Ellen Bryant Voigt: The Flexible Lyric II (July 1997)

Received definitions of poetic elements tend to conflate form and structure; Ellen Bryant Voigt powerfully distinguishes between them.  Structure, she shows, is “the order in which materials are released to the reader,” while form “creates pattern in these materials.”  Through close readings of poems by Shakespeare, Denise Levertov, John Berryman, and Stephen Dobyns, Voigt further agues that what defines a lyric poem is not its subject matter, its texture, or its form—but its uniquely lyric structure.