Description
Book SynopsisWhat do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of
Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to show that our oldest styles of poetic articulation – the elegy, the ode, the hymn – have figured all too briefly in modern genealogies of lyric, and that they have proved especially seductive, curiously enough, to avant-garde practitioners in the Anglophone tradition. The poets in question – Jorie Graham, Frank O’Hara, Michael Haslam, J. H. Prynne, Claudia Rankine, and others – have thickened the texture of lyric practice at a time when the growing tendency in critical circles has been to dissolve points of difference within the genre itself. The broader aim of this volume is to demonstrate that experimental poets since 1945 have not always been rebarbative and anti-traditional, but rather that their recourse to familiar forms and shapes of thought should prompt us to reconsider late modernism as a crucial phase in the evolving history of lyric.
CONTRIBUTORS: Ruth Abbott, Edward Allen, Gareth Farmer, Fiona Green, Drew Milne, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sophie Read, Matthew Sperling, Esther Osorio Whewell, John Wilkinson
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Edward Allen1. Aubade: Jorie Graham and “the pitch of the dawn”
Fiona Green2. Hymnody: From Lowell to Riley in Common Measure
Matthew Sperling3. Pastoral: “Language-Landscape Linkage” in Michael Haslam’s Verse
Sophie Read4. Elegy: Surreptitious and Prospective, from W. S. Graham to Margaret Ross
John Wilkinson5. Interpellation: Addressing Ideology in Claudia Rankine’s American Lyric
Drew Milne6. Ode: Veronica Forrest-Thomson and the Artifice of Resuscitation
Gareth Farmer7. Souvenir: Lucie Brock-Broido’s True Kitsch
Esther Osorio Whewell8. Song: Denise Riley in Parts
Ruth Abbott9. Dramatic Monologue: R. F. Langley and the Poem of “Anyone in Particular”
Jeremy Noel-Tod10. Nocturne: J. H. Prynne Among the Stars
Edward Allen
