The American Love Lyric After Auschwitz and Hiroshima Review

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(More customer reviews)As a former student of Barbara Estrin at Stonehill College, I hear her loud and clear in this her newest work. As a social activist, her perspective and insight into this noteworthy subject deserves close study and reflection. The connections Estrin makes between literature and these historic yet tragic events provides an interesting view of our world. Estrin challenges each of us to not only look deep within literature, but she forces us to confront new and disturbing reader responses that further our appreciation of her subject. Today I realize what a honor it was to have taken courses with this skilled scholar.

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In her provocative reassessment of the modern American love lyric, Barbara L. Estrin discovers the connection between the language of love poetry and the rhetoric of hate speech that culminated in the genocides of World War II. The American Love Lyric after Auschwitz and Hiroshima chronicles the return of three major American poets (Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Adrienne Rich) to the mid-century catastrophes that reveal unexpected links between poetry and war. Through close readings of individual poems, Estrin counters the presupposition that the lyric remains apolitical. She explores the prevalent influence of the traditional forms that all three poets simultaneously use and revise as they render the love lyric responsive to the cultural agonies of the postwar era.