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Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill

Jeffrey Wainwright

Geoffrey Hill has said that some great poetry ‘recognises that words fail us’. This book explores his struggle over fifty years with the recalcitrance of language. It seeks to show how all Hill's ... More

Geoffrey Hill has said that some great poetry ‘recognises that words fail us’. This book explores his struggle over fifty years with the recalcitrance of language. It seeks to show how all Hill's work is marked by the quest for the right pitch of utterance whether it is sorrowing, angry, satiric or erotic. The book shows how Hill's words are never lightly ‘acceptable’ but an ethical act, how he seeks out words he can stand by—words that are ‘getting it right’. It is a comprehensive critical work on Geoffrey Hill, covering all his work up to Scenes from Comus (2005), as well as some poems yet to appear in book form.Less

Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley

John Kinsella

Niall Lucy (ed.)

John Kinsella is known internationally as the acclaimed author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, but in tandem with — and often directly through — his creative and critical work, ... More

John Kinsella is known internationally as the acclaimed author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, but in tandem with — and often directly through — his creative and critical work, Kinsella is also a prominent activist. In this book the vegan anarchist pacifist poet claims that poetry can act as a vital form of resistance to a variety of social and ethical ills, in particular ecological damage and abuse. Kinsella builds on his earlier notion of ‘linguistic disobedience’ evolving out of civil disobedience, and critiques the figurative qualities of his poems in a context of resistance. The book includes explorations of anarchism, veganism, pacifism and ecological poetics. For Kinsella all poetry is political and can be a call to action.Less

After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics Across the Atlantic

Ignacio Infante

Translation--from both a theoretical and practical point of view--articulates differing but interconnected modes of circulation in the work of writers originally from different geographical areas of ... More

Translation--from both a theoretical and practical point of view--articulates differing but interconnected modes of circulation in the work of writers originally from different geographical areas of transatlantic encounter, such as Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Caribbean. After Translation examines from a transnational perspective the various ways in which translation facilitates the circulation of modern poetry and poetics across the Atlantic. It rethinks the theoretical paradigm of Anglo-American “modernism” based on the transnational, interlingual and transhistorical features of the work of key modern poets writing at both sides of the Atlantic--namely, the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa; the Chilean Vicente Huidobro; the Spaniard Federico García Lorca; the San Francisco-based poets Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser; the Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite; and the Brazilian brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos. Another central aim of this book is to analyze how the literary history of modern poetry—traditionally produced within mononational and monolingual frameworks—is altered by a comparative approach that incorporates different languages, poetic traditions, and cultures connected by the heterogeneous geopolitical space of the Atlantic Ocean.Less

Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry, Manuscript, Print, 1780-1850

Samantha Matthews

‘Will you write in my album?’ Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected contributions in their manuscript books. Those who obliged included Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and ... More

‘Will you write in my album?’ Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected contributions in their manuscript books. Those who obliged included Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Lamb, but also Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, and Sara Coleridge. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture presents the first critical and cultural history of this forgotten phenomenon. It asks a series of questions. Where did 1820s ‘albo-mania’ come from, and why was it satirized as a women’s ‘mania’? What was the relation between visitors’ books associated with great institutions and country houses, personal albums belonging to individuals, and the poetry written in both? What caused albums’ re-gendering from earlier friendship books kept by male students and gentlemen on the Grand Tour to a ‘feminized’ practice identified mainly with young women? When albums were central to women’s culture, why were so many published album poems by men? How did amateur and professional poets engage differently with albums? What does album culture’s privileging of ‘original poetry’ have to say about attitudes towards creativity, poetic practice, and the print marketplace? Album Verses recovers a distinctive subgenre of occasional poetry composed to be read in manuscript, with its own characteristic formal features, conventions, themes, and cultural significance. Unique albums examined include that kept at the Grande Chartreuse, those owned by Regency socialite Lady Sarah Jersey, and those kept by the Lake poets’ daughters. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture shows that album poetry reflects changing attitudes to identity, gender, class, politics, poetry, family dynamics, and social relations between 1780 and 1850.Less

Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics

Jason Crawford

This book is about the genealogies of modernity, and about the lingering power of some of the cultural forms against which modernity defines itself: religion, magic, the sacramental, the medieval. ... More

