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 idea, it has influenced theories of education; helped legitimize the entry of the middle class into political life; spawned ideas of symbolism that are still with us; formed a bulwark protecting literary culture from the commercial world; helped create the artistic subculture of bohemia; informed queer discourse and identity; and helped create both contemporary literary taste and the institutions that support it. Through chapters on figures from Coleridge and Tennyson to Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery, we see how maintaining that poetry has no use in the world has been and remains a very powerful-and useful-idea.

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 idea, it has influenced theories of education; helped legitimize the entry of the middle class into political life; spawned ideas of symbolism that are still with us; formed a bulwark protecting literary culture from the commercial world; helped create the artistic subculture of bohemia; informed queer discourse and identity; and helped create both contemporary literary taste and the institutions that support it. Through chapters on figures from Coleridge and Tennyson to Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery, we see how maintaining that poetry has no use in the world has been and remains a very powerful-and useful-idea.

Jazz-age Paris was the center of the artistic and literary world, and the center of the center was Gertrude Stein’ s salon, where the famous and aspiring creative talents gathered to gawk at Stein’ s Picassos and vie for status. Young Midwesterner Ida Caine arrives in Paris with her husband Teddy, a would-be Hemingway who thinks he can adventure first and write later. When Teddy falls in with the Stein set, he brings Ida to the salon, where she is shunted into a corner with the wives of famous men. She burns with resentment and wonders if she can ever develop into a real artist herself. A few days later, Gertrude Stein’ s partner Alice B. Toklas vanishes.Stein calls upon Teddy to investigate. Soon after, he vanishes. Forced to seek out her missing husband, Ida follows his trail through a milieu including strange Surrealist rituals, Tarot card readings, and the catacombs beneath the city. She falls in with a young American poet, T.S. Eliot. An unlikely passion grows while they seek answers to the shocking disappearances.

This collection brings together for the first time select works in English by the major Swedish modernist poet and critic Goran Printz-Pahlson. It was Printz-Pahlson who introduced poetic modernism to Scandinavia, and his essays and poems delve deeply into English, American, and continental modernist traditions. As well as "Letters of Blood," the collection includes the full text of "The Words of the Tribe," a major statement on modern poetics, in which Printz-Pahlson explores the significance of primitivism in Romanticism and Modernism, and the nature of metaphor and literary materialism. The collection also includes essays on style, irony, realism, and the relationship between historical drama and historical fiction, as well as studies of American poetry. Printz-Pahlson's poetry in English continues to explore these themes by different, often surprisingly innovative, means.

This collection brings together for the first time select works in English by the major Swedish modernist poet and critic Goran Printz-Pahlson. It was Printz-Pahlson who introduced poetic modernism to Scandinavia, and his essays and poems delve deeply into English, American, and continental modernist traditions. As well as "Letters of Blood," the collection includes the full text of "The Words of the Tribe," a major statement on modern poetics, in which Printz-Pahlson explores the significance of primitivism in Romanticism and Modernism, and the nature of metaphor and literary materialism. The collection also includes essays on style, irony, realism, and the relationship between historical drama and historical fiction, as well as studies of American poetry. Printz-Pahlson's poetry in English continues to explore these themes by different, often surprisingly innovative, means.

Robert Archambeau examines the influence of the poet and critic Yvor Winters on his final generation of graduate students at Stanford in the early 1960s: Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, James McMichael, John Matthias, and John Peck. Archambeau divides the poets into two groups, laureates and heretics. Hass and Pinsky, each of whom served multiple terms as United Sates Poet Laureate, achieved both popular recognition and institutional renown. In contrast, the poetic accomplishments of Matthias, McMichael, and Peck (and to some extent Winters himself), the "heretics," have not resulted in wide readership or institutional canonization. Archambeau begins with the context of the modernist poetics Winters first espoused and then rejected. The story that follows--of how his five most prominent students accepted, rejected, or transformed Winters's poetics, and how these poets went on to greater or lesser degrees of success in the field of late twentieth-century letters—illuminates the cultural politics of poetry in our own day. The author provides close readings of poems by this diverse group of poets, places their careers and works in the context of their times, and traces the relationship between American literary history and American canons of literary taste from the 1930s to the present day. Laureates and Heretics is an important contribution to American literary history and American poetry.