Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The Last Line 'i would be eight people each inhabiting each other's dreams walking through corridors of glass framed pages telling each other the final lines of letters' 1Literature is good at manipulating interruptions.Caesurae, commas, non-terminal sentences, interim end-stopped lines, pauses to rhyme, and ellipses have all become, over time, well-known playthings.Indeed, if as Frank O'Hara suggests , one kind of wish a poet might have is to control their medium's time-'as if/you would never leave me/and were the inexorable/product of my own time' 2 -the best way to act on that wish might be with intermediate stops.Texts may disrupt themselves however and whenever they like, with no better excuse than a memory deficit or the affectation of one.Keston Sutherland writes in The Odes to TL61P (2013): 'accumulation is about finally not remembering what meaning you are on, or not caring'.3 Texts may also behave as though there were no need to end, let alone permanently end.Cf.Molly Bloom's last chapter of Ulysses (1922).On the other hand, the absolute end of any text-when the words cut out altogether-is curiously immune to too much play.There is a fundamental artlessness to terminal last lines in that, whatever happens before they come and whatever the individual circumstances of the author, their coming is inevitable.Unfinished texts must still end.Even if an author dies mid-sentence, there will be a sentence fragment.In The Sense of An Ending (1966), Frank Kermode writes: 'We cannot […] be denied an end.' 4 There could be real relief in passing over the mic to someone else as the curtain threatens.'i would be eight people', says Tom Raworth, 'telling each other the final lines of letters'.There is an art of ending well, of course-one worthy of cultivation, which may at times motivate virtuosity.Yet endings differ from other features of a work's form in being resistant to technical perfectibility.Fine-tune them and you will risk
Source: Critical Quarterly
DOI: 10.1111/criq.70037
Author: Beci Carver
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,900
OpenAlex ID: W7128791736
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