Grounding the Lyric Essay

Poets talk about “spots of time,” but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. I shall remember that son of a bitch forever.

Odd, isn’t it, how we instantly recognize a writer through a peculiar combination of content and style? In 1977, Norman Maclean, whose manuscript was once rejected by a New York publisher with the phrase “this story has trees in it,” was not awarded a Pulitzer Prize for A River Runs Through It because, although nominated by the fiction jury, the board felt it was “too close to his life-story to be called fiction.” And thus was born the need for the term “creative nonfiction”!

There is still no established critical terminology by which we discuss the genre. Not only is there confusion between autobiography and memoir, but also between memoir and personal essay. Various types of essays are described in so many ways that it would be difficult to tell them apart. One subgenre of the personal essay—the “lyric essay”—seems especially to suffer from an identity crisis. The term is applied to anything short, anything (of any length) that uses poetic language, anything (of any length) that employs the mosaic technique, anything (of any length) experimental, and, for want of a better word, anything we might dub “clever.” Meanwhile, it’s a two-word form—and I’d like to reestablish the parameters of each of them.

The word “lyric” suggests music, and thus awareness of the cadences and sounds of the language itself. In recent history some of the most eloquent writers in this vein were those whose work came into vogue even before the term “creative nonfiction” was coined. In the 1950s, Loren Eiseley’s popular book The Immense Journey gave voice to scientific exploration. His writing, as the editor of the Bloomsbury Review stated, “delivered science to nonscientists in the lyrical language of earthly metaphor, irony, simile, and narrative, all paced like a good mystery.” The book’s subtitle—“An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature”—was meant to remind readers of his intentions, and Eiseley stuck to his self-proclaimed prescription:

The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore.

Occasionally, out of a felt necessity, he resorted to a poetry of sorts:

Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greenly overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness.

With his use of alliteration, assonance, syntactical repetition, Eiseley was clearly caught in a music of his own. But even in his desire to be “artful,” he did not lose sight of his reason for writing.

Others followed in his footsteps. In 1975, Annie Dillard was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, another book of scientific or environmental writing built on lyricism and metaphor. To my mind, the writing is a bit excessive, but it does convey the intensity for which Dillard is known:

No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.

Or;

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. . . . I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

Dillard is using elements of poetry—repetition, metaphor, inverted word order—in order to focus on her spiritual discoveries in nature, and I would contend that, as in the plays...