Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century. Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries. Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.

Death is no longer a mystery. The magic of eternity has been found. I often hear people wondering if life carries on after death. It always makes me smile. That’s exactly what happens. And I used to think no one would discover the truth while they were alive. I was wrong. A sixteen-year-old boy just did. His name is Jonathan Powers and this is his story. Jonathan’s from a planet called Centurian, but that’s not where his story begins. It begins on Earth with the tragic death of a boy from London, Jonathan Prior. Jonathan Prior’s soul travelled from Earth to Centurian and became part of Jonathan Powers. That much is as it should be. Humans join the consciousness of other humans on a distant planet when they die. It’s what happened next that I don’t understand. Jonathan Powers entered the world of the dead, alive. I’m still searching for answers to how he did it and I’m supposed to know about these things. My name is Rose. I’m a little robin. You might have met me outside your house or in a local park. Don’t worry if you haven’t, you’ll meet me inside this book. I’m helping Jonathan find a way home. It’s one thing to go where only the dead have been, quite another to find a way back.

The femme fatale appears with unceasing regularity in the texts of major poets of the nineteenth century. She symbolises an intractable mystery, a refusal to be defined and a fierce attempt to exist outside the established gender system. Soft-Shed Kisses: Re-visioning the Femme Fatale in English Poetry of the 19th Century interrogates the construction and use of the fatal woman motif in the poetry of canonical male writers of the times, both Romantic and Victorian. Subsequent chapters investigate a variety of poems by John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Charles Algernon Swinburne in which the femme fatale surfaces as the most important character. Close-readings of poetry are enriched by an examination of the same motif in visual art, set against the vivid cultural background of the Victorian era.

This book continues the adventure of a genius named Myles Standish Cabot, who successfully invented a radio that allowed him to visit the planet Venus. There, he finds not just foes and friends, but also a woman that he shall soon marry.