The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England

Introduction

Introduction Despite the problems posed by defining and describing lyric, the term appears with telling frequency in contexts ranging from the scholarship of many disciplines to the seductions of Madison Avenue to the stanzas of lyric poets themselves . Northrop Frye, characteristically no less acerbic than acute, remarks that “there is a popular tendency to call anything in verse a lyric that is not actually divided into twelve books.”1 The word in question and its cognates are indeed used at best liberally and variously, and at worst merely loosely, in numerous academic fields. Deployed broadly by film critics, “lyric” is also applied more specifically to the work of Stan Brakhage; his own writings on his films and those of his critics draw attention to characteristics frequently though not uncontroversially attributed to lyric poetry, such as intensity, a disruption of linear chronology, and an emphasis on the emotions of the artist.2 A placard in the San Diego Art Museum observes of Edouard Vuillard, who, like other members of the late-nineteenthcentury Nabi movement, created highly decorative surfaces: “his paintings are lyrical, poetic visions.” One study attributes to the modern Dutch architect and designer W. R. Dudock “a lyricism which had a close affinity with the Amsterdam School.”3 Positioned by John Stuart Mill, Theodor W. Adorno, and many others as an antithesis and even potentially an antidote to the commodified marketplace, lyric has nonetheless repeatedly been impressed into the service of commodification .4 An advertisement from the Crate and Barrel chain of stores celebrates the “lyrical patterning in luxurious, frosty silver” of a tablecloth.5 A type of wine glass from the same company has been graced with the name “Lyric Stemware,” either because it has the delicacy sometimes attributed to that mode or because it will contain the drink supposed to inspire it. A bar in Madison, Wisconsin, perhaps playing on that same ambiguity, sports the name “Liquid Lyric Lounge,” presumably encouraging its more sober patrons to debate whether the adjective applies to poetic or potable fare. Poets too have attempted to deploy the resonances of the term present in both scholarly discussions and advertisements. When Robert Herrick declares in “An Ode to Sir Clipsebie Crew” that “A Goblet, to the brim, / Of Lyrick Wine” (15–16) will be quaffed, he is referring not only to the wine’s capacity to inspire poetry and its association with Anacreon but also to the energy and sensuous pleasure that it, like poetry, can evoke.6 In our own era, the Irish poet Eavan Boland writes of an illness: I re-construct the soaked through midnights; vigils; the histories I never learned to predict the lyric of (“Fever,” 25–27)7 In the context of a poem where fever is associated with desire, loss, and irrationality and where disease also arguably gestures towards the presence of all three in Irish politics, lyric here seems to represent both the beauty and the meaning that are lost when temperatures rise. By linking that mode to “histories” (26), Boland also alerts her readers to the frequency with which it can be the companion and culmination of narrative rather than a temporary impediment, a point explored in Chapter 5. A more cynical view of lyric is adumbrated by the twentieth-century Australian poet and librettist Gwen Harwood, whose own work in that mode is extraordinary in its range and complexity—no less extraordinary than the widespread neglect of it in both Great Britain and the United States. In a poem about the many ways communication breaks down when a marriage does, she declares, “Master writes a lyric poem / So his pain is manifest” (“Fido’s Paw is Bleeding,” 21–22), thus ironically gesturing towards yet another way the expository functions of language can really be an instrument for misleading oneself, others, or both.8 Langston Hughes’s “Little Lyric (Of Great Importance),” which reads in its entirety, “I wish the rent / Was heaven sent,” deploys its title to play the idealization associated with lyric, ironically signaled as well by the noun in its second line, against the practical exigencies of quotidian life.9 In addition to these stars of the poetic playing fields, players indubitably on minor league teams have also utilized “lyric” as a trope; for example, I too engaged with the complex2 t h e c h a l l e n g e s o f o r p h e u s [3.147.104.248] Project...