This essay analyzes the testimonial occasion organized by Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Pound to honor the poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922). On 18 January 1914, Blunt welcomed six younger poets to his house in Sussex, where they dined on a peacock culled from his flock. At the ritual center of the meal was the presentation to Blunt of a marble box containing his guests’ poems; on the top of the box, designed by Gaudier-Brzeska, was a reclining nude woman. The dinner had a double purpose: to construct a poetic genealogy that would give meaning to a distinctly masculine literary tradition and to make that genealogy visible. Accounts of the event were planted in four journals, and the famous photograph, with the tall, impressively bearded Blunt surrounded by his scions, appears in all the poets’ biographies. With its potent combination of homosocial intimacy and artistic glamour, the “peacock dinner” claimed an important place in its participants’ memories and resonated in their writing for many years.

“Were i a writer, and dead.” that phrase from the preface to roland barthes's 1971 sade fourier loyola embodies a slightly perverse expression of posthumous longing from the critic who composed “The Death of the Author” a few years earlier. Barthes goes on to say how much he would like it if “through the efforts of some friendly and detached biographer,” his life were “to reduce itself to a few details,” to, since he loved neologisms, a handful of “biographemes” (9). These biographical details of taste and tone would somehow transport the writer into space, scatter, touch another body—that body too would be destined to dispersal. The result would be not a whole life but a life full of holes, the way Marcel Proust, Barthes thought, wrote his.

“Your corrections are biting, maternal, just. Your example is luminous.” These words float on the page in susan sontag's last novel, In America, near the end of the book (349). The reader isn't surprised by the indirection of the address, the fused “you” of the narrator's voice looped through the character's. Sontag has been present from the first pages, in which she finds herself traveling through time to nineteenth-century Poland, into a drawing room at a party. She moves about pleasantly dislocated, examining her statuesque characters caught in a tableau vivant as she is about to set them free. They will be freer than Sontag's four grandparents likely were when coming from Poland to America, yet this small group of fictional friends will be swept up in the centripetal power of a charismatic personality with exceptional talent, the historical actress Maryna Z. Now, as the novel is about to close, Maryna is poised to be the inspiring, compelling director of her own small repertory company in America. We have come to trust her completely. The praise for her efforts, those words about correction and example, comes from somewhere over the stage lights out of the depths of some metaphysical, darkened theater but also from inner admonishment and fair-minded assessment. This is how she must be, our Sontag-Maryna; this is what art requires, this is what is needed.

The accumulation of contingent personal details characterizing Frank O’Hara's poetry should be read in relation to his representation of personal choice. Examining O’Hara's poetic and critical texts in the context of American economic and political theory of the fifties, this essay suggests that the question of how personal choice becomes the ordering principle of a poem is identical to the urgent contemporary question of how personal choice becomes the ordering principle of a nation. Cold war discourse depicts personal choice as the guiding principle of a liberal society directed by the sovereign individual citizen. In his personal poetics, O’Hara reverses the liberal dynamic. Instead of reflecting the interiority of the chooser, O’Hara's choices are open to the contingencies of the social environment. Through this radical representation of choice, O’Hara raises the utopian specter of a collective national subject.

After her death, susan sontag was portrayed in many obituaries (including one i wrote for the french daily Le Monde) as an intellectual who had moved from the formalism and aestheticism of her early work to the ethically engaged stance of her later essays, right up to the last one she published in her lifetime, the stinging indictment of American torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Sontag was eloquent, as well as somewhat despairing, in her diagnosis of an “increasing acceptance of brutality” and a “culture of shamelessness” in American life (“Regarding the Torture” 28–29); similarly, after September 11, 2001, she did not hesitate to denounce (in a brief essay that earned her the label of “un-American” in some quarters) the “sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators” in the days following the attack (“Comment”).

This essay is about the pressure on the words poetry and marriage to pair off homologously, to behave isomorphically, and about the forms of resistance to that pressure, examples of which I locate under a term, indifference, that in Romanticism is coupled with conjugality to signify not apathy but recalcitrance. Reading Austen, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schlegel, and Barbauld, I adopt indifference to describe writing that works in fugitive ways outside the forensic boundaries of marriage culture, which constrain marriage writing whether it is epithalamic or anticonjugal. I then argue that Marianne Moore's “Marriage” (1923) and Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband (2001) do not write narrowly for or against marriage as, outrageously, freedom's necessary form but, more widely, write against the foundational grain of a pervasive marriage culture that would preempt the subjects and forms of writing, as well as the question of freedom.

When James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wen-Dell Holmes, and two hundred other prominent American Literary and intellectual figures joined efforts to bring Amelia Edwards to the United States for a public lecture tour in 1889-90, they were acknowledging her importance as a writer and educator. The author of novels, short stories, popular histories, and works of travel literature, Edwards had established a second career as an advocate for the new science of Egyptology. As cofounder of and secretary for the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) in 1882, Edwards wrote extensively for the Morning Post and the Academy in England and Harper's in the United States. By 1887, she had established a strong working relationship with William Copley Winslow of the Boston Museum and received honorary degrees from Smith College and Columbia College for her literary and scholarly achievements. By the time of her tour, Edwards had succeeded in fostering a new understanding of a culture more ancient and exotic than those of Greece and Rome. Audiences for her lectures in both England and America were thus prepared for her to illuminate the Egyptian past, but listeners to this lecture on the social and political position of women in ancient Egypt may have been somewhat startled to find shadows from that past cast on their own present.

In this essay, I reflect on the empirical and subjective foundations of critical readings of poetry. I use my own experience, not because it is more valid than anyone else's but because I have direct access to it. The first section, “The Used-Book-Store Approach,” addresses the formation of poetic canons and the position of the reader as an agent and a consumer. The second section, “The Subway Approach,” gives an example of close reading in a setting where the world within the poem, the world within the reader, and the world outside the reader lose their borders. The third section, “The Rare-Book-Room Approach,” examines the impulse to seek the real thing that poetry can trigger and proposes that the first critical step for the reader consists in assessing the status of the poem as his or her object.