While 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.