A thrillingly original exploration of a life lived under poetry's
uniquely seductive spell
"Oh! there are spirits of the air," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this
stunningly original book, Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and
voices that make up the music in one poet's mind. Weaving criticism and
memoir, My Poets explores a life reading and a life read. McLane
invokes not necessarily the best poets, nor the most important poets
(whoever these might be), but those writers who, in possessing her, made
her. "I am marking here what most marked me," she writes. Ranging from
Chaucer to H.D. to William Carlos Williams to Louise Gluck to Shelley
(among others), McLane tracks the "growth of a poet's mind," as
Wordsworth put it in The Prelude. In poetical prose both probing and
incantatory, McLane has written a radical book of experimental
criticism. Susan Sontag called for an "erotics of interpretation": this
is it. Part Bildung, part dithyramb, part exegesis, My Poets extends
an implicit invitation to you, dear reader, to consider who your "my
poets," or "my novelists," or "my filmmakers," or "my pop stars," might
be.