This chapter considers poetry of the 1870s in the aftermath of the previous boom decade in magazine verse, with the flowering of shilling monthlies and popular literary weeklies, when periodical publishers became firmly established as the era’s primary poetry publishers, and when most readers accessed poems in ephemeral print. Literary accounts of the Victorian era conventionally consider poetry book publication as defining the era’s poetics, and certainly in the 1870s there were no shortage of prominent poetry volumes. But this decade also saw poetry defined in relation to magazine verse, and the value of poetry was integral to associated issues of ephemerality and modernity. This chapter focuses in particular on the place of poetry in two new periodicals of the 1870s: The Dark Blue and The Nineteenth Century.

One trend in recent nineteenth-century American studies has been the rising critical status of poetry, which has gone from being widely neglected by C19 scholars to being a vibrant and diverse field of scholarship. Yet, while this scholarship has recovered major authors and recuperated long-derided aspects of nineteenth-century poetics, it has also maintained an old narrative about C19 poetry, namely that the status of poetry declined during the postbellum period. The career of William Cullen Bryant is emblematic of these trends: while there has been some fascinating recent work on his poetry, it has been informed exclusively by his early poetry of the 1810s and 1820s. This essay argues that Bryant’s career looks different when viewed from the end, rather than the beginning. In so doing, it revises recent critical accounts of Bryant, and C19 American poetry more broadly, by examining his translation of the Iliad, which he published in 1870. Bryant’s Iliad was one of the most celebrated poems of the postbellum era and was considered his masterpiece by contemporary readers. This essay examines the translation and discuss some of the ways in which it engages the politics and poetics of the Reconstruction period

Examining the cultural and religious context of male homosociality and homosexuality from the time of Hopkins’s undergraduate career at Oxford and throughout his life, this chapter introduces key primary sources for considering the place of queerness in the poet’s life and work. The chapter also explores the reception of Hopkins in queer studies, and the reception of Hopkins’s queerness in Hopkins studies.

This chapter delves into the profound interplay between Haitian revolutionary history, literature, and the broader context of global romanticism. Drawing on the pivotal work Le Romantisme en Haïti: La vie intellectuelle, 1804-1915 by Dolcé, Dorval, and Casthely, it critiques the dominance of Western thought and the triumph of Eurocentrism in global romanticism. Through a meticulous exploration of Haiti’s post-independence history and its relationship to French colonialism, it asserts the emergence of a distinctly national form of romanticism deeply entrenched in the country’s intellectual and literary evolution. Tracing the trajectory of Haitian romanticism from its roots in the Haitian Acte de l’Indépendance to the commencement of the US Occupation, it argues that Haitian poets’ blending of politics, history, and literary creation resonated with, at the same time as it transcended, romantic ideals popular in the British and French traditions. Fusing historical scholarship and literary critique, the chapter aims to reshape perceptions of Haitian intellectual history, unearthing the obscured ties between revolutionary actions, poetic expression, and the global romantic movement.

Was the stylistic exuberance and formal ambition of twelfth-century classicizing prose linked to the unprecedented study of ancient poetry during this period? Why would aspiring prose writers have been nurtured largely in verse? Long accustomed to regard Byzantine interest in ancient poetry as culturally antiquarian in nature, we have been less alert to the formal lessons available to aspiring Byzantine authors, most of whom would go on to compose in prose instead of verse. By tracing the long history of poetry as the school of prose, this chapter draws examples from Eustathios’ Parekbolai or ‘commentaries’ on Homeric epic in a bid to illustrate attempts to render Byzantine prose more ‘poetic’. The author thus hopes to underline the reciprocal and often seamless relation between prose and verse in the twelfth century and what this may teach us about both during what is widely regarded as the most innovative period in Byzantine literature.

This chapter examines Propertius’ poetics of space, particularly as it relates to Roman imperialist rhetoric. Beyond the relatively obvious metapoetic images of height and lowliness, it suggests that Propertius employs a range of other spatial metaphors in his construction of a poetic self-image, drawing notably on the language of boundaries and boundlessness, centre and periphery; here, elegiac poetics capitalises on what the author terms the ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ aspects of imperialist discourse, whereby Rome expands to fill the world, but also subsumes or draws in the products and characteristics of all other nations. In his more confident moments, the elegist represents himself not merely as echoing or collaborating with, but as surpassing the achievements of Augustus himself. A similar symbolic rivalry may be seen in Propertius’ self-representation as triumphator; the author links this in turn to the poet’s references to monumental architecture, particularly the ecphrasis of the Temple of Palatine Apollo in 2.31, which may be understood as a figurative monument to the power of poetry, dependent on but not identical with its counterpart in the physical landscape of Rome.

