This essay considers how poems and lyrical prose by J. H. Prynne, Kofi Awoonor, and Natasha Trethewey examine the conditions of possibility for a global subject in the light of finality: that which may no longer be prevented nor undone. Revising the tradition of the locodescriptive lyric and the prospect poem, Prynne, Awoonor, and Trethewey use the hill as a location for staging the ethical dilemmas of the putative “global citizen.” From poetic hills in England, Ghana, and New Orleans, the view stretches to accommodate global suffering, inequality, and the lives of others, who, however far or close, shape the contours, the possibilities and dangers, of the poem's immediate vicinity. Far from offering spectatorial mastery to the poet, however, the hill is transformed into the ground and habitation of precarious life. The hill makes visible an alternative trajectory of contemporary lyric subjectivity in which the lyric's “I” emerges from and is shaped by the collective immiseration of neoliberal globalization.

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The lyric poem has often been understood as incompatible with other discourses, set apart by its compression, privacy, and identification with the individual self. Recently, the New Lyric Studies has rejected both the essentialism and the exceptionalism of the lyric as a genre or mode, seeking instead to expose the term lyric as an ideological reading practice that separates the text from its historical context. This essay examines some of the ways in which four new books on poetry by Siobhan Phillips, Joel Nickels, Christopher Nealon, and Oren Izenberg contribute to lyric theory by emphasizing what the poem holds in common with other discourses. I analyze the intersection between the lyric and four concepts borrowed from sociology, moral philosophy, political theory, and economics: the everyday, the multitude, capital, and person. Stressing the lyric’s compatibility rather than its distinction, these four critics reveal the universalism and collectivity out of which the lyric voice is constructed. I argue that the New Lyric Studies, widely construed to include these critics, brings poetry in line with the social poetics, world systems, and democratic inclusivity that figure prominently in current literary discourse, as well as with European theories of poetic subjectivity and community.

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