From There: Some Thoughts On Poetry And Place

In his 2015 Garnett Sedgewick lecture, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephen Burt discusses the relation of poetry to time, space and place. He examines the widespread contemporary view of critics like Helen Vendler who claim that "modern ly... Read more

In his 2015 Garnett Sedgewick lecture, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephen Burt discusses the relation of poetry to time, space and place. He examines the widespread contemporary view of critics like Helen Vendler who claim that "modern lyric poetry, imagines a speaking self [existing] outside space and time: that while you are reading a poem, it does not matter who or where you are." But taking his examples from Chaucer onwards through Shakespeare, the landscape poets of the eighteenth century, and Wordsworth, along with a number of prominent Canadian poets such as Elise Partridge and Newfoundland''s Mary Dalton, Burt shows that the lyric poem often relies importantly upon an attachment to place and time. More significantly, he uncovers the fact that in lyric poetry "the contemplation of place is one way in which the outside,'' what''s shared, potentially public . . . can seem to meet the inside,'' the private or individual experience that we may consider ultimately unknowable (unless it is our own) and yet expect poetry to reproduce." Reading Burt, one comes to see lyric poetry from a wholly new perspective. Less