Poetry has long been regarded as the least accessible of literary genres. But how much does the obscurity that confounds readers of a poem differ from, say, the slang that seduces listeners of hip-hop?  Infidel Poetics examines not only the shared incomprensibilities of poetry and slang, but poetry's genetic relation to the spectacle of underground culture.

Charting connections between vernacular poetry, lyric obscurity, and types of social relations—networks of darkened streets in preindustrial cities, the historical underworld of taverns and clubs, the subcultures of the avant-garde—Daniel Tiffany shows that obscurity in poetry has functioned for hundreds of years as a medium of alternative societies.  For example, he discovers in the submerged tradition of canting poetry and its eccentric genres—thieves’ carols, drinking songs, beggars’ chants—a genealogy of modern nightlife, but also a visible underworld of social and verbal substance, a demimonde for sale.

Ranging from Anglo-Saxon riddles to Emily Dickinson, from the icy logos of Parmenides to the monadology of Leibniz, from Mother Goose to Mallarmé, Infidel Poetics offers an exhilarating account of the subversive power of obscurity in word, substance, and deed.

“Can we learn about the substance and the powers of poetry from the history of nightclubs, of urban lighting, of mathematically-inclined philosophers, of urban pickpocketry? Is lyric poetry obscure by nature, a road to nowhere, an open secret, a conspiracy, a counterfeit? Yes, says Daniel Tiffany, and he means it: his account of the substance, or darkness, of poetry stops in Shakespeare's England, in Mallarme's France, in Holderlin's Germany, and in more obscure locations, to build up its case that poetry has been, can be, perhaps even ought to be a turncoat, a creature of thieves' cant, and of the dance floor: from the pre-Socratics to Villon's jargon to a Vorticist cabaret, 'Orpheus could not turn his back on the underworld.' Here is the rare work of 'theory' and history that might inspire, not only the making of more theory, and the reading of more history, but the creation of new poems.”

“Daniel Tiffany's Infidel Poetics is a thrillingly original series of essays on the interrelation of seemingly disparate realms that turn out—under Tiffany's quirkily brilliant eye—to be essentially related; it will be important not just to readers of the particular texts under discussion (Emily Dickinson, say) but to readers of a range of literature, from Classical Greek to contemporary avant-gardes, who will see their own subjects in revealing and surprising new light. Tiffany takes his place next to Virginia Jackson and Marjorie Perloff in setting a new direction for the entire critical discourse in the field.”

“Among the many contributions to the recent revival of interest in Leibniz’s writings, none is more searching, none more scintillating, and none more consistently disorienting than Daniel Tiffany’s Infidel Poetics, which not only shows how the idea of the monad illuminates certain forms of hermetic poetry but also gives insight into the rationale—the infinitely fine ‘logic’—that governs the production of poetry as such.”