Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire [Hardcover]

Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empirere-examines the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, changing our understanding of their writing and the field of post-war American poetry.What is the difference between the I of a poem--the lyric subject-- and the liberal subject of rights?Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empireuses this question to re-examine the work of five major American poets, changing our understanding of their writing and the field of post-war American poetry. Through extended readings of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, Hugh Foley shows how poets have imagined liberalism as a problem for poetry.Foley's book offers a new approach to ongoing debates about the nature of lyric by demonstrating the entanglement of ideas about the lyric poem with the development of twentieth-century liberal discussions of individuality. Arguing that the nature of American empire in this period--underpinned by the discourse of individual rights--forced poets to reckon with this entanglement, it demonstrates how this reckoning helped to shape poetry in the post-war period.By tracing the ways a lyric poem performs personhood, and the ways that this person can be distinguished from the individual envisioned by post-war liberalism, Foley shows how each poet stages a critique of liberalism from inside the standpoint of lyric'REPLACEGREATERTHAN. This book demonstrates the capacities of poetry for rethinking its own relation to history and politics, providing a new perspective on a vital era of American poetry.Introduction1. Introduction2. Our Art and Our Government3. Poems, Persons, Critique4. Liberalism, Individualism, A Note on Historical Method5. OverviewChapter 1. Tradition and the Individual Dissent1. 1. The View from Prison1. 2. The View from Kenyon1. 3. 'The unforgivable landscape'1. 4. The Viló#