Poetry is dead. Poetry is all around us. Both are trite truisms that
this book exploits and challenges.
In his 1798 Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth
anticipates that readers accustomed to the poetic norms of the day might
not recognize his experiments as poems and might signal their awkward
confusion upon opening the book by looking round for poetry, as if
seeking it elsewhere. Look Round for Poetry transforms Wordsworth's
idiomatic expression into a methodological charge. By placing tropes and
figures common to Romantic and Post-Romantic poems in conjunction with
contemporary economic, technological, and political discourse, Look
Round for Poetry identifies poetry's untimely echoes in discourses not
always read as poetry or not always read poetically.
Once one begins looking round for poetry, McGrath insists, one might
discover it in some surprising contexts. In chapters that spring from
poems by Wordsworth, Lucille Clifton, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe
Shelley, McGrath reads poetic examples of understatement alongside
market demands for more; the downturned brow as a figure for economic
catastrophe; Romantic cloud metaphors alongside the rhetoric of cloud
computing; the election of the dead as a poetical, and not just a
political, act; and poetic investigations into the power of prepositions
as theories of political assembly.
For poetry to retain a vital power, McGrath argues, we need to become
ignorant of what we think we mean by it. In the process we may discover
critical vocabularies that engage the complexity of social life all
around us.
