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This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous literary–historical consensus that divides poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde. The book advocates a shift of emphasis, from “poems” as objects or occasions for experience to “poetry” as an occasion for reestablishing or revealing the most basic unit of social life and for securing the most fundamental object of moral regard. The book considers Language poetry as well as the work of William Butler Yeats, George Oppen, and Frank O'Hara—poets who seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal and universal.

Having considered concrete poetry in England and Scotland largely in relation to global trends, in the final chapter this text turns its attention to the binding characteristics of concrete poetry in those two nations. What unique features can be picked out which allow us to speak of ‘concrete poetry in England and Scotland’ as a distinct and coherent phenomenon? The argument is presented that, while concrete poetry in its initial, international guises often represented a response to modernist design aesthetics and semiotic theory, for poets in England and Scotland it was more likely to be placed in creative proximity to Anglo-American modernist poetry. In this sense, concrete poetry in England and Scotland can be considered one aspect of what Eric Mottram called ‘The British Poetry Revival’, that period during the 1950s-70s when a range of British poets began to reincorporate modernist forms and themes into their work. This occurred partly in response to a range of shifting social and economic circumstances, including the emergence of a global imaginative culture through the development of international markets, the space race, and the nuclear arms race of the post-war period, and the emergence of state-funded artistic and literary culture within Britain.

This essay asks if, and how, we can read the rhythms of Sappho’s poetry as if it could be heard, still. The Sapphic stanza is a poetic form that has gone through a long history of transformations, from a powerful metrical imaginary in Victorian poetics (graphing Sapphic meter as a musical form) into an idealization of “Sapphic rhythm” in twentieth-century prosody (naturalizing the rhythms of speech). By comparing metrical translations of Sapphic fragment 16 (“The Anactoria Poem,” discovered in 1914), the essay proposes “metametrical” reading as a model for critical reflection on the complex dialectic between rhythm and meter. Examples are drawn from Victorian metrical theory and Anglo-American imitations of Sappho by modern and contemporary poets, including Joyce Kilmer, Marion Mills Miller, Rachel Wetzsteon, John Hollander, Jim Powell, Juliana Spahr, and Anne Carson..