This book offers a ground-breaking exploration of the aesthetics of
poetic freedom, from antiquity to the present and from Europe and the
Middle East into the poetry of the English-speaking world. Questions
about the elusiveness of poetic freedom are tested vis-à-vis the works
of Whitman, Dickinson, Rilke, Dante and Virgil that result in a fresh,
and well-nigh revolutionary, way of seeing literary and modern history,
or an initiation into the more striking gift of aesthetic freedom.