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Starting with the idea of the late nineteenth century as a locus of ‘lyric crisis’, the introduction outlines established scholarly narratives of the relationship between poetry and modernity in the nineteenth century, and describes how the book will challenge these through its attention to aestheticist poetry. It goes on to explain the remit and choices made in the structure of the book (which is organized around three parts, each of which contains three chapters), and ends by situating the book’s methodology in relation to the fields of lyric studies and lyric theory. The overall aim of the book is stated as the analysis of the relationship between lyric and modernity prior to the better known story of poetic modernisation that occurs within high modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Stephen Nichols’s text analyzes one of the most famous examples of troubadour lyric, Peire d’Alverna’s Occitan canso Cantarai d’aqestz trobadors (‘I’ll sing about these troubadours’). Nichols explores its formal, linguistic, and epistemological character, its status in the broader literary-historical context of the late twelfth century, and its relevance for contemporary theoretical debates about conceptual knowledge.

This chapter explores the ‘minor’ subjectivity of Sylvain George’s film-work, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature and Henri Michaux’s ‘left-handed’ poetics. It claims that George’s unstable camera work, combined with the oscillation between the objectives of documentary observation and the sequences of lyrical expressionism, disrupt the traditional topographer’s position, resulting in a dynamic relation of inclusion. It closes by suggesting that this ‘minor’ mode, marked by its recurrent estrangement from the ‘real,’ is a crucial vehicle for capturing the complexity of the contemporary landscape of informal refugee camps in and around the cities of northern France.

The first chapter addresses T. S. Eliot’s struggle with history as this struggle unfolds between 1910 and 1920, between the composition of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the publication of “Gerontion.” Challenging readings of Eliot’s project as, from its inception, conciliatory—the terminus of a certain narrative of literary modernism, the moment when modernism became reconciled to its institutional status—this chapter reveals in Eliot’s lyric practice an opposed tendency. During the 1910s, Eliot characterizes the poetic ordering of literary history not only as a synthesis of diverse works but also as a practice whose success depends on a series of divisions, divisions inscribed in the consciousness or the life of the “mature poet” and reduplicated in the poet’s literary creations.

Greek lyric avoids the thorough, point-by-point narration characteristic of epic. Sappho engages in anti-narrative, exemplified by Aphrodite's questions in Sappho 1, which—unlike the questions gods ask in Homer, or the questions the Homeric narrator asks—are not answered. The goddess (in the past) asked who (tis) was doing wrong to Sappho, but Sappho's name appears, the name of this girl is not given anymore than is the name of the girl she loves now; even when she provides a name (as in 16), Sappho refuses to be specific, and using deictics without clarifying their referents. The traditional epic narrative conventions are a constant presence in Sappho's lyric, producing the expectation of a plot that her poems refuse to provide.

This chapter challenges the idea that the invocation of the Muses in early Greek Poetry means that poets saw themselves as reporting historical facts. Referring to Homeric epic, Hesiod, and archaic lyric poetry, it points to a variety of indicators that the authors were aware of their own invention of new material and expected their audiences also to be aware of this invention. Key examples include Hesiod's reported meeting with the Muses, Stesichorus’ two prologues on Helen and epodes by Archilochus referring to invented episodes. The overall implication is that there is a wide awareness of the possibility of what we call ‘fiction’ even if there is no genre which is explicitly presented as fictional and no term corresponding to the idea of fiction.

This chapter explores the apparently limited afterlife of Charlotte Brontë’s poetry. Addressing the critical fortunes of the Aylott and Jones collection of 1846 and considering Brontë's discussion of poetry in her letters, it argues that the author incorporates traces of the early poetry into her novels in different guises. Focusing on The Professor, Jane Eyre and Shirley, this chapter proposes Brontë’s fiction as a sequence of experiments in the poetics of the Victorian novel that retrieve and reform the Romantic lyric, granting it a marketable posthumousness and securing the feminine lyric voice for the printed page.

This chapter examines the biopolitics of marriage and sexuality in civil society from Benjamin to Foucault. The category of bare life is at stake in marriage, sexuality, and natality. The chapter argues that an affirmative politics of life needs to address the social organization of the reproduction of species life, as well as its connection with the social reproduction of capital.

This chapter addresses Byron’s Italian lyric mode by focusing on Childe Harold IV’s description of the Palatine as an exemplary instance of sustained poetic attentiveness. It places this description alongside the accounts of the Palatine in Goethe’s Italienische Reise and de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie. Comparing these three fundamental texts for the Romantic reinvention of Italy, the chapter draws out their very different ways of responding to Rome. In doing so, it contrasts the fictional and autobiographical works of de Staël and Goethe, which appropriate the ruins of Rome for their own needs and purposes, and Childe Harold IV,which offers an attentive responsiveness to Roman ruins per se. Whereas Goethe seeks an education in Rome, and de Staël finds consolation, Byron, in his poetic exploration of the Palatine, crafts an entirely original lyric mode and persona that are expressive of a heightened attention to the suggestions of Rome. The ‘eternal city’ thus becomes an ‘exhaustless mine’ (CHP, IV, 108, 128) of experiences that hosts of later tourists would then come to explore, relish and revel in.

