Lyric Poetry

The Pain and the Pleasure of Words

Mutlu Blasing

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780691126821
• eBook ISBN: 9781400827411
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Lyric poetry has long been regarded as the intensely private, emotional expression of individuals, powerful precisely because it draws readers into personal worlds. But who, exactly, is the "I" in a lyric poem, and how is it created? In Lyric Poetry, Mutlu Blasing argues that the individual in a lyric is only a virtual entity and that lyric poetry takes its power from the public, emotional power of language itself.


In the first major new theory of the lyric to be put forward in decades, Blasing proposes that lyric poetry is a public discourse deeply rooted in the mother tongue. She looks to poetic, linguistic, and psychoanalytic theory to help unravel the intricate historical processes that generate speaking subjects, and concludes that lyric forms convey both personal and communal emotional histories in language. Focusing on the work of such diverse twentieth-century American poets as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Anne Sexton, Blasing demonstrates the ways that the lyric "I" speaks, from first to last, as a creation of poetic language.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction “Making Choice of a Human Self”
• PART ONE Lyric Theory
• Chapter 1 The Lyric Subject
• Chapter 2 The Historical “I”
• Chapter 3 The Scripted “I”
• Chapter 4 The Body of Words
• PART TWO Lyric Practice
• Chapter 5 Four Quartets: Rhetoric Redeemed
• Chapter 6 Wallace Stevens and “The Less Legible Meanings of Sounds”
• Chapter 7 Pound s Soundtrack: “Reading Cantos for What Is on the Page”
• Chapter 8 Anne Sexton, “The Typo”
• WORKS CITED