The enigma of courtly love poetry, according to the great mid-century medievalist Hugo Kuhn, is that its restraint transmits across centuries a sense of the existential terror and compensatory joie de vivre that must have characterized life in the Middle Ages. In their utterances of love, these formulaic, strangely contentless verses register what Kuhn called the ‘objective social reality’ of a poem.footnote¹ Using metaphors derived from contemporary orders of hierarchy and subordination, medieval lyric not only sketches the feudal world but also documents its mood. We have no idea what it was like to be alive at that time, and yet, in this poetry, the atmosphere of the age appears to vibrate through.

The attempt to recover a felt sense of historical experience led Raymond Williams to invent the concept of a structure of feeling, which licenses a reading-backwards from ‘the arts of a period’ to its emotional ambience. ‘We can learn a great deal of the life of other places and times’, he wrote, ‘but certain elements . . . will always be irrecoverable’. Moreover,

Even those that can be recovered are recovered in abstraction, and this is of crucial importance. We learn each element as a precipitate, but in the living experience of the time every element was in a solution, an inseparable part of a complex whole. The most difficult thing to get hold of, in studying every past period, is this felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time: a sense of the ways in which the particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living.footnote²

Williams called this sense, inter alia, a ‘colour’, a ‘style’, a ‘pattern’, a ‘characteristic’, a ‘culture’, a ‘particular living result of all the elements in the general organization’.footnote³ Another term for it might be tone, a word with a heightened significance for poetry due to its association with song. In music, tone signifies pitch or key. It derives from the Greek verb teinein, meaning ‘to stretch’. In his prosimetrical treatise De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, the fifth-century African writer Martianus Capella wrote that ‘a tone is a magnitude of space’, or else ‘an interval of a certain magnitude that is encompassed between two mutually different sounds’—a stretching between fixed points and a way of calibrating the distance between them.footnote⁴ In this century, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has proposed that we understand tone as the German Stimmung: mood, humour, temper, spirit, attitude, or tuning, as in the tuning of an instrument, a word closely related to Stimme or voice.footnote⁵ Sianne Ngai, meanwhile, has articulated tone as ‘a global and hyper-relational concept of feeling that encompasses attitude: a literary text’s affective bearing, orientation, or “set toward” its audience and world.’footnote⁶

This is an essay about tone, prompted by Kuhn’s account of medieval lyric ‘reserve’ as an abstract but no less potent communication of social reality, and bolstered by Williams’s foundational analysis of the relationship between the arts of a period and the general organization of society. It is also about poetry, but the poetry of this era as opposed to a distant one. In what follows, I provide an account of three American poets whose work exhibits a distinctive approach to treating ‘composed and crafted poetic intonation’ as, in Holly Pester’s helpful phrase, ‘the sound of the work of the historical present’.footnote⁷ This is characterized by the use of flat, muted, withdrawn, inscrutable or otherwise recessive affects, which will, at first, seem at odds with the intensities of political commitment these poets also assert.

In her recent study of deadpan as a gesture that acquires special meaning in concert with racial blackness, Tina Post writes that deadpan depends on ‘a degree of contextual discord—being impassive in circumstances that might call for expressiveness, or stating an absurdity with seeming seriousness’.footnote⁸ The three poets I discuss write within that degree, widening it out such that the commonplace linkage of high-octane self-presentation to a sense of serious occasion or crisis comes undone. In doing so, they also challenge the pedestrian but no less potent conception of lyric poetry as an expressive genre that actively solicits empathy or (minimally) acknowledgement in exchange for intimate revelation. How might a poetics of withholding, impassivity or composure operate as a historical style, not least in a national context where the overflow of feeling is associated with what Lauren Berlant termed ‘sentimental whiteness’ and its longstanding centrality to the national project?footnote⁹ This is not an essay written for or against any one kind of poetry; I don’t mean to claim that flat poems are better than extravagant ones. I offer a provisional aetiology of flatness for the same reasons that Williams sought to understand the function of pastoral or the industrial novel: because these forms mediate the features of a history at once omnipresent and dislocated.

The old terms ‘lyric subject’ and ‘lyric “I”’ are customarily used to describe the projection of an individuated personality as the voice that says a poem. In the most basic conception, this ‘I’ is taken to be a first-person speaker whose thoughts and feelings provide the poem’s subject and compel its motion. Some argue that this model dates back to Ancient Greece; others, that it is a Romantic invention. Regardless, it is uncontroversial that modernist poetry, with its preference for an aesthetics of fragmentation and collapse, offered an opportunity to break with such an ‘I’ and the assumptions it carried: that poetry can make private experience public and intelligible; that language is a shared resource; that personal identity is consistent over time; that an individual’s viewpoint is unique and has value; that the perspective of one person can generally express human experience; that we can more or less say what we mean.