Lyric Powers

by Robert Von Hallberg

The authority of poetry varies from one period to another, from one culture to another. For Robert von Hallberg, the authority of lyric poetry has three sources: religious affirmation, the social institutions of those who speak the idioms from which particular poems are made, and the extraordinary cognition generated by the formal and musical resources of poems. Lyric Powers helps students, poets, and general readers to recognize the pleasures and understand the ambitions of lyric poetry.

To explain why a reader might prefer one kind of poem to another, von Hallberg analyzes—beyond the political and intellectual significance of poems—the musicality of both lyric poetry and popular song, including that of Tin Pan Alley and doo-wop. He shows that poets have distinctive intellectual resources—not just rhetorical resources—for examining their subjects, and that the power of poetic language to generalize, not particularize, is what justly deserves a critic’s attention.

The first book in more than a decade from this respected critic, Lyric Power will be celebrated as a genuine event by readers of poetry and literary criticism.

280 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2008

Reviews

[Azia · Rating 5 out of 5]

not just about poetry, but about life

[atito · Rating 5 out of 5]

fuck yeah

[Prisoner 071053 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book because I was looking for something about musicality in poetry. I was mostly interested in anything about that most elusive of subjects, vowel music. Unfortunately, I had to wade through a lot of loose and un-engaging material before I finally decided to skip ahead to the chapter I was actually interested in. The other stuff might have been more compelling if the author had used more actual poetry for his examples, however a lot of the pieces analyzed are neither verse nor poetic, but then that's typical of 20th/21st century literary criticism.

The chapter on musicality was actually quite good--at least 80% of it. The author writes well about Tin Pan Alley and Doo Wop lyrics, contrasting them and tying the two and their differences to the art of poetry. He then analyzes a couple of good poems, but then comes back around again to one of the previous non-poems, "Glory" by Thylias Moss (never heard of her). At that point, I only had to skip a handful of pages to mercifully end the chapter and the book as far as I was concerned.

Lyric Powers is a good example of what I like and dislike about literary criticism: it's at its best when dealing with literary history (authors, movements, etc) or actual technique, but it goes off the rails and becomes self-serving in a way only academic writing can when it lets in almost anything else.

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wouldn't often say this, but von Hallberg's scholarly work gripped my imagination in a way that few other scholarly treatises do or might. His writing is stilted at times, and I felt the beginning was especially curious, but once you fall into von Hallberg's rhythms you find yourself in a remarkably evenhanded and clearsighted world, where poetry doesn't just exist in schools, textbooks, or canons, but as a remarkably vital thing: from doowop to John Koethe, Percy Bysshe Shelley to Paul Celan, the lyric lives and breathes here, kept alive by von Hallberg's obvious and in the end remarkably deft care for language and poetry, accompanied by his ear for melody and his keen sight for readings. So. Lots to love. Find a library copy.