The Evanescence of Lyric: A Review of John Wilkinson’s Lyric in Its Times: Temporalities in Verse, Breath, and Stone

Abstract:In Lyric in Its Times (2019), John Wilkinson reads lyric poetry for its “repeatable evanescence,” which Wilkinson characterizes as lyric poetry’s ability to initiate disruptive aesthetic events for its readers across historical moments. In order to suggest the dynamic lives that poems lead as aesthetic object-events, each chapter of Lyric in Its Times offers close readings that combine the analysis of poetic rhythm with attention to poems’ material rhetoric of stone, rock, and glass. Readings center on poets of the New York School and St. Ives, Cornwall but reach back to the Renaissance and often discuss poetry alongside visual art. Wilkinson sketches lyric poetry’s aesthetic forcefulness across time and elucidates how objects like stone contribute to aesthetic effects.