Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Poetry and Uselessness: From Coleridge to Ashbery

Poetry and Uselessness: From Coleridge to Ashbery

Archambeau, Robert

Hardcover

Series: Among the Victorians and Modernists

Literary CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0367207362
ISBN13: 9780367207366
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Jan 16 2020
Pages: 254
Weight: 1.16
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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.

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