Contemporary Poetry

lyric subjects 27

address. It is important to consider what happens to the poem
when subjectivity is no longer represented as a stable voice. This
destabilising of voice and persona in the poem is what the American
poet Lyn Hejinian proposes as subjectivity that is less a fi xed entity
than ‘a mobile (and mobilized) reference point’.^5

TOWARDS A THEORY OF LYRIC EXPRESSION

The lyric or personal poem is often considered as expressive,
and the ‘expressive’ lyric posits the self as the primary organising
principle of the work. Central to this model is the articulation of
the subject’s feelings and desires, and a strongly marked division
between subjectivity and its articulation as expression. M. H.
Abrams identifi es an expressive theory of the lyric poem as the
internal made external:

A work of art is essentially the internal made external, result-

ing from a creative process operating under the impulse of

feeling, and embodying a combined product of the poet’s

perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. The primary source

and subject matter of a poem therefore, are the actions and

attributes of the poet’s own mind... The fi rst test any poem

must pass is no longer, ‘Is it true to nature?’ or ‘Is it appro-

priate to the requirements either of the best judges or the

generality of mankind?’ but a criterion looking in a different

direction; namely ‘Is it sincere? Is it genuine?’^6

Although Abrams has in mind primarily the poetry of the nine-
teenth century, this model resonates as a general impulse in poetry
from the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries, especially in its
evocation of sincerity and authenticity. The symbolic use of the
external world as a psychic landscape for the subject’s state of mind
is one we are familiar with, even in Eliot’s proposal of the objective
correlative: ‘in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of
events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such
that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory
experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked’.^7