What exactly is the lyric? What should it be? How has the "new" lyric emerged from the traditional or "romantic" lyric? Does the lyric inevitably attempt to transcend history? Can lyricism be reinvented as a historically engaged mode of writing or could a lyric poem's resistance to such engagement be figured as a genuinely subversive act within an oppressive culture?

All original essays

The original essays here address these questions and more as they struggle to articulate poetry's cultural responsibilities while enmeshed in the historical and institutional contexts of a decade in which academic scholarship has been largely dedicated to the historicizing of literary studies. The essayists represent all the different approaches to the subject that exist today from the call for a radically different poetics that will undermine the dominant, oppressive cultural formations of the historical moment to an emphasis on a poetics of reading as rewriting, recovery, and rediscovery to a valorization of the lyric as a marginal voice.

Examines viewpoints and controversies

The final essay deals with all these other viewpoints as it introduces still more areas of controversy in modern lyric practice and criticism. This fascinating and controversial volume covers works that range from epideictic song in Ancient Greece to the most modern of the language poets and the "dub" poets. It will be essential reading for all literature and cultural studies students.