Lyric Temporalities explores how lyric – a form of poetry often concerned with an insistently present experience – participates in the perception that time is scarce, ebbing away from us, while also shaping conceptions of remembrance and the future.
The essays in Lyric Temporalities explore poetry’s depictions and conceptions of time. Whether claiming to immortalize its addressees, worrying over time’s passage and the misspent youth of lovers, or testifying to the fleeting nature of the sounds it nonetheless seeks to preserve, the lyric has for millennia adopted temporality as a central subject and theme, as well as a self-conscious examination of its own form. The contributors to this volume show how these pivotal generic and historical elements operate across periods: in allusion and translation, in memories of what constitutes a legible selfhood, and even in speculation about what non-human timescales (large or small) might look like. This collection also reveals that lyric neither simply opposes itself to the temporal unfolding of narrative nor stands in for presentness or heightened emotional sensation. Rather, it makes possible a reimagining of how we exist complexly in time by performing a surprisingly dynamic range of temporal operations. Lyric Temporalities challenges critical presuppositions about the durational processes of poetic encounter and the linearity of empirical experience.