"Citing the massive horrors of the Nazi death camps and the domestic violence behind a woman's suicide, Adrienne Rich challenges a fellow poet: "would it relieve you to decide 'Poetry doesn't make this happen'?" In her provocative reassessment of the modern American love lyric, Barbara L. Estrin pursues Rich's question and 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 the unexpected links between poetry and war. Through close readings of individual poems and drawing upon gender and genre theories, Estrin counters the presupposition that the lyric remains sequestered in apolitical isolation. Her case that Stevens, Lowell, and Rich view the Petrarchan conventions they inherit from their European predecessors as contributive to the ideologies that went awry in the twentieth century constitutes a revisionist critique of American poetry.

She also 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."--BOOK JACKET.