Pablo Neruda’s Nobel lecture “To the Splendid City” was a summary of his poetic practice as well as a consummate presentation of his literary persona to the world stage. Although highly conscious of the political context of his utterance, and hugely laudatory of the recently elected socialist Allende administration, Neruda devoted most of his lecture to evoking the breadth and beauty of the Chilean landscape and the creativity and the imagination of the Chilean people. Evoking the panoramic and eulogistic register of Canto general, Neruda proffered a buoyant and empathetic vision of his homeland, even though some aspects of his approach might seem insufficiently critical to a twenty-first-century literary sensibility. Neruda used the platform of his lecture to give a convincing statement of his identity as a Latin American writer.

This chapter examines a literary critical ‘methodological moment’ from the middle of the nineteenth century to modernism. It argues that the re-emergence of the scientific method in this period was key to the normal scientific study of poetry. By returning to a series of forgotten critical debates about the relevance of the scientific method to the study of poetry, the chapter demonstrates how the nineteenth-century revival of method introduced a technical vocabulary into twentieth-century poetics, an epistemologically and politically charged discourse that centred on concepts of method, hypothesis and scientific law. The second half of this chapter goes on to examine published and unpublished poetry by George Oppen to show how he offered a new way of conceptualising the relationship between poetry and the scientific method. It suggests that Oppen turned to mathematics and set theory to create a new nominalist method that could create rather than explain. However, it is also argued that Oppen’s employment of the mathematical method actually ends up illustrating the epistemological power of poetic artifice: its ability to create the sights and sounds of the invisible but not inexistent multitude that Oppen’s poetry sought to bring into being.

This chapter reads the criticism of I. A. Richards in relation to the tradition of scientific reading sketched in this book, positioning him as a theoretician of linguistic exactitude. Far from Empsonian ‘ambiguity’, Richards’s overall investment in the striving for linguistic clarity reconfigures how we should view his place in the history of the discipline. If close reading is a practice that today prizes ambiguity, contradiction and the play of the signifier, then Richards sits awkwardly as its founder – and, towards the end of his career, Richards would even wonder out loud whether a literary criticism based on exactitude could help facilitate a one-world liberal government. The chapter ends by returning to the question of artifice and the knowledge it can produce, focussing on the Cambridge-based poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who sought to reconfigure Richards’s concept of a linguistic instrument through her verse practice. Reading her poetry and criticism from the 1970s, the chapter shows how Forrest-Thomson localises the idea of poetry as a unique linguistic instrument in her conception of poetic artifice, which she sees as a form of knowing irreducible to scientific explanation.

This chapter shows how Laura Riding’s poetry was responding to a now-unrecognisable scientific regime of reading that prioritised exactitude over ambiguity. For her, this regime was brought about by the emergence of a new kind of literary critic, one she scathingly referred to as a bureaucratic ‘expert’. In response, her verse aimed to develop a superior form of exactitude, which she hoped would provide a poetics of literal truth. However, this chapter suggests that if Riding’s poetry does evince a truth-content, then it is not in its supposed exactitude but rather in how its artifice demonstrates a thinking precisely in excess of the forms of rational knowing that sought to determine it. In Riding’s own poetry – and this despite her best intentions – it is precisely what she would call its graphic and sonorous ‘freakishness’ that displayed the truth-content of that which scientific modernity consigned to the unknowable. This chapter thus reads Riding as an unchosen path for the history of poetics, one devoted to thinking about poetry’s singular truth-content in an era devoted to scientific specialisation and professionalisation.

This chapter introduces the varied, intense, committed, unruly and, above all else, deeply political attempts to fashion a definitive scientific account of poetic production from 1880 to the present. It shows how, when one casts their eye back on nineteenth- and twentieth-century disciplinary history, criticism was not just written by literary critics. It was also an activity undertaken by scientists – by mathematicians, physicists, psychologists, statisticians, public rationalists, early computer scientists, educationalists and other generalist intellectuals seduced by the power of scientific rationality. This chapter then rehearses the major arguments of the book, noting, first, how professionalised literary criticism was shaped by this search for a science of verse. Second, it outlines how a series of modern poets, from Laura Riding to Veronica Forrest-Thomson, theorised how their poetry could produce a form of knowledge removed from the hegemony of scientific rationality. To do this, the chapter outlines a theory of the epistemology and political power of poetic artifice.

