Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (review)

Lyric Generations is a fresh and compelling study that traces the complex interdependence of lyric and novel from Richardson to Wordsworth. Gabrielle Starr investigates how the expressive limits of lyric and novel are often overcome in texts that fuse expressive devices from both genres: "the problems that the breaks in one genre pose can be answered by another" (5), Starr writes in her introduction. To the question, "what is missing from lyric?" (5), she gives the answer: "some of the things we find in novels." Yet this is a deceptively simple summary of the challenges to conventional readings of eighteenth-century poetry and prose that Lyric Generations lays out.

The counter-intuitive stakes of the book are self-evident, since conventional wisdom is that "the rise of the novel" in the eighteenth century marks the eclipse of the lyric. Generically distinct and distant from the novelty of novels, lyric poetry glows only dimly throughout the eighteenth century (famously in a churchyard, at evening, on the sofa)—until it flares brilliantly once again with the publication of Lyrical Ballads. But Gabrielle Starr sets out to teach us otherwise, and she traces a series of complex, sophisticated readings that show how the lyrical past haunts the novelistic present—and then how the inventions of novelistic narrative breathe life into the first stirrings of Romantic lyric.

Each chapter in Lyric Generations takes up a particular expressive challenge that the writers of major eighteenth-century texts (poems and novels) faced and demonstrates how the problem was solved by recourse to the "opposite" literary genre. So, in chapter 1, Donne's and Herbert's lyrics of suffering provide Richardson with a model for narrating Clarissa's own travails. In chapter 2, lyric devices for creating sympathetic identification between speaker and reader are shown to offer Behn and Haywood ways of generating intense, communally felt reader responses to their fiction. Starr turns to mid-century poems in chapter 3—The Seasons, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, and others—and shows that, even in non-lyric poetry, Renaissance "lyric affinities" allow formal, patriotic speaking voices to become personal and individual. In chapters 4 and 5, Starr argues that, perversely, novelistic "realism" depends often on the reuse of scenes and events recognizable from lyric. And, finally, she writes about early Romantic lyrics—unexpectedly, we learn that Wordsworth and Coleridge owe a deep debt to novelistic conventions.

Starr gives us the useful term "lyric absorption" to describe the focus of her scholarship. Certainly, the surprise and the success of Lyric Generations derive from the ways in which Starr shows lyric devices popping up in the most unlikely places. This book consistently produces vigorous and surprising readings of important novels and poems, made possible by Starr's perception that, far from being "opposed genres" in the period, novel and lyric are crucially interdependent.

The book's most important contribution lies in detailed close readings that speak to some long-standing problems in understanding eighteenth-century poetry. In chapter 3, for example, Starr attends to one of the critical frustrations for responding to mid-century lyric: how, amid so much national, patriotic, communal, general feeling, can an intimate, idiosyncratic "I" break forth—a speaking self that compels the reader to real identification and sympathy? She points out that Anne Finch, Mary Leapor, and Thomas Gray were all writing under pressure from a culture in which "we" was the priority speaking voice—in which collective sentiment was more important than the reflections of a solitary "I." So Starr's readings of Thomson, Shaftsbury, and Gray turn upon her identifying a series of "lyric moments" when the poet explicitly articulates deep anxiety about the disappearance of the speaker's actual, bodily self from his poem. Her argument here is that "physicality is stripped away because it is the most pressing representative or reminder of self, self-interest, and self-focus" (97).

This argument leads to another interesting question: where does...