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 In the arena of poetry and poetics over the past century, no idea has been more alive and contentious than the idea of form, and no aspect of form has more emphatically sponsored this marked formal concern than the line. But what, exactly, is the line? Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee’s anthology gives seventy original answers that lead us deeper into the world of poetry, but also far out into the world at large: its people, its politics, its ecology. The authors included here, emerging and established alike, write from a range of perspectives, in terms of both aesthetics and identity. Together, they offer a dynamic hybrid collection that captures a broad spectrum of poetic practice in the twenty-first century.

A masterful meditation on our most mercurial and abiding of poetic forms—the long poem

For decades, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has shown readers how genres, forms, and the literal acts of writing and reception can be understood as sites of struggle. In her own words, “writing is . . . a praxis . . . in which the author disappears into a process, into a community, into discontinuities, and into a desire for discovery.” It is cause for celebration, then, that we have another work of warm, incisive, exploratory writing from DuPlessis in A Long Essay on the Long Poem.

Long poems, DuPlessis notes, are elusive, particularly in the slippery forms that have emerged in the postmodern mode. She cites both Nathaniel Mackey and Anne Waldman in thinking of the poem as a “box,” both in the sense of a vessel that contains and as a machine that processes, an instrument on which language is played. This study’s central attention is on the long poem as a sociocultural Book, distinctively envisioned by a range of authors.

To reckon with these shifting and evolving forms, DuPlessis works in a polyvalent mode, a hybrid of critical analysis and speculative essay. She divides the long poem and the long poets into three genres: epics, quests, and a composite she terms “assemblages.” The poets she surveys include T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D., Louis Zukofsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Olson, Alice Notley, Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Silliman, Robert Duncan, Kamau Brathwaite, and, finally, Mallarmé and Dante. Instead of a traditional lineage, she deliberately seeks intersecting patterns of connection between poems and projects, a nexus rather than a family tree. In doing so she navigates both some challenges of long poems and her own attempt to “essay” them. The result is a fascinating and generous work that defies categorization as anything other than essential.
 

A collection of essays highlighting the pervasive, yet often unacknowledged, role of Romantic poetry and poetics on modern and contemporary innovative poetry.

Literary history generally locates the primary movement toward poetic innovation in twentieth-century modernism, an impulse carried out against a supposedly enervated “late-Romantic” poetry of the nineteenth century. The original essays in Active Romanticism challenge this interpretation by tracing the fundamental continuities between Romanticism’s poetic and political radicalism and the experimental movements in poetry from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

According to editors July Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson, “active romanticism” is a poetic response, direct or indirect, to pressing social issues and an attempt to redress forms of ideological repression; at its core, “active romanticism” champions democratic pluralism and confronts ideologies that suppress the evidence of pluralism. “Poetry fetter’d, fetters the human race,” declared poet William Blake at the beginning of the nineteenth century. No other statement from the era of the French Revolution marks with such terseness the challenge for poetry to participate in the liberation of human society from forms of inequality and invisibility. No other statement insists so vividly that a poetic event pushing for social progress demands the unfettering of traditional, customary poetic form and language.

Bringing together work by well-known writers and critics, ranging from scholarly studies to poets’ testimonials, Active Romanticism shows Romantic poetry not to be the sclerotic corpse against which the avant-garde reacted but rather the wellspring from which it flowed.

Offering a fundamental rethinking of the history of modern poetry, Carr and Robinson have grouped together in this collection a variety of essays that confirm the existence of Romanticism as an ongoing mode of poetic production that is innovative and dynamic, a continuation of the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition, and a form that reacts and renews itself at any given moment of perceived social crisis.

Musicologist Georgia J. Cowart explores how Antoine Watteau’s late paintings reimagine the symbolic order of absolutism in the wake of Louis XIV’s death.

Antoine Watteau has long been known for the theatricality of his paintings, but what that theatricality signifies has remained elusive. In After the King, Georgia Cowart contends that this mode of painting takes shape in response to the spectacle of Louis XIV’s absolutism, which the painter’s late works transform into a new aesthetic language.

The king’s death marked a turning point in Watteau’s art. In the six years that followed, his paintings turned more decisively toward the musical stage. Evoking theatrical plots, frontispieces, and costume types, they conjured a world in which the legacy of absolutist culture lingered as stylized memory—its rituals, emblems, and pleasures recast through theatrical illusion and ironic distance.

Rather than treating Watteau as a painter of nostalgic reverie or Rococo charm, Cowart situates his art within the immersive performance culture of Versailles and the vibrant Parisian stage, at a time when the opéra-ballet, popular opera, and the commedia dell’arte were charting new theatrical landscapes. Drawing on art history, musicology, theater studies, and Pierre Nora’s theory of lieux de mémoire, she proposes a new framework that understands Watteau’s paintings as acts of theatrical memory and cultural recomposition. 

Elegantly written and conceptually ambitious, After the King reveals how Watteau recoded the symbols of monarchy to stage a post-absolutist cultural imagination shaped by irony, sensuality, and poetic transformation. 

Alexander Pushkin’s four compact plays, later known as The Little Tragedies, were written at the height of the author’s creative powers, and their influence on many Russian and Western writers cannot be overestimated. Yet Western readers are far more familiar with Pushkin’s lyrics, narrative poems, and prose than with his drama. The Little Tragedies have received few translations or scholarly examinations. Setting out to redress this and to reclaim a cornerstone of Pushkin’s work, Evodokimova and her distinguished contributors offer the first thorough critical study of these plays. They examine the historical roots and connective themes of the plays, offer close readings, and track the transformation of the works into other genres.

This volume includes a significant new translation by James Falen of the plays—"The Covetous Knight," "Mozart and Salieri," "The Stone Guest," and "A Feast in Time of Plague."

Aristotle’s much-translated On Poetics is the earliest and arguably the best treatment that we possess of tragedy as a literary form. The late Seth Benardete and Michael Davis have translated it anew with a view to rendering Aristotle’s text into English as precisely as possible. A literal translation has long been needed, for in order to excavate the argument of On Poetics one has to attend not simply to what is said on the surface but also to the various puzzles, questions, and peculiarities that emerge only on the level of how Aristotle says what he says and thereby leads one to revise and deepen one’s initial understanding of the intent of the argument. As On Poetics is about how tragedy ought to be composed, it should not be surprising that it turns out to be a rather artful piece of literature in its own right.

    Benardete and Davis supplement their edition of On Poetics with extensive notes and appendices. They explain nuances of the original that elude translation, and they provide translations of passages found elsewhere in Aristotle’s works as well as in those of other ancient authors that prove useful in thinking through the argument of On Poetics both in terms of its treatment of tragedy and in terms of its broader concerns. By following the connections Aristotle plots between On Poetics and his other works, readers will be in a position to appreciate the centrality of this little book for his thought on the whole.

    In an introduction that sketches the overall interpretation of On Poetics, Davis argues that, while On Poetics is certainly about tragedy, it has a further concern extending beyond poetry to the very structure of the human soul in its relation to what is, and that Aristotle reveals in the form of his argument the true character of human action.

In Available Surfaces , T. R. Hummer explores the art of making both poetry and music, and of the concept of "making" itself. He draws on childhood experiences and experiences as an adult, as a poet, and as an explorer of unworldly spaces to examine that "something ineffable about the process of making of which the poem is the exemplary artifact."

Hummer grew up in the deep South, and spent many of his high school years playing saxophone in various rock and roll bands before he met poetry. This musical influence is visible in his work: he often discusses poetry together with music, or music with poetry, and his career has included both writing and performance.