Poetics of Agency, The: Action and Form in Post-War US Poetry (Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics) - Hardcover

Woodham, Tymek

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 135041722X ISBN 13: 9781350417229

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026

Synopsis

Focusing on the poetry and poetics of four pivotal authors, this book examines how experimental approaches to poetic form in the post-war United States rejected the model of the indivisible subject as the principal locus of artistic creation, and in so doing reframed period-defining questions surrounding the limits and possibilities of human agency. In the decades following the Second World War, poetry in the U.S. was marked by a resurgence of manifesto culture, where practitioners and scholars from a range of political persuasions debated fiercely the common presumptions underpinning the practice and interpretation of poetry. These debates were all primarily concerned with the agency of poetic writing and performance, including what cognitive or affective processes particular formal arrangements can be said to enact within a reader, or how different approaches to the writing and reading of poetry might encourage more desirable modes of acting in the world. Looking specifically at the work of Charles Olson, Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara and Denise Levertov, this book asks what role poetry plays in conceptualising human agency, and what interdisciplinary place the practice of poetry has within questions typically framed by the disciplines of philosophy and the social sciences.

About this title

About the Author

Tymek Woodham is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, UK.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 135041722X
• ISBN 13: 9781350417229
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 270