This book is about the genealogies of modernity, and about the lingering power of some of the cultural forms against which modernity defines itself: religion, magic, the sacramental, the medieval. The book explores the emergence of modernity by investigating the early modern poetics of allegorical narrative, a literary form that many modern writers have taken to be paradigmatically medieval. In four of the most substantial allegorical narratives produced in early modern England—William Langland’s Piers Plowman, John Skelton’s The Bowge of Courte, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress—allegory is intimately linked with a self-conscious modernity, and with what many commentators have, in the last century, called “the disenchantment of the world.” The makers of these early modern narratives themselves take a keen interest in metaphors and postures of disenchantment. They fashion themselves as skeptics, spell-breakers, prophets against false institutions and false belief. And they often regard their own allegorical forms as another dangerous enchantment, a residue of the medieval past they have set out to renounce. In the context of various early modern crises of historical loss and revolutionary dissent, English poets from Langland to Bunyan become increasingly militant in their skepticism about allegory and about the theologies of incarnation that undergird it. But their self-regard also responds to paradoxes and anxieties at the core of allegory’s medieval poetics, and they discover that the things modernity has tried to repudiate—the old enchantments—are not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.Less

The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

William Wootten

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as ... More

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.Less

The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

William Wootten

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as ... More

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.Less

Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane

Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker

This book studies the poetry and polemics of one of the greatest of early modern writers, a poet of immense lyric talent and political importance. The book situates these writings and this writer ... More

This book studies the poetry and polemics of one of the greatest of early modern writers, a poet of immense lyric talent and political importance. The book situates these writings and this writer within the patronage networks and political upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century England. It tracks his negotiations among personalities and events; it explores his idealizations, attachments, and subversions; and it speculates on the meaning of the narratives that he told of himself within his writings — what we call Andrew Marvell’s ‘imagined life’. The book draws the figure of this imagined life from the repeated traces that Marvell left of lyric yearning and satiric anger, and it suggests how these were rooted both in the body and in the imagination. The book sheds new light on some of Marvell’s most familiar poems — Upon Appleton House, The Garden, To His Coy Mistress, and An Horatian Ode; but at its centre is an extended reading of Marvell’s The unfortunate Lover, his least familiar and surely his most mysterious lyric, and his most sustained narrative of the self. By attending to the lyric, the polemical, and the parliamentary careers together, this book offers a reading of Marvell and his writings as an interpretable whole.Less

Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch

Jonathan Mayhew

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) had enormous impact on the generation of American poets who came of age during the cold war, from Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg to Robert Creeley and Jerome ... More

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) had enormous impact on the generation of American poets who came of age during the cold war, from Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg to Robert Creeley and Jerome Rothenberg. In large numbers, these poets have not only translated his works, but written imitations, parodies, and pastiches—along with essays and critical reviews. This book is an exploration of the afterlife of this legendary Spanish writer in the poetic culture of the United States. It examines how Lorca in English translation has become a specifically American poet, adapted to American cultural and ideological desiderata—one that bears little resemblance to the original corpus, or even to Lorca's Spanish legacy. As the author assesses Lorca's considerable influence on the American literary scene of the latter half of the twentieth century, he uncovers fundamental truths about contemporary poetry, the uses and abuses of translation, and Lorca himself.Less

Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Politics

Josephine Nock-Hee Park

This book traces an American literary history of transpacific alliances which spans the 20th century. Increasing material and economic ties between the U.S. and East Asia at the end of the 19th ... More

This book traces an American literary history of transpacific alliances which spans the 20th century. Increasing material and economic ties between the U.S. and East Asia at the end of the 19th century facilitated an imagined spiritual and aesthetic accord that bridged the Pacific, and this study reads the expression and repercussions of these links in American Orientalist and Asian American poetry. After considering both the transcendence and constraints of a structure of alliance between East and West in the introductory chapter, the first half of the study examines two key American instigators of Orientalist poetics, Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder, who imagined an identity between Eastern philosophy and idealized notions of America. Their literary alliances imposed a singular burden on Asian American poets, and the second half of the study considers a range of formal negotiations with this legacy in the poetry of Lawson Fusao Inada, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Myung Mi Kim. In examining avant‐garde Asian American poetry against an American Orientalist past, this book reads the intersection of modernist and minority poetics.Less

