Lyric, Space, Presence

Abstract: This essay explores how lyric poetry can produce effects of presence that are not primarily based on interpretation. After considering recent theorizations of the lyric, the article focuses on two defining features of the genre—apostrophe and deixis—that are relatively deficient in meaning but also inflected in space and shows how two sonnets by the early modern Catalan authors Francesc Vicent Garcia (1582–1623) and Francesc Fontanella (1622–1685) convey presence spatially.