Poetry and Cultural Studies

A collection of critical texts exploring poetry's engagement with the social

This volume is the first of its kind to collect classic and contemporary work focused on the intersection of poetry and cultural studies, reaching from Wordsworth's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" and W. E. B. Du Bois's "Of the Sorrow Songs" to present-day essays on rap lyrics, queer poetry, folk poetry, and beyond. Rethinking notions of poetic experiences and their roles in popular or mass culture, these essays effectively delineate the relationship between poetry--a stereotypically private endeavor in the post-Enlightenment West--and the public social culture in which it is engendered.

The writings in Poetry and Cultural Studies also acknowledge the major contributions of both the Frankfurt School, with its close analyses of reading and writing lyric poetry as social practices, and of the Birmingham School's major contributions toward broadening the field of artifacts permissible for serious study with the primarily literary tools of close reading of textual/textural detail. It is a volume that speaks to students, academics, poetry enthusiasts, and those interested in social movements, including slammers, academics, workshop leaders, and poetry theorists.