Grounding the Lyric Essay

The aspect of wholeness is often what is missing in the essays that claim to be lyric, but aren’t quite. They have flash, but they don’t add up. Or they play around, but to very little end. The “essay” part is missing. My guess is that they lack a  “ground,” to borrow a word used by the eminent new critic, I. A. Richards, when he defined another poetic  term—“metaphor.” In a metaphor, he stated, two elements were necessary: tenor and vehicle, which “in cooperation give a meaning of more varied powers than can be ascribed to either.” Of course, these are not absolute distinctions, but they do provide a useful tool even today when we consider the interactive nature of how a lyric essay works. He went on to say:

Metaphor is the supreme agent by which disparate and hitherto unconnected things are brought together . . . for the sake of the effects upon attitude and impulse which spring from their collocation and from the combinations which the mind then establishes between them. . . .

But Richards wanted it to be understood that the two elements were a “transaction between contexts,” and that where the two interact, a new—enlarged—meaning is generated. What the vehicle and tenor have in common he called the “ground.” And “ground,” in this sense, is what I think is the essence of the lyric essay—and perhaps any essay.

Tenor and vehicle, literal and figurative—the way an essay goes about discovering what it’s about is, in that larger sense, metaphorical. That is, an essay functions the way metaphor functions by negotiating the terrain between contexts, and it often does this consciously. I am going to suggest that it is the resulting “ground” that differentiates the personal essay from memoir.

The moment of the memoir is the past; the moment of the personal essay is the present. The memoir contains units of  time, and an implied story. That is the tenor. The memoirist is interested in the essence of the experience on its own terms: the sensory details, the flavor of the conversation, the scene reenacted. There is no complicating (or elucidating) vehicle; tenor and vehicle are one and the same.

On the other hand, the personal essayist seems almost from the outset to have sensed the need to connect the lived life with another, more universal, issue, setting the specificities of the personal smack in the middle of idea or concept. These essays usually focus on a personal experience, so the tenor is known; yet the essay is always also about something else, something to which personal experience merely provides the authority through which the vehicle (often, in this case, an idea) can help writer and reader alike perceive what’s at stake.

The lyric essay is even more present (and perhaps even more personal) because the present is enacted as the mind at work, spinning something that, in the end, is pure sensibility. In a lyric essay, even the tenor may be up for grabs, thus making it more playful, arbitrary. Bird outside the window, Heartbreak Hotel, paperweight, first kiss, fatal illness, list of war monuments—it can begin anywhere, be ostensibly about anything. It generates its meaning by asking its readers to make leaps, to make a kind of narrative sense of the random and the chance encounter. It eschews content for method, and then lets method become its content. In this way, the lyric essay is not a prose poem, but the poem of prose.