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This chapter discusses Auden's influence on Adrienne Rich. It argues that from her early emulation through her mature repudiation of his example, Auden's place in Rich's work and thought has persisted. As both an individual influence and as a representative of an entire range of poetic concerns which she has inherited and adapted, Auden comes to stand for poetic tradition itself—the tradition that gave her birth, and through and against which she has striven to define herself. For Rich, Auden sets the poetic terms—not always positively—out of which she constructs her own poetic identity. Like poetry itself, the figure of Auden and what he represents have been, throughout her career, ineluctable.

This chapter discusses two crucial mid-twentieth-century constructions of negative capability, juxtaposing Harvard scholar Walter Jackson Bate’s widely influential humanistic take on Keats’s concept with the way Black Mountain College poet Charles Olson enlists Keats, and negative capability specifically, to authorize his own postmodern poetics. For all their differences, the chapter shows, Bate and Olson’s constructions of Keats connect to similar responses to the perceived hyperspecialization and professionalization of mid-century intellectual life, responses articulated in part through shared intellectual sources. The chapter concludes with a reading of Adrienne Rich’s 1986 elegy ‘In Memoriam: D.K.’ as a poem that tests and critiques the idea of negative capability as masculinized ‘virtue’ advanced by both Bate and Olson.

This chapter opens with a claim that the harm that lies do results from their interference with one's efforts to understand things as they truly are. Lies thrust one into an imaginary world that one cannot live in or rely on. The chapter goes on to discuss Kant's and Montaigne's claim that lies undermine human society, arguing that Kant and Montaigne have gone too far: although it is true that lies can tear the social fabric apart, they can also knit it together. The discussion develops a personal take on the harm of the lie with a discussion of the poet Adrienne Rich. For Rich, the liar puts himself in a place of terrible loneliness: by hiding his mind from others, he perilously removes himself from human society.

This chapter argues that the representation of ‘queer’ time in postmodernist poetry extends beyond sexuality to encompass heterodox approaches to temporality more broadly. It starts by considering English poet Philip Larkin, suggesting how he reworked modernism within burlesque forms to evoke shifts in spatio-temporal scale. The second section, ‘Against Chrononormativity’, extends this analysis across various American postmodernist poets, arguing that interrogations of normative temporality in relation to gay sexuality (particularly in Adrienne Rich and Thom Gunn) can be understood as commensurate with reconstitutions of linear time in the work of John Ashbery and Louise Glück. It concludes by drawing comparisons with two Australian postmodernist poets, John Tranter and Les Murray, both of whom seek to reorient the direction of time. It discusses Tranter’s crossing of postcolonial theory with formalism, while also examining how Murray draws upon Indigenous culture and human/animal relations to reconfigure Western culture from a posthumanist perspective.

This chapter introduces the figure of the poet as lawgiver by focusing initially on Shelley’s famous definition of poets as ‘unacknowledged legislators of the World’ in his Defence of Poetry (1821). Following discussion of Thomas Love Peacock’s essay on ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’, to which the Defence is a reply, the chapter analyses Shelley’s arguments in detail. It then looks back to Plato’s views on the public role of the poet, especially in his Republic and the Laws, and forward to Adrienne Rich’s account of poets as ‘unacknowledged legislators’ within a twenty-first-century context. This is followed by discussion of the fundamental tension—already present in the ancient Greek concept of the nomos and implicit in the ambiguity of the English term ‘lawgiver’—between the poet as Moses, who receives and communicates the Law, and the poet as Orpheus, who creates order and ‘lawfulness’.