Throughout the third Critique Kant repeatedly stresses the importance of communication for human sociability, but he does not link communication to any particular view of language, making it uncertain how he thought of it and its importance for our cognition, rationality, and ethical sensibility. Against such uncertainty, my aim here is to show that there is at least one important form of linguistic expression – the poetic one – that is of paramount importance for Kant’s overall view of humanity’s progress towards the kingdom of ends. In developing my account, I start by explicating the importance of communication in Kant’s overall system, and I then focus on poetic expression, understood as a particular kind of communication. The emerging view of the centrality of the particular poetic expression generated by genius grounds Kant’s aesthetic cognitivism and brings to the fore the two main functions of poetic expression: the one related to development of human cognitive and moral capacities, and the one related to the role of poetry, and aesthetic judgments regarding poetry, in promoting our humanity.

Chapter 6 situates John Milton’s major works – Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes – in relation to abiding conflicts over fiscal policy prompted by the Civil War and its aftermath. Milton was actively critical of the Commonwealth’s management of fiscal policy and voiced his fear about the fiscal impact of a restored monarchy. Though fiscal concerns are largely occluded from his poetry, Milton’s depiction of war and its effects continues this critique by dramatizing the disastrous consequences of security imaginaries organized around the violently expansive accumulation of wealth. Milton’s metasecurity dilemma arises in his poetry as a question about how to value people and circumstances correctly, about the relevant criteria to use to orient oneself ethically and politically within catastrophic realities. His poems thus highlight Milton’s deep uncertainty about how to define safety or about what kinds of collective security might be possible in such a disoriented moment.

This chapter argues that rap has been undervalued by English studies. It conducts a close analysis of the work of Roots Manuva to develop a nuanced account of how his rap songs engage with contemporary human experience, and to demonstrate how literary critics might respond to them. It draws on the work of Jaques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben to examine the literary singularity of Roots Manuva’s third album Awfully Deep. Rodney Smith can be seen to play with with forms of temporality, the tension and difference between sound and sense, and understandings of the self in a digitally mediated world. The chapter proposes that by drawing on the concept of the semiotic-performative alongside that of the semantic and semiotic-poetic, students of English literature might be better able to engage with the significance of Smith’s oeuvre.

This chapter examines what happens when we decolonize the materiality of the nineteenth-century Hispano-American anthology, when we move away from the anthology as a book form with colonial publishers, titles, sections, bylines, and expand it to centralize the (formerly) colonized and their ephemera, that is, Hispano-American editors, readers, and writers as well the Spanish-language newspapers they edited, read, and wrote for. What do these perspectives teach us about the emergence of what we now call a Latinx people and literary tradition? Mirroring the instability of the region following the US–Mexico War and the ontological uncertainty of its readers, newspapers like the Los Angeles-based El Clamor Público represent the formation of a pre-Latinx literary tradition. The newspaper’s editor and proprietor, Francisco P. Ramírez gave expression to what I call a Hispano-American borderlands anthology of poetry before there was a formalized creation of a Latinx poetic tradition in the United States.

This chapter examines the work of three contemporary US poets – Daniel Borzutzky, Rosa Alcalá, and Wendy W. Walters – who explore how capitalist processes help to construct and “translate” race and gender into partitioned conditions of subjectivation and what Iris Marion Young, after Jean-Paul Sartre, calls serial collective identities. All three authors help us to reimagine the political economy of race in terms of bounded yet globally interconnected material contexts of action rather than as relations between collective subjects with fixed group attributes. These poets instead represent race as a social form of constraint and possibility powerfully conditioned by a capitalist logic of accumulation, spatial containment, and an international division of labor simultaneously dividing and connecting populations across great distances and differences.

At the time of his death in 1964, Sean O’Casey left a substantial body of disparate writings. His poetry, journalism, short stories, diaries, and his history of the Irish Citizen Army have received scant scholarly attention, but give us important clues about his literary development and his debt to other writers. This chapter examines some of these diverse writings to show how O’Casey experimented with a number of different forms. It also shows how O’Casey remained committed to writing in different genres throughout his life, and the chapter reveals some of the literary touchstones that would inform his non-theatrical writings.

This chapter situates three Latinx literary organizations – CantoMundo, Letras Latinas, and Undocupoets – in a trajectory of institution building dedicated to the support and development of Latinx poetry and poetics. Moving through organizational origins, concrete support strategies, founding members, and institutional alliances, the chapter maps out the practical as well as philosophical outcomes of developing Latinx poetry and poetics as a diverse, multiform set of voices. Coinciding with greater recognition of Latinx poets in terms of fellowship support, book prizes, and publication numbers, CantoMundo, Letras Latinas, and Undocupoets, as well as organizations that have built alongside and with them, have decisively shaped twenty-first-century Latinx poetry and given it many possible routes for future development.

