What Is This Thing Called Lyric?

Burt, Stephen

doi:10.1086/684097

Cited by 29 publications

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“…('She Walks in Beauty', 1. [1][2][3][4][5][6] The first clause exploits ambiguity; should we understand the woman to walk arrayed in beauty or surrounded by it? The second clause ensures that we begin to think of this 'she' as almost a natural phenomenon, 'like the night'.…”

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“…This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm'd-see here it is-I hold it towards you. 56 ('This Living Hand', [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] Plunging us into the poem, Keats insists on specifics: it is 'this living hand' [emphasis added], his own, that the reader must envisage. Not only does the hand live but this hand is 'capable / Of earnest grasping', with 'earnest' forcing us to recognise a personality, a self that holds out its hand to the reader.…”

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What can the romantic lyric do?

Callaghan

2022

Textual Practice

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The Romantic fascination with lyric is only matched by the poets' relentless drive to experiment with and individualise the genre. Lyric's limits test the creative and critical intelligence of the Romantic poet who asks what poetry can know and how it can know it, and what lyric can do and how it can do it. This article considers the ways in which each poet asks the question of what can lyric do and show how they react with and against a genre that imagines transhistorical existence even as it lives in the loss of the specific moment it would record. Focusing upon Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, I discuss the ways in which the Romantic poets responsible for this idea of 'the ideal form of "the Romantic lyric"' manipulated, challenged, and shaped the idea of lyric that we have inherited.

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confidence: 99%