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This is a splendid book, one of the best on the lyric that I have ever read, combining a rich and original theoretical account with chapters on four major twentieth-century American poets. Blasing's take on the lyric is convincing and original. -- Jonathan Culler, Cornell University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: "Making Choice of a Human Self" 1 PART ONE: Lyric Theory Chapter 1: The Lyric Subject 27 Chapter 2: The Historical "I" 45 Chapter 3: The Scripted "I" 78 Chapter 4: The Body of Words 96 PART TWO: Lyric Practice Chapter 5: Four Quartets: Rhetoric Redeemed 115 Chapter 6: Wallace Stevens and "The Less Legible Meanings of Sounds" 133 Chapter 7: Pound's Soundtrack: "Reading Cantos for What Is on the Page" 149 Chapter 8: Anne Sexton, "The Typo" 178 Coda: The Haunted House of "Anna" 198 Works Cited 205 Index 213

About the Author

Mutlu Konuk Blasing is Professor of English at Brown University. She is the author of The Art of Life, American Poetry, and Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry.

Reviews

"In her discussions of infant language acquisition, but more broadly in her portrayal of frames by which we separate poems from non-poems, Blasing has written a smart book that other critics will use, even critics with different attitudes toward individual poets and their poems."--Stephen Burt, Modern Philology