as the emblem of lyric’s capacity to stage an impossible but indispensable scene of enunciation.

 i.6.42.A particularly useful critical overview of these and later debates is provided by Cornelis van der Haven and Jürgen Pieters in their introduction to Lyric Address in Dutch Literature, 1250–1800 (Haven and Pieters 2018), on which the following summary draws. Expanding on Culler’s conception of apostrophe as the defining operation of lyric address, they turn to Roland Greene’s influential account of lyric as “the dialectical play of ritual and fictional phenomena” (Greene 1991, 5), emphasizing the ritualized and performative dimension of reading. In this view, the lyric poem offers “directions” for its own reutterance: readers are invited to perform the poem, to speak as its “I,” and thus to participate in the production of its voice. They also return to W. R. Johnson's (1982) account of classical lyric as a social act of performance, in which the singer’s I–You address transforms shared emotion into communal experience – a model that grounds later theories of lyric address in performative exchange rather than solitary expression. Van der Haven and Pieters trace a broad continuum of critical positions on address, ranging from W. R. Johnson’s (1982) and William Waters’ (2003) relational and participatory models to Heinz Schlaffer’s (2012) conception of lyric as Anrufung: having lost its incantatory power, lyric has become, in his view, a one-directional act of invocation addressed to an absent or unresponsive addressee. Finally, they situate these divergent approaches within a larger debate over lyric fictionality, contrasting Greene’s view of lyric as a fictional utterance with Culler’s insistence that lyric speech makes claims about the actual world rather than about a fictional one.

Contemporary practices and prospects for further investigation

 i.6.43.The following section, necessarily selective, examines a few contemporary practices of address and the critical issues they foreground, while also pointing toward directions these suggest for further inquiry. I will touch briefly on four central examples – ecological, epistolary, testimonial, and dedicatory – that illustrate the range of contemporary practices of address and the questions they continue to raise.

Address and Ecology

 i.6.44.Some scholars have examined the case where, through prosopopoeia, a non-human entity addresses a human. In such cases, the impossible addressee becomes not some absent or nonhuman entity, but rather the lyric subject themselves, and by extension the human reader. What makes this address “impossible” is not that it cannot be heard, but that it cannot be spoken – it originates from an entity inherently incapable of speech. One critic proposes the term “prepostrophe” as distinct from “apostrophe” – and perhaps preceding it in its unthinkability (Slater 2014). This device is notably evident in Louise Glück’s collection The Wild Iris (1992), where flowers address their human gardener, or in Wislawa Szymborska’s (1999) poetry featuring animals, where creatures frequently address the reader as a disindividuated member of the human species.

 i.6.45.By allowing us to see ourselves and our actions from the other end of the natural world, this reversed angle – “ecocentric” rather than “anthropocentric” – has frequently been deployed to advance ecological advocacy and environmental critique (Lyric Poetry and the (Human) Environment). In Dart (2002), Alice Oswald gives the eponymous river a voice by weaving together the human voices of those who inhabit its banks (swimmers, poachers, ferrymen, sewage workers, etc.) into “water’s soliloquy, // all names, all voices” (Oswald 2002, 48), thus making more evident the artifice involved in any form of “prepostrophe”: this non-human writing still originates from human authors. This device has been taken outside the strictly poetic realm: in France, the collective of writers, artists and scholars “Parlement de Loire” proposes to offer the river Loire a voice so that it can articulate its grievances against the harm caused by human action. They even entertain the possibility of granting the river legal personhood, enabling it to defend itself against human aggression in courts of law. The river’s “hearings” have been anthologized in a book compiled by Camille de Toledo (Le fleuve qui voulait écrire. Les auditions du parlement de Loire, de Toledo 2021).

 i.6.46.As Anahid Nersessian (2020, 21) observes in her study of Romantic poetry, apostrophe to natural elements such as clouds was already “an address to a nature in the process of disappearing.” While such address registers an ecological sensibility in the face of industrial modernity, it also exposes, through its choice of impossible addressees, the poet’s inability to respond adequately to the unfolding catastrophe. These questions of non-human agency and voice gain increasing urgency as the world manifests accelerating environmental degradation, and philosophers, scholars and politicians have embraced these questions, but, as Culler (2015, 242) notes: “The poets, though, were here first. [...] The testing of ideological limits through the multiplication of the figures who are urged to act, to listen, or to respond is part of the work of lyric.”

