“NONE OF IT! NONE OF IT WILL LAST!”

A screamer. A gasper. A startler. A dog’s cock.¹ “An index finger raised in warning.”² A bang. A pling. A slammer. A shriek. “A squiggle manufactured in Renaissance Italy in order to revive the ideals of classical oration.”³ “A squirt of lighter fluid to the smoldering embers of tempo.”⁴ “Startles and provokes.”⁵ “Like laughing at your own jokes” (according to Fitzgerald).⁶ “Intolerable” (according to Adorno).⁷ A punctus admirativus, or a modified io. A signifier of the barbaric yawp, or a lazy effort to simulate fervor. A yearning to transcend language (in vain, or not in vain, that is the question). A signal of poetic irony, or a gesture toward an ecstasy derived from death-consciousness.

I bring you: The exclamation point.

This little, unevenly bifurcated mark—but a dot beneath a line—can play an outsized role in a work of literature, and is the subject of much scholarly and literary derision, often viewed as base, unsophisticated, cheap and loud. In keeping with this view, when wielded in contemporary English-language poetry, this mark is often deployed to signal the poet’s ironic gaze on a subject, and carries with it an undertone of derision, caricature and scorn. Less often, I think, is this punctuation mark celebrated in literary or scholarly settings for its potential poetic power as an ecstatic death-marker. In this essay, I will explore the ways in which the exclamation point can be deployed to imbue poems either with extratextual irony or, when wielded well, with transcendent, death-conscious ecstasy. In doing so, I will take a close look at the exclamation points in four collections by American poets: Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets, Robert Hass’s Sun Under Wood, Langston Hughes’s Selected Poems, and Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems. But before delving into the work of the poets, I will begin with a brief discussion of a scholarly debate regarding this punctuation mark’s genesis, and of a curious consensus, from both sides of the pro-pling and the anti-gasper divide, regarding the mark’s self-conscious conspicuousness.

ON ORIGINS AND OSTENTATION

There are two prominent, competing scholarly theories regarding the origin of the exclamation point. The first theory holds that this controversial piece of punctuation is an outgrowth of the medieval practice of ending sentences with the Latin io, which denotes joy or delight. According to this theory, at some juncture, some scribe, overwhelmed by the spirit of their writing, or simply sloppy with their penmanship, might have “had a slip of hand and written the i above the o, thus forming the exclamation mark we use today.”⁸ The second theory, less whimsical and more workaday, holds that the mark was invented in late fourteenth-century Italy, by a poet named Iacopo Alpoleio da Urbisaglia.⁹ Urbisaglia, according to this theory, bestowed upon his creation the name “punctus admirativus,” and tasked it with indicating “the tonal inflection of clauses,” namely, the “exclamatory clauses… perceived in the classical orators.”¹⁰

Regardless of its origin, there is scholarly agreement that the exclamation point is one of the most—if not the most—ostentatious pieces of punctuation. Matthew Yeager notes that the exclamation point stands out from all other forms of punctuation in that every other mark is designed to slow down tempo, while the exclamation point’s task is to speed it up.¹¹ Theodor Adorno argued that exclamation points are “gestures of authority with which the writer tries to impose an emphasis external to the matter” and “have degenerated into usurpers of authority, assertions of importance.”¹² Lin Su, while dissenting from Adorno’s declaration that the exclamation point is thus “intolerable,” agreed with Adorno’s assessment of the extratextual performative qualities of this mark: “It is the punctuation mark that is perhaps most self-conscious about its own intentionality and the one that most readily acknowledges the existence of a readership.”¹³

The exclamation point And indeed, both the ironic and ecstatic modes are conscious of the exclamation point’s yearning to transcend language. The ironic mode performatively (and self-consciously) assents to Adorno’s assertion that this gesture is necessarily in vain, and perhaps, even, that all yearning is in vain. The ecstatic mode, however, is less certain of this. A useful starting point, then, is a recent, acclaimed poetry collection in which both modes appear.