Ambiguities of Biography: Introducing Rita Dove's Lyric Life Writing

Abstract

In considerations of biography and the telling of lives, the history of helplessness and risk represented by the chorus is often overshadowed, especially in more modern contexts of literary criticism by considerations of its dramatic counterparts, the heroic parts, those of will, decision-making, and action. The poet Rita Dove, however, aims with new forms of lyric poetry to redirect our focus and favour historically more ambiguous and anti-heroic perspectives of biography and life writing.

The chorus is often considered the voice of inaction, even disregard: it is a ‘perspective’ offered finally of a group that plays it safe. Traditionally resistant to both risk and change, the chorus thus generically does not make a name for itself, as it coaxes and perpetuates self-protection. The contemporary lyric poems of Dove update the complex work of perspective often associated with the dramatic chorus and its historic role of anonymity and marginality through new work in life writing and biography. Epitomized by but not exclusive to the breakthrough in Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove’s lyrics offer a fundamental reconsideration of form and history through the very elements of our common helplessness, anonymity, and interdependency.