Theory of the lyric: an intervention

On 13 October 2016, Bob Dylan, the American singer-songwriter, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and controversy raged. Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, and a Professor of Aesthetics, celebrated Dylan as a ‘great sound poet’, comparing him to Sappho and to Homer, while Salmon Rushdie reached even further back to evoke Orpheus. The Swedish Academy's literary historian, Horace Engdahl, more contentiously contextualised Dylan's triumph in terms of the ‘great shifts in the world of literature’. For Dylan's champions, one ‘shift’ was very specific – a new dawn had risen for lyric, and our idea of what poetry is, what it can be and how it can work had acquired a different complexion. These defining questions reverberated at the core of the Dylan debate, and its social media presence brought the matter of poetry to the attention of a wider audience, but the questions themselves are hardly new. Plato, the founder of the first Academy in Athens, had much to say on the subject, as did his student Aristotle, and through time poets such as Sir Philip Sidney, Percy Bysshe Shelley, T. S. Eliot and Joseph Brodsky. But most recently these underpinning issues have re-emerged with renewed urgency in academia's return to the scrutiny of literary genre, with a particular focus on the relevance, indeed the very existence, of a category stable enough to encompass a transhistorical concept of the lyric. The historicist school of the New Lyric Studies is positioned in the eye of this storm, formulating a set of contentious propositions that revolve around the central notion that ‘lyric’ is a modern construction whose salient characteristics originate in the Romantic period, and has been imposed retrospectively on the poetic productions of earlier ages. The result, as New Lyric advocates argue, is a flawed collapsing of various types of poetic genre and subgenre into an overly extended, abstract idea of poetry that fails to take full account of the varied conditions under which poetry of differing periods is produced; a process referred to by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins as ‘lyricisation’.