Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words

Description

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. This work proposes that lyric poetry is a public discourse rooted in the mother tongue. It demonstrates the ways that the lyric "I" speaks, from first to last, as a creation of poetic language.

Mutlu Konuk Blasing is Professor of English at Brown University. She is the author of "The Art of Life, American Poetry", and "Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry".

"In her discussions of infant language acquisition, but more broadly in her portrayal of frames by which we separate poems from non-poems, Blasing has written a smart book that other critics will use, even critics with different attitudes toward individual poets and their poems."--Stephen Burt, Modern Philology