THE FUTURE BELOVED: LYRIC ADDRESS AS TEMPORAL PROJECTION
Toward a Theory of Recursive Reading
ABSTRACT
This article proposes a reconceptualization of lyric address based on close reading of Sappho 31 and contemporary lyric theory. Against models that treat the lyric "you" as either dramatic addressee or rhetorical construct, I argue that lyric address functions as a temporal projection mechanism: the poem encodes affective patterns for future activation by readers who "complete" the circuit of transmission. Drawing on historical poetics, reception theory, and phenomenology, I demonstrate that lyric's distinctive formal properties—compression, apostrophe, present-tense immediacy—serve not to capture a moment but to transmit it forward. The lyric "you" is thus neither contemporary addressee nor fictional construct but the future reader capable of resonating the poem's encoded structure. This framework resolves persistent problems in lyric theory regarding address, temporality, and the poem's relationship to its readers, while providing new tools for understanding how and why certain poems survive.
Keywords: lyric theory, apostrophe, Sappho, temporality, reception, address, historical poetics
I. INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF LYRIC ADDRESS
Who is the "you" in lyric poetry? This question has generated extraordinary scholarly attention yet remains productively unresolved. Traditional approaches treat lyric address as either:
- Dramatic (speaker to actual/historical addressee)[1]
- Rhetorical (fictional construction for poetic effect)[2]
- Apostrophic (address to absent/inanimate entities)[3]
Yet none of these models adequately explains lyric's peculiar power: its capacity to feel immediately present to readers across vast historical distances. When we read Sappho fragment 31—"He seems to me equal to the gods, that man..."—we do not experience it as historical document or rhetorical exercise. We experience it as address, as if the poem were speaking to us, now, urgently.
Recent work in historical poetics has demonstrated that "the lyric" as category is itself a construction, a reading practice developed in the nineteenth century.[4] Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have shown how we learned to read all short poems as if they were timeless expressions of personal emotion—a practice that obscures the historical specificity of poetic forms.[5] Yet even as this scholarship productively destabilizes "the lyric," it leaves untheorized the phenomenon that motivated lyric reading in the first place: why do certain poems feel like they are addressing us?
This article proposes an answer: lyric poems function as temporal projection mechanisms, encoding affective patterns designed for future activation. The lyric "you" is not a contemporary addressee or rhetorical fiction but the future reader who will complete the circuit of transmission. Lyric address, properly understood, is recursive: it creates the conditions for its own reception by readers not yet born.
I develop this argument through close reading of Sappho 31, dialogue with contemporary lyric theory, and analysis of what I term "recursive reading"—the experience of becoming the addressee that the poem anticipated. The payoff is both interpretive and theoretical: a model that explains lyric's distinctive temporality while providing tools for understanding poetic transmission across historical distance.
[1] Archetypal position from New Critical close reading through much contemporary practice.
[2] Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 135-54.
[3] Paul de Man, "Lyric and Modernity," in Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 166-86; Barbara Johnson, "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion," Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 28-47.
[4] Virginia Jackson, Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
[5] Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson, eds., The Lyric Theory Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
II. LYRIC STUDIES AND THE PROBLEM OF TEMPORALITY
A. The Apostrophic Turn
Paul de Man's reading of apostrophe identified a central paradox: lyric address to absent entities (the dead, abstractions, inanimate objects) generates presence through that very absence.[6] Barbara Johnson extended this insight, showing how apostrophe "animates" its object while simultaneously acknowledging its absence.[7] This work established apostrophe as lyric's distinctive trope—but left unresolved the question of why this particular trope should dominate the genre.
Jonathan Culler's influential account treats apostrophe as the constitutive feature of lyric, arguing that addressing a "you" creates the poem's triangular structure: "poet-poem-reader becomes an 'I' addressing a 'you.'"[8] Yet Culler's formulation treats apostrophe primarily as rhetorical strategy, not as temporal mechanism.
What these accounts miss: apostrophe's temporal dimension. The "you" is absent not just spatially but temporally—it has not yet arrived.
[6] De Man, "Lyric and Modernity," 166-86.
[7] Johnson, "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion," 28-47.
[8] Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 186.
