An investigation of how American poetry since Whitman makes its
beginnings, with what means and to which political and aesthetic ends,
and how it addresses fundamental questions about what the future is and
how it may be affectednow.
Although issues of futurity have become more and more central to
literary and cultural studies in recent years, especially in
environmental criticism, no scholarly work has yet addressed the topic
of beginnings in American poetryin sufficient scope or detail or with
adequate theoretical background. This book is a study of how beginnings
are made in American poetry, and to what ends. It borrows Walt Whitman's
term "future-founding" to establish a theory ofpoetic beginnings that
asks how poetry relates to notions of the future and how it imagines,
constructs, and influences this future in the present. Furthermore, it
seeks to change the way literary scholars think about futurity with
regard to American poetry: they most often conceive of it in terms of
newness alone, yet a deeper theorization of beginnings must open up new
ways of understanding the complexities of this relation. With chapters
on Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser,
Allen Ginsberg, and future-founding poetry after 9/11, this book
explains how American poetry makes its beginnings, with what means and
to which political and aesthetic ends, and how it addresses fundamental
questions about what the future is and how it may be affected now.
Sascha Pöhlmann is Associate Professor of American Literary History at
Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich.
