SOURCE: Crown, Kathleen. “‘This Unstable I-Witnessing’: Susan Howe's Lyric Iconoclasm and the Articulating Ghost.” Women's Studies 27, no. 5 (1998): 483-505.

In the following essay, Crown underscores Howe's “iconoclastic approach to lyric convention and traditional historiography” and asserts that her “serial lyrics testify not to the solitary speaker's inward eye but to a painfully public, dissociated and multiple sensibility.”

We ask for history, and that means that we ask for the simple record of unadulterated facts; we look, and nowhere do we find the object of our search, but in its stead we see the divergent accounts of a host of jarring witnesses, a chaos of disjoined and discrepant narrations, and yet, while all of these can by no possibility be received as true, at the same time not one of them can be rejected as false.

—F. H. Bradley

Break the words. Words are indivisible crystals. One cannot break them...