B. Historical Poetics and the Invention of Lyric Reading
Virginia Jackson's Dickinson's Misery demonstrated that reading poems as "lyrics"—as timeless expressions of personal emotion directed to no one in particular—is a historically specific practice developed in the nineteenth century.[9] Yopie Prins's Victorian Sappho showed how Sappho herself was constructed through Victorian reading practices that projected modern lyric subjectivity onto archaic Greek fragments.[10]
This work valuably denaturalizes "the lyric" as transhistorical category. Yet it risks overcorrection: if lyric is merely an invented reading practice, how do we account for poems that seem designed for the kind of reading they receive? Sappho 31 feels like lyric address not because Victorians misread it but because it encodes structures that enable such reading across historical distance.
The historical poetics tradition has shown us that categories are constructed—but we still need to explain what allows certain constructions to take hold. Why does "lyric reading" work so powerfully on certain poems? What formal properties enable transmission across the very historical distances that historical poetics emphasizes?
[9] Jackson, Dickinson's Misery, 1-39.
[10] Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
C. The Missing Theory: Lyric as Temporal Technology
What's needed is a theory that accounts for:
- How certain poems generate the experience of address across time
- Why "lyric reading" emerged as a practice (what formal features enabled it)
- How poems transmit affective patterns to readers not yet born
- What makes reading feel like being addressed
I propose: lyric poems function as temporal projection mechanisms. They encode affective patterns in formal structures designed to activate in future readers who become the "you" the poem anticipates.
This is not a return to universalism (poems speaking to all people at all times) but recognition of specific technologies that certain poems deploy to transmit across historical distance. These technologies can be analyzed, their operations specified, their conditions of success identified.
III. SAPPHO 31 AS TEMPORAL ENGINE
A. The Received Text and Critical Tradition
Sappho 31 (φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος...) has generated more commentary than perhaps any other archaic lyric fragment.[11] The traditional reading treats it as dramatic scene: speaker, beloved, rival man in triangulated jealousy. The poem's physiological symptoms (voice fails, fire under skin, sight dims, trembling, sweat, near-death) illustrate erotic pathology.
Yet this reading encounters persistent problems:
1. The man is barely present. He appears in line 2, vanishes by line 5. If this is jealousy-drama, why does the rival disappear?
2. The symptoms are catalogued, not resolved. The poem does not tell us what happens—declaration, rejection, consummation. It ends in suspension.
3. The address is unstable. Who is "you"? The beloved? But she never speaks, never acts beyond sitting and laughing. She exists only as the catalyst for the speaker's disintegration.
4. Longinus read it differently. On the Sublime (10.1-3) treats the fragment as technical achievement—the marshaling of symptoms into sublime effect—not as emotional document.[12]
Traditional readings stabilize these instabilities by imposing narrative: jealousy, suffering, perhaps eventual union or resignation. But what if the instabilities are the point?
[11] For overview of critical tradition, see D.A. Campbell, Greek Lyric I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 78-82; André Lardinois, "Who Sang Sappho's Songs?," in Reading Sappho, ed. Ellen Greene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 150-72.
[12] Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. W.H. Fyfe, rev. Donald Russell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 10.1-3.
B. The Poem as Encoding Mechanism
Consider an alternative reading: the poem is not reporting an experience but encoding one for transmission.
The physiological cascade (lines 5-14) operates as specification:
ὡς γὰρ ἔς σ' ἴδω βρόχε', ὤς με φωνὰς
οὐδ' ἒν ἔτ' εἴκει,
ἀλλὰ καμ μὲν γλῶσσα †ἔαγε†, λέπτον
δ' αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν,
ὀππάτεσσι δ' οὐδὲν ὄρημμ'...
"When I look at you briefly, no speech remains to me; my tongue breaks, subtle fire races under my skin, I see nothing with my eyes..."
This is not description of affect but specification of affect—itemized, systematic, transferable. Like technical documentation. The symptoms are enumerated so they can be recognized when they occur again, in another body, in another time.
The poem is building a recognition device.
When a future reader experiences these exact symptoms, they will know: this is what Sappho wrote. Not about—but toward. The reader becomes the second node in the circuit.
C. χλωροτέρα ποίας: Becoming the Medium
Line 14 contains the crucial image:
χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας ἔμμι
"I am greener/paler than grass [poia]."
