Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Lyric Shame

Lyric Shame

White

Hardcover

Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism

ISBN10: 0674734394
ISBN13: 9780674734395
Publisher: Harvard
Published: Oct 13 2014
Pages: 360
Weight: 1.48
Height: 1.16 Width: 6.45 Depth: 9.57
Language: English

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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