Skepticism and Impersonality in Modern Poetry: Literary Experiments with Philosophical Problems

Winner of the 2026 Hugh J. Silverman Book Prize

Modern literature is often described in terms of its impersonality. What is the significance of this fact?

In Skepticism and Impersonality, V. Joshua Adams follows the history of impersonality in modern poetry from Mallarmé and Eliot through to the present, engaging with work by major poets and critics, but also contemporary philosophers. Rather than seeing impersonality exclusively as a literary historical phenomenon, Adams argues that we shou...