Secular Lyrics interrogates the distinctively individual ways that Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson adapt ancient and renaissance conventions of lyric expression to the developing conditions of their modern context, especially to the heterogeneity of beliefs and believers in a secular society and to the altered or emergent role that literature assumes in a secular age. These poets, in idiosyncratic but related ways, register the pressures of the modern crowd—which Benjamin rightly identified as nineteenth-century poetry’s essential topic—within their poems, where the mass appears as potential reade ... More

Secular Lyrics interrogates the distinctively individual ways that Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson adapt ancient and renaissance conventions of lyric expression to the developing conditions of their modern context, especially to the heterogeneity of beliefs and believers in a secular society and to the altered or emergent role that literature assumes in a secular age. These poets, in idiosyncratic but related ways, register the pressures of the modern crowd—which Benjamin rightly identified as nineteenth-century poetry’s essential topic—within their poems, where the mass appears as potential readers, as resistant skeptics, as a heterogeneous crowd of contending beliefs and contentious believers. For these poets, the processes of signification rather than the communication of truths become central to their poetry, which in turn becomes an important origin of the modern poetry that in Europe and the United States follows. Each invokes the normative practices that have long characterized Western poetry only to disrupt the audience’s conventional expectations and enliven the reader’s sense of language’s material density and the limits and potentials of modern life.