Putting “Putting The Lyric In Its Place” In Its Place

 The essay:

https://search.proquest.com/docview/1299903305?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true

My note to a friend:

My basic beef with this essay is that I learned nothing of value about what a lyric poem is and, further, got confused by what Nathan was trying to say about it. No added value, just the opposite. 

He notes at the beginning a distinction between narrative poetry aiming at truth and lyric poetry aiming at beauty, which I think pious and fatuous. 

So I was heartened when Nathan, paraphrasing, Jarman for that distinction, said Jarman’s way of putting it is wrong.

Mind you, lay me, who doesn’t generally give any thought to the nature of lyric poetry, understands a broad distinction, embedded in the narrative-lyric distinction, between: 

narrative poetry, typically being long and telling an actual story;

and lyric poetry typically being shorter and illuminating a certain experience or line of thought or insight and not telling a story as such, a story being the depiction of a set of events, most often with a beginning, middle and end. 

Nathan rejects the truth beauty distinction and rejects conventional ways of defining the lyric poem, ways which in fact reflect my own lay understanding.

Nathan says they defy years of accumulated practice. He wants a “pragmatic” definition, and I immediately wondered what work “pragmatic” does here. 

He says:

...it’s “...almost always, even if only implicitly, part of a narrative or dramatic situation, part of a story, and thus to be read as such.” 

He goes on to say lyric poems don’t spring ex nihilo. They’re prompted by occasions, which are part of stories. They involve pauses when the poetic recreation of them are created. These recreations boil down to, in one way of putting it, says Nathan, “this is what it feels like or means to be at this point in the story.” 

And a further point of Nathan’s is:

 “most—if not all—lyrics are based on narratives that characterize a culture or a subculture in one of its phases and represent the way a life is or should be lived...according to the cultural values that inspires the narrative.”

Nathan wanting a “pragmatic” definition is an early warning sign of “slippery road ahead.” One can see the diverse possibilities of the lyric without needing to offer a pragmatic definition. “Pragmatic” shies away from a central or core definition. It usually involves “whatever works.” In philosophy it’s a methodology more than an overarching way of seeing the world or some aspect of it. How this methodology applies to lyric poetry without a prior core understanding of it is unclear to me.

Then Nathan tries to collapse the lyric-narrative distinction by asserting that lyrics are always part of a story.  But he problematically conflates poems telling a literal story, a narrative poem, with his use of the notion of story or narrative as occasioning a poem, with as well the latter being based on the culture’s stories.  As he goes on in this way, Nathan broadly does two things at the same time: he’s arbitrary in how poems come about, what they spring from; and, as well, he dresses up some common places in fancy clothes.  In all of this, he poorly  serves his task of illuminating lyric’s nature. 

Some of that is signaled right off by his weasel word here “implicitly.” 

Lyrics may involve a bit of a plot line in what the poem describes but that is usually distinguishable from telling a story in narrative poetry. So, in wanting to collapse the narrative-lyric distinction by submerging it in levels of story, the story sparking the poem, and the cultural story that former story is rooted in and arises from, the nature of lyric poetry becomes an unidentifiable mish mash. Well done, pragmatic definition. Not. 

And what does it mean to read a lyric poem as part of a cultural story? If I wander lonely as a cloud, see a field of daffodils, and then recall them with my inward eye, what does that have to with my embedment in my culture? What culture narrative am I implicating? And what does any such implicit—that word again—narrative have to do with a long poem that tells a story, say Dangerous Dan McGrew or Casey At The Bat or Paradise Regained? How does that implicit narrative clarify what constitutes lyric poetry?After all, explicit narrative poetry also rests on cultural narratives. So does every work of literature ever written insofar as poets, dramatists and fiction writers, and all of us in our every utterance, can’t help but in some way reflect our time. It’s the cultural air we breathe and the waters we swim, sometimes seeing into it and past it penetratingly and critically. 

What is being explained here but that poets all grow up and live in specific formative times and sometimes their experiences strike them as wanting recreation in poetry? This commonplace illuminates lyric poetry how? Plus, the variety of impulses leading to poetic creation defy reducing the nature, or part of it, of lyric poetry to one account of them. That one account will either omit other impulses to creation or be so general as to be fatuous.

Nor is his attempt at clarification helped by saying lyric poetry shows us that this is what so and so feels like or means. The reason is that this is a truism for what all of artful literature does including, to the point here, both lyric and narrative poetry. And doesn’t Nathan cover the waterfront with his phrase “feels like or means?” I mean, broadly speaking, what else is there besides “feels like or means”? How is lyric poetry specifically illuminated by this commonplace?