The Coda shows how the post-Enlightenment desire for a science of verse has been fundamental to contemporary machine learning technologies. It also reflects on the historical development, ideological commitments and epistemological foundations of the normal scientific study of poetry, both at its inception and in its enduring legacies, inquiring into what is at stake when techno-scientific reason attempts to exert its full domination over the poetic imagination, into how the nineteenth-century dream of a science of verse has shaped contemporary scientific exploration. It does so via the often-overlooked mid-century poet and scientific critic Josephine Miles.

Lyrics in folk songs – defined as those ‘most folks are fond of singing’, to quote Phillips Barry (1939 – shape the mysterious processes by which a song can remain widely known as people hear it, re-create it, and keep it singing, sometimes for generations. I identify prevalent strategies in folk-song words – repetition and familiar imagery, rhetorical framings, parodic echoing and interjection, evocation of childhood and youth, voicing catastrophe and grief, formulaic (yet flexible) structural patterning, and call-and-response engagement – that enable people to carry songs onward and also to be carried by them, by creating shared identification, belonging, emotion, humor, participation, and more. Examples include ballads, lyric songs, and hymns from the U.S. Ozark mountains; a French children’s song; commercial 1960s and 1990s pop hits in English; disaster songs about a Pacific Northwest volcanic eruption, a Mississippi flood, an Oregon shipwreck, and a Spanish mine explosion; and Shona responsorial and improvising songs from Zimbabwe.

Chapter 4 examines how contemporary poetry plays with the world and necessarily puts its own relation to the world at risk, thereby making visible the fragility and creative potential of the world. I analyse wordplay, translational strategies and ‘drifting’ trajectories in poems by Hong Kongese Sinophone poet Xi Xi, contemporary French poet Valérie Rouzeau, Japanese-Francophone poet Ryōko Sekiguchi, Taiwanese Sinophone poet Hsia Yü and multilingual poet Caroline Bergvall. What makes these poets comparable, I argue, is their shared concerns about the poet’s relation to the world, about translational and translingual poetics, migratory and dispersive trajectories of language, identity and life. I examine how these poets employ ludic poetic language to incorporate and transform risk. A poetics of risk emerges from poetry’s performance of the precarious conditions of contemporary life and ultimately of poetry itself.

This chapter opens with the pivotal scene in Goethe’s bestselling novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, when Werther reads Ossian to Charlotte. In describing this moment, Goethe reproduces Ossian’s patterns of rhythm and syntax in his own prose. The effect suggests that Werther and Charlotte share an embodied responsiveness to their reading. Goethe here seems to be drawing upon contemporary theories of universal rhythm and debates about prosody. The idea that poetic rhythm is a sensuous experience that can be shared between readers is then pushed to the extreme in the Roman Elegies, in which he playfully compares prosody to sex. The final section of this chapter focuses on Elective Affinities and shows how the novel’s comparison between chemical bonds and bonds of human affection extends also to a comparison between human relationships and the relational structures of language and metaphor.

This chapter explores the significant impact of the digital age on the realm of literature, focusing specifically on Hebrew poetry as a distinctive case study. This focus is driven by the declining status of literature within Israeli culture and the dynamic state of its reviving literary landscape. The study is structured in two phases: the first delves into practices and phenomena, while the second aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the field’s logic and values by examining different participants and levels. The chapter claims that the necessity of the second phase arises from the current state of the field, where the adaptation of media has become so ingrained that it conceals its influence on literary themes, forms, and language. The chapter addresses this gap using the theoretical framework of mediatization, which explores long-term changes associated with media evolution.

From its “Golden Age” in Paris during the interwar years, to its subsequent rearticulations and revisions in the following decades, negritude has remained something of a moving target for literary-historical inquiry while garnering significant criticism, especially leading up to and in the immediate wake of formal decolonization. This chapter reconsiders negritude’s contested origins and complex trajectory through African and Afro-diasporic thought, identifying suggestive new lexical sources for this supposed neologism that stand to shed light on the underappreciated “oracular” or “prophetic” dimensions of negritude. It argues for the enduring relevance of negritude as a key site for articulations of blackness in French and as a horizon for African literature more broadly.

