Adaptations in the Age of the Arbitrary

This chapter begins by noting with Saussure that the rupture structural linguistics makes between sound image and referent would appear to make etymology theoretically vacant. How one might continue to ‘believe’ in the truth of etymologies in the face of this occupies the rest of the discussion, beginning with the problems and possibilities of phenomenological ‘unveiling’ (Martin Heidegger, Anne Carson, Jan Zwicky, and Anne Waldman are discussed) and deconstructive etymological word play (Jean Paulhan, Nancy Streuver, Derek Attridge, Paula Blank). Play, or work, with etymology then frames a comparative reading of poems by G. M. Hopkins and Ciaran Carson, which explores questions of poetic assertion, belief, and irony. After sketching a taxonomy of etymological tropes in modern poetry, the chapter concludes by following the etymological development and redeployment of central metapoetic metaphors, which imagine the work of poetry as that of maker, weaver, singer, and ploughman.