The Poetics of Agency: Action and Form in Post-War US Poetry

Focusing on the poetry and poetics of four pivotal authors, this book examines how experimental approaches to poetic form in the post-war United States rejected the model of the indivisible subject as the principal locus of artistic creation, and in so doing reframed period-defining questions surrounding the limits and possibilities of human agency.

In the decades following the Second World War, poetry in the U.S. was marked by a resurgence of manifesto culture, where practitioners and scho...