Deconstructing the High Modernist Lyric

Abstract

‘One of the anomalies of criticism in the late twentieth century’, the American critic Marjorie Perloff has recently stated, ‘is that the lyric poem, the great genre of the Romantics, as of the High Modernists, no longer seems central to its discourse.’¹ Whether we agree with Perloff’s implicit judgement of the importance of the lyric form or not, her comment reminds us that the radical transposition of the lyric — particularly of the High Modernist lyric — from centre to margin is one of the most notable events in the recent history of literary criticism. For forty years, from the early 1920s to the late 1960s, the lyrics of Yeats and Eliot enjoyed an almost unimaginable prestige in Anglo-American letters. They provided the models which younger poets, from Auden to Plath, sought to emulate; they inspired in Practical and New Criticism institutionally powerful and influential doctrines of criticism; and they constituted for many critics the poles within which poetic writing itself was deemed possible. So overpowering was their prestige that few thought odd the view that the significant history of English literature was to be found in the development of the lyric.