Given the extent to which queer writers have played starring roles in most of what we think about when we think about the representative movements and innovations of modern American poetry, this chapter takes up the question of the association between poetry and queerness, asking how the aesthetic invention that characterizes modern American poetry might be related to the expressive capacities of sexuality. My limited and speculative response to this question focuses on how poets, and particular poems, have exploited the queer affordances of the lyric genre. The historical rhyme between the “queer” and the “poet” across the first half of the twentieth century evinces how the uneasy consolidation of aberrant sexual practices into modern homosexual identity coincides with the uneasy consolidation of poetry, in all its diversity, into a particular understanding of the lyric. If the twentieth century presents the gradual conflation of poetry and lyric, modern queer poets found in the lyric’s shared set of expectations a means of living within the social and its reductive demands for visibility, intelligibility, and transparency, while still holding space for the strange or unknowable.

This chapter begins with a familiar antithesis: the opposition between the lyric poem and the novel. If the former seems to be characterized by the capture of a single instant, the expression of subjective thoughts and emotions, and a reaching after eternal truths, the latter seems instead to move through time, to fictionalize the objective world, and to be caught in the social and political webs of real life. This chapter challenges this received wisdom by considering the hybrid genre of the verse-novel and by taking as its chief case study George Meredith's 1862 verse-novel Modern Love. Meredith's work simultaneously dissolves and highlights the borders of the single poem, forcing readers to reconsider the relationship of the individual lyric to a larger whole, to the narrative threads running through that whole, to other individual poems, and to other generic alternatives. The chapter concludes by arguing that, because the act of reading verse-novels is often so self-conscious, the genre productively questions ideas of singularity and of self-sufficiency.

This chapter explores the link between poem and song by examining the relationship between texts of poems, their metrical properties, their performance modes, and their musical settings. Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of choral support as an element of lyric and Michael Silverstein's analysis of metricalization in ritual serve as the main theoretical reference points. The chapter draws a distinction between, on the one hand, varieties of lyric that retain a historical link to song (such as Ancient Greek stanzaic forms of melos or the East Slavic chastushka) and, on the other, poems that evoke a potential sung performance, often as an invitation to set these poems to music (e.g., Schiller's “An die Freude”). The chapter then considers the political significance of collectively sung lyric with reference to the modern European revolutionary tradition, concluding with an examination of Fyodor Chaliapin's spontaneous performance of “Dubinushka” in Kiev in 1905. The formal properties of this working-class song, whose authors and origin are obscure but whose refrain was familiar to most audience members, contributed to a scene of secular social effervescence.

Chapter 8 offers an overview of Goethe’s development as a lyric poet, from his earliest innovations to his mature work, and highlights the diversity of his poetic oeuvre. It demonstrates the variety of forms which he adopted, often shaping them decisively in turn. The chapter also positions him in relation to his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, emphasising the influence of Klopstock, and examining Goethe’s participation in certain literary trends, including classical metres and the sonnet form. Finally, it considers Goethe’s relationship to the German Romantics.

The introductory chapter is framed by the story of Ergoteles, a major Panhellenic victor and the only athlete whose epinikian ode and epigram have survived to the present day. The differences and similarities in the characterization of Ergoteles in each medium prompt the book’s main question: how does place, performance mode, and genre affect the representation of athletic identity? The bulk of the introduction outlines the angelia, the proclamation of victory by a herald at an athletic event. By stressing our – and ancient audiences – inability to access the actual speech-act, the chapter reinterprets the angelia as it persists in epinikian and epigram as an allusive representation, the modification and manipulation of which lies at the core of the verse celebration of athletic victory.

While the figure of herald and the actual angelia at the athletic site sit at the beginning of athletic praise, these real figures and actual proclamations are not the only heralds and messages that find their way into epinikian song and inscribed epigram. Rather, explicit and implicit references to the figure of the herald and the angelia are frequent in both genres. This chapter examines implicit and explicit heralds and messages across epinikian song and inscribed epigram. It focuses on the figure of the herald and the message and their ability to authenticate what are, in fact, secondary and elaborated speech-acts. By attaching themselves to the voice of the herald at the Games, epinikian songs and epigrams demand that audiences take their praise seriously, as if it were the voice of herald itself in the sacred landscape of a Panhellenic sanctuary.

This chapter focuses on elaborations from the categories of the angelia - the herald’s proclamation of victory - that are so productive for epinikian verse. The angelia’s utility for epinikian song goes beyond simply reinforcing authority or justifying praise. While the epinikian singer was undoubtedly provided the “facts of identity," they do not dryly report these facts; moreover, in some cases they do not report the specific “facts” of the angelia at all. “Identity,” in epinikian song’s modification of the angelia, is a subjective category, and the “facts” that relate to the victor – name, father’s name, polis, festival, and event – are not set in stone but rather creatively reworked, sometimes reimagined, and sometimes made extremely complex, in the context of song and its performance. By replacing fathers and integrating family, spinning myths derived from the victor’s polis or the festival site, and using the details of athletic practice itself as a mode of praising, the epinikian singer uses the angelia to structure his song and praise his patron (or patrons).

