Likewise, Anthony Easthope disperses the genre of lyric poetry into the overall category of discourse hence, all exchanges engage equally in “a process of enunciation.” The poet’s presence-and the anthropomorphic trope of the poet’s “voice”-is hereby recuperated into a symptomatic of ideologies, power struggles, and destabilized structures. This attitude dissolves the self into the social collective. Sometimes we think of the self as a more fluid or deconstructed thing: an artifice formed by convenience and language, a social construct, a fiction. Emerson identifies this version of the self in its most pure and central state: “I see all the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.” This is consistent with Bloom’s notion of the lyric’s function: to enlarge a solitary existence. Sometimes we hold that the self is an autonomous and independent entity, a body and a psyche of measurable dimensions, the fixed hub around which our perceptions and relationships orbit. If a lyric poem is a song of oneself, what is that self? What is its relation to the collective? Has the lyric poem always extended outward from the center of the solitary self to the “others”? The answers range vividly. I wish to consider the center of both the social and lyric cosmos: the self, that conscious or self-conscious entity speaking from the singular and personal present. I am going to limit my own discussion to a more basic problem of people and the lyric. Does the lyric possess a political aptitude? Can it protest, criticize, convince? What is the place of the popular in a seemingly hermetic site? How do communities, indeed how do urban and technological constructions, fit into the private or pastoral space of the lyric? These are real and delicious problems to tackle, for don’t we want a lyric poetry capable of cities, populations, politics, testimony, exchange, social engagement? In a narrative of self, what is the place of the other, of others, of people? From here the problem extends in many directions. Harold Bloom goes so far as to assert that the main value of literary study is to “enlarge a solitary existence.” Such is the dream of the lyric in particular, that the self shall be revealed and enlarged. But I seek lyric poetry specifically for its meditation, for the example of its music, the solace of its radical interiority. Conventional definitions of the lyric poem generally abide by Roman Jakobsen’s assessment: “lyric poetry speaks for the first person, in the present tense-a present toward which lyric always impels any past or future events.” Isn’t this the case? I turn to works of literature for many things, in many needs. To be sure, people are a real problem for the lyric poem. ![]() Wallace Stevens prepares us in Adagia: “Life is not people and scene but thought and feeling.” Our present issue finds its focus in lyric meditation and the problem of people. In parsing these three categories into more specific rhetorical modes or landscapes, we have looked at other problematics within the lyric: pastoral poetry (thus, the problem of nature), the sublime (the problem of beauty), and narrative and syntax (the problem of time). ![]() In our own investigations of three primary lyric modes, we have previously considered the love poem (and the problems of passion, heartbreak, betrayal), the elegy (and the problems of death and loss or forgetting), and the ode (and the problems of social rhetoric and lyric progression). The problems with people have provided poets with their subjects for millennia. I want to press on with this proposition for a moment before I turn my attention more fully to another part of the title. Our symposium is entitled “Lyric Poetry and the Problem of People.” My list, of course, denotes the problem, some of the problems, with people. Life is an affair of people not of places.
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