Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence

Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence investigates the ways in which some of our best poets writing in English have used poetic sequences to capture the lived experience of marriage. Beginning in 1862 with George Merediths Modern Love, Jane Hedleys study utilizes the rubrics of temporality, dialogue, and triangulation to bring a deeply rooted and vitally interesting poetic genre into focus. Its twentieth- and twenty-first-century practitioners have included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Lowell, Rita Dove, Eavan Boland, Louise Glck, Anne Carson, Ted Hughes, Claudia Emerson, Rachel Zucker, and Sharon Olds. In their poetic sequences the flourishing or failure of a particular marriage is always at stake, but as that relationship plays out over time, each sequence also speaks to larger questions: why we marry, what a marriage is, what our collective stake is in other peoples marriages. In the books final chapter gay marriage presents afresh testing ground for these questions, in light of the US Supreme Courts affirmation of same-sex marriage.