This chapter considers what kind of utopian articulations can be glimpsed in contemporary British experimental poetry. Three experimental poets writing in the 2010s are analysed in detail: Sean Bonney, Verity Spott, and Callie Gardner. The chapter situates these poets within the British experimental poetry scene, tracing an ecosystem of small-scale independent publishing. DIY poetry magazines such as Zarf (produced in Cardiff, Leeds, and Glasgow) and presses such as the87press, Aquifer, DATABLEED, Sad Press, and many others operated outside of formalised spheres of paid labour. In the 2010s, communities of British poets, publishers, audiences, and readers sustained themselves through a non-commercial ethos of gift exchange. This ethos was explicitly utopian in its attempt to construct an alternative to capitalism through non-alienated economic and social structures. Whilst Herbert Marcuse’s utopian theorisation of the 1960s counterculture feels relevant to this moment in the British experimental poetry scene, the chapter explores how many of these poets expressed scepticism about the form’s inherent political potential. For them, politics, rather than aesthetics, contained the germs of utopian possibility. Their experimental works offer precursors to a futurity that is not yet here, but the arrival of which is necessary for the survival of progressive politics.

This chapter explores the poetry of G. D. H. Cole (1889–1959) as a medium for expressing political ideas, highlighting his dual identity as a socialist intellectual and poet. While Cole is best remembered for promoting guild socialism and contributing to economic history and the Fabian Society, he also published poetry, which he saw as part of his political life. His early and middle-age works, including New Beginnings (1914) and The Crooked World (1933), reflect a serious literary approach, aspiring to integrate historical verse forms within socialist thought. Cole’s poetic output also embraced satire, with The Bolo Book (1921) parodying hymns and popular songs to critique political figures and issues humorously. This blend of literary and satirical genres allowed him to engage readers in socialist discourse through varied tones and forms. By examining both the poetry itself and its cultural reception, this chapter illuminates how Cole’s verse contributed to and reflected British socialist culture in the early twentieth century, offering insight into how poetry served as a vehicle for political engagement in his era.

This chapter explores the writings of working-class female activists during and after the 1984–85 miners’ strike, highlighting the numerous books and pamphlets produced that combined autobiography, group histories, photographs, and poetry. These works were primarily published by radical publishers, reflecting a boom in community publishing in the 1970s and 1980s, which sparked interest in working-class history and the experiences of ‘ordinary’ people. The chapter investigates the writing and publication processes of these texts, as well as their intended audiences. It situates these works within a longer tradition of working-class autobiography and poetry, with roots dating back to the nineteenth century, often serving political purposes - such as the poetry inspired by the Chartist movement or the autobiographical accounts of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, like Maternity (1915) and Life As We Have Known It (1931).The chapter analyses the moral economy created by women’s strike literature, focusing on how personal narratives were used for political impact, even when the authors downplayed their political identities. It argues that through authentic expressions of personal experience and emotion, women sought to establish themselves as legitimate political actors, thus validating their political aspirations within the leftist discourse of the time.

A fictional covenant is established to inquire into humanity. Benjamin Franklin’s writings help define the tasks of the covenant. The fragmentation of the German nation is lamented. Frederick the Great’s correspondence with Voltaire is cited at length to provide insight into the problems facing a monarch confronted with German disunity, war, and the ideal of Humanity. The personal and political failures of Emperor Joseph II are the subject of discussion, introduce by Friedrich Gottlob Klopstock’s ode to Joseph. Contemporary German poetry is described in prophetic terms, but it fails to address contemporary political issues. The chapter closes with Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg’s Ode to the Crown Prince of Denmark.

“The Poet” is what Adorno calls a “carpet essay,” which weaves its announced topics of the poet and poetry into a host of other subjects: character and expression; reception and abandonment; beauty and love; the present, new, and near; the Neoplatonic One or “whole”; and a fundamental “flowing” or “metamorphosis.” Chapter 8 focuses on Emerson’s romantic and proto-existentialist pronouncement that “the man is only half himself, the other half is his expression”; his theory that language “is fossil poetry”; and the proto-pragmatic picture of language in his statement that “all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.” Other topics treated are the place of what Kant calls “unbounded” ideas in Emerson’s account of poetry, thinking as a mixture of reception and activity, and the connections and differences of “Experience” and “The Poet.”

In the People’s Republic of China, according to Mao Zedong himself, literature was to serve politics. But where did the ideas of politics come from, and how did they circulate throughout the state? This book is an exploration of the literary aspects of a political campaign and how literary practice shaped Maoism and the Chinese state. The spring of 1957 found China in the midst of a great bloom. Floral themes and imagery permeated texts across genres of poetry, journalism, political speeches, and fiction. They decorated covers of literary journals, fabric for dresses, and even architecture. Where did these flowers come from? What happened to them in the second half of the year during the Anti-Rightist campaign? This chapter introduces the major questions of the book through the story of the young Shanghainese poet Xu Chengmiao. Through Xu’s poetry and life we explore the flowering of China and the broader question of how individuals participated in Maoism.

This Preface begins with a passage from Pierre Auguste-Renoir’s diary, in which he records the following aphorism: ‘Everything that I call grammar on primary notions of Art can be summed up in one word: Irregularity.’ Taking Renoir’s idea of irregularity as a starting-point, this chapter sketches out the historical origins of impressionism and gives a brief outline of its formal and thematic variety, before gesturing to its significance as a cultural and stylistic reference point for writers at the turn of the century, including the group of British, Irish and American poets at the heart of the present study.

