Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire

What is the difference between the ‘I’ of a poem--the lyric subject-- and the liberal subject of rights? Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire uses this question to re-examine the work of five major American poets, changing our understanding of their writing and the field of post-war American poetry. Through extended readings of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, Hugh Foley shows how poets have imagined liberalism as a problem for poetry.

Foley's book offers a new approach to ongoing debates about the nature of lyric by demonstrating the entanglement of ideas about the lyric poem with the development of twentieth-century liberal discussions of individuality. Arguing that the nature of American empire in this period--underpinned by the discourse of individual rights--forced poets to reckon with this entanglement, it demonstrates how this reckoning helped to shape poetry in the post-war period.

By tracing the ways a lyric poem performs personhood, and the ways that this person can be distinguished from the individual envisioned by post-war liberalism, Foley shows how each poet stages a critique of liberalism from inside the standpoint of ‘lyric'. This book demonstrates the capacities of poetry for rethinking its own relation to history and politics, providing a new perspective on a vital era of American poetry.

Hugh Foley, Teaching Fellow in English, Queen Mary University of London

Hugh Foley is currently a teaching fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He has taught at the University of Liverpool, and at the University of Oxford, where he received his DPhil in 2017.

Introduction
1. Introduction
2. Our Art and Our Government
3. Poems, Persons, Critique
4. Liberalism, Individualism, A Note on Historical Method
5. Overview
Chapter 1. Tradition and the Individual Dissent
1. 1. The View from Prison
1. 2. The View from Kenyon
1. 3. 'The unforgivable landscape'
1. 4. The View from the Library of Congress
1. 5. The View from Blue Hill
Chapter 2. Universalism and the Universe of Death
2. 1. 'Not one death but many'
2. 2. 'Some slightness of feeling they think is sweet and long to die inside'
2. 3. The deadly idiot of compromise'
2. 4. 'If I see past what I feel'
Chapter 3. 'Freedom that has turned into a painting'
3. 1. 'One more painted sunset'
3. 2. 'Instantaneously extending your hesitation into an empire'
3. 3. 'Our fate can be exemplary'
Chapter 4. 'The Injustice of the World'
4. 1. 'To know the world'
4. 2. 'A picture held us captive'
4. 3. 'The finished painting'
4. 4. 'The genius of the shore'
Conclusion