This chapter explores the question of whether the epistemology of the secret of international law and the necessities it puts in place can be resisted. No definite answer to that question is sought here and only tentative reflections on the possibility of resisting the epistemology of the secret are provided in the following paragraphs. This chapter proceeds as follows. This chapter starts by elaborating on why it matters to spare no effort to resist the epistemology of the secret and rein in its consequences. The chapter then recalls that a mere termination or discontinuation of the epistemology of the secret, of its necessities, and of all the literary, hermeneutical, critical, economic, and ideological attitudes it entails is an impossibility. Resistance, it is subsequently argued, can only take the form of an act of obnubilation, a notion whose concrete implications for international legal thought and practice are subsequently spelled out.

This chapter explores how the revision of amatory poetics creates a throughline across all seven volumes of poems jointly written by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper under the pen name of Michael Field. This chapter argues that Michael Field’s revision of the tradition of love poetry, and specifically the Renaissance tradition of courtly love poetry, opens a space for same-sex eroticism, feminist revision of male-centric tropes and the male gaze, and even calls into question the lyric voice as a construct. Bradley and Cooper’s poems complicate the lover/beloved binary through voice and poetic form, shaping the love lyric into a more apt vehicle for their own unique voice and position.

Chapter 4 unpacks the complex ways in which claims to craft emerge in speechwriters’ metadiscursive accounts of their work. As theoretical background Mapes considers the ways in which more ordinary instances of language play are necessarily distinct from the “exceptional” creativity which defines speechwriters’ work (see Swann and Deumert 2018). Relatedly, she turns to poetics (e.g. Jakobson 1960) to examine how speechwriters exemplify a spectacular, institutionalized expression of the aesthetic or artistic dimensions of language. The subsequent analysis draws primarily on speechwriter memoirs and interviews to investigate the the microlinguistic choices which characterize speechwriters’ claims to artistry; their emphasis on persuasion as creative practice; and their proclivity for formulating themselves as distinctly neoliberal “bundles of skills” (e.g. Holborrow 2018). This chapter thereby demonstrates how poetics/creativity are used as key status-making strategies by which speechwriters shore up their privilege vis-à-vis peers and other language workers.

Chapter 3 illustrates the poetics of illness experience by examining clinical conversations during a psychiatric assessment of a patient. Patients’ narratives in clinical contexts are often fragmentary and contradictory, reflecting their ongoing struggle to make sense of inchoate experience and position themselves in ways that elicit care and concern. Metaphors of illness experience open up narrative possibilities, but may be blocked by conflicting agendas or cross-purposes of clinician and patient. In place of an overarching integrative narrative are interruption, miscommunication, and mutual subversion. Focusing on narratives, with close attention to the speakers’ rhetorical aims, can identify situations of tension and misunderstanding, which can be clarified through cognitive and social analysis tracing the models and metaphors used in clinical exchanges to their personal meaning and embodiment and outward into the social world where they function as part of discursive systems that organize institutions and confer power. Close attention to metaphor in lived experience, social interaction, and cultural performance can yield an account of the dynamics of clinical conversations.

Chapter 8 considers the politics and poetics of alterity or otherness. Others confront us with experiences that may be radically unfamiliar, strange, and unsettling. This may be compounded by illness, trauma, and cultural difference. With empathy and imagination, we can gain an understanding of another’s experience, see their perspective, and build a picture of their predicament. The imaginative spaces and places in their stories offer us a way into another’s lifeworld—even when that world is profoundly different from our own. Narrative medicine provides a pedagogy of empathic understanding through literature. While much of this work employs story, lyric poetry offers another mode of articulating illness experience that may be closer to patients’ emotionally charged, confused efforts to make sense of experiences that do not fit cultural models or templates. The work of the poets Paul Celan and Edouard Glissant sheds light on the power of language to bridge disparate worlds and on the ethical stance needed when empathy fails. A poetics of alterity has implications for efforts to understand individuals’ illness experience and grounding an ethics of care.