In 1946, French film critic Nino Frank, having just seen "The
Maltese Falcon", "Double Indemnity", "Laura", and "Murder", "My
Sweet" linked them all with the term "film noir." No one working on
these projects knew they were making film noirs; Frank invented a
label that connected them after the fact, and it is because of his
label that the genre became famous. "Imaginary Biographies:
Misreading the Lives of the Poets" aims to do for poetry what Frank
did for film: to gather together previously unrelated works in
order to better understand and appreciate them as a new,
unrecognized literary genre. In "Imaginary Biographies", Geoff
Klock argues that the bizarre portrayal of historical writers in
post-Enlightenment English poetry constitutes a genre, a
battleground for two central conflicts: the confrontation of the
self-sufficient Romantic imagination with the brute fact of
external precursors (in the nineteenth century); and the
participation in, and simultaneous deflation of, Romantic idealism
(in the twentieth). In William Blake's "Milton", the author of
"Paradise Lost" returns to earth to redeem his female half,
confront Satan and herald the apocalypse. Percy Bysshe Shelley's
Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been physically deformed and mentally
ruined by a hellish chariot in "The Triumph of Life". Algernon
Charles Swinburne, in his Anactoria, hijacks the ancient Greek
poetess Sappho and turns her into his anti-Christian Sadistic
lesbian vampire cannibal Muse. In "The Changing Light at Sandover",
James Merrill contacts W.H. Auden and William Butler Yeats with a
Ouija board and discovers their part in an insane cosmic hierarchy.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey abandoned their youthful
plans to establish a utopian community in America; Paul Muldoon's
Madoc imagines they went through with it and describes the ensuing
disaster. John Ashbery's "Sleepers Awake" gages the work of Miguel
de Cervantes, James Joyce and Homer in terms of how much they slept
while writing. In "TV Men", Anne Carson portrays "Thucydides",
"Sappho", and "Antonin Artaud" anachronistically preparing, or
being prepared for, television adaptations. Klock makes the
audacious and fascinating case that the imaginary biography is in
continuity with literary criticism. He concentrates on how one poet
misreads another by explicitly naming the earlier poet in the
latter poem. This "misreading" forms a new genre, creating a new
kind of character and a new kind of poem. The result is a dazzling
work of literary scholarship that will stimulate debate for years
to come.
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