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‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book examines the relation between Blake's text and the visual designs in The Four Zoas, one of the most important works in Blake's oeuvre. It uncovers a Blake deeply engaged with the cultural discourses of his time, in profound dialogue with Swedenborg, Locke, and Young. In the course of this conversation, Blake anatomizes a remarkable variety of cultural practices (including religion, science, and art) designed to achieve transcendence. He focuses in particular on the fate of the body in cultures of transcendence, developing perhaps the first theory of sexual sublimation. Blake's radical visual and verbal strategies in this poem are part of an attempt to defer the movement of transcendence, long enough for the reader to see the warring elements of the fallen world as the dismembered body of humanity.

For many decades, R.S. Thomas has been portrayed according to terms that he himself helped to define. Drawing on the poet’s status as a passionate defender of the Welsh nation, scholars have followed his lead in emphasizing the Welsh credentials and dimensions of his work, tacitly affirming his chosen cultural identity. This book, however, through detailed consideration of Thomas’s writing, and extensive archival research into his reading and correspondence, goes against the grain of previous studies by revealing him as profoundly indebted to the English literary canon. Ultimately, Thomas emerges as a classic example of what Keats famously described as the ‘chameleon poet’, and through this prism the book illuminates the various dimensions of his relationship with the literary tradition, ranging from his early immersion in the work of the English Romantics, through to his discovery of Irish and Scottish writing, his response to key poetic figures, such as Herbert, Tennyson, Edward Thomas, and T.S. Eliot, his involvement with the influential journal Critical Quarterly, which inspired a creative dialogue with contemporaries like Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, and his late engagement with the traditions of the elegy as conceived within Thomas Hardy’s Poems of 1912–13. As well as suggesting new readings and associations, this groundbreaking exposition of R.S. Thomas’s work forms part of a wider investigation into the nature of the British poetic tradition and archipelagic identity, showing how Thomas’s Welshness was in fact a hybrid construct, emerging from his vigorous interaction with the literary cultures of England, Scotland, and Ireland as much as those of his homeland.

Digression is widely considered a mark of disordered or evasive discourse. Modern legal, philosophical, and political writing largely disavows this trope, regarding it as a departure from the model of rational exposition institutionalized under the Enlightenment. And yet, as the rhetorical figure of digression has grown increasingly marginalized within the decorum of public discourse, it has come to occupy a central position in the private discursive world of poetry. This book outlines an anatomy of “the excursus” within twentieth-Century American poetics; moving from aesthetics to the archive to narratology to theories of identity, this study considers the various spheres in which American writers of the period revise prior models of purposeful discourse by cultivating a poetics of digression in the modern poem. The opening section considers the manner in which Wallace Stevens employs digression within the ars poetica genre to deconstruct aesthetic theory under High Modernism; the second chapter examines Marianne Moore’s use of the excursus to organize archival knowledge in the Progressive poetry of instruction; the third section turns to Lyn Hejinian’s construction of a digressive narratology intended to unsettle master-narratives of the Cold War era; the fourth chapter treats digression as a strategy for fashioning the self in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara; and the book concludes with a survey of “Elliptical” strategies employed by a new generation of poets, writing in the wake of John Ashbery’s aleatory craft, who seek to extend the digressive project of American poetry into the 21st Century.

The Practice of the Self situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910–70) at the centre of the early postwar American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson’s work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson’s published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early postwar American modernism. The development of Olson’s work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists—including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage—The Practice of the Self offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of postwar American modernism.

This book considers the overlap between cinema and poetry and examines the key theorists and filmmakers who first brought expression to the “cine-poem.” The first half of the book begins with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Il ‘cinema di poesia’” and continues through the films of Dimitri Kirsanoff, Ingmar Bergman, and Andrey Tarkovsky to develop a critical framework for the cine-poem. The second part of the book overviews the careers of a number of American avant-garde filmmakers (Joseph Cornell, Lawrence Jordan, Stan Brakhage, Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, and Gregory J. Markopoulos) and describes how their works show affinities for certain poets.