Image credit: Pablo Picasso, Head of a Man with a Hat, 1912. © 2026 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The 20th and 21st Century Cultures Series is pleased to welcome
Bradford Case
PhD student in English, University of Chicago
“Space Permitting”: Susan Howe’s Theory of the Lyric
Tuesday, March 3, from 3:30-5pm
Ryerson Laboratory 177
with a response from
Heather Keenleyside, Associate Professor of English, University of Chicago
“I think the lyric poem is a most compressed and lovely thing,” Susan Howe told the critic Edward Foster in 1989. “I guess it’s the highest form.” Though Howe’s readers have broadly agreed that her poems have “the look of a lyric,” scholars have yet to sharply detail what Howe’s term “lyric” itself means. This essay reads “Space Permitting,” the final poem in Howe’s 2020 volume Concordance, as her statement of what she has called her “Romantic Modernist” lyric poetics. Howe’s account of the lyric in “Space Permitting” inverts three interrelated tropes of Romantic and Modernist conceptions of the lyric: the primacy of utterance, the lyric’s formal closure, and its corresponding representation of a speaker’s inner life. Opening “Space Permitting” with a photocopy—in fact, a reprint of a photocopy of a printed transcription of a manuscript—Howe immediately transforms the spontaneity of lyric utterance into the modes of reproduction to which a Romantic lyric might seem innately opposed. Switching the polarity of utterance and reproduction, “Space Permitting” also reverses the process Virginia Jackson has termed “lyricization”—the mode of reading that transforms every poem into a lyric whose form mirrors its speaker’s (and its reader’s) interiority. Much as a Cubist collage, for Clement Greenberg or Rosalind Krauss, exposes the literal nature of its canvas in the act of obscuring it, so Howe’s collage-lyrics demystify the page and the voice on which they cohere. “Space Permitting” shows that the same lyricizing logic can apply to the person that lies at lyric’s conceptual center. Like the page and the voice, for Howe, the lyric person is not the purveyor of an inner subjectivity, as in a New Critical account of lyric, but the support on which her collages collect—the literal figure that “Space Permitting” occludes only, ultimately, to reveal.
Bradford’s paper (to be read in advance) can be found here. The password will be distributed to our listserv. Click here to join.
Our meetings are open to the University of Chicago community and visitors who comply with University of Chicago vaccination requirements. We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible for people with disabilities. Please direct any questions or concerns to the series coordinators, Erika Barrios (erikabarrios@uchicago.edu) or Carson Eschmann (ceschmann@uchicago.edu).