This chapter examines a series of athletic dedications to trace both the evolution of the epigrammatic representation of the angelia - the herald’s proclamation of victory at an athletic festival - and to define the particular characteristics of the epigram as an athletic dedication. While a continuity exists between modes of athletic verse, epigrams – as inscriptions – and epinikian songs – as choral performances – function differently and interact with different audiences. Epigrams do not, for example, use large-scale mythic narratives to bestow glory on their patrons, but they do circumscribe the movements and voices of their audiences and use the religiously and culturally important sites of their dedication to add to their meaning.

Colonial-era Mexican poetry presents a complex interweaving of several genres; this chapter explores two of its major forms: epic poetry and lyric poetry. The epic, often understood as a propaganda instrument for colonial interests, is also constitutive of colonial historical narrative, as is illustrated by works by Bernardo de Balbuena, Antonio de Saavedra Guzmán, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Arias de Villalobos and others examined in this chapter. Lyric poetry captured the creative virtuosity of colonial Mexico. While past critique has framed this opus in relation to European sources, more contemporary readings focus instead on its interplay with the literary, political, and societal elements of its environment. This chapter explores the scope of this genre and the challenge that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing practices pose to twenty-first-century readers.

The 1860s is a decade that, in many ways, marks the death of the Victorian era and the start of a long modernism. Certainly for British poetry, the 1860s marks a moment of historical retrospection, summation, and definition, and, simultaneously, the start of a new poetry of Why is this spelled out?modernity. The year 1861 marked Prince Albert’s death but also a landmark publication that is often overlooked because of ital its popular status: Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, which was to remain a definitive articulation of the lyric tradition in English poetry for at least a century. Yet the same decade also saw the publication (in 1866) of a volume of poetry that was crucial in opening the door to a new kind of poetry in English: Swinburne’s ital 1866 Poems and Ballads (First Series). This chapter explores the nature and importance of Palgrave’s historical anthology in counterpoint with the birth of a striking new aestheticist poetry.

The modern lyric, emerging in the late eighteenth century, is the genre par excellence of the private individual alone with their thoughts. The construction of material and psychic interiority for the normative bourgeois subject has relied on the violent dispossession of Black people through slavery, colonialism, and other forms of exploitation. This chapter first considers the possibilities of re-marking the lyric as Black – reading the claims of Theodor Adorno’s account of lyric’s social character through a history he does not consider – before turning to contemporary questions regarding the emergence of the lyric as the preeminent genre of African American poetry since the 1980s.

If so much of American poetry from the early twentieth century onward looks to revitalize the genre’s forms and conventions by mining from the national vernacular, then jazz has been both a model for that process and a source of expressive inspiration. This essay looks at the range of American poetic responses to jazz, from the early modernist efforts of poets such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Vachel Lindsay, to more contemporary figures like Nathaniel Mackey, Morgan Parker, and Kevin Young. In observing the long shadow that the music has cast on poetic experimentation, this survey also observes variations in identity and perspective and maps the reciprocal relationship between different jazz styles and modern poetics, including the tension between song lyrics and lyric poetry. Ultimately, this essay reveals through a wealth of examples the comprehensive heterogeneity of jazz poetry despite these writers’ shared starting points.

Critical framing of UK poetry often ignores the pressures of racism or xenophobia (even when the work at hand responds to it), the shaping of a reader’s perceptions of the poet and her text as one and of the same and from where this cultural construction emerges, as well as the poet’s own determination of themselves as a subject. It is my intention here to interrogate the readerly gesture, its lyric premise of expression and authenticity, in order to reproach national canons and traditions that privilege the well-crafted lyric poem and its supposed universality. Mobilizing a decolonized reading of the lyric – one that dismantles formal features and a reader’s expectations of an expressive and authentic voice – I will offer finally two examples from my own experience teaching the works of Sarah Howe and Bhanu Kapil.

