What can the romantic lyric do?

Abstract

The Romantic fascination with lyric is only matched by the poets' relentless drive to experiment with and individualise the genre. Lyric's limits test the creative and critical intelligence of the Romantic poet who asks what poetry can know and how it can know it, and what lyric can do and how it can do it. This article considers the ways in which each poet asks the question of what can lyric do and show how they react with and against a genre that imagines transhistorical existence even as it lives in the loss of the specific moment it would record. Focusing upon Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, I discuss the ways in which the Romantic poets responsible for this idea of 'the ideal form of "the Romantic lyric"' manipulated, challenged, and shaped the idea of lyric that we have inherited.