Poetics and politics of the lyric poem

Distinguished by the expression of personal observations and feelings, the lyric poem is an introspective and self-reflexive form that seeks to give direct voice to individual consciousness, articulating its singular patterns of cognitions, desires and doubts. This self-expressive impulse is closely associated with Romanticism, and specifically with the Romantic projection of the internal life of a subject who is estranged from existing political institutions and social structures, turns to nature and natural philosophy for alternative systems of meaning and value, and takes this subjective revolt as the very material of poetry, striving, against the limits of language itself, for spontaneous and sincere utterance. For all their conceptual and stylistic differences, Wordsworth's ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Shelley's ‘Adonais’ have in common the self-expressive impulse of a subject who seeks in nature an aesthetic understanding of the mind's symbolic relation with the real.

Whilst Romantic aspiration towards authentic individual expression has been subjected to the dislocations and ironic perspectives of modernism, it has continued to haunt modernism as an elusive possibility, a transitory achievement of consciousness, even where, as in Eliot's ‘Waste Land’, the myths that inform western culture are invoked in fragmentary form to constitute an aesthetic of loss. A more systematic challenge to Romantic subjectivity was formulated by late twentieth-century literary theory, specifically poststructuralist deconstructions of the expressive self and post-Marxist exposures of the ideological investments of poetic discourse. The latter, in particular, was influential in determining attitudes to the lyric poem in the apartheid period.