Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1998

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Arthur Smith

Committee Members

B. J. Leggett, Nancy Goslee, Elizabeth

Abstract

For the last century, discussions of American poetry have touched on a central question: Is the lyric mode still viable? Recently, poststructuralist theorists and language poets alike typically answer “No,” contending that cultural, historical, and textual factors make the conception of an autonomous lyric subject a dubious one, one very much implicated in a bourgeois Romantic nostalgia. As a result, much recent critical practice disparages the lyric as the genre most closely associated with that Romantic notion of the self

This disparagement is traceable in part to the way many critics misunderstand contemporary poetry’s connection to the Romantic legacy and the practice that places a solitary speaker voicing his or her passions in a “timeless” moment. This misunderstanding is complicated by a common misreading that sees Wordsworth’s poetic theory as advocating simple expressivism. By overly emphasizing Wordsworth’s equation— that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”“critics often ignore Wordsworth’s qualification that the poet must have “also thought long and deeply.” This dissertation argues that the lyric mode remains viable in contemporary poetry because of the self-critical, self reflective, and self-suspicious move already apparent in the lyric mode even as Wordsworth defines it in his Preface.

Beginning by investigating the lyric aesthetics offered both in Wordsworth’s Preface and in John Keats’s letters, this dissertation focuses on four recent American poets who have chosen to work within the lyric tradition. By examining the prose and poetry of James Wright, Louise Gliick, C. K. Williams, and Robert Hass, this dissertation illustrates how these poets have uncovered for themselves, in the mature phases of their careers, a lyric already suspicious and critical of its own assumptions. Rather than engage in postmodern semantic play, these poets clearly prefer the more familiar lyric terrain, finding there a necessary and vital lyric suspicion, that is, the ability to question the conventions of lyric poetry in order to purify its usage. This study concludes by insisting that these four poets’ projects demonstrate the continued viability of the lyric mode, thus calling into question the polemical cries either to undermine radically the lyric mode or to abandon its enterprise altogether.

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