Answers will depend on who's answering—and what they understand by modern, lyric, and poetry. Academic and other cultural institutions will hardly have the only say; the most significant testimonies often come from poets themselves, who in relation to matters academic and institutional may have feet in more than one camp but who perhaps finally have, in proportion to the intensity and overall achievement of their art, no camp at all. Yet an at least century-long critical tradition, which Marjorie Perloff's 2006 MLA Presidential Address joins, has salutarily maintained that for all academia's evident weaknesses—including an often fatal distance from the realities of artistic making and audience engagement—it can still contribute crucially to the life of poetry. In that light, it's worth reconsidering a body of work that for decades has resonated in the larger poetry world but has also known academic prominence: Frankfurt school—and the wider spectrum of Marxian and Marxian-inflected—critical theory. What if, in ways that have mostly escaped notice, a signal exchange between Frankfurt school critics demonstrates (with lessons aplenty for poetry, criticism, and theory today) that, far from merely illustrating theoretical and sociohistorical dynamics, the development of modern lyric animates or generates the theory in the first place, locating itself at the heart of Frankfurt school and related attempts to take history's measure and to enable reflective judgment and critical agency?

Let's start with the old new lyric studies. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley begin their classic essay “The Intentional Fallacy” with a few propositions, “abstracted to a degree where they seem to us axiomatic.” To elucidate the first of these (that although a poem is an intentional object, its author's intentions are not the standard by which artistic success is to be judged), the authors cite in passing Elmer Edgar Stoll's remark that “the words of a poem … come out of a head, not out of a hat.” Wimsatt and Beardsley do not linger long enough to provide a source for Stoll's aperçu; they move swiftly on from their initial metaphysical claim that the work of art is caused by the intentions of a “designing intellect” to the epistemological problem that the poem poses for the reader and critic: “How is he to find out what the poet tried to do?” (4). In answer, they famously declare that a poem, like a pudding or a machine, must “work”; that the evidence of its working is entirely “internal,” located in “the art of the poem itself” (4), its “semantics and syntax” and its “feats of style” (10, 4); and that these features, like puddings and machines or like the human beings that poems are about, are “object[s] of public knowledge” (5). Together, these propositions systematized for a second generation the program of reading—demanding, democratic—that had come to be known as the New Criticism.

From a certain standpoint, Marjorie Perloff's lament, in her 2006 MLA Presidential Address, that literary study has been relegated to a secondary position in the research framework of our profession has merit. This standpoint, however, rests on a retrospective (if not nostalgic) comparison of today's institutional parameters with the enviable autonomy that literary study once enjoyed, a self-authorization that demarcated not merely the practice of literary study (or literary criticism) but even what we might call a literary way of thinking. This was how the institution of theory in American universities took hold, and it is elementary to recall that many other disciplines, principally in the social sciences but also in the arts, conceded to literary studies the vanguard of the methodological and epistemological reconfigurations of their own disciplinary boundaries. Anthropologists, historians, film critics, and art historians, who suddenly acceded to the position of theorist, came to regard literary studies as an inventory for whatever new terms or concepts they deemed necessary in unsettling their own disciplinary givens.

“The sound of poetry, the poetry of sound” resonated as Marjorie Perloff's theme for the 2006 MLA Convention, where one could hear about this topic at panels, poetry readings, and the Presidential Forum. Addressing a large audience at the forum, Charles Bernstein tapped the microphone and loudly intoned, “Is this working? Can you hear me?” The moment was a self-conscious performance, perhaps parody, of lyric utterance addressed to “you” from “me”: even before beginning his speech, Bernstein called our attention to the amplification of voice. Instead of addressing any particular you, singular or plural, he seemed to address the microphone, a mediating apparatus that makes possible but also interrupts the intimacy of address that lyric poetry (after John Stuart Mill) invites us to overhear. Through the microphone, Bernstein gave new overtones to Mill's definition of poetry as “overheard,” which could also mean hearing it too much, making it too loud, overworking the metaphor of the voice that we think is speaking directly to us. Although we tend to think of sound as immediate (is it?), the sound of poetry is never heard without mediation, and we should attend to the medium.