Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Lyric, Aestheticism and the Later Nineteenth Century
- Part I Time
- Part II Space
- Part III Subjectivity
- 8 Desire Lines: Subjectivity and Collectivity
- 9 A. C. Swinburne in the Round: Drama, Personae and Lyric Subjectivity
- 10 Ezra Pound's Troubadour Subject: Community, Form and ‘Lyric’ in Early Modernism
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Desire Lines: Subjectivity and Collectivity
from Part III - Subjectivity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Lyric, Aestheticism and the Later Nineteenth Century
- Part I Time
- Part II Space
- Part III Subjectivity
- 8 Desire Lines: Subjectivity and Collectivity
- 9 A. C. Swinburne in the Round: Drama, Personae and Lyric Subjectivity
- 10 Ezra Pound's Troubadour Subject: Community, Form and ‘Lyric’ in Early Modernism
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[The poem's] content is not the object but the subject, the inner world, the mind that considers and feels, that instead of proceeding to action, remains alone with itself as inwardness, and that therefore can take as its sole form and final aim that self-expression of the subjective life.
Hegel, Aesthetics, p. 1038Today, when individual expression, which is the precondition for the conception of lyric poetry that is my point of departure, seems shaken to its very core in the crisis of the individual, the collective undercurrent in the lyric surfaces in the most diverse places […]
Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, p. 46While Part II ended with an analysis of the significance of lyric as a transaction between ‘I’ and ‘you’, Part III considers the construction of the lyric subject itself. Both topics require an engagement with that central dilemma of modernity: the accompaniment of the ‘inward turn’ (the idea that all we can ever really know, we must know through our own subjective impressions) with a questioning of the relevance of ‘inner worlds’ and a drive towards a more objectivist or depersonalised ideal. Yet my focus on the lyric subject in this part enables me to draw out some different issues within the poetry I study, and to reveal the importance of some very different responses to modernity within an aestheticist lyric trajectory. In this initial short framing chapter I will set up a nexus of ideas to contextualise, conceptually, my exploration of lyric subjectivity in the following two case studies. In order to respond to the problems of a Romantic legacy in which the lyric voice is simultaneously personal, introspective and universal, the poetry I explore looks back to pre-Romantic models. In Part III, then, the focus falls particularly on the significance of an engagement with lyric history to devising fresh models of lyric subjectivity. This chapter introduces the idea of ‘desire lines’ to provide a conceptual frame for the poetic negotiation between the personal and the collective that is at the heart of the renegotiation of lyric subjectivity that I trace in my focal poems.
Susanne Langer describes the lyric subject as an ‘impersonal subjectivity’, and captures the characteristic territory of the lyric as introspection, but an introspection that attains an impersonal universality.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Lyric Poem and AestheticismForms of Modernity, pp. 177 - 188Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016