Lowell’s attraction to the sonnet was historical and architectural and yet the form itself, one he wrestled with above all others, had at its origin desire and unrequited love. For Lowell, the little song of the sonnet worked well as a house for the complaint, “an expression of grief, a lamentation, a plaint” (OED). As far back as the fourteenth century, Chaucer used it as a title for poems (“The Complaint unto Pity,” c. 1368) and complaints hold both an expression of torment or grief and a song. In the 1946 volume, Lord Weary’s Castle, Lowell uses the sonnet form to express such a plaint, in this case as a measure to aid in indirect self-reflection (“The North Sea Undertaker’s Complaint”). Life Studies (1959) finds Lowell still ruminating on the sonnet form and its expressive capacities, as we see in the triple sonnet “Beyond the Alps,” pivoting as it does between subjects and acting as an opportunity for historical rather than personal insight. Day by Day (1977) roots itself in the personal and introduces looser forms. The sonnet’s acoustic energies are not bottled here but the poems participate in sonnet-like thinking.

This chapter offers an analysis of the language, metres and forms of Old Norse poetry. It begins with a brief account of Old Norse language and related languages, and then considers the specialized language of Old Norse poetry, with its distinctive lexis and syntax, especially in skaldic verse. Compound words and kennings are discussed, followed by analysis of alliteration and rhyme in Old Norse poetry. The stanzaic form of eddic verse is described, with a detailed account of its main metres and scansions based on Sievers’s ‘five types’. Next, the forms of skaldic poetry are outlined, with an account of lausavísur or ‘loose stanzas’, and the different kinds of stanza sequences, such as the flokkr and the drápa. The primary metre of skaldic verse, dróttkvætt or ‘court metre’, is defined and illustrated, together with some of its many variations, and then attention turns to the rímur, a later form of rhyming and alliterative poetry in extended sequences of stanzas. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how metrical considerations may have affected scribal practice in the Middle Ages and have impacted editorial processes by modern scholars.

The book’s Introduction addresses the ways in which the notion of crisis functions conceptually to name not only moments of economic and cultural rupture, which become normalized within capitalist modernity, but also moments of epistemological doubt, when the taken-for-granted relationship between language and the social is called into question and subjected to critique. The Depression represented not only a breakdown of the smooth functioning of modernity and its market-based social organization, but also a parallel breakdown in a collective investment in the idea that language can represent the social, as language came to be regarded with suspicion for its role in perpetuating forms of commodification and appropriation associated with a crisis-ridden modernity. In response to this crisis, poetic language was forced to reconfigure its relationship to a society that was itself always in flux. The book’s Introduction thus establishes a basis for its survey of a broad cross-section of the poetic idioms associated with the Depression as both critiques of the idea of market modernity as a progressive, developmentalist force, and efforts to shore up language’s efficacy as a social and cultural form.

The impact of Wittgenstein’s work on lyric poets, literary critics, and philosophers has been well documented. Philosophers and literary scholars, including Charles Altieri Stanley Cavell, Richard Eldridge, Michael Fischer, Walter Jost, and Joshua Wilner, have drawn on Wittgenstein to consider poetry from the Romantics to the present. Numerous poets from the mid-twentieth century on – among them Barbara Köhler, Marjorie Perloff, Lyn Hejinian, John Koethe, Charles Bernstein, and Ingeborg Bachmann – discuss or reference Wittgenstein, to say nothing of the authors like Perloff, David Rozema, Christopher Norris, or Benjamin Tilghman who contend that Wittgenstein’s writing is itself “poetic.” This chapter takes a different approach: it argues that Wittgenstein’s work illuminates the central questions of the theory of the lyric, namely questions about what lyric poetry is and what it does. As questions of essence and existence, these are the kinds of question Wittgenstein helps us understand – not, primarily, by answering them but by prompting us to consider why and how we ask them. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s attention to the ways poems use language and what we do with them shows how both poetry and the ways we respond to poems rest on his view of language as emerging from and constituting a form of life.

In a marginal note of 1807, Coleridge writes: ‘who shall dare say of yon river, such & such a wave came from such a fountain? What Scholar […] shall say—Such a conviction, such a moral feeling, I received from St John/ such & such from Seneca, or Epictetus?’1 An essay of the kind presented here – which pursues how elements of form and style in Byron’s verse manifest in British poetry since the 1940s – contends with a similar issue. Cultural currents flow mixedly in poetry, and to discover a ‘Byronic’ characteristic in modern verse may not be to prove direct readerly influence. That is why, in part, I refer to inflection – which preserves a certain agnosticism – as the more accommodating term for the Byronic traces I have recognised: those observable variations in the practice of poetry that, however obliquely, respond in some way to Byron’s own. That response may involve a deliberate engagement with Byron’s work (and often does), but it may also be more implicit: a response to the less obvious but nonetheless palpable effects that Byron’s poetry has had on the possibilities of language and poetry, as they have been perceived since the mid-twentieth century. These inflections reveal the latent presence of Byron’s poetics the way iron filings reveal the presence of a magnetic field.