This chapter directly picks up where Stétié ends, with a textual analysis of a poetic cycle of chapbooks by Meddeb. I argue that a renouveau in the Francophone lyric is made possible through his translations of classical Arabic and Sufi poetry. In his chapbooks, Meddeb attempts to refashion himself, after his two successful and widely acclaimed first novels Talismano (1979) and Phantasia (1986), as a mystical, wandering Sufi poet. With Tombeau d’Ibn Arabi (1987), Les 99 stations de Yale (1995), and Aya dans les villes (1999) in particular, Meddeb manically focuses on an adaptational, modern rewriting in French verse of the history of Sufi saints, poets and poetry. Meddeb simultaneously draws on the formal and structural poetics of the pre-Islamic odes (as we will have seen with Tengour and Jabès), but he recasts them in light of the life of the Sufi saints and mystics rather than the pagan poets. Meddeb’s major innovation lies not only in the poetic combination of sacred and profane poetic registers, but also in an original combination of French and Arabic poetic registers with the world of modern American poetics. A central literary case whom I revisit in the conclusion to Pacifist Invasions, a critical re-evaluation of Meddeb reveals him to be indispensable for the successful poetic reconstruction of Francophone studies. I demonstrate how, much like the Sufi poet, and in keeping with ‘Ā’ishah al-Bā‘ūniyyah’s Principles of Sufism, Meddeb’s new Francophone lyric self-inflects as consciousness in search of what lies beyond its knowledge of its current state: situated in relation to itself, its paradoxical internal genealogy, its contemplative meditational mode. The poetic import of Meddeb’s lyric consists of the masterful blending of the figure of the Sufi poet and the Arabic tongue with contemporaneous intonations in French poetry. Meddeb’s writing transverses concurrent and widely divergent poetic trends, and connects them to one another in an original French-language arabesque. Beneath the surface of his first poetic experiments, Meddeb had couched a hidden, propagative poetics of the trace, barely perceptible, held together by thematic and generic modulations, a double lyric voice, and the infralinguistic.

John T. Sebastian conceives of social and religious communities through the articulation of “common voice.” Building on Anne Middleton's formulation that public poetry speaks in a common voice on behalf of a common good, Sebastian reminds us that public poetry provides an important site of interaction between medieval poetics and social practice. In “The Idea of Public Poetry in Lydgatean Religious Verse: Authority and the Common Voice in Devotional Literature,” Sebastian proposes to extend the category of public poetry by including within it John Lydgate's devotional verse. He argues that in the poems he examines, speaking voices are multiple and sustain complex relationships to their audience, and that these multivocal networks challenge hierarchies in order to claim “a truly common and public form of devotion.” Lydgate's linguistic and formal instabilities allow his poetic speaker to dismantle his own authority and thereby accommodate an ideal community of “common English citizens.” This vision exists in opposition to the fragmented and contentious theological landscape of Lydgate's time.

This chapter focuses on the poetics of popular poetry in the Argosy under the editorship of Isa Craig. It argues that a careful reading of the periodical’s sentimental poetry challenges the critical dismissal of such light, entertaining verse as simplistic, marginal, and trite. In particular, it considers how the periodical poems of Christina Rossetti, Isa Craig, Jean Ingelow and Sarah Williams test as well as champion the conventions of the sentimental lyric form to produce a new poetics, one defined both through and against conventional representations of the Victorian poetess and her gushing, heart-inspired poetry. Ultimately, this chapter suggests that evaluating the poems of the Argosy on their own merits as poetic forms produced as part of the era’s complex, interconnected literary culture provides a way to discuss sentimental poetry and female poets without falling back on the defensive and sometimes dismissive language found in much of the critical work published on women’s popular poetry.

Chapter 4 traces the traumatic impact of the 1859 Second Italian War of Independence in Elizabeth Barrett Browning ’s Poems Before Congress (1860) and Last Poems (1862). Despite voicing enthusiastic support for unification, Barrett Browning’s poems also recognise the Risorgimento’s failures and costs. ‘Napoleon III. in Italy’, ‘Mother and Poet’, ‘Died . . .’, ‘The Forced Recruit’ and ‘A Tale of Villafranca Told in Tuscany’ explore the uses and limits of lyric utterance, using familial and intergenerational motifs to demonstrate how a performative poetic voice that ushers Italy into being conflicts with the historical trauma that precludes speech and severs the correspondence between words and deeds. EBB attempts a kind of wounded utterance, exploring a poetics of recognition that acknowledges the deep roots of political trauma embedded in the nation-making process while accepting and respecting the wartime suffering and grief that are beyond the powers of poetic convention and speech.

Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin impetuses of conceptual expansion and formal reduction’. It then goes on to outline the context of ‘cultural modernity’, to which it is suggested aestheticist lyric poetry is responding, in order to define further the ‘crisis’ in lyric. It also introduces the three conceptual frames that set the remit for the three parts of the book; these are three key axes around which lyric poetry operates: time, space and subjectivity. Chapter 1 ends with a preliminary case study from the work of ‘Michael Field’ (the assumed name of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) to demonstrate in practice the relevance of the three frames to aestheticist poetry.