Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets
In 1946 French film critic Nino Frank, having just seen The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura, and Murder, My Sweet linked them all with the term "film noir." No one working on these projects knew they were making film noirs; Frank invented a label that connected them after the fact, and it is because of his label that the genre became famous. Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets aims to do for poetry what Frank did for film: to gather together previously unrelated works in order to better understand and appreciate them as a new, unrecognized literary genre.





In Imaginary Biographies Geoff Klock argues that the bizarre portrayal of historical writers in post-Enlightenment English poetry constitutes a genre, a battleground for two central conflicts: the confrontation of the self-sufficient Romantic imagination with the brute fact of external precursors (in the nineteenth century); and the participation in, and simultaneous deflation of, Romantic idealism (in the twentieth). In William Blake's Milton, the author of Paradise Lost returns to earth to redeem his female half, confront Satan and herald the apocalypse. Percy Bysshe Shelley's Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been physically deformed and mentally ruined by a hellish chariot in The Triumph of Life. Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his Anactoria, hijacks the ancient Greek poetess Sappho and turns her into his anti-Christian Sadistic lesbian vampire cannibal Muse. In The Changing Light at Sandover James Merrill contacts W.H. Auden and William Butler Yeats with a Ouija board and discovers their part in an insane cosmic hierarchy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey abandoned their youthful plans to establish a utopian community in America; Paul Muldoon's Madoc imagines they went through with it and describes the ensuing disaster. John Ashbery's Sleepers Awake gages the work of Miguel de Cervantes, James Joyce and Homer in terms of how much they slept while writing. In TV Men Anne Carson portrays Thucydides, Sappho, and Antonin Artaud anachronistically preparing, or being prepared for, television adaptations.


Klock makes the audacious and fascinating case that the imaginary biography is in continuity with literary criticism. He concentrates on how one poet misreads another by explicitly naming the earlier poet in the latter poem. This "misreading" forms a new genre, creating a new kind of character and a new kind of poem. The result is a dazzling work of literary scholarship that will stimulate debate for years to come.

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Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets
In 1946 French film critic Nino Frank, having just seen The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura, and Murder, My Sweet linked them all with the term "film noir." No one working on these projects knew they were making film noirs; Frank invented a label that connected them after the fact, and it is because of his label that the genre became famous. Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets aims to do for poetry what Frank did for film: to gather together previously unrelated works in order to better understand and appreciate them as a new, unrecognized literary genre.





In Imaginary Biographies Geoff Klock argues that the bizarre portrayal of historical writers in post-Enlightenment English poetry constitutes a genre, a battleground for two central conflicts: the confrontation of the self-sufficient Romantic imagination with the brute fact of external precursors (in the nineteenth century); and the participation in, and simultaneous deflation of, Romantic idealism (in the twentieth). In William Blake's Milton, the author of Paradise Lost returns to earth to redeem his female half, confront Satan and herald the apocalypse. Percy Bysshe Shelley's Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been physically deformed and mentally ruined by a hellish chariot in The Triumph of Life. Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his Anactoria, hijacks the ancient Greek poetess Sappho and turns her into his anti-Christian Sadistic lesbian vampire cannibal Muse. In The Changing Light at Sandover James Merrill contacts W.H. Auden and William Butler Yeats with a Ouija board and discovers their part in an insane cosmic hierarchy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey abandoned their youthful plans to establish a utopian community in America; Paul Muldoon's Madoc imagines they went through with it and describes the ensuing disaster. John Ashbery's Sleepers Awake gages the work of Miguel de Cervantes, James Joyce and Homer in terms of how much they slept while writing. In TV Men Anne Carson portrays Thucydides, Sappho, and Antonin Artaud anachronistically preparing, or being prepared for, television adaptations.


Klock makes the audacious and fascinating case that the imaginary biography is in continuity with literary criticism. He concentrates on how one poet misreads another by explicitly naming the earlier poet in the latter poem. This "misreading" forms a new genre, creating a new kind of character and a new kind of poem. The result is a dazzling work of literary scholarship that will stimulate debate for years to come.

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Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets

Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets

by Geoff Klock
Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets

Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets

by Geoff Klock

Hardcover

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Overview

In 1946 French film critic Nino Frank, having just seen The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura, and Murder, My Sweet linked them all with the term "film noir." No one working on these projects knew they were making film noirs; Frank invented a label that connected them after the fact, and it is because of his label that the genre became famous. Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets aims to do for poetry what Frank did for film: to gather together previously unrelated works in order to better understand and appreciate them as a new, unrecognized literary genre.





In Imaginary Biographies Geoff Klock argues that the bizarre portrayal of historical writers in post-Enlightenment English poetry constitutes a genre, a battleground for two central conflicts: the confrontation of the self-sufficient Romantic imagination with the brute fact of external precursors (in the nineteenth century); and the participation in, and simultaneous deflation of, Romantic idealism (in the twentieth). In William Blake's Milton, the author of Paradise Lost returns to earth to redeem his female half, confront Satan and herald the apocalypse. Percy Bysshe Shelley's Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been physically deformed and mentally ruined by a hellish chariot in The Triumph of Life. Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his Anactoria, hijacks the ancient Greek poetess Sappho and turns her into his anti-Christian Sadistic lesbian vampire cannibal Muse. In The Changing Light at Sandover James Merrill contacts W.H. Auden and William Butler Yeats with a Ouija board and discovers their part in an insane cosmic hierarchy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey abandoned their youthful plans to establish a utopian community in America; Paul Muldoon's Madoc imagines they went through with it and describes the ensuing disaster. John Ashbery's Sleepers Awake gages the work of Miguel de Cervantes, James Joyce and Homer in terms of how much they slept while writing. In TV Men Anne Carson portrays Thucydides, Sappho, and Antonin Artaud anachronistically preparing, or being prepared for, television adaptations.


Klock makes the audacious and fascinating case that the imaginary biography is in continuity with literary criticism. He concentrates on how one poet misreads another by explicitly naming the earlier poet in the latter poem. This "misreading" forms a new genre, creating a new kind of character and a new kind of poem. The result is a dazzling work of literary scholarship that will stimulate debate for years to come.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780826428028
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 06/01/2007
Series: Continuum Literary Studies
Pages: 288
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author


Geoff Klock is the author of How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (Continuum, 2002) a study guided by Harold Bloom's poetics of influence. After getting a Masters degree in English he spent two years studying literature as a night security guard. He was then admitted to Balliol College, Oxford. His doctoral thesis there, Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets, focuses on Romantic poetry and its extensions through the 20th century- specifically poetry's bizarre and idiosyncratic portrayals of historical writers (e.g. Virgil in Dante's Divine Comedy). This work will be followed by a complementary study of the same device in popular culture, (e.g. Johnny Depp's portrayal of William Blake in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man).

Geoff Klock is twenty-seven years old, and was raised in Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. For more information visit his website at www.geoffklock.com

Table of Contents

Introduction

part one

Chapter One: John Milton in William Blake's Milton: A Poem in Two Books (1804)

Chapter Two: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Triumph of Life (1822)

Chapter Three: Sappho in Algernon Charles Swinburbane's Anactoria (1866)

part two

Chapter Four: W.H. Auden and William Butler Yeats in James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover (1982)

Chapter Five: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey in Paul Muldoon's Madoc: A Mystery (1990)

Chapter Six: Miguel de Cervantes, James Joyce and Homer in John Ashbery's Sleepers Awake (1995) and Memories of Imperialism (2000)

coda

Chapter Seven: Thucydides, Sappho, and Antonin Artaud in Anne Carson's TV Men (2000)
Epilogue

Bibliography

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