“My Life Is Only One Life”: Turning to Other People in American Lyric Poetry After New Criticism

Abstract

Lyric poetry has the reputation of being solitary, hermetic, and focused exclusively on the experiences of the poet or first-person speaker. This reputation can make lyric poems seem self-involved and even solipsistic – uninterested in pressing social, historical, and ethical concerns. I contest this notion, and argue for lyric poetry’s social relevance, by drawing attention to the many poems written about other people. I argue that inherited New Critical ideas have guided the common false assumption that lyric poems must be solitary, and I make the case for an alternative non-New Critical kind of ‘lyric reading’ in which we pay more attention and attribute more significance to the myriad people and characters who appear in poems. I also provide a few general theoretical categories for thinking about others in lyric. In particular, I distinguish between ‘closed’ characters who don’t seem to resemble real people or to refer to real situations beyond the poems in which they appear, and ‘open’ characters who aren’t props or masks for the poet, but seem full of independent vitality, and to refer us to realistic, external lives outside the text. Finally, I argue that a generation of American poets in the 1950s and 60s broke from New Critical well-wrought solitude and autonomy by writing poems full of open characters. My dissertation examines four such poets – Thom Gunn, James Wright, Adrienne Rich, and Frank O’Hara. I explore these poets’ works in depth, taking them as rich case studies in lyric representations of others and in the complex roles others can play in lyric poems.