THE NEW MAN AND THE PEOPLE: THE LYRICAL VOICE AND POETIC DEMOCRACY IN N. A. NEKRASOV

This article analyzes the expression of individual limitation in Nekrasov’s poetry as a model of democratic pathos which departs from the 1860s standard of self-sacrifi ce. Who Lives Well in Russia is treated as a culminating expression of Nekrasov’s unique combination of individual lyric voice and the shared affective experiences created by sound, which symbolizes a bid for agency among the intelligentsia and the narod alike and draws attention to linguistic form as a combined poetic and political act.

To the Cool Grove

This chapter differentiates modern connotations of the term “ode” (which now overwhelmingly refers to a praise poem) from its sense in antiquity as a musical composition. A discussion of Odes 1.1 shows how Horace situates himself as the Roman counterpart to the canonical Greek lyric poets such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar. Several other aspects of “lyric” as defined by Horace are identified, such as verbal decorum, a flexibility of subject matter, and an absence of polemic. Horace’s references to the Muses are interpreted in this chapter as a means of conferring authority on his personal lyric voice.

A Disintegrating Lyric? – Henri Michaux and Chinese Lyricism

This essay examines the perplexing triangular relation between Henri Michaux's ambiguous and attenuated lyricism, the French lyrical tradition, and Michaux's Chinese-inspired poems. I explore how Michaux's West-Eastern cross-cultural straddling relates to the way he renders the lyric problematic, and how this relation can help us re-read and perhaps unread the lyric (at least, its European understanding) in a comparative way. I first read some poems that are representative of Michaux's uneasy and disintegrating lyricism; then I consider how Michaux's poems that allude to Chinese and Far Eastern sources of inspiration reinstate his lyric voice, but in a new, ‘Asianised’ way. This raises the intriguing question of why there exists a coincidence between Michaux's ‘Chinese-style’ and his lyrical moments. Besides considering Michaux's Chinese influences and the Orientalist stereotyping of Chinese literary style, I argue that a stronger comparative approach to this question is to consider lyricism in the Chinese context and how shuqing (approximately translated as ‘lyrical’) writing – despite its very different conceptual framework – may shed light on Michaux's poetry and dislodge Eurocentric views of the lyric. Finally, I propose that Michaux's poetry marks the point of simultaneous lyric disintegration and reformulation. Although Michaux's Chinese-inspired dimension sustains certain lyrical moments, the transcultural aesthetics of his West-Eastern lyric in fact resists fusion and reconciliation, presenting instead a juxtapositional tension and splintering of poetics between Michaux's French and Chinese sides.

Mary Wroth, Ovid, and the Metamorphosis of Petrarch

The language of arboreal metamorphosis in Lady Mary Wroth’s pastoral song “The Spring Now Come att Last” from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) may invoke the myth of Apollo and Daphne. However, the Ovidian narrative so central to Petrarchan poetics celebrates the male poet by erasing the female voice. This essay instead explores parallels between Wroth’s poem and the metamorphosis of the Heliades, who turn into poplars while mourning their brother Phaeton in book 2 of the Metamorphoses. Their transformation is predicated on an act of female speech, however precarious and evanescent. This alternative Ovidian scenario offers a model of lyric that capitalizes on the brief resonance that the female voice acquires at the point of vanishing. By deploying it in her song, Wroth not only rewrites Petrarch through Ovid in order to articulate a gendered lyric voice but shows herself a poet attuned to the crucial developments in English lyric of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular the complex relationship between the Petrarchan and the Ovidian legacies.

Da sátira obscena ao axioma do frei: poesia romântica e homoerotismo no Brasil (1850-1864)

This paper addresses the emergence of homoerotic themes in the context of Brazilian romanticism, in poetic works obviously outside or on the margins of the official canon. It also examines the changes from the obscene and satirical verses to the lyric voice in the poems attributed to Moniz Barreto, Laurindo Rabelo and, with special emphasis, Junqueira Freire, author of the only lyric love poem about this theme at the time.

Marvell’s Classical Similitudes

This chapter tries to isolate what is distinctive about Marvell’s lyric voice, by examining his comparisons with classical history and literature. It argues that his poetry is both reassured and repelled by ideas of decorum and resemblance, especially in relation to poetic ‘wit’, a category his verse regularly identifies with political prudence. This dividedness is demonstrated by exploring Marvell’s running obsession with classical architectural motifs and his fascination with the problematics of translation and pastoral figuration. It is partly derived, the chapter argues, from a heightened sense of contemporary historical rupture, and the pressures which civil war, regicide, and Protectorate placed on timely (that is, historically decorous) action or utterance. But it is also, it suggests, linked to more personal fears of alienation and self-exposure.

Let Us Go

The second chapter explores global citizenship as a practice of exclusion undertaken in part through policies of liberal multiculturalism. In Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), Claudia Rankine writes an experimental “American lyric” in which the confessional lyric voice is made to contain the micro-aggressions and minoritarian struggles situated within the US but created by a US-manipulated global capitalist economy. The poems in Citizen offer both a diagnosis of the failures of citizenship as an ideal and a staging of the violent “beauty” that emerges from these failures. The poetic transit of Citizen across the Atlantic, and implicitly across the Mediterranean as well, creates the conditions for imagining solidarity between anti-racist movements in the US and ongoing anti-colonial struggles in France and North Africa.