Poetics and the Gift, by Adam Rosenthal

Reviewed by Nora Fulton

Adam Rosenthal, Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida (Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Press, 2022), xxvii + 270 pp.

‘The Western poetic tradition is in need of reappraisal. An essential element of its form has been under-theorised. From this lack of attention, what in fact constitute founding and interrelated features of poetry’s history have been interpreted to be disparate, secondary, and merely contingent. This neglected element […] is the gift’ (x).

With this diagnosis, Adam Rosenthal’s Poetics and the Gift sets out to retrieve the figural node of the gift, ‘one of poetry’s basic, structuring conditions’ (xv), from the sediment of poetic history.^[1] Across the long history of poetry’s various analogisations as gift – the gift of poetic genius, the ode’s gift of immortality, an origin gifted through inherited poetic tradition, to name just a few – Rosenthal identifies a dialectical process emergent from its oscillating embraces and refusals of such analogisations. For him, poetry has been able to survive precisely because it has drawn upon and embodied the idea of the ‘binding nature’ of the gift, as explicated by sociologist Marcel Mauss and the many others who have followed his interpretation. In this interpretation, the freely given gift, which due to its unconditioned giving cannot properly be refused, secures an obligation on the part of the recipient to return the act of donation, and therefore founds nearly all social relations of reciprocity (84).^[2] But rather than analyzing the gift’s structuration of poetry through a purely philosophical or economic lens, Rosenthal attempts to ask what ‘the specific meaning of these gifts’ that it has been ‘might be for the poem, or why, beyond a general structural coherence, the gift seems to impose itself whenever one poses the question of poetry’ (26).

Poetics and the Gift contends that if there is such a meaning, and if there is such a coherence, it must be understood through and at the limits of Jacques Derrida’s influential thinking on the gift. For Derrida, as is often the case, the essence of the gift is its impossibility: in Given Time, he grapples with the idea of the gift as that which is ‘given gratuitously and fortuitously, as if by chance encounter’.^[3] Derrida shows how the impossibility of distinguishing ‘the desire to give’ from ‘desire [on the whole]’ makes it radically uncertain whether any act of supposed giving, any attempt to give from oneself to the other, is not in truth the giving to oneself of the capacity to give, or the receiving from that other the capacity to give.^[4] Rosenthal’s project is, in his own words, a way of asking what ‘Derrida’s corpus might have looked like, had he instead chosen to work through the figure of “poetry” – as he had that of “gift”’ (23). The question, of course, is whether such a substitution changes anything at all, and whether there exists a difference between these two figures, the poem and the gift, for either author.

Though Derrida occasionally connected his thinking on the gift and givenness to the poem in the abstract, Rosenthal notes he never carried out a ‘serious interrogation of poetic history, let alone its enormous investment in the gift’ in all its literal, institutional and infrastructural senses.^[5] Rather, for Derrida ‘“the gift of the poem” [becomes] a free-floating figure, even a mantra, locatable within the work of a Celan, a Mallarmé, or a Deguy, without any questioning of the impact of thousands of years of poetic interest in just this configuration.’ In other words, if for Derrida the gift points to an essential moment of hiatus in exchange, to the delay between gift and countergift in which everything from desire to law becomes possible, forming a (frequently oppressive) circuit of inarticulable gratitude and unpayable debt – if this hiatus can only ever secure a cyclical metabolism that must be tarried with, passed on, and never resolved – then the gift as he conceives it may bear upon poetry but fails to account for the way poetry’s specific material histories and channels of transmission have participated in the general constitution of the gift’s problematics. Poetics and the Gift carries out its retrieval of these problematics in four distinct areas.