This chapter turns from democracy as theatre to the question of theatre’s place within a democracy. Modern political theatre foregrounds playwrights, understood to be people capable of enlightening the audience through their truthful representation of the world. Euripides’ Trojan Women has typically been read as an exposé of political wrongdoing, and an invitation to empathise with the suffering of the protagonists. In Athens, these plays were ’political’ in that they helped spectators unpick rhetorical strategies (Aristotle’s term is dianoia), making them discriminating judges in the law-courts and Assembly. Tragedies were part of a competition where audiences learned to judge the performance skills of writers and actors. Aristophanes’ Frogs is a case study in how decisions were actually made. Plato thought it unacceptable that aesthetic judgements could be based on crowd responses. He coined the term theatrocracy to evoke the power of the crowd to make aesthetic judgements, which he thought should remain the preserve of an educated elite. He saw the rule of the people in the theatre as both a metaphor for democracy and an instance of democracy in action.

Ancient literary-historical narratives commonly envisage developments in poetry and music in terms either of gradual technical progress, or of decadence and hyper-sophistication. This chapter argues that Lucretius strikingly combines these two perspectives in the concluding paragraphs of the culture-history at the end of De Rerum Natura 5: the invention of carmina as songs (5.1379–1411) is associated with simple pleasures, emphatically unsurpassed by later refinements in technique which are linked in turn to the insatiable and destructive desire for novelty and luxury; whereas carmina as (epic?) poems are mentioned amongst the refinements listed in the book’s closing lines as steps on the way to a ‘peak’ (cacumen) of artistic and cultural progress (5.1448–1457). The dual narrative adumbrated here may be linked in turn with the dichotomy between text as written artefact and poem as disembodied ‘song’, which has been a focus of attention in recent scholarship on Latin poetry: both models of textuality, like the conflicting models of cultural development that shape the finale to Book 5, are important to Lucretius’ poetics and his Epicurean didaxis. Lucretius’ poem thus exemplifies the manifold ways in which literary-historical narratives may be determined by the discursive demands of the text in question.

The image is at once easy to identify and difficult to define. If the image is, in a basic sense, the visual language of poems, the concept also extends to modes of meaning making which sometimes have little to do with visuality, as well as to related concepts such as metaphor and conceit. This chapter explores this complex conceptual field by considering examples by Amy Clampitt, Bernadette Meyer, Hope Mirrlees, Sylvia Plath, and others. It shows that the image serves often to unify a poem or structure its narrative, and it proposes that we approach the image as both procedural and constructed. A single poem's presentation of an image in process or the repetition of an image across multiple poems may, in this way, represent a psychological drama or a narrative of intellectual understanding. From this perspective, images are not merely found; they are made.

Introducing the concept of verse history and adapting Roman Jakobson's distinction between verse design and verse instance, this chapter considers a sequence of brief case studies drawn from the work of multiple writers: the Beowulf poet, William Langland, the Gawain poet, John Gower, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Willis, Victoria Chang, and André 3000. The chapter proposes that, even after free verse, reading poetry historically still must involve a consideration of the relationship of rhythm to meter. The potential for friction between verse instance and verse design, and more broadly between poems and poetry, implies a need for relations of supplementarity. Moments of rhythmical disturbance disclose how what one had located outside the lone poem – a metrical template, a political ideal, or a historical event – comes rushing into it and through it.

This chapter begins by arguing that debates about whether a poem can be translated reflect debates about the nature of the poem itself. Those who assert that poetry is untranslatable, for example, tend to believe that every poem is a unique event in a specific language. Conversely, those who assert the importance of translation tend to see poems as existing, and as having their meanings, only in relation to other poems or art forms. Considering examples from Roy Fisher, Friedrich Hölderlin, Vittorio Sereni, Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo, César Vallejo, Donald Justice, Elizabeth Bishop, and Frank O’Hara, the chapter demonstrates that in practice, both these conceptual positions are essential. It explores how the practice of translation generates networks of mutually referential identities over time, and it suggests that, more broadly, the emergence of the abstraction known as “the poem” depends on its relation to such interconnections between poems, poets, and translations, ones that may be shaped by imitation, parody, homage, and adaptation.

