Synopses & Reviews
An essential collection of essays by important contemporary poets about the forms and rhetorical strategies of lyric poetryWe are delighted when we recognize patterns and continuities, as we are delighted by a new poem's radical adjustment of, critique of, rejection of, or simple application of those patterns and modes. A poem means something because of previous poems. --from the Introduction Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry is a significant new book on poetry from its earliest, traditional roots to its most recent and fractured forms. The essays gathered here, by an array of brilliant contemporary poets, explore the history of the lyric poem, its rhetorical modes and strategies. How does the lyric operate in an elegy, a love poem, or an ode? How is meaning conveyed by a pastoral poem, the sublime, the narrative? How does the lyric investigate nature, beauty, and time? How are these lyric forms and strategies received? Radiant Lyre gives the contemporary reader a sense of the origin, evolution, and present status of the modes and means of lyric poetry.
David Baker and Ann Townsend have assembled an important anthology, vital to any serious reader of poetry. Contributors include Linda Gregerson, Richard Jackson, Eric Pankey, Carl Phillips, and Stanley Plumly.
About the Author
David Baker is the author of
Midwest Eclogue and
Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry. He is the poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. Ann Townsend is the author of two collections of poems, The Coronary Garden and Dime Store Erotics.
Table of Contents
Introduction by David Baker and Ann Townsend
I. Lyric Modes
1. The Elegy
David Baker, "Elegy and Eros: Configuring Grief"
Richard Jackson, "'One's Own Sad Stead': American Elegy as Self-Elegy"
2. The Love Poem Linda Gregerson, "Rhetorical Contract in t he Erotic Poem"
Ann Townsend, "Meretricious Kisses"
Richard Jackson, "Eros and the Erotics of Writing"
3. The Ode Carl Phillips, "The Ode"
Stanley Plumly, "Between Things: On the Ode"
Linda Gregerson, "Ode and Empire"
II. Lyric Means
1. On the Pastoral: The Problem of Nature David Baker, "The Pastoral: First and Last Things"
Eric Pankey, "Meditative Spaces"
Stanley Plumly, "Pastoral Matters"
Ann Townsend, "Arcadia Redux"
2. On the Sublime: The Problem of Beauty David Baker, "The Sublime: Origins and Definitions"
Linda Gregerson, "The Gay Sublime"
Stanley Plumly, "The Intimate Sublime"
Ann Townsend, "The Technological Sublime"
3. On Meditation and Mediation: The Problem of People David Baker, "'I'm Nobody': Lyric Poetry and the Problem of People"
Linda Gregerson, "Life among Others"
Stanley Plumly, "A Place for People in Lyric Poetry"
Ann Townsend, "A Mind for Metaphors"
4. On Subject, Story, and Style: The Problem of Time David Baker, "To Think of Time"
Linda Gregerson, "Mortal Time"
Stanley Plumly, "Lyric Time"
Ann Townsend, "All the Instruments Agree: Taking Time's Measure"