Unheard Melodies: Apophatic Poetics and Literary Reading

Unheard Melodies is an essay in comparative poetics. The book draws together readings of fourteenth- and twenty-first-century poetry, from Chaucer and Langland to Claudia Rankine and Ben Lerner, to reframe literary methodologies. Weiskott works through the tension between lineage and family resemblance, between mounting a literary-historical claim to connect old poetry to new and suspending claims of influence in order to draw out similarities in the practice of poetry writing across dispar...