Literary Theory and Poetry

Modern literary theory has opened up a variety of new approaches to reading texts of all kinds, however these have been applied mainly to works of prose fiction. This volume contains a collection of essays which attempts to apply these theoretical techniques to works of poetry. The texts chosen for examination include those of the established canon (Yeats, Eliot and Pound), performance poetry and recent work which has tended to be ignored in the past by traditional forms of criticism. A major theme of the book is the range of poetry which can now be treated by the new theories. The text also examines the similarities between recent developments in criticism and poetry, and the ways in which they complement each other. Contributors apply new theoretical insights to the work of Gertrude Stein, black American women's poetry, Ishmael Reed, Frank O'Hara, the Peruvian poet Ruben Dario and many others.