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14 - The Poem as World

from Part III - The Poem in the World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2024

Sean Pryor
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Sydney
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Summary

Can a poem create a world? Among other poets, Wallace Stevens affirms a poem's capacity to make a mountain or even a planet. This chapter examines the history behind the idea of the poem as worldmaking, from Renaissance ideas rooted in antiquity, through Enlightenment concepts such as heterocosm, to modernist ideas of autonomy, including W. H. Auden's “secondary worlds.” Allowing for subsequent historicist, political, and poststructuralist critiques of such ideas, it argues for the enduring value of the concept of poem as worldmaking. Some theorists of lyric have advanced a notion of the poem as a ritualistic event of enunciation and others have held that the poem, even if not primarily mimetic, still evokes a world. This chapter argues for a synthetic model of the poem as enacting an event in language and as also producing a polyspatial, polytemporal world, as exemplified by poems by Patience Agbabi, Margaret Atwood, Tracy K. Smith, and others. Drawing on the field of world literature, it explores how the poem's transnational and transhistorical travel worlds the world. Analyzing a poem by A. K. Ramanujan, it asks about the ethical implications of a poem's worldwide reach.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • The Poem as World
  • Edited by Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to the Poem
  • Online publication: 30 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009498852.018
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  • The Poem as World
  • Edited by Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to the Poem
  • Online publication: 30 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009498852.018
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Poem as World
  • Edited by Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to the Poem
  • Online publication: 30 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009498852.018
Available formats
×