Previous articleNext article FreeFrom the EditorCharles W. MahoneyCharles W. Mahoney Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis issue of The Wordsworth Circle, “Lyric Elements,” takes its bearings from a special session of the same name at the 2019 meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) in Chicago. The session was proposed as an opportunity to reconsider the contested situation of the Romantic lyric, not least due to the recent critical work developed under the aegis of the New Lyric Studies. Given the ambiguous—indeed vexed—position that Romanticism occupies in New Lyric Studies (Romantic-era critical writings as well as the Romantic lyric being subject to both celebration and suspicion), the conference’s theme, “Romantic Elements,” provided a timely opportunity to consider whether it might be worthwhile to think about the lyric in terms of its “elements” (whether construed formally, generically, culturally, historically, or otherwise). In addition to work initially presented at NASSR by Jonathan Culler, Jonathan Mulrooney, Laura Quinney, and Karen Swann, the current issue includes new work, addressing the same possibilities, by Julie Camarda, Celeste Langan, Omar Miranda, and Gordon Teskey.Lyric elements under consideration in these essays include sound, in Culler’s explorations of sound patternings (free of semantic imposition) and of the unpredictable relations between written texts and oral performances. In a similar register, Langan analyzes the role of lyric refrain, in terms of the linkages between phrasal and historical repetitions, in order then to reframe our sense of the politics of both poetic and historical repetitions. Taking up the time of the lyric (beyond our understanding of the lyric “present” or the lyric “now”), Mulrooney provides a model for an elegiac understanding of lyric temporality. Explicitly engaging the vexed generic status of the lyric, Camarda reconfigures “lyrical ballads” as “balladic lyrics,” and Miranda reorients our sense of the “greater Romantic lyric” in terms of a “global Romantic lyric.” Swann explores the “lyric power” of Clare’s experiments with the sonnet (his interest in the “spell” of lyric) while, in a related register, Teskey analyzes the role of poetic “enchantment” as a lyric element in Coleridge. And Quinney forcefully repositions Dickinson’s poems as in fact lyrics, further inflecting them as Schlegelian fragments crossing poetry and philosophy. All eight essays vibrantly attest to the resounding call of the lyric as an essential—and elemental—way of thinking about Romantic poiesis.The next issue of The Wordsworth Circle, “Romanticism and Wilderness” (vol. 52, no. 3, summer 2021), will feature work presented during the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association’s (virtual) session at the 2021 meeting of the Modern Language Association, with additional essays under the same heading. —CWM Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 52, Number 2Spring 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/714109 Views: 154 © 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.