The American Love Lyric After Auschwitz and Hiroshima

Citing the massive horrors of the Nazi death camps and the domestic violence behind a woman’s suicide, Adrienne Rich challenges a fellow poet: ’would it relieve you to decide/Poetry doesn’t make this happen?’ In this provocative reassessment of the modern American love lyric, Barbara L. Estrin chronicles the return of three major American poets (Wallace Stevens in the late forties and fifties, Robert Lowell in the Seventies, and Adrienne Rich in the nineties) to the mid-century catastrophes that gave rise to such thorny questions. Through close readings of individual poems (and drawing upon the gender and genre theories of Jean François Lyotard, Judith Butler, Melanie Klien, and Jacques Lacan), Estrin counters the usual presuppositions that the lyric remains sequestered in a-political isolation, and offers a new, revisionist critique of American poetry.

BARBARA L. ESTRIN is Professor of English and Department Chair at Stonehill College. Author of The Raven and the Lark: Lost Children in English Renaissance Literature (Bucknell, 85) and Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell (Duke, 94), she has also published numerous articles on Renaissance and Modern topics.