Curious to know what you all think of the idea of
lyric poetry. Does the phrase make you all snort in
derision as a hopelessly uncontemporary way of
writing? Or is there more interesting theorisation of
contemporary lyric, aside from the obvious application
of popular songs?
I should say that I think the most persistent force in
20th century poetry was lyric. And a quote from Musil
to cement my thinking a bit - "... it seems quite
probable that the basic characteristics of our lyric
poetry have subsisted pretty much unchanged since
primitive times. These include the manner of dividing
the poem into stanzas and lines, symmetrical
construction, parallelism (as it is still manifest
today in rhythm and rhyme), the use of repetition,
even of pleonasm, as a stimulus, the scattering in the
poem of meaningless (that is, secret, magic) words,
syllables and series of letters, and finally, too, the
peculiarity that the individual component, the
sentence or phrase, has no meaning in itself but only
acquires meaning through its position in the whole."
Prynne, for example, does these things, although
obviously the means have changed sinced Musil was
writing (say, rhyme has fallen out as a means of
parallelism). Someone was asking weeks ago what the
meaning of the mathematics was in Triodes: could it
be, in this sense, magic?
Best
Alison
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