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In his 1668 preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton rejected the use of rhyme, portraying himself as a revolutionary freeing English verse from “the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.” Despite his claim to be a pioneer, Milton was not initiating a new line of thought—English poets had been debating about rhyme and its connections to liberty, freedom, and constraint since Queen Elizabeth's reign. This book traces this dynamic history of rhyme from the 1590s through the 1670s. The book uncovers the surprising associations early modern readers attached to rhyming forms like couplets and sonnets, and it shows how reading poetic form from a historical perspective yields fresh insights into verse's complexities. The book explores how early modern poets imagined rhyme as a band or fetter, comparing it to the bonds linking individuals to political, social, and religious communities. She considers how Edmund Spenser's sonnet rhymes stood as emblems of voluntary confinement, how John Donne's revival of the Chaucerian couplet signaled sexual and political radicalism, and how Ben Jonson's verse charted a middle way between licentious Elizabethan couplet poets and slavish sonneteers. The book then looks at why the royalist poets embraced the prerational charms of rhyme, and how Milton spent his career reckoning with rhyme's allures. Examining a poetic feature that sits between sound and sense, liberty and measure, the book elucidates early modern efforts to negotiate these forces in verse making and reading.

This is the first book to focus on the poet's use of the first-person plural voice—poetry's “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, the book uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying “I,” “we” has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, the book's author explores the communal function of poetry—the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural. The author adopts a taxonomic approach to her subject, considering “we” from its most constricted to its fully unbounded forms. The author also takes a historical perspective, following Auden's interest in the full range of “the human pluralities” in a time of particular pressure for and against the collective. Examples from many other poets—including Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens—arise throughout the book, and the final chapter offers a consideration of how contemporary writers find form for what George Oppen called “the meaning of being numerous.” Connecting insights to philosophy of language and to recent work in concepts of community, the book shows how poetry raises vital questions—literary and social—about how we speak of our togetherness.

Keats mixed up Cortez and Balboa. Heaney misremembered the name of one of Wordsworth's lakes. Poetry—even by the greats—is rife with mistakes. This book gathers together for the first time numerous instances of these errors, from well-known historical gaffes to never-before-noticed grammatical incongruities, misspellings, and solecisms. But unlike the many critics and other readers who consider such errors felicitous or essential to the work itself, the book makes a compelling case for calling a mistake a mistake, arguing that denying the possibility of error does a disservice to poets and their poems. Tracing the temptation to justify poets' errors from Aristotle through Freud, the book demonstrates that the study of poetry's mistakes is also a study of critical attitudes toward mistakes, which are usually too generous—and often at the expense of the poet's intentions. Through close readings of Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Clare, Dickinson, Crane, Bishop, Heaney, Ashbery, and others, the book shows that errors are an inevitable part of poetry's making and that our responses to them reveal a great deal about our faith in poetry—and about how we read.

This is the first book of its kind — an introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. The book introduces prose poetry's key characteristics, charts its evolution from the nineteenth-century to the present, and discusses many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today's most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. The book explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry' s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women's essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre. Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.