The book closes with a coda that turns to a set of poems and other writings by William Carlos Williams – including, of course, “This Is Just to Say” – to differentiate between the queer pleasures the book investigates and the profoundly heteronormative world of that famous poem. Williams’s work offers a clear example of how the insights of this book might have purchase beyond the texts and contexts that inspired them, and beyond the fields in which the book’s argument is grounded.

This chapter considers Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems in light of the various difficulties they pose to readers interested in thinking of them in formal and also in generic terms (however broadly construed). I suggest that each of them might be understood as individual attempts to resist intellectual, critical, and hermeneutic recourse to any such generalization per se. A salient feature of these “modernist” “American” “long poems” consists in a variable but tenacious schedule of negations: of literary conventions, of readerly expectations, of internal consistencies, and, ultimately, of any sense of an ending whatsoever. I reflect upon the implications of negation and excess when discussing “long poems” by three straight, white male poets, especially in a context as institutional as a Cambridge History.

This chapter traces key moments and motifs in the history of the translation of Greek texts primarily into English. It highlights how Greek translation becomes paradigmatic for translation tout court, informing both translation rhetoric and practice, and then tackles the model cases of Homer and Sappho, the former diachronically, the latter synchronically through several case studies from the first half of the twentieth century. It homes in on modernist writers’ particular understanding of translation as poised between critical scholarship and creative practice in order to argue that poets such as H.D. or Ezra Pound evade or even subvert existing modes of conceptualizing both ‘Greece’ and translation, thus opening the way for the plethora of approaches that characterize Greek translation today. The chapter concludes with a cautionary note as it examines the programmatic resistance to Greek translation displayed by Virginia Woolf and Yorgos Seferis.

A study of Elliott Carter’s song cycles and other text settings from the period 1998-2011, with close readings of both poetry and music. Included are individual analytical essays on Tempo e tempi (poetry by Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Giuseppe Ungaretti), Of Rewaking (poems by William Carlos Williams), In the Distances of Sleep (poems by Wallace Stevens), Mad Regales (poems by John Ashbery), “La Musique” (poem by Charles Baudelaire), On Conversing with Paradise (texts from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos), Poems of Louis Zukofsky, What Are Years (poems by Marianne Moore), A Sunbeam’s Architecture (poems by e e cummings), Three Explorations (poems by T. S. Eliot), The American Sublime (poems by Wallace Stevens).

This chapter examines some conceptual problems that arise when we apply new embodied theories of mind in literary analysis. Critics have used affordance theory and models of predictive processing to reflect on narrative and genre, the literary devices and codes that shape our expectations about how a text will unfold. Instead of reinforcing the functionalist assumptions that guide cognitive scientists, including the effort to treat reading literature as just another cognitive task that is directed toward problem solving, this chapter proposes to view it instead as an emotionally engaging or ethically challenging way of reconstructing the ecology in which we think. This approach helps theorists honor the conceptual resources that the 4Es offer by giving more heed to individualized and culturally specific encounters with literary texts. I end by examining a poem that demands that we alter prevailing interpretive practices, thus exposing the way literature reorganizes emotional responses and value schemes.