The Singer and the Song: A Study of Voice and Distance in Lyric Poetry

FAIN: FB-13218-77

Martha Collins
University of Massachusetts, Boston (Boston, MA 02125-3300)

A comprehensive study of the English and American lyric with special attention to Renaissance poetry and late nineteenth and twentieth century British poetry. Starting with a literal notion of the lyric, this study would attempt to trace and explain a movement from Renaissance directness to late eighteenth-century self-consciousness, indirection, and distance in the lyric, and ways in which Romantic and modern poets manage to both utilize and transcend these eighteenth-century traits by combining them with some of the directness of earlier poets.