1st Edition

Poetry and Uselessness From Coleridge to Ashbery

By Robert Archambeau Copyright 2019
264 Pages
by Routledge

264 Pages
by Routledge

264 Pages
by Routledge

W.H. Auden famously claimed "poetry makes nothing happen." That may or may not be the case, but the idea that poetry makes nothing happen has, itself, been extremely influential, and has made a great deal happen in the world.  This book examines several of the main currents in literary history as that influential idea flows through poetry and into the wider world. Since the invention of the... Read more

1 Aesthetic Autonomy and the Bourgeoisie: A Love Story 2 The Shadow of the Dome of Pleasure: Coleridge and Aesthetic Autonomy 3 Tennyson as Aesthete and Public Moralist 4 From the Cultured Minority to Minority Culture: The Rise of the Aesthetes 5 Awakened from the Common Dream: Yeats and Aesthetic Autonomy 6 Being Geniuses Together: Gertrude Stein in Paris 7 T.S. Eliot and the Burial of an American Elite 8 W.H. Auden: Camp and Crisis 9 Ashbery Adrift

Biography

Robert Archambeau received his MFA in creative writing and PhD in English from Notre Dame and is a poet and critic. His books of poetry include Home and Variations (Salt, 2004), The Kafka Sutra (MadHat, 2015), and other collections and collaborations. His critical books include Laureates and Heretics (Notre Dame, 2010), The Poet Resigns (Akron, 2013), Inventions of a Barbarous Age (MadHat, 2016) and several edited collections. He teaches at Lake Forest College and has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Illinois Arts Council, and Swedish Academy.