Lyric's Expression: Musicality, Conceptuality, Critical Agency

Abstract

What today could be more bourgeois, more aestheticist, than a poetry and poetics of lyric expressivity? Not much; or at least, that's periodically been the response, across the last century, of key pro- gressive and Left strains in poetry and criticism. Everybody knows that, starting essentially with Romanticism, individualist bourgeois subjectivity sidles up to the social jukebox and pushes the button marked lyric expression whenever it's time to hear a songful medi- tation of and about poignant longing, mild dissatisfaction, or care- fully delimited negativity. That lyric is the mode or genre at issue surprises no one, nor should it, because lyricism, musicality, and expression have been formally and historically bound together since well before the advent of Romantic poetry, a binding that has con- tinued through the most modern poetic and musical experiments in and after atonality, dissonance, and serialism. During the past few decades of Left artistic and critical activity, the critique of lyric expressivism has often turned to Marxian and, more speciWcally, to Frankfurt School Wgures—Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno above all—to underwrite renewed attempts to imagine a poetry that could leave expression behind; whether in Language Poetry in the United States or in kindred neo-avant-gardist groupings, and with a host of citations in particular to the translated texts of Benjamin's Passagenwerk and Adorno's Asthetische Theorie, this has often seemed like a call to abolish lyric musicality tout court, though experiments have also toyed with notions of a nonexpressive or antiexpressive musicality, even an antiexpressive lyric. For all the real interest thereby generated, such critical and artistic