In this chapter, Lowell and Language poets are juxtaposed as opposite interpretations of historical impulses fueling twentieth-century American poetics: modernism and Romanticism. While the poetic culture that elevated Lowell to esteem interpreted those traditions as an injunction to seek the poetic in the authenticity of the personal subjecthood, Language poetry aimed to radically disrupt the entire paradigm. Proposing a unique amalgam of theory and practice, Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, or Ron Silliman treated theory as a provocation to revisit the common ground of philosophy and poetry. As such, it was an attempt at rejuvenating the encounter of word and world in order to regain access to the political plasticity of an autobiographical subject’s life. The chapter shows how this paragon of the lyric is fascinatingly revised by such poets as Bernstein, Hejinian, Armantrout, or Peter Gizzi.