The lyric as the voice of pain:|Individual suffering in contemporary Anglo-American poetry

Abstract

There is an emerging trend in contemporary studies on lyric poetry, namely the exploration of the social, moral, ethical, and worldly aspects of the lyric, a genre that has been viewed as the realm of the subjective. This tendency overlaps with recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the inexpressibility of private pain, which leads critics to search for alternative avenues for the representation of individual suffering. Drawing on contemporary lyric theory and studies on private pain, this dissertation explores how Ted Hughes in Prometheus On His Crag (1973), Kate Daniels in The Niobe Poems (1988), and Alice Oswald in Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad (2011) utilize lyric devices to give voice to the body in pain. Employing the selected four lyric parameters (the focus on the subjective, lyric address, lyric temporality, and intense formal structuring), this study examines how these three lyric sequences revisit mythological bodies in pain both to uncover and to subvert ideologies regarding the suffocating experience of individual suffering. This dissertation seeks to place lyric theory in dialogue with recent scholarship on private pain so as to address a gap in existing criticism with regard to the privileged position of lyric poetry in terms of communicating private, somatic, and complex experiences. Thus, it aims to contribute to contemporary studies on lyric theory and the representation of individual suffering by analyzing the lyric strategies these three poets use to cast light on the dark geography of private pain.