Bringing a provocative perspective to the poetry wars that have
divided practitioners and critics for decades, Gillian White argues
that the sharp disagreements surrounding contemporary poetics have
been shaped by lyric shame an unspoken but pervasive embarrassment
over what poetry is, should be, and fails to be.
Favored particularly by modern American poets, lyric poetry has
long been considered an expression of the writer s innermost
thoughts and feelings. But by the 1970s the lyric I had become
persona non grata" in literary circles. Poets and critics accused
one another of identifying with lyric, which increasingly bore the
stigma of egotism and political backwardness. In close readings of
Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Bernadette Mayer, James Tate, and
others, White examines the social and critical dynamics by which
certain poems become identified as lyric, arguing that the term
refers less to a specific literary genre than to an abstract way of
projecting subjectivity onto poems. Arguments about whether lyric
poetry is deserving of praise or censure circle around what White
calls the missing lyric object: an idealized poem that is nowhere
and yet everywhere, and which is the product of reading practices
that both the advocates and detractors of lyric impose on poems.
Drawing on current trends in both affect and lyric theory, Lyric
Shame" unsettles the assumptions that inform much contemporary
poetry criticism and explains why the emotional, confessional
expressivity attributed to American lyric has become so
controversial."
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