over emergent literature and will show him to be a major figure in the conflict between tradition and contemporary cultural identity.

A collection of revised and expanded writings culled from the author's popular Washington Post Book World "Poet's Choice" column demonstrates how poetry respond

What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Theory of the Lyric reveals the

How did nineteenth-century poets negotiate the complex interplay between two seemingly antithetical modes--lyric and narrative? Narrative Means, Lyric Ends exam

A poet and scholar explores how lyric poetry works by examining the lives and works of thirteen twentieth- and twenty-first–century American poets and musicia