Stephanie Burt reviews Amphion

Leah Middlebrook. Amphion: Lyre, Poetry, and Politics in Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. 208 pp.

Review by Stephanie Burt

27 June 2025

In 1615, the city of Córdoba convened “a “poetry festival in honor of St. Teresa of Ávila,” drawing thick crowds for versification contests and for “the social activity of collective poetry-making” (pp. 109, 107). In 1604, Bernardo de Balbuena finished his book-length poem La grandeza de Mexico, honoring work begun by Hernán Cortés: the genocidal “ravaging of one great polis and the construction of another” (p. 129). And in 1558 Joachim du Bellay completed Les Antiquitez du Rome, about the once-imperial, now-diminished city. Edmund Spenser, Francesco de Quevedo, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the Irish writer Trevor Joyce then adapted du Bellay for their own meditations on empire. Joyce’s Rome’s Wreck (2014) rewrites du Bellay in quatorzains composed entirely of monosyllables, lending his lines “a sense of lyric poetry as transmediated human force,” as if to summon “the shades of those / who built this town in days gone by” (p. 80).

What aspect do all these verse-makers’ efforts share? For Leah Middlebrook, a scholar of early modern Spain and New Spain, it’s the legend of Amphion. Invoked in Horace’s Ars Poetica as well as in Homer and Ovid, the god-born musician used his lyre-playing powers to build the walls of Thebes. Balbuena envisions that ancient city “ampliada y fortalecida por el músico Anfión, quien a fuerza de la suavidad de su arpa la ennoblecío de muros y edificios” (amplified and fortified by the musician Amphion, who through the sweetness of his harp ennobled it with walls and edifices) (p. 124). “The metaphor of Amphion’s stones . . . captures the way in which . . . to compose language in a pre-given, socially recognized verse or poem form constitutes a meaningful contribution to collective social life” (p. 28).

Ways of considering Western poetics (Middlebrook argues) that attend to Amphion can recognize how high-prestige writings like sonnets work alongside “non-epic song forms, hymns, work songs, lighthearted ditties,” projecting what Middlebrook somewhat confusingly calls “lyric’s social nature” (p. 25). Lyric meaning particular forms (sonnets, sestinas)? Lyric meaning the sonically rich expression of inward emotion? Or lyric meaning whatever it meant in English or Spanish or Latin at the time?

Such semantic questions—perhaps too familiar in present-day academe—may draw attention away from the poems, and from the two big arguments Middlebrook makes. The first argument holds that poetry can do and has done social, communal, collaborative, and political work. Sometimes that work supports murderous agendas, as in Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico. Sometimes that work lifts up the vulnerable instead, as when Don Quixote (part 2, 1615) appears to defend at once the new class of letrados (verse-making men of letters) and the moriscos, people of Moorish descent expelled from Spain.

Poets who pursue such civic goals can encourage, calm, enrage, oppress, or liberate. They may also quote, or invoke, earlier poets with similar goals, as when the early modern lawyer Alonso de Cervantes wrote glosas, verse glosses—expansions, interpretations, variations—on Jorge Manrique’s well-known Coplas (1479). Middlebrook finds Alonso’s glosses drab, didactic, even “prating,” though later glosses can serve songlike ends (like Donna Stonecipher’s The Cosmopolitan [2008], or H. L. Hix’s Moral Tales [2024]) (p. 32). Chile’s Raúl Zurita “uses Dante to give form and substance to conditions of radical violent unworlding” (p. 141). Zurita’s interlocutor, in Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985), echoes Dante’s Guido Cavalcante: “ya que de puro verso / y desgarro . . . ¿tú puedes decirme dónde está mi hijo?” (for all that verse / and heartbreak . . . can you tell me where’s my son?) (p. 148). “Amor desaparecido” means both a lost love or lost lover, and a desaparecido, one of the many people kidnapped and “disappeared” by the dictatorships of Chile and Argentina. It’s as if Zurita wished that Dante could help find them.

For readers of modern poetry in English these examples may fascinate; their overall argument may seem true, but not new. Seamus Heaney (“Station Island,” 1984) and T. S. Eliot (“Little Gidding,” 1942) featured Dantean interlocutors too, in poems also obsessed with their social uses. Neither Zurita, nor Heaney, nor Eliot, nor Don Quixote mention Amphion by name. We ought to call them Amphionic anyway: that’s Middlebrook’s second big argument. “The meaning of Amphion’s lyre was intuitive enough in the sixteenth century that many writers didn’t see the necessity of explaining it.” (p. 5) In the same fashion, we may label as Orphic poets who aspire to transcendent heights whether or not they write sonnets to Orpheus. Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” counts as Amphionic because it describes a built estate. Cortés’s “narrative leads later writers to describe him in terms of Amphion,” though it’s unclear who does so besides Balbuena (p. 122). Garcilaso de la Vega’s famous “Ode ad florem Gnidi” (1543) counts as Amphionic because it disavows Orphic powers “in order to focus on the more modest aims of musa lyrae sollers,” a Horatian phrase that Middlebrook uses for the variety of this-worldly verse techniques (pp. 3, 38).

Horace’s Latin literally means “the Muse (who is) skilled with the lyre,” in parallel to cantor Apollo, “the singer Apollo.”[1] Middlebrook gives the phrase instead, as “songs of the lyric muse,” treating it as a plural. Two dozen times (pp. 3, 104, 106, 218). It’s a quibble (the sort of thing editors should catch), but a pointed one, because it points to the most frustrating aspect of Middlebrook’s fascinating, compact study: its sometime rush to generalize about poetry, “lyric,” and society across the centuries. Her book excels when it gives us close-ups instead. Some poems—notably those from poetry contests—do not lend themselves to that scrutiny: they require, as Middlebrook says, social studies. With others, though—Zurita, Joyce, Quevedo—any reader will learn a great deal, about Spain and New Spain, translation and imitation, authority and imagination, whether or not they hold the walls of Thebes in mind.

[1] Horace, Ars Poetica 3.407.