Along the same line, how is lyric poetry, compared to all other genres of literature, unique in being prompted  by some “occasion”? 

Part of Nathan’s generalizing opacity is evident in him saying, given his “thesis,” “Where Eliot found reason to grieve, Ashberry finds permission to play, and besides having no story is an amusing story in itself.

In relation to your last comment to me, it seems further a commonplace that often the context of a poem will help us to understand it, which is true of all literary genres. I’d add, contrary to him, any poem’s central context is the meaning it by its own poetic innards gives rise to and informs (and is informed by its parts).  I didn’t need his essay to know that. And too sometimes knowing the “occasion” for a poem, something external which inspired it, can help in understanding, but not necessarily.

I think with you that Stevens’ description of the lyric is the nicest and most incisive part of the whole essay and indeed, for me, makes everything else Nathan says unnecessary.

I went back to M.H. Abrams’ definition of the lyric and suggest it’s a vast improvement over Nathan’s essay, capturing both the essence of lyric poetry and its variety. 

“Lyric. In the most common use of the term, a lyric is any fairly short poem, consisting of the utterance by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought, and feeling. Many lyric speakers are rep­resented as musing in solitude. In dramatic lyrics, however, the lyric speaker is represented as addressing another person in a specific situation; instances are John Donne's "Canonization" and William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey." 

Although the lyric is uttered in the first person, the "I" in the poem need not be the poet who wrote it. In some lyrics, such as John Milton's sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight," the references to the known circumstances of the author's life make it clear that we are to read the poem as a personal expression. 

Even in such personal lyrics, however, both the character and utterance of the speaker may be formalized and shaped by the author in a way that is con­ ducive to the desired artistic effect. In a number of lyrics, the speaker is a con­ ventional period-figure, such as the long-suffering suitor in the Petrarchan sonnet (see Petrarchan conceit), or the courtly, witty lover of the Cavalier poems. And in some types of lyrics, the speaker is obviously an invented fig­ure remote from the poet in character and circumstance. (See persona, confes­ sional poetry, and dramatic monologue for distinctions between personal and invented lyric speakers.)

The lyric genre comprehends a great variety of utterances. Some, like Ben Jonson's "To the Memory of. .. William Shakespeare" and Walt Whitman's ode on the death of Abraham Lincoln, "O Captain, My Captain," are ceremo­nial poems uttered in a public voice on a public occasion. Among the lyrics in a more private mode, some are simply a brief, intense expression of a mood or state of feeling; for example, Shelley's "To Night," or Emily Dickinson's "Wild

Nights, Wild Nights," or this fine medieval song:

Fowles in the frith,

The fisshes in the flood, And I mon waxe wood: Much sorwe I walke with For best of bone and blood.

But the genre also includes extended expressions of a complex evolution of feelingful thought, as in the long elegy and the meditative ode. And within a lyric, the process of observation, thought, memory, and feeling may be or­ ganized in a variety of ways. 

For example, in "love lyrics" the speaker may simply express an enamored state of mind in an ordered form, as in Robert Burns' "O my love's like a red, red rose," or Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways"; or may gallantly elaborate a compli- ment (Ben Jonson's "Drink to me only with thine eyes"); or may deploy an ar- gument to take advantage of fleeting youth and opportunity (Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," or Shakespeare's first seventeen sonnets ad- dressed to a male youth); or may express a cool response to an importunate lover (Christina Rossetti's "No, thank you, John"). 

In other kinds of lyrics the speaker manifests and justifies a particular disposition and set of values (John Milton's "L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso"); or expresses a sustained process of observation and meditation in the attempt to resolve an emotional problem (Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," Arnold's "Dover Beach"); or is exhibited as making and justifying the choice of a way of life (Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium").

In the original Greek, "lyric" signified a song rendered to the accompani- ment of a lyre. In some current usages, lyric still retains the sense of a poem written to be set to music; the hymn, for example, is a lyric on a religious sub- ject that is intended to be sung. The adjectival form "lyrical" is sometimes applied to an expressive, song-like passage in a narrative poem, such as Eve's declaration of love to Adam, "With thee conversing I forget all time," in Milton's Paradise Lost, IV, 639-56.

See genre for the broad distinction between the three major poetic classes of drama, narrative (or epic), and lyric, and also for the sudden elevation of lyric, in the Romantic period, to the status of the quintessentially poetic mode. 

For subclasses of the lyric, see aubade, dramatic monologue, elegy, epithal- amion, hymn, ode, sonnet.”