This chapter defines a genre of lyric whose speaker is a personification of an entire species. Lyrics of this kind appear in poetic field guides in the 1830s, and in poetry for children throughout the century. The chapter closes with readings of lyrics by Swinburne and Hardy in which the conditions under which a species can become a speaking subject are opened to critique

The impact of Wittgenstein’s work on lyric poets, literary critics, and philosophers has been well documented. Philosophers and literary scholars, including Charles Altieri Stanley Cavell, Richard Eldridge, Michael Fischer, Walter Jost, and Joshua Wilner, have drawn on Wittgenstein to consider poetry from the Romantics to the present. Numerous poets from the mid-twentieth century on – among them Barbara Köhler, Marjorie Perloff, Lyn Hejinian, John Koethe, Charles Bernstein, and Ingeborg Bachmann – discuss or reference Wittgenstein, to say nothing of the authors like Perloff, David Rozema, Christopher Norris, or Benjamin Tilghman who contend that Wittgenstein’s writing is itself “poetic.” This chapter takes a different approach: it argues that Wittgenstein’s work illuminates the central questions of the theory of the lyric, namely questions about what lyric poetry is and what it does. As questions of essence and existence, these are the kinds of question Wittgenstein helps us understand – not, primarily, by answering them but by prompting us to consider why and how we ask them. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s attention to the ways poems use language and what we do with them shows how both poetry and the ways we respond to poems rest on his view of language as emerging from and constituting a form of life.

This chapter focuses on the arrival of a new dominant mode in American poetry of the 1970s – accessible, free-verse, first-person lyric poems that are often autobiographical. The chapter links this new mainstream style to the emergence of a new force in American poetry: the rise of creative writing as an academic discipline and MFA graduate writing programs as a new institutional setting for the teaching and circulation of poetry. The chapter focuses on some of the shared characteristics of this mode as well as the variety of poetry produced during this period by looking at a range of poets, including Stanley Kunitz, Mary Oliver, Robert Hass, Louise Gluck, and Carolyn Forché.

This chapter describes the music performed by upper-class diners at archaic/classical symposia as documented by literary evidence and red-figure pottery. Following a discussion of the rise of the aristocratic symposion and shifts in musical entertainment from the picture given in Homer to the period when upper-class men began singing a repertoire of elite poetry at drinking parties, the following topics are taken up: the group libation paean, scolia, elegiac verse and its performance mode, other types of sung poetry, and dance. The aim is to identify the musical rituals as precisely as possible. This prepares for a discussion in Chapter 2 of the social function of aristocratic lyrody at symposia and its historical development.

The chapter explores the genre situation in Norway around the time of Ibsen’s debut, probing the question of why Ibsen chose to write within the genre of drama in his pursuit of a literary career. Particular political and cultural circumstances are relevant here: After centuries of foreign rule, the Norwegian cultural field was small and undeveloped when the country took up the impulses of national romanticism. In this situation, the theatre became an institution of political and cultural prestige, and constituted a forum for a cultural and literary debate that was still largely lacking in the printed press. Furthermore, the genre of drama was largely untarnished by the associations of sentimentality and femininity that still attached to the prose genres, and especially the novel. As for lyric poetry, it was a genre still not in line with the artistic ideals of romanticism, drawing heavily on classicist aesthetics, and particularly so after the death of the romantic poet Henrik Wergeland in 1845. Hence, drama would have appeared a safe genre for å budding poet, a genre that was modern, masculine, national and even potentially profitable.

Though the practice of solo singing and improvising continued well past the 1530s, sea changes in the politics and poetics of the peninsula after the Sack of Rome make this a reasonable point at which to conclude the book. This section will briefly explain those changes and how they altered the status and nature of poetic performance. I will also pose questions and suggestions about the course of the practice in the sixteenth century in relation to the rise of the madrigal and opera, extraordinary developments that I believe cannot be fully understood without a more comprehensive view of vernacular poetic performance in Renaissance Italy. The epilogue is structured around the consideration of a number of dualities: elite and popular, oral and written, lyric and epic, poet and composer, nature and artifice.

Lucy Tunstall provides readers with a crucial understanding of Plath’s conception of the lyric. Tunstall brings alive Plath’s continuous, deliberate interventions in the lyric mode’s possibilities and limits. She situates Plath’s development of the lyric in the poet’s childhood and College influences and traces it through to the Ariel poems and their seemingly incompatible registers. Tunstall shows us not just the unsurprising engagement with sound and voice, but with the visual, too, in Plath’s unique conceptions of the lyric. Finally, Tunstall confronts the difficult questions raised by Plath’s treatment of race in the context of her obsessive exploration of ideas of purity.