Answer:
itional; not experimental; not epic; not dramatic; not rhetorical or persuasive; not performative. And yet, somehow, “lyric” has come to stand in for poetry in general, or prose at its most “poetic,” whatever that means.
Jackson and Prins speculate, “Perhaps the lyric has become so difficult to define because we need it to be blurry around the edges…to include all kinds of verse and all kinds of ideas about what poetry is or should be” (1).
When critics do define lyric against something else, it’s often something perceived as normative, some sort of “front door.” In one of the most influential discussions of lyric poetry, “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties” (1833), John Stuart Mill defined it against the performative rhetorical eloquence of political oratory: “Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard” (71). In a sentence deleted from the essay yet printed and widely circulated later, Mill used an image of spatial marginalization to compare the poet to someone crying out in a solitary prison cell, overheard by the reader on the other side of the wall. This spatial metaphor, like D’Agata’s and Tall’s, explicitly eschews the front door—in fact, eschews entrance altogether. For Mill, the wall between the poet and the reader preserves the authenticity of the poet’s utterance. Uncorrupted by attention to rhetoric, which bends it to another’s perceived expectations, the poet’s expression remains pure.
But the poet knows he’s writing for someone. Mill himself admits as much, acknowledging the inherently performative character of lyric: “It may be said that poetry which is printed on hot-pressed paper, and sold at a bookseller’s shop, is a soliloquy in full dress and on the stage….The actor knows that there is an audience present; but if he acts as though he knew it, he acts ill.” In other words, the poet’s art consists of skillfully, publically, pretending to be alone.