Introduction -- Chapter One. Aesthetic Autonomy and the Bourgeoisie: A Love Story -- Chapter Two. The Shadow of the Dome of Pleasure: Coleridge and Aesthetic Autonomy -- Chapter Three. Tennyson as Aesthete and Public Moralist -- Chapter Four. From the Cultured Minority to Minority Culture:The Rise of the Aesthetes -- Chapter Five. Awakened From the Common Dream: Yeats and Aesthetic Autonomy -- Chapter Six. Being Geniuses Together: Gertrude Stein in Paris -- Chapter Seven. T.S. Eliot and the Burial of an American Elite -- Chapter Eight. W.H. Auden: Camp and Crisis -- Chapter Nine. Ashbery Adrift.
Summary:
"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"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.