For all intents and purposes, life was good for Karen: happily married and settled with three children and a nice life. A series of events -- including bereavement; a large, organised fraud involving threats, police involvement and a court case; and the sudden severe ill health of her husband -- sent her down a deep hole. Major depression and anxiety opened boxes that were closed many years ago containing trauma that was never disclosed and everything collapsed. PTSD added to the deep despair and there were numerous episodes of self-harm and suicide attempts. Six years of repeated admissions (mostly involuntary) followed, being treated with medications and four courses of ECT. ECT was instrumental in Karen being well enough to be able to engage with the therapy she needed for long-term recovery. The story is narrated with original diary extracts and poems written at the time of her suffering. Karen now works with the ECT Accreditation scheme, reviewing ECT clinics around the country, and has spoken extensively about her experiences to journalists and at conferences, trying to reduce the stigma that surrounds the treatment. She is also employed in the clinic where she received treatment as a peer support worker

Holocaust literature started even before the mass killings themselves, with Jewish poets, novelists, and essayists reacting to the rise of Nazism and the war, and it continues to the present day. At first, many representative authors were survivors, but, with the passage of time, new generations of writers came to engage with the reality of the Holocaust, either as descendants of survivors themselves, or simply as human beings wrestling with one of humanity’s greatest calamities. Traversing poetry, diaries, memoirs, and novels, this chapter tracks the evolution of Holocaust literature, its expansion into a global vernacular, and the ways in which diverse authors have sought to deploy language to process mass slaughter.

What little we know about the Latin author Commodian comes directly from his own poems – the Instructions and the Apologetic Poem (also known as the Poem about Two Peoples). Gennadius (On Illustrious Men 15) mentions him but relies on Commodian’s poems just as we do. Commodian was most likely writing in North Africa, probably Carthage, in the third quarter of the third century. He has a deep affinity for and familiarity with Cyprian, and was likely a direct contemporary, though it appears he himself never held ecclesial office. Commodian seems to have been a layperson whose own journey from “frequenting the [pagan] temples” (1, 1.5) to becoming a “Law-inspired” – that is, “scripture-inspired” – Christian (1, 1.6) prompted him to make his own efforts to influence his various communities in Carthage. It seems likely that he identified as ethnically Syrian (hence the final poem’s title, where the author of the Instructions identifies himself as “the man from Gaza”), and that, prior to his time in Carthage, he spent substantial formative years in Aquileia.

In the 1990s, the challenges of representing the (perhaps, arguably) unrepresentable horror of the Holocaust were hotly debated. The issue still poses crucial theoretical questions that have animated a wide array of both scholarly and aesthetic responses. One might think, for instance, of the very different representational strategies adopted by Claude Lanzmann in Shoah and Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List as marking two ends of the spectrum on how to represent the Holocaust. This chapter articulates the theoretical terrain upon which Holocaust representation unfolds and, in this respect, serves as a theoretical companion to the topic-specific culture chapters that follow.

Chapter 1 presents Ovid in exile as a highly self-conscious, reflexive figure whose ironic turns perforate a real desire to effect both an imperial pardon and poetic immortality. Moreover, the chapter situates Ovid as the first respondent to his exile, finding many points of commonality between the ways that Ovid and medieval respondents reacted to his exile (in other words, medieval audiences used Ovid as a model for their responses). This chapter makes these arguments from three perspectives. Firstly, it characterises Ovid’s response, focusing especially on his desire to control the narrative being relayed both to Augustus in Rome and to posterity. Secondly, it explores Ovid’s tendency to revise his works. He edits and revises his pre-exilic poetry from the perspective of his exile and reworks his exile poetry over the course of his relegation. Finally, it argues that Ovid’s depictions of his exile as severe are another vehicle for modelling a flexible response. Overall, Ovid constructed an authoritative hold over his life and works but nevertheless formed a response which allowed for ambiguities that could be embedded into that authority. This double model allowed medieval respondents to incorporate both equivocation and authority into their own poetic self-presentation.

Even in the worst conditions, Jews needed to hear music, read books, attend lectures, watch actors perform, and participate in a myriad of cultural activities in order to connect to prewar values and memories. This chapter highlights the extraordinary cultural production of Jews in situations from cramped, dangerous ghettos, to the worst possible extremes, concentration and extermination camps. Jews stressed how much cultural activity helped them retain their psychological integrity and resist Nazi attempts to dehumanize them.

Liz remembers experiencing episodes of depression since an early age but completed her university degree and worked as a medical doctor for many years. The story starts with the description of a psychotic episode that she experienced for the duration of one summer. Diaries kept from that time were used for the story, giving the episode detail, helped by a poem also written at the time. The depression gradually got worse over the years, despite trying more than twenty different antidepressants and mood stabilisers, regular exercises and prolonged courses of psychotherapy, causing an early retirement and eventually hospital admissions. Finally, ECT was recommended, and it worked despite the very long and resistant type of depression. The improvement was incomplete, though; it required maintenance treatment and caused marked memory problems, which are also described in detail.

Not all eighteenth-century mock-arts were satires. The long, mixed blank-verse poems modelled on Virgil’s Georgics that were popular throughout the period always dealt positively with the practical, mechanical world. Georgic poems followed oblique strategies, coded into the genre by their ancient models: their paradoxically rational appeal to slow, unconscious experience and their characteristic swerves into digressive anecdote, haptic description and mythography. Georgic (like satire) is interested in the processes by which people sharpen their wits, not through the exercise of raillery, but through the ‘labor improbus’ of skilled work. Like the Scriblerian mock artists, Georgic writers applied representations of the mechanical arts to political contexts. Comparison between satirical mock arts and georgic poems is fruitful because of what they have in common: a rhetoric of indirection, a psychology focused on extended cognition and tacit knowledge and a fascination with the mechanics of commercial production.