Synopses & Reviews
In her provocative reassessment of the modern American love lyric, Barbara L. Estrin discovers the connection between the language of love poetry and the rhetoric of hate speech that culminated in the genocides of World War II.
The American Love Lyric after Auschwitz and Hiroshima chronicles the return of three major American poets (Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Adrienne Rich) to the mid-century catastrophes that reveal unexpected links between poetry and war. Through close readings of individual poems, Estrin counters the presupposition that the lyric remains apolitical. She explores the prevalent influence of the traditional forms that all three poets simultaneously use and revise as they render the love lyric responsive to the cultural agonies of the postwar era.
Review
"Estrin's text is both rigorous and readable...Highly recommended."--E.R. Baer, Choice
Learned and allusive, yet at the same time absolutely and devastatingly straight-forward, Barbara Estrin's The American Love Lyric after Auschwitz and Hiroshima is a meditation on and an account of poetry's unwillingness to let itself off the hook in the wake of modern disasters that are as much cultural as political. The writing is stunning. The message is uncompromising. The insights leap off the page. -- Stanley Fish, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago
Synopsis
Citing the massive horrors of the Nazi death camps and the domestic violence behind a woman's suicide, Adrienne Rich challenges a fellow poet: 'would it relieve you to decide/Poetry doesn't make this happen?' In this provocative reassessment of the modern American love lyric, Barbara L. Estrin chronicles the return of three major American poets (Wallace Stevens in the late forties and fifties, Robert Lowell in the Seventies, and Adrienne Rich in the nineties) to the mid-century catastrophes that gave rise to such thorny questions. Through close readings of individual poems (and drawing upon the gender and genre theories of Jean Francois Lyotard, Judith Butler, Melanie Klien, and Jacques Lacan), Estrin counters the usual presuppositions that the lyric remains sequestered in a-political isolation, and offers a new, revisionist critique of American poetry.
About the Author
Barbara L. Estrin is Professor of English and Department Chair at Stonehill College. She is the author of
The Raven and the Lark: Lost Children in Literature of the English Renaissance, and
Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell.
Table of Contents
Introduction: From Bird Song to Atom Bomb * Theorizing the Lyric * “Form Gulping after Formlessness”: Petrarchs Resistant Lauras in Stevenss “Auroras of Autumn” * “The Intricate Evasions of As”: Stevenss “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” * “Infinite Mischief”: Robert Lowells Fiction of Desire in
The Dolphin * “Solid with Yearning”: Lowelling and Laurelling in
Day by Day * Re-Versing the Past: Adrienne Rich's Outrage Against Order * “At Long Last First”: Adrienne Rich's
Dark Fields and Samuel Beckett's Colorless Cliff * After-Words