Address and Dedication

 i.6.47.Dedication, one of paratexts (seuils or thresholds) Gérard Genette (1997) analyses, provides one of the most revealing intersections between address and display. As Genette observes, “whoever the official addressee, there is always an ambiguity in the destination of a dedication,” since it is “always intended for at least two addressees: the dedicatee, of course, but also the reader, who is called on to witness” (Genette 1997, 134). The act of dedicating a poem therefore enacts a double scene of address, both intimate and public: it proclaims relation even as it performs exposure. Often written in the third person, the dedication acknowledges its own triangulated nature – an ostensibly private gesture inscribed for the gaze of others.

 i.6.48.Among the many poems that use dedication to stage a scene of address, Jules Supervielle’s “Les Nerfs” ([1948] 1996), dedicated to his doctor, the neurologist Théophile Alajouanine, offers a particularly striking instance. The poem opens with the apostrophe “Vous qui rendez la chair pensante / Et raisonneuse sous la peau” (Supervielle [1948] 1996, 498; “You who make flesh think / And reason beneath the skin”), a line that seems at first directed toward the doctor but soon reveals the true interlocutors to be the poet’s own nerves. In this oscillation between the medical and the lyrical, the dedication turns the poem into a negotiation between two modes: clinical auscultation and poetic introspection (Barnabé 2018). When the speaker later declares “Merci de m’avoir fait poète” (“Thank you for making me a poet”) gratitude shades into paradox: illness itself becomes the source of creative power, subtly undermining the apparent gratitude of the dedication to his doctor – whose task, after all, is to cure the illness or relieve its symptoms (Barnabé 2018, 499). By addressing his nerves, Supervielle also opens another modality of address – that of translating into language a cenesthesic state: the internal murmurs and sensations of the body. In this sense, the poem’s address mediates not only between poet and doctor but also between corporeal feeling and its verbal articulation, a process made possible by turning the poet’s own organs into addressees. The dedication thus converts an act of homage into a public assertion of poetic knowledge and power. In Supervielle’s poem, with its various layers of address – both textual and paratextual – the reader overhears an intimacy that is at once diagnostic and declarative, a private address whose full meaning depends on its being witnessed by others.

Address and Epistolarity

 i.6.49.With the rise of the postcard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the medium quickly became, for some poets, a model of poetic exchange, extending a much older epistolary tradition, from Horace’s Epistles addressed to identifiable contemporaries to Ovid’s Heroides, where both speaker and addressee are fictionalized. French poet Henry Levet pioneered the form with his Cartes postales, later taken up by Apollinaire, Cocteau, and the Surrealists (Reverseau 2018; Nachtergael and Reverseau 2022). Such poems borrow from postcards their short format, layout, and interplay of text and image. They often reproduce the immediacy and triviality of travel writing, recording the contingencies of place and time. The modesty of the form – its lightness and disposability – offered poets a means of shedding the “vatic stance,” replacing lyrical grandiloquence with the humility of a quick message home. For the avant-gardes of the 1910s and 1920s, this shift was also a way of rejecting the Symbolist model of elevated poetic speech.

 i.6.50.Yet even as postcard poems downplay poetic presumption, they simultaneously double down on address. The poem is at once materially addressed – sent through the mail or structured as a correspondence – and rhetorically addressed, deploying the full range of lyric vocatives. Apostrophe, which traditionally marks the poet’s claim to speak to all creation, here reappears in a humbler, literalized form: the card or letter is addressed to someone real. In replacing divine or universal interlocutors with named recipients, these poems retain the structure of address while neutralizing its potential for “poetic embarrassment”.

 i.6.51.This literalization of address continues in the twentieth century with the rise of mail art – the use of postal systems as artistic media. Artists and writers such as Ray Johnson, founder of the “New York Correspondence School,” used the post to circulate poems and collages, transforming correspondence into a collective aesthetic. A precedent can be found in Mallarmé’s playful “quatrains adressés” (Grojnowski 1994) where the addressee’s name and location become part of the poem’s rhyme. One can read these experiments, from Mallarmé to Apollinaire and beyond, as exploring the tension between communication and artifice that lies at the heart of lyric address.

 i.6.52.The epistolary impulse persists today in projects such as Jacques Jouet’s projet poétique planétaire (PPP). Since 2013, Jouet has mailed a daily poem to addressees selected alphabetically from phone books, beginning with France’s Ain department, in an effort – at once absurd and moving – to send a personal poem to every human being on Earth. This quixotic enterprise literalizes the fantasy implicit in apostrophe: the dream of universal address. In its material and logistical impossibility, Jouet’s project reveals both the persistence and the transformation of the lyric impulse in an age of global communication.

