This chapter traces the modernist short poem’s hauntings by the lyric, most particularly in thinking through what came to be regarded as problems of emotion and expressive subjectivity within the discursive strains defining the modernist lyric, especially as clustered around a poetics of impersonality. The “lyric discontent” of modernism marks multiple modalities energizing modern American poetry’s varied points of emergence in the 1910s and 1920s – particularly associated with women and African American poets – among which the distrust of emotion and embrace of impersonality endured contested influence in defining the modernist lyric. Locating this discontent in the years concurrent with early articulations of modern poetry’s extinction of personal emotion and expressive subjectivity – roughly the mid-1910s to early 1920s and before New Criticism takes hold – invites consideration of poetry’s exploration of affective constructions of subjectivity that grapple with elements of emotion, expressivity, and the lyric gaze.

Although no real institutionalization of intersectional studies as such has yet taken place, the habit of thinking in terms of intersectional identities has established itself fully across multiple fields—from critical race theory to gender studies and queer studies as well as in sociological and legal studies. Steinman looks at some of the ways that intersectional studies have informed literary critical practice, including studies that focus on Wallace Stevens’s own identity (in terms of gender, race, and class) and on the figures enabled and occluded by his poetic imagination. Describing how previous critical work that addressed race, class, or gender in Stevens’s poetry might be refigured in light of the perspectives intersectional studies have brought to critical attention, Steinman offers, as an example of the merits and drawbacks of reading Stevens intersectionally, a discussion of “The Virgin Carrying a Lantern.” She sets this against an account of how many contemporary writers of color respond more to Stevens’s style than to his representations of others, voicing an ambivalence that repositions their work and Stevens’s work within African American literary tradition; Steinman suggests that such voices might open new possibilities for intersectional studies of Stevens.