Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words

by Mutlu Konuk Blasing

Lyric poetry has long been regarded as the intensely private, emotional expression of individuals, powerful precisely because it draws readers into personal worlds. But who, exactly, is the "I" in a lyric poem, and how is it created? In Lyric Poetry , Mutlu Blasing argues that the individual in a lyric is only a virtual entity and that lyric poetry takes its power from the public, emotional power of language itself.


In the first major new theory of the lyric to be put forward in decades, Blasing proposes that lyric poetry is a public discourse deeply rooted in the mother tongue. She looks to poetic, linguistic, and psychoanalytic theory to help unravel the intricate historical processes that generate speaking subjects, and concludes that lyric forms convey both personal and communal emotional histories in language. Focusing on the work of such diverse twentieth-century American poets as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Anne Sexton, Blasing demonstrates the ways that the lyric "I" speaks, from first to last, as a creation of poetic language.

Genres: Poetry

232 pages, Hardcover

First published December 4, 2006

Reviews

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's the thing: Blasing's work is likeable and dense, if forbiddingly studded with an obscurantist tendency toward the hermeneutic and away from the celebratory. She's doing an admirable job bringing together language acquisition theory (!!!), poetics from the Agamben bent, and American literature. So far so good. What's missing is a certain clarity of purpose that brings her out from theoretical readings of poems and toward a discourse recognizable to, well, people who haven't been born at the Sausseurean font and come to adulthood through the twin gates of Kristeva and de Man. So good, so mixed, but with glimmerings of fresh though through linguistic acquisition and the psychological apparatus of what Blasing is content to continue calling "the mother tongue" effect.

[Austin Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant synthesis of formal poetics and neurolinguistics. It’s so theoretically dense, however, that it’s almost incomprehensible unless you’re already grounded in Agamben, Deleuze, Saussure, and de Man—which is to say, this is a book for people who like to suffer.

[Víctor Bermúdez · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE NATURAL SIN OF LANGUAGE

[Andrea]

so far so good. such I shame she didn't venture into psychoanalysis as much as I expected. and she should have done it:)