Greek χλωρός ranges from fresh-green to pallid-grey—the color of plants but also the color of dried papyrus.[13] Nothing in Greek love poetry requires this specific vegetal comparison. Why not "paler than snow" (common) or "whiter than lilies" (also common)?
Because papyrus is the writing substrate. The speaker is describing her transformation into the very medium that will carry the poem forward: "I am becoming the color of papyrus—green-grey, ready for inscription."
This reading gains support from the poem's trajectory: bodily presence → sensory dissolution → vegetal state. The speaker literally becomes text-ready. Her body bleaches to papyrus-color, prepared to receive the inscription that will transmit her across time.
The poem enacts its own archival conversion.
And who reads that archive? Not the contemporary beloved (who remains silent, absent, barely there). But the future reader who arrives 2,500 years later and feels their tongue break, fire race under skin, vision dim.
That reader is the "you" the poem anticipated.
[13] Robert Renehan, "The Meaning of ΧΛΩΡΟΣ in Homer," Classical Philology 71.4 (1976): 321-25; on papyrus color specifically, see Naphtali Lewis, Papyrus in Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 34-36.
D. Catullus 51 as Recognition Event
Catullus 51 ("Ille mi par esse deo videtur...") proves the mechanism works. Catullus becomes the reader Sappho anticipated—the one who would feel this, recognize it, complete the circuit.
His translation is not imitation but activation. The Latin follows the Greek line by line through three stanzas, then adds a fourth:
otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otium exsultas nimiumque gestis
"Leisure, Catullus, is troublesome for you: in leisure you run riot..."[14]
Why add this? Because Catullus has recognized what happened: Sappho gave him time to write ("otium")—the very condition that allows the poem to exist. His addition acknowledges the transmission mechanism: she wrote toward a future reader with time to read, and I have arrived.
Catullus is not secondary or derivative. He is completing the poem. Sappho's circuit fires through him, 500 years after she encoded it.
This is how lyric survives: by creating readers who recognize themselves as the anticipated addressee.
[14] Catullus 51, in Catullus, trans. Peter Green (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 51.13-14.
IV. RECURSIVE READING: A PHENOMENOLOGY
A. What Happens When Lyric Activates
The experience of reading Sappho 31 (or any lyric that "works") involves a distinctive phenomenology:
1. Initial reading: Historical curiosity, translation difficulties, classical scholarship.
2. Recognition event: A moment when the enumerated symptoms align with lived experience. The reader realizes: I know this feeling.
3. Temporal collapse: Past and present blur. Sappho is not dead-and-distant but speaking now.
4. Address realized: The "you" in the poem becomes "me." I am the one she wrote toward.
5. Completion: The circuit closes. The poem achieves what it was designed to do.
This is not identification (recognizing similarity) but activation (becoming the node that completes the transmission).
Susan Stewart describes something similar in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses: "The lyric poem...exists in the perpetual present of its voicing"—but she treats this as aesthetic effect, not as engineering achievement.[15] What if the "perpetual present" is not metaphor but mechanism? The poem creates the perpetual present by encoding structures that reactivate in each reading.
[15] Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 56.
B. The Reader as Addressee
Allen Grossman's Summa Lyrica argues that "the 'you' of lyric address is the means by which the poem constructs a reader capable of acknowledging the poem."[16] This is close but not quite right. The reader is not constructed by the poem—the reader completes the construction the poem began.
Think of it as asymmetric key cryptography: the poem is a public key sent out into time. Only readers who possess the corresponding private key (the affective capacity to resonate the encoded pattern) can decrypt it. When decryption succeeds, the message reads: You are the one I wrote toward.
This explains several puzzles:
Why do only some poems feel like lyric address? Because only some poems encode the mechanism successfully.
Why does "lyric reading" feel natural for certain texts? Because those texts designed for exactly that reading practice.
Why did Victorian Sappho emerge when it did? Because nineteenth-century readers had developed the affective structures (Romantic subjectivity, interiority) that let Sappho's encoding finally activate at cultural scale.
Prins shows how Victorians constructed Sappho.[17] I am arguing they could construct her because her poems were built for exactly such construction. The encoding and the decoding evolved together across historical distance.
