This book offers a ground-breaking exploration of the aesthetics of
poetic freedom. The range is broad, from antiquity to the present and
from Europe and the Middle East into the poetry of the English-speaking
world. Revealing questions about the elusiveness of poetic freedom--what
does the term actually mean?--are repeatedly tested against the
accomplishments of major poets such as Whitman, Dickinson, Rilke, Dante
and Virgil, and their public yet intensely private originality. The
result is a fresh, and well-nigh revolutionary, way of seeing literary
and modern history, or an initiation into the more striking gift of
aesthetic freedom.