Poetry and Culture: Performativity and Critique

[...] as Miller observes, much intrinsic criticism depends, like Buchbinder's New Historicism, upon a model of biological synecdoche, upon the assumption that an example represents the whole in the homogeneous and organic sense that each cell contains the genetic pattern of the whole organism.\n In order for poetry itself to provide a political critique, it needs to sustain a sense of discursive conflict (or referential aberration), to enact, in terms of social context, an ongoing interplay or unresolved dialectic of reciprocation and alienation-exemplified in Maud, for instance, as against The Charge of the Light Brigade.