In the first area, Rosenthal lays out how the poem and poetic capacity have been literally rendered as gifts – either as gifts bequeathed to the poet through supernatural election or as gifts bequeathed by the poet through systems of social patronage. His intention is to erode the ‘secular/religious binary’ implicit in this rendering: in his readings of the works of Horace, William Wordsworth and others, he suggests that ‘the shared gift logic of […] various tropes of enthusiasm, inspiration, genius, natural-born talent, and imagination’ reveals ‘the survival of scriptural modes of writing’ (47). For him, the poem as ‘“merely human” language, or the inscribed trace, can never simply be opposed to forms of scripture,’ or texts that are conceived as having sprung from gifts granted from extra-human authorities like the muses or the divine. Rather, ‘the gift (of poetry) survives at authority’s edge, and it does so because it lives on the very non-presence of this trace that allows for something like ‘scripture’ to appear in the first place.’

In the second area, Rosenthal looks at instances wherein the gift and givenness have characterised the way poets speak of the very material of poetry, the word, as a substitute for ontological immediacy. The issue he takes with this kind of narrative, shared by philosophers like Martin Heidegger and poets like Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which ‘the singularity of poetry […] consists in its ability to re-name, or even to un-name, that which has, through no fault of its own, become the reified object of past acts of nomination,’ is that ‘they often require that one identify a strict limit between poetry and non-poetry, or gift and non-gift’ (123/4). Again the goal is to dissolve a conceptual dyad: that of name and being. If it is impossible to know whether the poem gives the being itself or only a name for the being, just as it is impossible to know where border between gift and non-gift is located, ‘it cannot be because poet and sage fail to name, but, conversely, because naming happens,’ and the name ‘persists, idles, or hangs on’ – ‘remains’ – ‘as the record of the poet’s vain endeavour to respond to the question of being’ (151).

In the third area, Rosenthal investigates the poem’s understanding of itself as a commodity in economic exchange and looks ways poets have tried to donate a poetic essence to commodities in general. Such acts of speculation, which imagine the ‘as yet unapprehended [poetic] character’ of non-poetic commodities, come to ‘[expose] an abyss’, which ‘[threatens] to shatter the divide between material possession and linguistic matter, as well as the corresponding and conditional identity of the subject who – evidently – relied on this distinction for his very self-understanding’ (214). What the poet gives in their speculation then is merely ‘a portion of [themselves]’, which can only signal a resignation to an ontology of the social world in which, pace Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘a man’s biography is conveyed in his gift, and every man’s wealth is an index of his merit’ (170).

Rosenthal admits that one of the difficulties of his argument rests in the fact that the problematics of the gift – the structuring force of patronage as an extra-poetic obligation resisted by and built into John Keats’ poetry (61), or the undecidable difference between a giving of names to the thing and a giving of the thing itself through naming raised in the poetry of Gertrude Stein (123), or the pleasurable and poem-like excess left behind in any supposedly equal exchange of goods testified to in the poems of Charles Baudelaire (230) – are in no way unique to poetry; similar phenomena can be seen across the histories of every art. But he defends the specificity of his object: ‘it is neither the exclusivity of these tropes to the field of poetry that lends them their significance; nor is it, for that matter, the fact of the poetic work’s participation within actual, “material” gift exchanges. […] Rather, what makes an understanding of these figures critical to the study of poetry is the internalisation of these apparently “contingent”, “historical”, or “inessential” forms as essential, within poetic discourse itself’ (73). On a methodological level, therefore, Poetics and the Gift manages to ground the question of the gift’s particular impingement upon poetry through its specific formal afterlives, under the view that poetry, uniquely, tends to incorporate the pressures of its historical characterisations as a gift into its own conception of its being. Exemplary of this approach are Rosenthal’s readings of the dedication poem and the invitation poem. As he shows, each of these at one point stood as separable composites of gift character and poetic matter, but the former lives on as an integral formal possibility for the latter, i.e., as lyric address (67). Appearing to us now as an essentialisation of its past occasions, the poem promises an occasion – a poetry – that is, like the compensation for the gift, always yet to come.^[6]

