chapter 1
Lyric Subjects
I
n the essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ T. S. Eliot
famously declares that ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,
but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality,
but an escape from personality.’^1 Eliot also adds playfully: ‘But, of
course, only those who have personality and emotions know what
it means to want to escape from these things’ (p. 21 ). It might seem
curious to open this chapter with Eliot’s essay of 1919 , but his high-
lighting of poetry as work that is created and formed, as opposed
to spontaneously expressed, draws important attention to how we
think about poetry. Discussions of poetry often draw attention to
the articulation of the poet’s voice, poetry as an expression of per-
sonal sentiment or the poem as the recollection of events. While
Eliot’s claims for poetry are arguably based on an attempt to secure
the legacy of his work, the distinctions between control, craft and
the spontaneous expression of personality lead to some useful
questions when approaching the work of contemporary poets.
One might ask, how do recent poets approach the personal in their
work? How can everyday experience make for poetic material? To
what extent do contemporary forms offer a challenge to our per-
ceived notions of voice in poetry? How does recent poetry negoti-
ate ideas of memory and recollection? Moreover, what happens
to the individual speaking voice, or lyric ‘I’, when the self is dis-
placed from centre stage and an experience of language takes its
place?