This Introduction offers a historical survey of the relationship between impressionism and literature, especially poetry. The chapter foregrounds the stylistic variety of the visual form – what Renoir called its ‘irregularité’ – as well as its wide range of cultural connotations during the period. It then explores how this irregularity was replicated in literary responses to impressionist art. Tracing the word’s passage out of the Paris salons, into contemporary French writing and across the Channel, it charts how various important ideas in the history of modern poetry – ideas such as decadence, symbolism, vers libre and imagism – were formulated as expressions of (or sometimes as antidotes to) impressionist aesthetics. In doing so, it suggests that ’impressionism’ was one of the crucial terms – often the crucial term – through and against which verse of the period was defined. The Introduction concludes by discussing the drawbacks of recent attempts to propose unified theories of ‘literary impressionism’, and suggests that the relationship between impressionism and literature might more fruitfully be conceived as one of irreconcilable irregularity, particularity and self-difference.

Chapter 2 considers the desire to escape impressionism which shaped Yeats’s early writings. Yeats’s formative visual interests are usually discussed in terms of the tastes he inherited from his Pre-Raphaelite father, but in his early verse and criticism he would often also express hatred for, and a desire to escape, French art of the later nineteenth century. In his writings of the 1890s and 1900s, it is the paintings of Édouard Manet which most disturb Yeats, appearing repeatedly to threaten his early theories of symbolism. Time and again, Yeats strove to counter them with the art of Titian, which came to serve as a paradigm for his own evolving poetics. The present chapter considers the antagonism in Yeats’s thought between modern French painting and the art of the Renaissance, as well as the cognate binaries (of hard outline against glimmering colour, unity against disunity) this came to encompass, before exploring their formative influence on the symbolist poetics he was developing at the turn of the century.

The Afterword considers a passage from Clive Bell’s seminal book of modernist art criticism, Art (1914), in which he puzzles over whether to describe impressionism as an art-historical end-point, while also expressing a deeper uncertainty about the ends of impressionism itself. In particular, he returns to the question that had baffled critics at the inaugural impressionist exhibition in 1874, and which has been a source of vexation to scholarship ever since: the question of whether impressionism is imaginative and self-expressive, or imitative and bound to the external world. By following the twists and turns in Bell's thought, the Afterword reflects on the irregular significance of impressionism to the writers discussed in the present study, before gesturing to its continued importance for the writers who followed them.

This chapter focuses on some representations of the people in some of the literary productions of the 1640s, the decade of the English Civil Wars. The people were seen by some writers as dangerous, unruly, and driven by passions rather than reason. But they were thought by others to be essential to the politics of the country. The chapter traces the tensions between these contrary representations of the people across courtly dramatic performances, political pamphlets, and in poetry and prose connected to the execution of Charles I.

This chapter discusses certain ways that literature represented ‘the people’, and the idea of national community, during the Thatcher years in Britain. Literature essays a range of strategies to evoke collective life: using specific characters as representative of general trends, depicting groups, or making explicit statements about the state of the nation. Nonetheless, in the literature of the 1980s evocations of ‘the people’ prove difficult to sustain: an observation supported by the social and political analysis offered by Stuart Hall. In reflecting a single ‘people’, writers often register the strain, frame the task with irony, or eschew the attempt altogether, and seek to evoke the collective experiences of particular communities. Writers considered in this chapter include Seamus Heaney, Margaret Drabble, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, Jackie Kay, Geoff Dyer, and Martin Amis.

This chapter asks how ‘the people’ has been mobilised in contemporary literature as an anti-hegemonic category for imagining collective life in times of crisis. Reading a handful of poems written by Sean Bonney, D. S. Marriot, and Andrea Brady, the chapter’s hypothesis is that poetic address – the axis of communication, the deictic situation that obtains between articulation and understanding – acts as a cipher for the people in moments of social upheaval. Specifically, this chapter shows how poetic form bears witness to the people as an antagonistic social force defined by class, race, and gender, but also as a category that disarticulates – or has been forcefully disarticulated from – labour and its traditions and cultures.

This chapter examines the “verse politics” of eighteenth-century Asia. It explores how Anglophone authors used epics and ruin poetry to advance imperialism, assess governmental policy, and reimagine the role of India in the British Empire. To demonstrate poetry’s role in politics and imperial policymaking, this chapter focuses on the career of Eyles Irwin, a colonial administrator stationed in Madras during the 1770s and 1780s and one of the earliest authors to publish English poetry while in India. The chapter analyzes his collection of travel poems, the Occasional Epistles (1783), and his lengthy poetic epistle, “The Ruins of Madura, or, the Hindoo Garden” (c. 1785–92), which versifies the holy sites and gardens of an ancient southern Indian city, Madura (Madurai), and the decayed palace of one of its Hindu rulers, Tirumala Nayaka. From these details, and Madura’s ruins, Irwin reanimates a South Indian culture and polity. Epics and ruin poetry reimagined writing about empire not as an attempt at personal fame but as an extension of imperial policy, and in ruin poetry Anglophone authors sought to reconcile the obvious oppression of India with the supposed liberty of Britain’s empire.

This chapter tracks the way the accumulation of capital in the colonial metropole enabled a cross-cultural dialogue among certain poets from the East and the West in London in the 1920s and 1930s, one that gradually diminishes in the postcolonial period. Poetry, in the modernist period, sought to dismantle the binary between authenticity and derivation, a binary which has been given new life in our own moment and has, therefore, blinded us from seeing these poets as participating in a common enterprise, even if it is one beset with many conceptual pitfalls resulting from the colonial relation. Nevertheless, poets as distinct as Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, and Una Marson – and thinkers such as C. L. R. James – wished to construct a universal humanism out of the uneven terrain of imperial modernity, an impulse they shared with such complicated figures as W. B. Yeats and even the violently reactionary Ezra Pound. Ultimately, this unstable humanism gives way to the starker divides of the period of decolonization.