Alan Marshall takes Alexis de Tocqueville's discussion of 'Some Sources of Poetic Inspiration in Democracies' in the second volume of his Democracy in America as the starting point for a wide-ranging examination of the nature of democratic thought and expression in American experimental poetry, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in the mid-nineteenth century, to George Oppen, Frank O'Hara, and Robert Creeley a century later. The book begins by considering the political significance of what Marshall describes as 'the invisible physiognomy' of Whitman's poetry, which is followed by a re-evaluation of the flawed republican humanism of Ezra Pound in the light of the thought of Hannah Arendt. Other chapters deal with Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser. The book argues against the narrowly ideological interpretation of politics that dominates contemporary literary studies. To that extent it recalls Tocquevilles concern to underline the differences between his own methods and perspectives and the historical determinism of his contemporaries. Marshall brings together an exceptional variety of theoretical writing, including works by Theodor Adorno, Seyla Benhabib, Stanley Cavell, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, James Madison, Karl Marx, David Riesman, and Donald Winnicott, as he seeks to expand and develop Tocqueville's circumspect humanist critical trajectory. The chapters are conceived as a series of innovative dialogical constellations, to which the close reading of poetry is central. The aim throughout is to measure the thought of the poets or their poems against the thoughts of those who are more often called thinkers.

A compelling revision of the history of experimental writing from Pound and Stein to Language poetry, disclosing its uses and its limits. In this bold new study of twentieth-century American writing and poetics, Natalia Cecire argues that experimental writing should be understood as a historical phenomenon before it is understood as a set of formal phenomena. This seems counterintuitive because, at its most basic level, experimental writing can be thought of as writing which breaks from established forms. Touching on figures who are not typically considered experimental, such as Stephen Crane, Jacob Riis, Busby Berkeley, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Gottlob Frege, Experimental offers a fresh look at authors who are often treated as constituting a center or an origin point of an experimental literary tradition in the United States, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. In responding to a crisis of legitimization in the production of knowledge, this tradition borrows and transforms the language of the sciences. Drawing upon terminology from the history of science, Cecire invokes the epistemic virtue, which tethers ethical values to the production of knowledge in order to organize diverse turn-of-the-century knowledge practices feeding into "experimental writing." Using these epistemic virtues as a structuring concept for the book's argument, Cecire demonstrates that experimental writing as we now understand it does not do experiments (as in follow a method) but rather performs epistemic virtues. Experimental texts embody the epistemic virtues of flash, objectivity, precision, and contact, associated respectively with population sciences, neuroanatomy, natural history and toolmaking, and anthropology. Yet which virtues take precedence may vary widely, as may the literary forms through which they manifest. Bringing it up to the 1980s, Cecire reveals the American experimental literary tradition as a concerted and largely successful rewriting of twentieth-century literary history. She shows how the Language poets, a group of primarily white experimental writers, restored to the canon what they saw as modernism's true legacy, whose stakes were simultaneously political and epistemological: it produced a poet who was an intellectual and a text that was experimental.

An experiment with language. Is it an object cultivated in poetic laboratories where entry is locked for mere mortals? And what do language scholars think about it? Specialists in language and literature studies interested in linguistic innovation and experimental poetry will find answers to these questions in Vladimir Feshchenko’s book. The study investigates various strategies of radical linguistic creativity in Russian and American experimental writing of the 20th century and explores cases of contemporary ‘language-oriented’ and ‘trans-language’ poetry. It is a comparative examination of two national avant-garde cultures, but also a juxtaposition of the relationships that Russian and American avant-garde poetics had with linguistic ideas of their times. The monograph may serve as a wonderful introduction to the entire field of ‘linguistic poetics of the avant-garde’.

This informative edition explores Walt Whitman's poetry through the lens of democracy. Chapters include an examination of Whitman's life and influences, a look at key ideas related to democracy in Whitman's poetry, and a series of essays that explore topics such as Whitman's views of democratic comradeship, the role of bonds between men, Whitman's approach to patriotism, and Whitman's contradictory views on slavery and race. Readers are also presented with contemporary perspectives on democracy, such as the importance of an informed electorate and the impact of American individualism on contemporary politics.

An investigation of how American poetry since Whitman makes its beginnings, with what means and to which political and aesthetic ends, and how it addresses fundamental questions about what the future is and how it may be affectednow.

"A study of modernist poets who, finding both support and stimulation in popular political theory, were committed to transforming their art in and through attempts to engage the evolving concept of the public sphere"--

The Plural of Us is the first book to focus on the poet’s use of the first-person plural voice—poetry’s “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, Bonnie Costello uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying “I,” “we” has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, Costello explores the communal function of poetry—the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural. Costello adopts a taxonomic approach to her subject, considering “we” from its most constricted to its fully unbounded forms. She also takes a historical perspective, following Auden’s interest in the full range of “the human pluralities” in a time of particular pressure for and against the collective. Costello offers new readings as she tracks his changing approach to voice in democracy. Examples from many other poets—including Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens—arise throughout the book, and the final chapter offers a consideration of how contemporary writers find form for what George Oppen called “the meaning of being numerous.” Connecting insights to philosophy of language and to recent work in concepts of community, The Plural of Us shows how poetry raises vital questions—literary and social—about how we speak of our togetherness.

Amid gloomy forecasts of the decline of the humanities and the death of poetry, Angus Fletcher, a wise and dedicated literary voice, sounds a note of powerful, tempered optimism. He lays out a fresh approach to American poetry at large, the first in several decades, expounding a defense of the art that will resonate well into the new century. Breaking with the tired habit of treating American poets as the happy or rebellious children of European romanticism, Fletcher uncovers a distinct lineage for American poetry. His point of departure is the fascinating English writer, John Clare; he then centers on the radically American vision expressed by Emerson and Walt Whitman. With Whitman this book insists that "the whole theory and nature of poetry" needs inspiration from science if it is to achieve a truly democratic vista. Drawing variously on Complexity Theory and on fundamentals of art and grammar, Fletcher argues that our finest poetry is nature-based, environmentally shaped, and descriptive in aim, enabling poets like John Ashbery and other contemporaries to discover a mysterious pragmatism. Intense, resonant, and deeply literary, this account of an American poetics shows how today's consumerist and conformist culture subverts the imagination of a free people. While centering on American vision, the argument extends our horizon, striking a blow against all economically sanctioned attacks upon the finer, stronger human capacities. Poetry, the author maintains, is central to any coherent vision of life.