Table of Contents
Prefatory Notes
Introduction: The Estrangement of Poet and Reader
Critics in the Material World
The Dissociation of the Poet: A Brief History
An Overview of this Study
A Note on Inclusion and Exclusion
1. Romanticism and Politics: Perspectives and Contexts
Romanticism and Liberalism in Conflict
Romanticism, Mythology, and Ideology
From Aesthetics to Real World Politics
Transcendentalism and Empiricism
2. Selfless Reliance: Emerson's Psychology of Power
The Impersonal is Political
Emerson as a Psychologist
Emerson as Literary Guru
The Self as Society
Transcendental vs. Empirical Concepts of Identity
Nominalism, Realism, and Identity
The Post-Transcendentalist Poet
Friends of Solitude
"Experience": The Consequences of Power
3. Pound's Public Mysticism–––and Search for an Audience
The Missing Subject
From Emerson to Whitman to Pound
Pound's Casual Mysticism
Containing Power in Language
The Translator as God
The Search for a Company
Questioning the Public Self
Romanticism, Modernism, and Liberalism (Revisited)
4. Infinity and Community in Emerson and Pound
Public and Private: Emersonian Paradoxes
The Self as Other: More Emersonian Paradoxes
The Community of Solitude (Revisited)
Pound: The Elimination of Otherness
The Cantos as a Mirror of Self
A Brief Summary
5. The Poem as Social Contract: Notes on the School of Pound
Limiting the Self
Williams: The Importance of Place
Paterson, Book One: Twilight of the Gods
Person as Place: Zukofsky, Olson, and Creeley
6. The "New Liberalism" of Williams and Olson
Radical Pluralism: Self and Fact in Paterson
Freedom of Association: The Maximus Poems
Afterword: Wisdom and Community
Notes
Works Cited and Consulted