If there is one point at which Poetics and the Gift stumbles, it is in its fourth section, where we the leap is made from the early 20^th century to the early 21^st century. There, Rosenthal attempts to view our access to the unrestricted accumulation of poetic history, which for the contemporary poet stands as radically available and open to appropriation, as an encounter with the gift. He attempts to bring his argument closer to the present by reading the ways that the work of the poets Kennth Goldsmith, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Susan Howe have worked this accumulation as poetic material. It is not so much that I feel this turn toward more recent poetic production fails to offer Rosenthal anything new in terms of his broader analysis of the gift as a structural condition for poetry – clearly, the conceptualist branding of the poet as a Robin Hood-esque distributor of linguistic wealth, and the post-conceptualist branding of the poet as an activist-archivist, distributing evidence of formerly obscured injustices, both depend upon and call into question the figuring of the poem as gift. But by ending Poetics and the Gift with this familiar story, of a development tracking from European avant-gardes to Anglo-American experimentalism, Rosenthal leaves untouched many other possible stops, continuities, and retrogressions along the way – not to mention the effects over this span of intervening time of the West’s ongoing inability to think poetic traditions and conceptions of the gift beyond its own.^[7] In any case, one cannot but feel that the kind of formal afterlives which interest Rosenthal exist elsewhere than where he concludes.

After all, Poetics and the Gift stakes out its place in the fields of literary, philosophical and economic study by centering the way poetry metabolises and makes radically dubitable its identity with the gift.^[8] Rosenthal draws a sharp distinction between his work on the gift’s import for poetry and that of Lewis Hyde’s, for example, which claims more strongly that ‘“where there is no gift there is no art”’:

while [Hyde] makes it as a normative claim, arguing for the essentialness of the gift within art as such, my aim is to demonstrate how the Western concepts of ‘art’, and especially ‘poetry’, emerge out of an internalisation of the gift. Thus, I do not take it for granted that ‘poetry’ is anything except for a self-reflexive discourse. Whereas Hyde believes that where there is no gift, there can be no art, I read the systematic grafting of each of these concepts on to the other as symptomatic. In this sense, Hyde’s Gift propagates a poetic ideology that we can trace at least as far back as Greek antiquity. It also denies the integral role that ambivalence plays within the gift’s functioning. (75)

Unlike the normative claims made by Thoreau, Pindar and others, which Rosenthal always succeeds in throwing into doubt, the normative claims made by conceptualists and post-conceptualists about their practice go unchallenged, perhaps because they largely echo his own ideas about the durability of poetry residing in its production of the lack of a distinction between itself and the non-poetic (just as the durability of the gift resides in its production of the lack of a distinction between itself and the non-gift). Conceptualist views of the text and the archive as transparent and infinitely copiable/distributable processes, and of a disintegration of ‘the border between “poetry” and “non-poetry,”’ (246) are in contrast taken as givens (pun not intended); as are the post-conceptualist views on the text and the archive as ‘space[s] where one may work to counteract the “transubstantiations” and near-magical “conversions” that its laws have perpetrated, through its various decisions and decrees, by rewriting its contexts and unearthing its false foundations’ (257). Rosenthal does suggest that ‘by embracing and exploiting an uncertainty that has always, to a certain extent, haunted the question of poetry, contemporary poetics risks not only troubling this difference, but also effacing it altogether, thereby eliminating the gift, or at least radically minimising its role within poetic self-definition, to the point of unrecognisability’ (246). But could not the rapid diminishment of these veins of conceptualist and post-conceptualist thinking in contemporary Anglo-American poetry (perhaps due to the obsoletion brought about by AI models of language generation in the case of the conceptual position, or by the urgency of non-poetic political action in the case of the post-conceptual position) be explained in part by an inability to any longer doubt the poem’s ability to internalise the gift? Can the poet still believe that the dialectical process, before which so many dyads and binaries have hitherto disintegrated, is so linear?

