Inspired Conflations

T. S. Eliot did not describe his poetry as “lyric,” nor did he employ the term as a catch-all for non-narrative, non-dramatic poetry centered on the individual voice. On the infrequent occasions when he speaks of “lyrics,” he tends to mean short, typically stanzaic poems, with a pronounced musical element.1 However, from earlier studies that questioned modernism’s claim to have broken with nineteenth-century poetics, to more recent forays into biography inaugurated by Ronald Schuchard’s proposal to “resurrect the depersonalized” voice in Eliot’s “acutely personal poems,” many critics have claimed Eliot as a lyric poet despite himself.2 But a lyric poet in what sense?