The Art of Love Poetry

Erik Gray

Love begets poetry; poetry begets love. These two propositions have seemed evident to thinkers and poets across the Western literary tradition. Plato writes that “anyone that love touches instantly ... More

Love begets poetry; poetry begets love. These two propositions have seemed evident to thinkers and poets across the Western literary tradition. Plato writes that “anyone that love touches instantly becomes a poet.” And even today, when poetry has largely disappeared from the mainstream of popular culture, it retains its romantic associations. But why should this be so—what are the connections between poetry and erotic love that lead us to associate them so strongly with one another? An examination of different theories of both love and poetry across the centuries reveals that the connection between them is not merely an accident of cultural history—the result of our having grown up hearing, or hearing about, love poetry—but something more intrinsic. Even as definitions of them have changed, the two phenomena have consistently been described in parallel terms. Love is characterized by paradox. Above all, it is both necessarily public, because interpersonal, and intensely private; hence it both requires expression and resists it. In poetry, especially lyric poetry, which features its own characteristic paradoxes and silences, love finds a natural outlet. This study considers both the theories and the love poems themselves, bringing together a wide range of examples from different eras in order to examine the major structures that love and poetry share. It does not aim to be a comprehensive history of Western love poetry, but an investigation into the meaning and function of recurrent tropes, forms, and images employed by poets to express and describe erotic love.Less

At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn

Joshua Weiner (ed.)

Maverick gay poetic icon Thom Gunn (1929–2004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments either to claim or disavow him. To critics in the UK and US alike, ... More

Maverick gay poetic icon Thom Gunn (1929–2004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments either to claim or disavow him. To critics in the UK and US alike, he demonstrated that formal poetry could successfully include new speech rhythms and open forms, and that experimental styles could still maintain technical and intellectual rigor. Along the way, Gunn's verse captured the social upheavals of the 1960s, the existential possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the tumult of post-Stonewall gay culture. This book surveys Gunn's career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, from his earliest publications to his later unpublished notebooks, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre. It traces how Gunn, in both his life and his writings, pushed at boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic.Less

An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise

Ross Chambers

An Atmospherics of the City traces Baudelaire’s evolution from an aesthetics of fetishizing, in which the function of poetry is to produce beauty out of the ordinary by means of the poet’s artifice, ... More

An Atmospherics of the City traces Baudelaire’s evolution from an aesthetics of fetishizing, in which the function of poetry is to produce beauty out of the ordinary by means of the poet’s artifice, to a poetics of allegory that reads the modern city’s atmospherics as a product of urban noise and as a function, therefore, of what today would be recognized as entropy. In this later stage, the function of the poetic becomes one of disalienation; it strives to awaken readers to the presence of Evil as a malevolent force that is responsible for the depredations of human history over time. This evolution, in which poetic practice is redefined for the modern age as one of bearing witness to that which is most alien to (and destructive of) the poetic, is traced through readings of verse poems drawn principally from the “Tableaux Parisiens” section of the Fleurs du Mal (in that volume’s second edition of 1861), and of prose poems from the posthumously published Le Spleen de Paris, defined here as a poet’s “urban diary” and understood as a manifestation of temporality in its very absence of structure. Motifs such as the pane of glass and the statue are traced as their significance evolves from a very early poem (“Je n’ai pas oublié”) through later poems in both verse and prose.Less

Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture

Andrew Epstein

Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. ... More

Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. Drawing on theories and debates about the nature of everyday life from fields in the humanities, this book traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that it is no coincidence a potent hunger for everyday life exploded in the post-1945 period. This cultural need could be seen as a reaction to rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social transformations that have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction, interruption, and fragmented attention. The book argues that poetry has mounted a response, and even resistance, to a culture that is gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. It examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday became predominant in decades after modernism, why it has often led to unusual projects and formal innovations, and why poetry in particular might be an everyday-life genre par excellence. The book considers the forms this preoccupation takes and examines their aesthetic, philosophical, and political ramifications. By exploring these innovative strategies, unusual projects, and new technologies as methods of attending to dailiness, Attention Equals Life uncovers an important factor at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first–century literature.Less

Avant-Folk: Small Press Poetry Networks from 1950 to the Present

Ross Hair

Avant-Folk is the first comprehensive study of a loose collective of important British and American poets, publishers, and artists (including Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Jonathan ... More

