Twentieth Century Poetry

Peter Robinson’s third book of literary criticism presents a sequence of chapters exploring ways that selves and situations interact and become imaginatively identified with each other in poems. Readings of works by Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, Louis MacNeice, W. S. Graham, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Curnow, Charles Tomlinson, Mairi MacInnes, Tom Raworth, and Roy Fisher share an interest in how poems can be both attached to, and detached from, the culture, society, and conditions in which they were written. These studies draw out and underline both the ubiquity and elusiveness of the self in the situation of the text. The poems studied here are also discussed as focal points for relations between readerly and writerly selves and their situations in and over time.