In Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry, Peter Riley confronts our enduring and problematic investment in poetic vocationa myth, he argues, that continues to inform how all our multifarious labors are understood, valued, and exploited. The book seeks to challenge a dominant cultural logic that frames contingent, nonvocational labor as a necessary sacrifice that frustrates the righteous progress towards realizing that seemingly purest of callings Poet. Incorporating the often overlooked or excluded workaday ephemera of three canonical US Romantic poetsWalt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Hart Cranethis volume offers new archival insights that call for a reexamination of celebrated literary careers and disputes their status as renowned or tragic icons of creative vocation. The poetry of Whitman the real estate dealer, Melville the customs inspector, and Crane the copywriter, Riley contends, does not constitute the formal inscription of an antagonistic or discreet poetic labor struggling against quotidian work towards the fulfilment of exceptional individual callings. Instead, the distracted forms of their poetry are always already intermingled with a variety of apparently lesser labors. Ousting poetic production from its default sanctuary of privileged exemption or transcendent repose, the volume refigures the work of the poet as a living sensuous activity that transgresses labors various divisions and hierarchies. It consequently recasts the poet as a...

Binding: Hardcover;212 pages; Publisher: Oxford University Press; Classification: DSBF; Weight: 524 g; Dimensions: 219 x 144 x 20

Something not quite right? You have 21 days from the day you receive it, to send something back.

Please note, we cannot offer refunds on fashion face masks, cosmetics, pierced jewellery, adult toys, and swimwear or lingerie if the hygiene seal is not in place or has been broken.

Items of footwear and/or clothing must be unworn and unwashed with the original labels attached. Also, footwear must be tried on indoors. Items of homeware including bedlinen, mattresses, and toppers, and pillows must be unused and in their original unopened packaging. This does not affect your statutory rights.

Click here to view our full Returns Policy.