The section’s final chapter examines the relation between philosophy, poetry, and criticism, revisiting a number of concepts introduced in previous chapters, including the development of a historical imagination and of organicist ideas of nature and culture, the new interest in aesthetics as a moral source, and the rise of sensibility as a challenge to disembodied reason. All of these contributed to a sense of crisis inherent to Enlightenment itself. It first reads the English poets Thomas Gray and Edward Young, traditionally seen as precursors of European Romanticism, alongside Kant’s First Critique to show how the philosopher sought to save reason from Hume’s scepticism by making it the product of a shared knowledge based on nature rather than book learning. the chapter then explains how the notion of ideas as historically and linguistically mediated emerged out of Vico, Rousseau, and Kant, giving particular attention to the Genevan philosopher’s social thought. The last part examines the Kant-Herder controversy, which brought to a crisis key tensions in late-Enlightenment culture between critical reason and a direct, lyrical insight into natural causality. The latter was dismissed by Kant as a dangerous form of ‘genius-cultism’ that lent itself to revolutionary fanaticism.

This chapter traces the modernist short poem’s hauntings by the lyric, most particularly in thinking through what came to be regarded as problems of emotion and expressive subjectivity within the discursive strains defining the modernist lyric, especially as clustered around a poetics of impersonality. The “lyric discontent” of modernism marks multiple modalities energizing modern American poetry’s varied points of emergence in the 1910s and 1920s – particularly associated with women and African American poets – among which the distrust of emotion and embrace of impersonality endured contested influence in defining the modernist lyric. Locating this discontent in the years concurrent with early articulations of modern poetry’s extinction of personal emotion and expressive subjectivity – roughly the mid-1910s to early 1920s and before New Criticism takes hold – invites consideration of poetry’s exploration of affective constructions of subjectivity that grapple with elements of emotion, expressivity, and the lyric gaze.

Thomas Wyatt lived in an environment where it was unwise, if not impossible, to speak one’s thoughts plainly. This chapter explores how Wyatt’s life at court, and his career as an ambassador, informed his tendency towards irony, obliquity, and indirection in his verse. As a close reading of his diplomatic correspondence demonstrates, Wyatt learned to speak in blank phrases, proverbs, and clichés, not just from his ambassadorial profession, but from contemporary writings on counsel, courtiership, and literary style. What is more, these influences seem to have inspired a theory of making in which, for Wyatt, the message of a poem is to be found, neither in its matter, nor in its form, but in its suggestive implications—in the sense of “grace,” to use his term, that the poem may evoke for its reader. By tracing the effects of this “grace” throughout Wyatt’s lyrics—and especially in poems such as “What Vaileth Trouth” and “They Fle From Me”—I argue that Wyatt anticipates later theories of aesthetic autonomy by shifting the reader’s attention away from the contingent materials of his poetry and towards the imaginative space that a poem may seem to open up.

This chapter seeks to remedy the decontextualization of Donnes Songs and Sonnets, to restore them alongside not only Donnes satires examined in Chapter 2, but also the other poets and writers that appear in this book and that were Donne’s closest peers. In doing so, the aim is both to resituate these lyrics amidst the urban culture in which Donne was so immersed through nearly all of his writing life and to connect these quintessentially metaphysical poems to the contemporary urban writing of the 1590s. Donnes lyrics reveal a similar concern with the social worlds of London in their persistent attempts to close out the particulars with which Nashes prose and the Inns satires engage. As a result, these poems are as much about the spatial realities of urban everyday life as they are about desire. Stylistically Donne’s Songs and Sonnets look less like a clean break with the past and more like an affirmation of an urban aesthetic that suffused the literary works of a certain subsection of 1590s London. Donnes lyrics take up the skeptical materialist style of this group of urban writers, at once obscure, various, and vibrantly immediate.

Chapter 4 resituates Cervantes’ poetics within the erotic philosophy of the sixteenth century, particularly in Judah Abravanel’s Dialoghi d’Amore ([Leone Ebreo], Rome, 1535). By 1569, Cervantes was serving in the court of the young Neapolitan nobleman Giulio Acquaviva in Rome, where Vicenzo Orsini’s gardens at Bomarzo were one of many private pastoral courts cultivated by various Italian noblemen throughout the region. Within pastoral poetics, the beloved, as embodiment of beauty, was often conceived of as the summa belleza or summum bonum in the natural world. In light of Abravanel’s influence on early modern poetics, this chapter studies Cervantes’ octavas for the Sicilian poet and fellow captive Antonio Veneziano that Cervantes wrote from Algiers and sent to Veneziano in 1579 in response to Veneziano’s own songbook, the Celia. They survive in Veneziano’s autograph manuscript (Biblioteca Centrale Regione Siciliana, Palermo) along with Veneziano’s sonnet response. This chapter concludes with Cervantes’ earliest dramaturgical work, the Trato de Argel (likely composed in Algiers or shortly upon his return to Madrid, ca. 1575–1582), in which he developed the concept of “love as faith” as transposing the religious within the confluence of Islamic and Christian beliefs. The Trato evidences figurations of intersubjectivity and female desire necessary for character formation in Cervantes’ subsequent fiction.