Wheatfield with Crows and Beside Myself: A Theory of Lyric Impersonality

This thesis consists of two parts. Wheatfield with Crows is a collection of poems that explore loss, twinship, landscape, and resurrection. It includes a series of ‘dead twin’ poems in which I invent a twin brother who was never born, as well as a sequence of poems about the Biblical figure of Lazarus, the story of whose resurrection is told in John 11. I discuss some of these poems, and the ideas behind them, in the appendix.

Beside Myself: A Theory of Lyric Impersonality is a study of what I call ‘lyric impersonality’ in the work of three contemporary English-language poets. In the introduction, I contextualise this tendency as a complication of the dominant model of lyric as a genre of emotional expression. Lyric impersonality, I argue, challenges the centrality of ‘expression’ as the defining function of lyric poetics. Emotions, in these poems, are performed, parodied, examined, estranged, dismissed, flattened and so on, rather than straightforwardly ‘expressed’. And while these poems retain the ‘I’ as an organising principle, they also simultaneously challenge the unity or legibility of that ‘I’ through a variety of strategies.

The subsequent three chapters identify and analyse those strategies of impersonality and elucidate some of the effects they produce. In Chapter 1, I offer a reading of the work of Denise Riley as a poetics of performance in which the self is made and unmade, voiced and unvoiced. In Chapter 2, I read Anne Carson’s ‘The Glass Essay’ as a challenge to Bakhtin’s characterisation of poetry as intensely monological. And in Chapter 3, I discuss the ‘special effects’ of shame as they manifest in Emily Berry’s Stranger, Baby, particularly in moments of self-examination and emotional detachment. My conclusion explores lyric impersonality as a means of negotiating gendered reading practices associated with first-person poetics.