In

Abstract

hat’s in a lyric? This basic definitional question, one that lies beneath the very notion of “lyric keywords,” can point down a number of critical avenues—inviting us to consider, for example, lyric poetry’s thematic preoccupations (love or longing, God or small things), its formal or stylistic quiddities (meter or rhyme, tone or voice), or its verbal texture (all those “I”s and “ah”s).While this essay will venture down some, if not all, of those avenues, it will focus on the modest preposition at the center of the originating question. This vanishingly brief, deceptively reticent monosyllable metonymizes some of the most enduring critical concepts in the study of lyric. It also, more interestingly, hints at what we might call a prepositional understanding of the genre. And with that, to borrow the words of a poet who will reappear later in this essay, “Let’s in.” Let’s start, in fact, with one of the most familiar critical definitions of the lyric: that it is a genre profoundly concerned with interiority or inwardness. Critics have long argued over what kind of address we take a lyric poem to be; is it, to quote John Stuart Mill, “feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude,” or is it an address (direct or indirect) to a listener (visible or invisible)? Setting aside the vexed question of audience or occasion, we might still wish to grant that the stated subject of much lyric poetry is the speaker’s inmost feeling or thought and the nuances of individual psychological, emotional, or spiritual experience. Examples of this kind of lyric inwardness crowd the Renaissance canon, with poetic speaker after poetic speaker claiming to have followed, in one way or another, the directive of Astrophil’s muse: “Looke in thy heart and write.” This inward turn can sometimes be presented as reluctant, even painful—as, for example, in the claustrophobic self-scrutiny of the “hurt imagination” in Fulke Greville’s Caelica 100 (“In