Lyric Returns in Recent Black British Poetry

Abstract

This essay considers some reasons for lyric’s return in black British poetics by first taking a broad look at the field, and then by attending to the work of several poets writing since the 1990s but publishing most visibly since the millennium – ranging from an innovative writer acclaimed even by the mainstream, Patience Agbabi, to one whose work has been so new in texture, tone and project that it still evades most poetic maps, D. S. Marriott. It argues that lyric in the general sense of being ‘the genre of personal expression’, which American lyric theorists Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins rightly critique as a twentieth-century invention, has long been interrogated in raced poetry in the UK for its tacit collation of personal and universal – a collation which ironically makes lyric the least personal of genres, in a sense (or in theory). And in fact, recent re-readings of modern aesthetics argue that the really personal was never welcome in New Criticism. So, after postmodernism’s thorough-going investigations of how language overwrites the universalized lyric subject, post-postmodern lyric investigations of subjectivities neglected in such studies are proving increasingly necessary in black British poetry. And in particularly the work of D. S. Marriott, where they point up what even the finest postmodern critiques both missed and disavowed precisely by not taking lyric’s definition at its word – i.e., by not taking lyric “personally” enough.