Lyric after epic: Gender and the postwar long poem

This dissertation analyzes long poems of the postwar period as sites of conflict around the relationship between gender and genre. I propose that in texts that inherit the cultural ambitions of high modernism as well as the indeterminacy of lyric, genre appears as a space of possibility as well as an inevitable problem of modern subjectivity. "Lyric after Epic" investigates the lyric moment within the postwar long poem: moments when an ambitious, culturally wide, historically inflected masterwork breaks or sweeps into registers of the personal, the interior, the private, or the otherwise apparently' ahistorical and runs up against the gendered contours of poetic form. This dissertation also takes seriously the instability of that very definition of lyric for women poets writing after World War II. Beginning with H.D.'s 1955 poem Helen in Egypt, which locates a discursively divided female poetic subject in the split between epic and lyric, this dissertation goes on to examine polyphonic lyric subjectivity in the 1968 work of Lorinc Niedecker. first-person quotidian speech registers in the 1970s work of Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley's uses of lyric catharsis in her nightmarish 1992 vision of an intensely tyrannical brand of masculinist modernism. The long poems discussed here question lyric inheritance and exploit its basic instability for critique as they take on and respond to the epic-inflected modernist long forms to which they are indebted. I examine the lyric coming "after' modernist epic: a lyric written into long poems composed after the period of high modernism, a postwar lyric that capitalizes on the anxieties and instability of gender and genre for modernism.