“Lord I am 1”: The Solitary “I” and the Social Lyric

This dissertation explores the ways in which sociality and isolation are understood in lyric poetry. When Theodor Adorno begins his 1957 lecture “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” by suggesting that the topic “will make many […] uncomfortable,” he identifies that discomfort with the tendency, as he puts it, to “experience lyric poetry as something opposed to society, something wholly individual.” He clearly has in mind the kind of poem we associate more broadly with the “voicing” of an individual point of view, often (but not always) marked by the first-person singular pronoun. At the same time, Adorno sees this tendency as a function of material conditions that affect everyone – social conditions in other words— under which such poems get written. For Adorno, the fact that these conditions so often register as expressions of a singular voice or “solitary singer” is also what gives the lyric its power. Solitude in this form, Adorno argues, represents a universalizing fantasy of escape from those material conditions that, he says, “every individual experiences as alien, hostile, cold, oppressive.” Jonathan Culler’s 2015 study, Theory of the Lyric, offers a more abstract view of this tendency, one that doesn’t reduce lyric to something “wholly individual,” but that can still accommodate the solitary singers of the genre. Lyric’s work has been understood, Culler says, as above all “mimetic: an imitation of the subject.” Like Adorno, Culler also sees this aspect of lyric as an historically specific development, arguing that our inherited understanding of the lyric as an “imitation of the subject” – one that we also see reflected in Adorno’s critique of the genre – comes out of the Romantic period, “when a more vigorous and highly developed conception of the individual subject” made this kind of “mimesis” possible. For both Adorno and Culler – for that matter, even for many poets and critics of the Romantic period, the first-person singular “I” is thus never as solitary as it seems. The question my dissertation ask is this: if lyric is understood as playing a social role despite the fact that the lyric voice often seems to speak from a place of solitude, what do we make of poems in which solitude figures as necessary to lyric’s social project?