Publisher's Synopsis
How modern is modern? How does the new come to be the surface which makes the personality visible? How does an offset become a peak? One of the key differences in the poetry world is between those who see a stream of innovation over the last 50 years, a source of hope and renewal at each moment, and those who see innovation as self-willed and unnecessary, so that poems in the style of the 50s still "look up to date". There seems to be a lot of confusion about this issue: this book is an attempt to improve the quality of debate by describing the stylistic innovations since 1960, giving dates to the changes, and fitting them into the horizon of a time -- a unique composite of collective ideas, wishes, or projections, evanescent and rich in fine interactions. An ample accumulation of descriptive and comparative material allows us, finally, to detect what is innovative and what is not -- and gives us a technical vocabulary with which to describe poems, capturing them as art-historical objects, before or beside aesthetic judgment.;Probes into the zone of conservatism allow us to identify it as a form of melancholia, a collective rancour, a thermal death, a distrust of consciousness -- a modern disease which thrives on islands. Finally, we stumble into the zone of what isn't clear yet, or hasn't happened, in order to flourish the names of poets to whom the future may belong.
