What the Nightingale Sings: History, Lyric, and the Modernist Epic

This article offers a reading of the figure of the nightingale in the T.S. Eliot's "A Game of Chess" section in The Waste Land and Ezra Pound's canto 20, arguing that the lyric facilitates the modernist engagement with history and gives the modern epic the organizing logic it needs to draw past and present into meaningful relationship through the lyric present. In the process, Eliot and Pound use the figure of the nightingale and lyric poetics more generally cast doubt upon achieving complete historical recovery not because they do so through lyric rather than more traditional historical modes, but because they reveal the aesthetic dimension inherent in the task of coming to terms with history.