At first glance, Byron and Keats make an unlikely pair. Keats dismissed Byron as being merely interested in cutting a figure and pinned his literary success to the advantages of being six feet tall and a lord, while Byron disdained ‘that little dirty blackguard KEATES’ and snobbishly suggested he was spoiled by ‘Cockneyfying & Suburbing’ (BLJ, VII. 229; VIII. 102). The one was a middle-class poet who died young with little fanfare and a relatively slim output of published work. The other was a nobleman, a world-famous celebrity, with a prolific output of bestselling poems. But what might we learn about each poet by thinking about them together? And what might their pairing tell us about Romanticism more broadly?

She was 68, he was 24. Both hit the winter of 1812 with poetic heat that radiated into a future bereft of British self-recognition, importance and supremacy.

There are numerous records of Byron and Shelley’s discussions, including, perhaps above all, Shelley’s brilliant conversation poem, Julian and Maddalo, in which Shelley’s ‘Byron’ is Count Maddalo and Shelley’s ‘Shelley’ is Julian. Like the conversation of Julian and Maddalo, the conversation with which I want to begin this consideration of the overlapping poetries and poetics of Byron and Shelley may or may not have happened quite as reported. ‘Byron and Shelley on the Character of Hamlet’ appeared in the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal eight years after Shelley’s death and six after Byron’s.

In 1881, Arnold concluded that, of the century’s poets, ‘Wordsworth and Byron stand out by themselves’.1 The judgement was a little more surprising then than it seems now, because the reputations of both were if not in eclipse then at least overshadowed. Between 1840 and 1870 it was the fashion, according to John Nichol, to talk of Byron as ‘a sentimentalist, a romancer, a shallow wit, a nine days’ wonder, a poet for “green, unknowing youth”’.2 After Wordsworth died a fund was established to raise a memorial to him, but it was less successful than had been hoped. Macaulay commented that ‘ten years earlier more money could have been raised in Cambridge alone’. Arnold tells that story in 1879, in the preface to his selection of Wordsworth’s poems, and it was that volume that did most to re-establish Wordsworth’s reputation.3 There were more hands involved in salvaging Byron’s. In 1870, Alfred Austin published The Poetry of the Period, in which all the century’s poets are compared with Byron and found wanting, and in the same year John Morley brought out his essay on Byron as the poet of the French Revolution in the Fortnightly Review.4 Ten years later, John Nichol published the volume on Byron in Morley’s English Men of Letters series from which I have already quoted. But the first sign that a revival in Byron’s fortunes might be under way came in 1866, when Swinburne published his Selection from the Works of Lord Byron.5

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has long had a reputation for obliquity, and in approaching her work we will often find she withholds as much as she discloses. Ní Chuilleanáin’s frequent ekphrastic poems and recourse to metaphors of framing are also ways of rephrasing the central question of what a poem is, and how to approach lyric form afresh. Her focus on art works frequently transports the reader to a pre-Renaissance world, which Ní Chuilleanáin finds temperamentally conducive in her warm visions of Mediterranean Catholicism, and in the stress in her critical writings as well as her poetry on questions of embodiment and revealed truth. Music and architecture are frequent reference points, sometimes via the metaphysical poets, before Ní Chuilleanáin puts her distinctive and personal stamp on these themes. Hers is a complex art, but one whose façade of secrecy provides the necessary theatrical backdrop while Ní Chuilleanáin probes and reinvents received ideas of the woman poet in the Irish tradition.

This essay argues that the niche occupied by contemporary Irish poetry in global Anglophone literature is a function of its formal conservatism and resistance to theoretical reflection. Irish poetry offers a moderate and palatable alternative to poetic work that works in a more thoroughgoing fashion through the violence of the present. Its conservative formalism is a hedge against confronting form with the conditions poetry must engage with. Accordingly, much of recent Irish poetry paradoxically furnishes a convenient and consumable commodity form even where it seems to offer an alternative to the economic and ecological spectacle of global transformations. But a number of poets have found formally innovative ways to accommodate both the political violence of the Troubles and the depredations of neoliberalism in Ireland while at the same time drawing on the long history of Irish resistance to such effects of colonialism and capitalism.

This coda juxtaposes two of the most important Irish poets of the past fifty years, focusing in particular on the ways in which Boland and Heaney base their poetics on turns to the past, whether personal memory or cultural history. It also locates ways in which Boland and Heaney aim to transform their backward-looking glances in order to account for the complexities and uncertainties of historical change, as well as to model alternate ways to think about temporality and transition.

Laura Perry argues that Plath’s concerns with purity and cleanliness take the form of a poetics of hygiene. This poetics engages in conversation with a transatlantic discourse evident in post-war advertisements and government publications that trafficked in mid-century anxieties about biological containment, sexual purity and interracial contact. Perry shows how Plath links hygiene to gender, geopolitics, and poetic form throughout her writings. She reframes Plath’s search for transcendental purity by showing how this purity is embodied and historically located.