Politics & Society
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Is the lyric poem, with its often emotionally expressive first-person address, a fundamentally private utterance—or is it, in its powerful articulation of a distinctive perspective, a political act demanding that we pay attention to the particularity of persons? Lyric—in song, verse, anthems, chants, ballads and braodsides—has often marked the soundtrack of revolution. Constellating voices into collections of verse, as in the books here, suggest how lyric praxis—the writing, reading, and reciting of poems—can themselves shape political formations. |
featured titles
Poetry in a Global Age
by Jahan Ramazani
University of Chicago Press, 2020. One of the foremost living critics and theorists of contemporary poetry, several of Ramazani’s works are part of this MRC. In this book, he explores what lyric poetry can tell us about globality and the crossing of the boundaries of national literatures. Lyric, he shows, has much to say about world literature and politics; it tackles war and migration, climate change and ecocriticism, translation studies, tourism and the remaking of cultural geographies. “Even when poetry seems locally rooted,” he writes, “its long memory of forms and words, its connections across centuries, continents, and languages, make it a powerful imaginative resource for a global age.”
Poetry and the Fate of the Senses
by Susan Stewart
A classic study of lyric’s central role in our culture, Stewart’s book insists on the importance of the senses in the making and reception of poetry. Poetry’s purpose, she argues, is “to counter the loneliness of the mind, or to help it glean, out of the darkness of solitude, the outline of others. Poetry…makes tangible, visible, and audible the contours of our shared humanity.”