Overview

Winner of the ASLE-UKI Book Prize 2023. The commons and enclosure are among the most vital ways of thinking about poetry today, posing urgent ecological and political questions about land and resource ownership and use. Poetry & Commons is the first study to read postwar and contemporary poetry through this lens, by putting it in dialogue with the Romantic experience of agrarian dispossession. Employing an innovative transhistorical structure, the book demonstrates how radical Anglophone poetries since 1960 have returned to the 'enclosure of the commons' in response to political and ecological crises. It identifies a 'commons turn' in contemporary lyric that contests the new enclosures of globalized capital and resource extraction. In lucid close readings of a rich field of experimental poetries associated with the 'British Poetry Revival', as well as from Canada and the United States, it analyses a landscape poetics of enclosure in relationship with Romantic verse. Canonical Romantic poetry by Wordsworth and Clare is understood through the fine-grain textures of the period’s vernacular and radical verse and discourse around enclosure, which the book demonstrates contain the seeds of neoliberal political economy. Engaging with the work of Anne-Lise François and Anna Tsing, Poetry & Commons theorizes commoning as marking out subsistence 'rhythms of resource', which articulate plural, irregular, and tentative relations between human and nonhuman lifeworlds.

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9781836243984

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Reviews

'This is an excellent, highly original, and necessary study of poetry and radical thought. In tracing both the persistence (and permutations) of the concept of the commons alongside a probing reading of lyric poetry in the Romantic and British and North American postwar periods, Poetry & Commons makes anew the case for thinking about lyric in the neoliberal era.' - David Farrier, Professor of Literature and the Environment, University of Edinburgh 'Daniel Eltringham’s brilliant Poetry & Commons traces the transhistorical relationship between a poetry of the common word and the continuing resistance to ongoing practices of enclosure, dispossession, and extraction. Few critics have so precisely articulated the conceptual range with which the commons is necessarily entangled: from a romantic-era politics of enclosure to contemporary ecopoetics; from land rights and the right to roam to the interdependencies of ""earth’s human and nonhuman tenants""; and, ultimately, from the origins to the outputs of the Anthropocene. Throughout, Eltringham has his finger on the pulse of the poet’s temporally open practice of ""commoning historical languages of resistance"". Poetry & Commons constitutes a major expansion of our understanding of the literary commons.' - Stephen Collis, Professor of English, Simon Fraser University ‘Through meticulous, expansive research and illuminating close readings… Eltringham’s negotiation of entangled Romantic and contemporary forms of enclosure and commoning offers an abundantly original, thorough and politically sharp analysis of both the cultural history of the commons and the kinds of conceptual work the commons perform in mapping the historically inflected relationship between human and more-than-human worlds.’ Mandy Bloomfield, Review of English Studies ‘[O]riginal and discerning… Eltringham marshals an eloquent and superbly researched argument, covering the literary and social implications of the issues and controversies involved in land use, and this study makes a genuinely significant intervention in current debates.’ Roger Ebbatson, Green Letters ‘Original, rigorous and timely, this book puts Romantic-era poetry into fruitful dialogue with post-war and contemporary British avant-garde poetry. In doing so, Eltringham reveals why the figure of the commons might matter now more than ever, in the face of market-driven, neoliberal forms of enclosure, entwined with ecological crisis. Eltringham compellingly demonstrates how we can use historical knowledge in the contemporary moment by tracing the ways in which recent poets revisit, revise and revivify ideas of the commons and practices of commoning. The book’s materialist approach offers an inventive take on some well-known poems by canonical Romantic writers, as well as introducing readers to a wealth of new poetic and contextual materials. The judges especially valued its meticulous research, astute in-depth analysis and illuminating discussions of both poetry and politics. But there are moments of humour and hope too. As Eltringham wryly points out, “sheep and poetry are uneasy companions;” yet his book amply reveals how such unlikely alliances might model productive forms of collectivity and resistance.’ Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK and Ireland) Book Prize

Author Information

Daniel Eltringham is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English at the University of Sheffield.

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