This chapter examines the relationship between poems and the commodities that structure both our intimate lives and the vast social geographies of the globe. If the content of a poem must often be discovered through interpretative work, reading between the lines of its figurative expressions and other such devices, the commodity, too, is a form of appearance which conceals its origins in labor and the exploitation of that labor. Beginning with this correspondence, and analyzing examples by Bernadette Mayer, Claude McKay, Keston Sutherland, and others, the chapter maps out several ways in which poems both present and negate the commodity. It discusses the poetic representation of labor itself as a commodity, of nonremunerative care work, of the factory and global commodity chains, and of the circulation of commodities through colonial networks. In conclusion, the chapter argues that learning to read the poem is inseparable from learning to read the commodity, for in both cases, the reader's success lies in the ability to re-suture the text to, rather than rescue it from, its worldly net.

This Introduction explores what it means to encounter a poem. What is involved when we read a poem in a book, hear a poem at a poetry slam, or translate a poem for readers of another language? What ideas about “the poem” inform such encounters, shaping what readers and audiences want from poems and what they do with them? This chapter examines the conceptual relation between the terms “poem” and “poetry,” as well as the shifting relations between “poem,” “song,” “hymn,” and other related terms. The Introduction considers how ideas about the poem have changed over history and how they differ between cultures. It then addresses several influential ideas about the poem, especially the notion of the individual poem as a unified whole and the notion of the poem as singular, as valuable in its difference from other poems. This chapter concludes that to encounter a poem is necessarily to encounter a work which, whether as object or experience, is always already entangled with other poems and with ideas of the poem as such.

This chapter explores the concept of voice, both as the marker of an individual poet and as a poem's specific configuration of form and content. Taking as its chief case study the work of Ishwar Gupta, the chapter examines voice as vocal utterance and as the representation of identity. It shows how Ishwar Gupta's singular and innovative voice, epitomizing a shift in the history of Bengali poetry from an oral to a written poetics, is characterized both by intricate sound play and by its politically charged representation of the modern city in colonial India. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that, even when encountered as text on the page, the voice of Ishwar Gupta's poems remains living and material: this is a vernacular voice, sensitive to the everyday, the local, and the urban. In this way, the voice of the poem conveys the lived materiality of a specific historical moment.

This chapter examines the opposition between, on the one hand, an approach to diction as the index of broader poetic, historical, and social formations (e.g., genre, period, and class) and, on the other hand, an approach to diction as the expression of an individual poem's singularity, whereby the choice and the meaning of every word is specific to that poem. The chapter then considers two nineteenth-century examples, neither of which neatly fits this dichotomy: George Gordon Byron's Don Juan and Catherine Fanshawe's “Lord Byron's Enigma.” The first of these subversively amalgamates multiple, generally available vocabularies into its own idiosyncratic vernacular, while the second produces singular effects out of an entirely formulaic lyrical diction. The chapter thereby proposes that diction reveals in the individual poem a constitutive tension between singularity and exemplarity.

This chapter begins with a familiar antithesis: the opposition between the lyric poem and the novel. If the former seems to be characterized by the capture of a single instant, the expression of subjective thoughts and emotions, and a reaching after eternal truths, the latter seems instead to move through time, to fictionalize the objective world, and to be caught in the social and political webs of real life. This chapter challenges this received wisdom by considering the hybrid genre of the verse-novel and by taking as its chief case study George Meredith's 1862 verse-novel Modern Love. Meredith's work simultaneously dissolves and highlights the borders of the single poem, forcing readers to reconsider the relationship of the individual lyric to a larger whole, to the narrative threads running through that whole, to other individual poems, and to other generic alternatives. The chapter concludes by arguing that, because the act of reading verse-novels is often so self-conscious, the genre productively questions ideas of singularity and of self-sufficiency.

This chapter approaches the concept of the poem through the recitation of oral praise poetry in interpersonal exchanges and in an increasingly textual world. Blending literary history, textual analysis, and autoethnography, the chapter illuminates a decolonial approach to the poem, shifting from an emphasis on the individually authored work to the value of shared practice. Through a close analysis of nhetembo dzemadzinza, a genre of oral clan praise poetry central to Shona-speaking people in Zimbabwe and its environs, the chapter considers the function of poems in rites of passage, affirmations of kinship, and erotic exchanges, while also affirming the interpretive acumen of collectives rather than individuals. The chapter then addresses the reimagination of nhetembo by poets who, living in the diaspora, seek nevertheless to claim a nonhierarchical, decolonializing set of social relations.