Any who have marveled at Emily Dickinson’s wonderfully enigmatic poems have also likely noticed as well their similarity to riddles—her apt comparison of a train to a horse in “I love to see it lap the miles,” for instance. But has anyone actually written an in-depth study of the relationship between the riddle and modern poetry? An exhaustive study is yet to be written, but this book by folklore and comparative literature scholar Živil? Gimbutas is an excellent beginning.
The Riddle in the Poem presents a clear and useful discussion of the riddle as it illuminates poetry and as it is used by poets in the creation of poetry. The author, Živil? Gimbutas, has effectively drawn together research from folklorists and literary scholars to support her description of the essential components of both the folk and the literary riddle, and she has employed this analytical frame in an examination of selected works of five twentieth-century poets—Francis Ponge, Wallace Stevens, Richard Wilbur, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Henrikas Radauskas.
Gimbutas’ study is a well-developed application of an integrative folklore and literature perspective. Perhaps most valuable is the first chapter, in which she reviews some of the foundational research on the oral riddle tradition, paying particular attention to the formal and structural features of the riddle as outlined by Archer Taylor, Elli Köngäs Maranda, and Alan Dundes. She moves from this fundamental concept of the riddle as question and comparison to a related theoretical view of the riddle as a kind of modified quest for a metaphorical “other.” Many of the lyrics characteristic of twentieth-century poets reflect a literary riddle tradition, one less dependent on the paradoxical descriptions associated with oral riddles and more dependent on dream and visual images associated with art and its interpretation. Gimbutas introduces the concept of the “ekphrasis,” or a verbal description of a visual enigma, as an analytical tool tied to the literary riddle tradition.
After offering a number of useful answers to the question “What is a riddle?” in the first chapter, the author briefly reviews the history of riddle research and points out that much of the study of the oral riddle in Europe involved the recording of repeatable texts. More useful to twentieth-century poets was the improvisational riddling tradition itself, something treated most impressively in John H. McDowell’s study, Children’s Riddling. To demonstrate how the poets she selected for her book did in fact use the riddling tradition, Gimbutas turns to the process of riddle creation rather than to indexes of traditional riddles. For poets such as Stevens and Rilke, it is the process of metaphorical description that ties their work to the riddle tradition, not any lingering consideration of the usual subjects of traditional riddles.
The four applied chapters of the book examine poems that seem to most effectively use the riddle as a conceptual framework—whether consciously or not. Before addressing the twentieth-century poets she has selected for attention, Gimbutas comments on some of the earlier literary figures, such as the Old English composer of the Riddle of the Swan or, more recently, Franz von Brentano. Her primary focus, however, are the five twentieth-century poets chosen for their varied use of the riddling process. Francis Ponge is a French poet whose first book of poetry was published in 1942. Rilke and Stevens are well-known poets from the same period, and Richard Wilbur and Henrikas Radauskas are poets who wrote during the last part of the twentieth century. All, in Gimbutas’ view, write their lyrical pieces using some useful process borrowed from the folk or literary riddle tradition. Like Emily Dickinson, whose poetry so effectively applies the best rules of riddling, these five poets draw upon the creativity inherent in riddling traditions and riddling process. In The Riddle in the Poem, Živil? Gimbutas has given us a clear insight into how contemporary poets absorb the tradition and process of the riddle and use it in their creative verbal comparisons, quests, and questions that emerge as striking and often enigmatic poetry.
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[Review length: 667 words • Review posted on June 7, 2006]