Matthew Kilbane

“Lyric Accompaniment” develops a theory of the lyric from the archives of media history, examining signal encounters between lyric poetry and emergent sound technologies of the mid-twentieth century in order to unfold the sociological and aesthetic complexities of lyric as a sonic medium in its own right. Drawing together a diverse range of poets and composers, the dissertation shows how lyric poems, formally caught between print and sound, offer especially sensitive indices of technological transformation. By opening our lyric archives to such things as pop songs, radio poems, and speech-music, this project’s materialist theory of midcentury lyric also supplies a framework for apprehending poetry’s dynamic transactions with ever-newer media in the twenty-first century.