The American Love Lyric After Auschwitz and Hiroshima

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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 reassessment of the modern American love lyric, Barbara L. Estrin chronicles the return of three major American poets (Wallace Stevens in the late 1940s and 1950s, Robert Lowell in the 1970s and Adrienne Rich in the 1990s) 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 Francois 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.