Oak Knoll

This volume presents seventeen new essays that make significant contributions to the study of early modern and modern poetry today. They are written by both established and new scholars. Investigating the affective, formal, and historical dimensions of English and American poetry during the last four centuries, the authors are committed to reexamining the current demands of specialization in literary studies by implicitly expanding the definition of what it means to find literature a home in which contextual and aesthetic issues are mutually informing. Like the scholar-poet John Hollander, whose lasting influence this collection honors, the essays approach the meaning-making arguments that poetry figures forth from disparate angles that are almost always indebted to, but often quarrel with, recent developments in the field of literary study such as new historicism, genre studies, deconstruction, textual criticism, philosophy, and reception history.

Early modern poetry is the subject of the five essays in the first section, which advance compelling arguments about Spenser, Shakespeare, Elizabethan verse satire, religious lyric, and Milton. How poetry recognizes its own past and its limitations is a running theme in these pieces. The second part of the collection engages wider hermeneutic and pragmatic questions regarding the categories of thought that we bring to the appreciation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets such as Tennlyson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens, and to the often contentious relationship between textual critics and "traditional" scholars, as well as between political philosophy and poetry In the third section, the poetry and essays of John Hollander and the manifold worlds created by his work are the subject of investigation that unites the entire collection as a whole. Implicitly they argue that Hollander's pedagogy and practice continue to offer a compelling model for an original, playful faith in the processes of thinking, reading, and reasoning that poetry offers its readers and practitioners.

Whatever their engagements with particular poets and methodologies, the authors' of the essays in this volume are united in their commitment to investigating the category of the literary through the multiple lenses of teachers, scholars, poets, and common readers. The worlds created by the poetic investigations in this volume are daringly new in that they renew our understanding of the category of the aesthetic.