Brief, Undeniable: Lyric Address in Mark Strand

Abstract

Abstract: This essay balances universalist and historicist approaches to reading lyric through an analysis of the poetry of Mark Strand. The ordering consciousness behind a given poet’s body of work offers an avenue to understanding Strand’s work and lyric more generally. Textual rather than biographical, this “lyric self” manifests the twin functions of the lyric poem, to challenge death and to reach out to the reader. Developments in late modernity have occasioned a turn from a self-enclosed mimetic model of lyric to a rhetorical one conscious of audience. Strand’s awareness of this change and his position relative to it assigns him a paradoxical vision of lyric, one that inscribes a self and communicates with the reader but simultaneously questions the potential and value of doing so. A close reading of Strand’s work reveals how his poems balance motivations fundamental to lyric form against the philosophical commitments of secular modernity.