Rosenthal’s labour in this monograph will be indispensable to anyone interested in the philosophy of the gift and its relevance to phenomenology and deconstruction, let alone to anyone interested in Marxist views of the economic determination of poetic production and its relevance to the literary study. Poetics and the Gift is the rare example of a book which refuses to cordon off rigorous philosophical and economic analysis and questioning from the specificity of its literary, historical and material referents. It forces us to think the difficulty of reading, writing and living with what the gift never manages to give us: namely, its own occasion, which we chafe at the idea of our full identity with. ‘Because the proffering of the gift already interpellates me as a recipient (an “I”), there is no real difference between acceptance and refusal, but only different gift-effects that might follow from either. And, in this respect, the gift may be said to be both undeniable and ineluctable, for it imposes itself upon a necessarily passive recipient even as it incites the latter to action. To be subject to the address of a donation is thus to be fated to respond’ (214). Today, amid the incessant propagation of new gift-effects, which seem always capable of blending into the old stream of ‘poured nectar, gift of the muses and sweet fruit of the mind, to men who win prizes’ (42), poets and poetry may appear frozen, like a stream of fluid in a state of laminar flow. As Poetics and the Gift reveals, just as in the seeming hiatus of the gift in its exchange, there is movement nonetheless; it may in truth be our own.

Specifically, Rosenthal limits his study to Western poetic history, and specifically an idea of the West beginning in Greece and concluding in Europe, which is paralleled in and equally contingent to the traditions of continental philosophy he responds to. ↑
The reception by Derrida of Mauss’s ideas – which we should not forget were derived from a Eurocentric interpretation of the potlach ceremonies of the Haida and Salish indigenous peoples – is the focus here, but it may also be useful to think of Jean-Paul Sartre’s much different reception of the same, which emphasizes the need for a ‘third party’ between, or beyond, the binary of one who gives and one who receives. It is thanks to this third party’s ‘mediation’ of the exchange of the gift – whether by being a witness to the exchange, or by being excluded from the exchange – that the relation of reciprocity is first revealed. (Critique of Dialectical Enlightenment, 106) ‘Whatever the society, the third party is everyone and everybody;’ (108) for this reason, for Sartre the gift shows that ‘the real relation between men is necessarily ternary. But this trinity is not a designation or ideal mark of the human relation: it is inscribed in being, that is to say, in the materiality of individuals.’ (109) Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1. Verso, 1991. ↑
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992), 127. ↑
Given Time, 4. ↑
For example, in the institutions of its instruction as a kind of gifting, as explored in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, the institutions of its valuation of the gift, as explored in James English’s The Economy of Prestige, or the institutions of its judgement of the sincerity of the gift-giver, as explored in Donato Mancini’s You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, (Harvard University Press, 2009); James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard University Press, 2009); Donato Mancini, You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence (BookThug, 2012). ↑
‘Poetry is, for this reason, destined to be caught between these versions of itself, in the gap between two notions of the present, and as a force of rupture as well as one of origination’ (141). Rosenthal sees this as ‘the power of the non-presence of the poetic gift – which is to say, into the non-presence of the very poem that “presents” this non-presence’ (140). ↑
Even just within the Anglo-American situation he focuses on, one might think of the neoclassical mythos of poet-as-divine-receptacle which grounded the oracular work of Jack Spicer, the decommodifying gestures of John Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem ‘public service’, or the anti-capitalist ethos of mimeopress publishing which gave rise to something like Bernadette Mayer’s freely composed and distributed Utopia. Jack Spicer, ed. Robin Blaser, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Black Sparrow Press, 1989); John Giorno, Dial-A-Poem (Giorno Poetry Systems, 1968), accessed June 4^th, 2025, https://giornopoetrysystems.org/dial-a-poem; Bernadette Mayer, Utopia (United Artists Books, 1984). ↑
Closer to the side of economic analysis, Scott Cutler Shershow’s The Work & the Gift similarly attempts to dismantle the structuration of the gift in the field of labour. Closer to the side of philosophical analysis, Marcel Hénaff’s The Philosophers’ Gift follows Sartre in challenging the Maussian view of the gift as fundamentally self-interested, and articulates an ethics of the third party from a Levinasian perspective. Scott Cutler Shershow, The Work & the Gift (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Marcel Hénaff, trans. Jean-Louis Morhange, The Philosophers’ Gift (Fordham University Press, 2020). ↑