In her provocative reassessment of the modern American love lyric, Barbara L. Estrin discovers the connection between the language of love poetry and the rhetoric of hate speech that culminated in the genocides of World War II. The American Love Lyric after Auschwitz and Hiroshima chronicles the return of three major American poets (Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Adrienne Rich) to the mid-century catastrophes that reveal unexpected links between poetry and war. Through close readings of individual poems, Estrin counters the presupposition that the lyric remains apolitical. She explores the prevalent influence of the traditional forms that all three poets simultaneously use and revise as they render the love lyric responsive to the cultural agonies of the postwar era.

Citing the massive horrors of the Nazi death camps and the domestic violence behind a woman's suicide, Adrienne Rich challenges a fellow poet: 'would it relieve you to decide/Poetry doesn't make this happen?' In this provocative reassessment of the modern American love lyric, Barbara L. Estrin chronicles the return of three major American poets (Wallace Stevens in the late forties and fifties, Robert Lowell in the Seventies, and Adrienne Rich in the nineties) to the mid-century catastrophes that gave rise to such thorny questions. Through close readings of individual poems (and drawing upon the gender and genre theories of Jean Francois Lyotard, Judith Butler, Melanie Klien, and Jacques Lacan), Estrin counters the usual presuppositions that the lyric remains sequestered in a-political isolation, and offers a new, revisionist critique of American poetry.