ABSTRACT

At the end of the previous chapter, we saw that the Romantic lyric constituted an evolution rather than a revolution in poetics. As this chapter will demonstrate, the attempt in modern lyric to construct an inward-looking poetic self who is ‘overheard’ remains crucially dependent on the structure of address. Romantic and post-Romantic lyric still involve both introspection and display, the personal and the public, escapism and ‘serious’ purpose. The continued reliance on dramatic or performative modes of address over the past two centuries will be traced in exemplary Romantic lyrics and odes, in the prominence of the dramatic monologue and meditative poem from the Victorian and Modernist periods to the present day, and in the ‘performance’ of the self in contemporary poetry. Given these important qualifications, it is nonetheless the case

that by the later eighteenth century, poetic theory tended to regard lyric as ‘the songlike personal expression, the feeling centred in the image’ (Wimsatt and Brooks 1965: 433). As Alistair Fowler has observed, almost every genre became lyric in the nineteenth century (Fowler 1982: 206). This is accompanied by the collapsing of

various related poetic forms into the general term ‘lyric’. According to Paul de Man, ‘it would be impossible to speak relevantly about modern literature without giving a prominent place to lyric poetry’. Indeed, for many critics, ‘the question of modernity in the lyric is considered as the best means of access to a discussion of literary modernity in general’ (de Man 1983: 169). Thus the predominant late modern association of lyric with sincerity, intimacy and the direct expression of feeling becomes all-encompassing in the study of literature. For de Man, however, lyric poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries questions rather than confirms that centrality of the ‘I’: modern lyric plays out a ‘crisis of self and representation’ (ibid.: 182). A central feature of modern lyric, the autonomous, coherent lyric self becomes the site of its greatest uncertainty. This ‘crisis’ will now be traced through an examination of the range of voices and personae, and the complex versions of both the writing and the textual self, in Romantic and post-Romantic lyric.