ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies several sites at which to map the forms of queer modernist lyric, arguing first for the use of lyric studies as a way to read queer poetic form. Lyric studies has recalibrated the way we understand the relationship between gender, sexuality, and expression in twentieth-century poetry, from protomodernism (Emily Dickinson’s hermetic lyrics, Walt Whitman’s syncretic ones) to high and postwar modernism (H.D.’s lyricized feminist epics, Hart Crane’s lyrics of the cruising straphanger). This chapter concludes with readings of a number of writers whose queered lyric forms offer counterhegemonic takes on temporality, historicity, desire, and subjectivity.
