Clipping Easter’s Wing: Lorine Niedecker and the Metaphysical Lyric

Abstract

This article examines Lorine Niedecker’s poetry and correspondence, demonstrating that she read widely in seventeenth-century poetry and frequently borrowed lines and formal strategies from early modern poets in her own verse. However, Niedecker’s relationship to this body of work was complex and sometimes tense, and this essay argues that even as her work quoted and riffed on “metaphysical” poetry, it refashioned these lyric fragments to materialist philosophical ends, in a distinctly vernacular or “conversational” style. The essay demonstrates this through close readings of Niedecker’s “And at the blue ice superior spot,” “Far reach,” “In Europe they grow a new bean,” “Paean to Place,” and “Easter,” in relationship to lyrics by Herrick, Marvell, Shakespeare, and Herbert. In narrating this history, the essay hopes not just to enrich and expand our sense of the range of sources and influences Niedecker drew on, but also to help us understand more fully the afterlives of early modern lyric, the interest it held for members of the American modernist avant garde, and the links between the genre’s afterlife and particular modernist formal concerns and philosophical positions.