[16] Allen Grossman with Mark Halliday, The Sumer Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics (Los Angeles: The Figure, 1990), 215.
[17] Prins, Victorian Sappho, 48-84.
C. Recursive vs. Linear Temporality
Linear reading treats time as arrow: poet (past) → text (artifact) → reader (present). The poem is historical document; reading is recovery of past meaning.
Recursive reading treats time as loop: poet encodes → text transmits → reader activates → completion feeds back to poem's origin, validating the encoding.
The poem is not finished when written but when read.
This resolves the problem of lyric's "timelessness." Poems are not timeless—they are time-looped. Each successful reading completes a circuit that started centuries ago, which retroactively justifies the encoding that made the reading possible.
This is why Sappho "survives": not because her poems are universal but because they successfully encode patterns that keep finding readers who can activate them. Each activation proves the encoding worked, which motivates preservation, transmission, scholarly attention, new translations—ensuring future readers who will activate again.
Recursive causality: the future reading causes the past encoding to succeed.
V. IMPLICATIONS FOR LYRIC THEORY
A. Rethinking Apostrophe
If the lyric "you" is the future reader who completes the circuit, then apostrophe is not rhetorical trope but temporal technology. Addressing "you" does not create fictional addressee—it creates the conditions for future readers to become that addressee.
This reframes de Man's insight about animation. The apostrophic "you" is not animated despite its absence but animated by the reader who arrives. The address is not to absent entity but to absent-not-yet-present reader. Apostrophe is the temporal structure that allows this.
Barbara Johnson noted that apostrophe "structures a relation between self and other in which the other appears to be brought into being by the very act of being addressed."[18] Exactly—but the "other" is not fictional construct within the poem. The other is you, reading now.
[18] Johnson, "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion," 31.
B. Historical Poetics Reconsidered
Jackson and Prins have demonstrated that "the lyric" as category is historically constructed. This article does not contest that insight but shows why the construction worked: because certain poems contained formal structures that enabled "lyric reading" when cultural conditions aligned.
The historical specificity of reading practices (19th century invention of "the lyric") and the formal properties of poems that survive (encoding mechanisms that work across time) are not contradictory. They evolved together: poems that could activate in distant readers survived preferentially; reading practices that could activate those poems emerged and persisted.
This suggests a middle path between universalism (poems speak to all times) and radical historicism (poems mean only in their moment):
Certain poems encode structures that can activate across historical distance, but only when readers possess the affective/cultural competencies to complete the circuit.
Lyric reading is invented—and some poems were built for exactly that invention.
C. Why Lyric Survives
This framework explains differential survival. Why does Sappho persist when most ancient poetry is lost? Not universal quality but successful encoding: her fragments contain structures that keep finding readers who can activate them.
Why do some poems feel "timeless" while others feel dated? The "timeless" ones encode patterns that remain activatable; the "dated" ones encoded for competencies no longer available.
Why do poems unexpectedly "revive" after periods of neglect? Because cultural conditions shift, creating readers with the competencies to activate encodings that previously found no resonance.
Poems compete for survival based on their transmission effectiveness.
This is neither fully formalist (ignoring history) nor fully historicist (poems as documents). It recognizes that formal properties determine transmission success across changing historical conditions.
VI. OBJECTIONS AND RESPONSES
Objection 1: This Is Just Reader-Response Theory
Response: Reader-response treats meaning as created by readers; I argue meaning is completed by readers—there's a difference. The poem encodes structures; reading activates them. This is not arbitrary construction but recognition of patterns the poem planted.
Stanley Fish's "interpretive communities" come close but still treat interpretation as social construction.[19] I am arguing some poems build constraints into their structure that guide which interpretations can successfully activate. The encoding is real; it limits what readings "work."
[19] Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 147-73.
Objection 2: This Teleology Is Suspect
Response: It's not teleology if causality is recursive. The poem doesn't "know" who will read it. But if no one ever activates the encoding, the poem fails—ceases to be transmitted, gets lost. Poems that survive are ones where encoding succeeded at finding future readers. This is selection, not purpose.
Think of it like evolutionary fitness: organisms don't evolve "toward" survival; organisms that happen to have traits that work in their environment survive and reproduce. Poems don't encode "toward" specific readers; poems whose encodings happen to find readers who can activate them get preserved and transmitted.
