Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women's Poetry examines representations of philosophical discourses in Modernist women's writing. Philosophers argued in the early twentieth century for an understanding of the self as both corporeal and relational, shaped and reshaped by interactions within a community. The once clear distinction between self and other was increasingly called into question. This breakdown of boundaries between self and world often manifested in the style of early twentieth-century literary works. Modernist poetry, like stream of consciousness fiction, used metaphor, sound, and a revision of received grammatical structures to blur the boundaries between the individual and collective. This book explores the ways that feminist writers like Mina Loy, H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore used style and technique to respond to these philosophical debates, reclaiming agency over a predominantly male philosophical discourse. While many critics have addressed the thematic content of these writers' work, few scholars have taken up this question while focusing on the style of the writing. This book shows how these feminist poets used seemingly small stylistic choices in poetry to make necessary contributions to contemporary philosophical discourses, ultimately rendering these philosophical conversations more inclusive.

The Intersection of Poetry and Jungian Analysis Through Metaphor: In Creation You Are Created explores the relationship between Jungian psychoanalytical intervention and poetry, focusing on the emergence of metaphor, which occurs in both processes, as it happens in neuroscience and fairy tales.Metaphor is a mode of communication that forms a bridge between different experience domains through associative linkages: it refers to a subject by mentioning another for rhetorical effect. Indeed, the prominence of metaphor in Jungian therapy is a characteristic that differentiates it from other forms of treatment. That’s because metaphor—as we will see in this book—is deeply rooted in the body in two ways: It is used to organize bodily sensations cognitively and is located on the border between mind and brain. C. G. Jung uses a metaphor when he observes, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

Spanning four books across a six year period, Darling''s selected delivers a natural cohesion, a sense of the single, complex gesture, sharply whittled from these formerly separate visions. In the opening poem, Darling writes, "when she falls in love/ physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it,"posing a thesis statement for the poems'' skeletal, clawing elegance. At the center of this book is a failed engagement, a sudden abandonment, tinged with violence, which serves as Darling''s flood subject, and expressed most often though erasures and extended narratives centered on playwriting and theatrical performance. Specifically, Shakespeare''s Ophelia appears as a wire running through the poems, serving as a totem for the speaker''s despair and aesthetic concerns. Those who have followed Darling''s astonishing artistic output will be delighted to possess this selection of her strongest and most current work. --Allison Benis White "Truest intimacy comes with an awful paradox: How can what is closest to us also be what is furthest away? An uncanny familiarity binds together these poems selected from the volumes Kristina Darling has written, so much so, it can feel as if each poem is trying to make the same gesture, to show us something--some scene, some relic, some person, some story, some confession--that retreats into obscurity as soon as a portion is revealed. Motifs surface and resurface again, nodes of a bare nerve: a silken dress, a bouquet of flowers, a seascape, a you, a her, a window, a text, a room. The great virtue here is a poetry that makes of itself an inner chamber, a place aside from the grand narratives--be they Shakespeare''s tragedies, or a text of which we have but the footnotes--that give ground to thoughts so quiet we seldom hear them even within ourselves. It is an old word, but an apt one, that describes these pages: they are lovelorn. That is, they suffer the thing they seek; and they offer us steadfast company as we do the very same."--Dan Beachy-Quick "The remarkably prolific Kristina Marie Darling presents selected poems covering only 6 years, but many styles. Intensely literary, and visually beautiful as well, these poems in the form of footnotes, erasures, lyric essays, and meditations on other texts, show the full array of her interests and literary powers. She has the ability to create haunting and intimate physical spaces with her language and her visual arrangements. Reading these poems, you will feel like you are in a carefully curated environment--like those foreign films you saw as a teen that made you, when you emerged into the bright light of your boring life, want to take a train to a rainy European city and fall in love with the wrong person."--Matthew Rohrer "What an inventive and brilliant collection this is, finding in free verse, in prose, in Shakespeare, in memoir, in erasure, and even in footnotes surprising opportunities for lyric meditations on love, violence, womanhood, and death. The poetry here is always intimate and lush, narrative voices and poetic modes interrupting each other, gesturing toward each other, concealing just below their many surfaces that sense of a story urgently trying to be told. This is a remarkable collection by a poet of depth and vision."--Kevin Prufer "This marvelously rich collection, gathering selections from Darling''s last four books, displays the complete range of her formal invention. She uses both footnotes and erasure to suggest social forces constantly repressed, but refusing to remain so, transforming themselves into constantly emergent truths. Her dynamic visual and verbal strategies create a dramatic vitality on every page. And indeed, drama is at the center of it all, in a long excerpt from her 2015 Women and Ghosts, a feminist reading of Shakespeare''s tragic heroines. The power and clarity of her voice and the haunting echoes of her imagery forge a stunning and deeply moving work."--Cole Swensen Poetry. Women''s Studies.

The essays in the collection examine, from a variety of perspectives and conceptual standpoints, the ways performative language in contemporary poetry can be politically charged. The poetic text, then, becomes a spectacle, which ultimately renegotiates the power dynamics implicit in the simple act of looking. As the language unfolds before the reader, they are involved and implicated in a revision of what is and what always has been an unequal share of power on the stage of textual authorship and readerly interpretation. In Look to Your Left: A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle, Darling grounds these ambitious theoretical discussions (and interventions) in poetry by women, non-binary writers, and writers of color, with a particular emphasis on texts that have been heretofore undertheorized.

The essays collected in this volume survey the major works of modern American poetry, from magnificent epics like Hart Crane's "The Bridge" and Wallace Stevens's "Auroras of Aurmn," to such central lyrics as Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Maranne Moore's "Poetry." the complexity of modern American poetry has demanded appreciation and analysis of an especially high order, and the list of critics included here makes up a veritable all-star team of close readers, from Kenneth Burke to Helen Vendler, from Richard Poirier to David Bromwich.

As authors and publishers, individuals and collectives, women significantly shaped the modernist movement. While figures such as Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein have received acclaim, authors from marginalized communities and those who wrote for mass, middlebrow audiences also created experimental and groundbreaking work. The essays in this volume explore formal aspects and thematic concerns of modernism while also challenging rigid notions of what constitutes literary value as well as the idea of a canon with fixed boundaries. The essays contextualize modernist women's writing in the material and political concerns of the early twentieth century and in life on the home front during wartime. They consider the original print contexts of the works and propose fresh digital approaches for courses ranging from high school through graduate school. Suggested assignments provide opportunities for students to write creatively and critically, recover forgotten literary works, and engage with their communities.

In the teens and twenties, New York was home to a rich variety of literary subcultures. Within these intermingled worlds, gender lines and other boundaries were crossed in ways that were hardly imaginable in previous decades. Among the bohemians of Greenwich Village, the sophisticates of the Algonquin Round Table, and the literati of the Harlem Renaissance, certain women found fresh, powerful voices through which to speak and write. Enda St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker are now best remembered for their colorful lives; Genevieve Taggard, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Helene Johnson are hardly remembered at all. Yet each made a serious literary contribution to the meaning of modern femininity, relationship, and selfhood. Making Love Modern uncovers the deep historical sensitivity and interest in these women's love poetry. Placing their work in the context of subcultures nested within national culture, Nina Miller explores the tensions that make this literature so rewarding for contemporary readers. A poetry of intimate expression, it also functioned powerfully as public assertion. The writers themselves were high-profile embodiments of femininity, the local representatives of New Womanhood within their male-centered subcultural worlds. This book captures the literary lives of these woman as well as the complex subcultures they inhabited--Harlem, the Village, and glamorous midtown Manhattan.