Address and Witnessing

 i.6.53.A long tradition of testimonial poetry attests to the entanglement of lyric address and historical trauma. While this tradition can be traced back centuries (Forché and Wu 2014), the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen an unprecedented proliferation of testimonial writing, fueled on the one hand by higher levels of global literacy and communication, and on the other by the scale of violence and mass atrocity made possible by modern warfare (Fiction and Referentiality in Poetry). Out of this context has emerged what Carolyn Forché (1993) calls the “poetry of witness,” a mode of writing that transforms lyric address into an act of testimony.

 i.6.54.Witnessing departs from the mere recounting of an event and transforms utterance into an event in itself. Testimonial speech is inseparable from the effort to create – and to find – its addressee: someone who must exist for the testimony to have meaning. The act of witnessing thus hinges on address, since the ethical and political force of testimony depends entirely on the possibility of its being heard. As Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992) have argued, the “crisis of witnessing” in literature is also, by definition, a crisis of address. What happens, then, when such crisis enters the domain of lyric, where address is not only structural but constitutive?

 i.6.55.One form of such practices appears in Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975), where the poet, drawing on transcripts from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, assembles and reshapes witness testimony, extracting voices from their juridical framing and re-presenting them in poetic form. The speaking “I” is here lifted from documentary material, no longer the poet’s own but that of recorded witnesses, raising the question of address anew: to whom were these words first directed, and to whom do they now speak? Testimony thus emerges as a form of address that does not depend on an explicit “you,” yet whose very status presupposes a recipient.

 i.6.56.A particularly compelling example that brings together the stakes of address in epistolarity, dedication, and witnessing is Juan Gelman’s Carta abierta (Open Letter, 1980). The slim volume, written from exile, is dedicated “to my son” and takes the form of poem-letters addressed to Marcelo Ariel Gelman, who was “disappeared” along with his pregnant wife by the Argentine military in 1976. Thus, these poems also function as acts of testimony: by publicly addressing his disappeared son, Gelman bears witness to a crime that official discourse seeks to erase, transforming private grief into a form of collective memory.

 i.6.57.In the poems, Gelman learns to “deshijarse” (Gelman 2011, vol 1., 411; “‘unson’ himself”) – to write from the position of a father who must continue to address a son who, in the junta’s own words, belongs among “los ausentes para siempre” (Gelman 2011, 421; “those absent forever”), yet whom he cannot, in 1980, consider dead for lack of proof. The book thus combines the intimacy of correspondence with the public act of testimony: each poem is both a letter and an appeal, an attempt to speak to the dead and, through that impossible address, to the living. Yet this testimony is necessarily speculative, unfolding through a series of interrogative phrases that, through powerful metaphor, seek to imagine what the absent addressee might be undergoing in the absence of any verifiable knowledge. One such instance is poem XXI in the sequence (Gelman 2011, 419):

¿dónde estás mesmo ahorita?/¿descansás?/
¿nadie tortura tu blancor?/¿ya mudo
quietás tu luz contra tinieblas?/¿late
tu oscuridad?/¿llagás en puro fuego […]?

where are you right now, truly?/are you resting?/
no one tortures your whiteness?/now mute,
do you quiet your light against the dark?/does it still beat
your darkness?/do you wound in pure fire […]?

 i.6.58.The poem’s cascade of questions enacts the crisis of address itself: each question reaches toward an addressee who may no longer exist, sustaining communication as an ethical necessity when response has become impossible. Through the epistolary form, address becomes testimony – the open letter transforming private grief into a public act of witnessing. In the absence of any surviving witness to the crime, the poem itself becomes the event of address, drawing the reader into its circle of responsibility. Yet this act of speaking to the disappeared can offer no closure; it exposes instead the limits of language when confronted with silence, leaving the reader to inhabit that silence in turn.