Poetry Binds All: Liminoid Strategies and Metapoetic Visitations of “The Scholar Gipsy”

Abstract

This study considers Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar Gipsy” within the liminal-limioid theoretical grounds touched upon by Victor Turner and Friedrich Max Müller. The body of discussion focuses on the metapoetic aspect of the art of poetry in relation to liminal-liminoid projections featured within Arnold’s poem. The main argument is that liminal projections within the poem transform into a liminoid and metapoetic space where the essential core of the art of poetry itself is revealed as the product of a liminoid process. The figure of the scholar-gipsy who left Oxford hundreds of years ago and joined a gipsy tribe in pursuit of greater knowledge is animated by means of the speaker’s recalling the now-gipsy-scholar’s story in the poem. Such a summons becomes an eternal symbol of the kind of metapoetic relationship between the speaker and his liminoidly inspiring source. Metapoetic and liminoid connections are further layered with the inescepable presence of a timeless reader bound neither by space nor by time. Thus, boundaries between source-material, speaker, poet, the art of poetry, inspiration and the reader are stretched, where Arnold’s whole metapoetic-liminoid process binds all humanity together by means of the same poetic and re-creative liminoid play.