Individual and Lyric History in "Audubon: A Vision"

Abstract

A contemporary impatience with the heroic and mythic model of lyric is once again beginning to swell, redirecting my attention to under-recognized choral practices for modeling, paradoxically, what the modern lyric can do for taking up, and identifying in the first instance, what constitutes acts of history-making in our times. In an era of post-confessional poems, life-writing, and overt social responsibilities of poems, there is surprisingly little work on one of the most important writers wrestling directly with what we are continuing to understand as “lyric” or “history” and, in particular, the intersections of lyric history with individual history. This paper, therefore, situates “Audubon” in a new lineage of non-narrative third-person lyric that borrows formally from choral rather than traditional heroic models of first person and the first-person lyric.