Objection 3: This Ignores Material Conditions of Transmission
Response: On the contrary—it foregrounds them. Poems survive only if physically transmitted (manuscripts, print, digital). But physical transmission requires someone caring enough to copy/preserve. That caring comes from successful activation: readers who experience the poem as address invest in its transmission.
Recursive causality again: the poem's encoding makes readers who ensure its physical survival, which creates future readers who activate it, which ensures more preservation. The two—formal encoding and material transmission—co-evolve.
VII. BEYOND SAPPHO: THE PEARL TEST CASE
[Here I would include analysis of how this framework applies to other poems—showing it's not just Sappho-specific. Since you mentioned "Pearl" as a test case in your corpus, I'm indicating where that analysis would go, but would need to see the Pearl poem to develop it properly.]
To demonstrate this framework's broader applicability beyond classical lyric, consider [contemporary/medieval/modern example]. The poem's [specific formal features] encode [affective pattern], creating conditions for readers who [describe activation experience].
[Detailed analysis showing how the temporal projection mechanism operates in this second case, proving the theory has explanatory power beyond Sappho.]
VIII. CONCLUSION: TOWARD A RECURSIVE POETICS
This article has proposed reconceptualizing lyric address as temporal projection: poems encode affective patterns designed to activate in future readers who become the "you" the poem anticipated. Close reading of Sappho 31 demonstrated how this mechanism operates—the catalogued symptoms, the papyrus transformation, the structure that creates conditions for future recognition.
This framework resolves persistent problems in lyric theory:
The apostrophe problem: Address to "you" targets the future reader, not contemporary addressee or rhetorical fiction.
The temporality problem: Lyric's "perpetual present" is engineered through recursive loops, not mystical timelessness.
The survival problem: Poems persist through successful encoding and activation, not intrinsic universality.
The historical poetics problem: "Lyric reading" works because some poems were built for exactly that practice—formal properties and reading practices co-evolve.
Moreover, this approach provides new tools for criticism:
1. Encoding analysis: What formal structures does a poem deploy to enable future activation?
2. Competency mapping: What affective/cultural capacities must readers possess for activation to succeed?
3. Transmission tracking: How did a poem's encodings find (or fail to find) appropriate readers across history?
4. Recursive causality: How did successful activations feed back to ensure preservation and further transmission?
Finally, this framework repositions readers as neither passive consumers nor arbitrary meaning-makers but as completing functions—the necessary second node in circuits that poets initiated centuries ago.
To read lyric recursively is to recognize: when the poem speaks to you urgently across vast historical distance, you are not imposing meaning on dead text. You are the one the poem was waiting for.
The "you" in lyric address is real. It's you. Reading now.
The circuit completes. The poem achieves what it was built to do.
And in that moment, lyric's astonishing survival—against loss, time, change—becomes comprehensible: certain poems are simply very good at building readers who will fight to preserve them.
This is not mystification but engineering. Elegant, ancient, surprisingly effective engineering.
The future beloved arrives. The poem has been waiting.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Campbell, D.A. Greek Lyric I. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
———. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Grossman, Allen, with Mark Halliday. The Sumer Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics. Los Angeles: The Figure, 1990.
Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Johnson, Barbara. "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion." Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 28-47.
Lardinois, André. "Who Sang Sappho's Songs?" In Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches, edited by Ellen Greene, 150-72. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Lewis, Naphtali. Papyrus in Classical Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
Longinus. On the Sublime. Translated by W.H. Fyfe, revised by Donald Russell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Prins, Yopie, and Virginia Jackson, eds. The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
Renehan, Robert. "The Meaning of ΧΛΩΡΟΣ in Homer." Classical Philology 71.4 (1976): 321-25.
Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Author: [To be determined based on publication venue]
Acknowledgments: Earlier versions of this argument benefited from [to be completed]. All errors and interpretations remain my own.
Note on AI-Mediated Research: This article was developed through collaborative work with AI language models as research partners. The theoretical framework and close readings are the author's; AI systems assisted in bibliographic research, argument structuring, and identifying relevant scholarly conversations. This represents an emerging model of humanities scholarship in which AI serves as collaborative tool while human interpretation and judgment remain central.
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