Avant-Folk is the first comprehensive study of a loose collective of important British and American poets, publishers, and artists (including Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Jonathan Williams) and the intersection of folk and modernist, concrete and lyric poetics within the small press poetry networks that developed around these figures from the 1950s up to the present day. This book argues that the merging of the demotic with the avant-garde is but one of the many consequences of a particularly vibrant period of creative exchange when this network of poets, publishers, and artists expanded considerably the possibilities of small press publishing. Avant-Folk explores how, from this still largely unexplored body of work, emerge new critical relations to place, space, and locale. Paying close attention to the transmission of demotic cultural expressions, this study of small press poetry networks also revises current assessments regarding the relationship between the cosmopolitan and the regional and between avant-garde and vernacular, folk aesthetics. Readers of Avant-Folk will gain an understanding of how small press publishing practices have revised these familiar terms and how they reconceive the broader field of twentieth-century British and American poetry.Less

Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony

Sonya Stephens

The aim of this book is to offer a new reading of Baudelaire's Petits Poèmes en Prose that demonstrates the significance of ironic otherness for the theory and functioning of the work and for the ... More

The aim of this book is to offer a new reading of Baudelaire's Petits Poèmes en Prose that demonstrates the significance of ironic otherness for the theory and functioning of the work and for the genre of the prose poem itself. The book considers Baudelaire's choice of this genre and the way in which he seeks to define it, both paratextually and textually. It examines the ways in which the prose poem depends on dualities and déboublements as forms of lyrical and narrative difference which, in their turn, reveal ideological otherness and declare the oppositionality of the prose poem. Finally, the book demonstrates a relationship between these forms of otherness and Baudelaire's theory of the popular comic arts and, in doing so, proposes that the prose poems should be read as literary caricature.Less

Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry

Andrew Epstein

Despite the deep-seated notion that the archetypal American poet sings a solitary “Song of Myself,” much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with friendship and its ... More

Despite the deep-seated notion that the archetypal American poet sings a solitary “Song of Myself,” much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with friendship and its pleasures, contradictions, and discontents. This book examines this obsession with the problems and paradoxes of friendship, tracing its eruption in the New American Poetry that emerges after World War II as a potent avant-garde movement. The book argues that a clash between friendship and non-conformity is central to post-war American poetry and its development. By focusing on some of the most important and influential postmodernist American poets, the book offers a new interpretation of the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the role of the individual within them. At the same time, this study challenges both the reductive critiques of American individualism and the idealized, heavily biographical celebrations of literary camaraderie one finds in much critical discussion. The book foregrounds a fundamental paradox: that at the heart of experimental American poetry pulses a commitment to individualism and dynamic movement that runs directly counter to an equally profound devotion to avant-garde collaboration and community. It demonstrates that this tense dialectic between an aversion to conformity and a poetics of friendship actually energizes post-war American poetry, drives the creation, meaning, and form of important poems, frames the interrelationships between certain key poets, and leaves contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate.Less

Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry

Justin Quinn

This book is about the transnational movement of poetry during the Cold War. Beginning in the 1950s, it examines transnational engagements across the Iron Curtain, reassessing US poetry through a ... More

This book is about the transnational movement of poetry during the Cold War. Beginning in the 1950s, it examines transnational engagements across the Iron Curtain, reassessing US poetry through a consideration of overlooked radical poets of the mid-century, and then asking what such transactions tell us about the way that anglophone culture absorbed new models during this period. The Cold War synchronized culture across the globe, leading to similar themes, forms, and critical maneuvers. Poetry, a discourse routinely figured as distant from political concerns, was profoundly affected by the ideological pressures of the period. But beyond such mirroring, there were many movements across the Iron Curtain, despite the barriers of cultural and language difference, state security surveillance, spies, traitors, and translators. This book shows how such factors are integral to transnational cultural movements during this period, and have influenced even postwar anglophone poetry that is thematically distant from the Cold War. For this purpose, the exchanges between anglophone and Czech poetry are examined; the latter stood on the other side of the Iron Curtain as receptor and, which has been overlooked, part creator of the anglophone tradition in this period. By stepping outside the frameworks by which anglophone poetry are usually considered, this book provides original readings of such figures as Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg, and Seamus Heaney, and shows the ideological mechanisms that were at work behind the promotion of the aesthetic as a category independent of political considerations, foremost among these postcolonial theory.Less