The Defective Art of Poetry Sappho to Yeats

Treating the work of Sappho, Goethe, Blake, Hölderlin, Verlaine, George, Mörike, and Yeats in detail, Benjamin Bennett makes the provocative argument that the nature of lyric poetry in the West has an element of defectiveness. The book sets out to prove that using the idea of perfection, which is applied routinely as a criterion of excellence in lyric poems, is fundamentally misguided. Once poetry in the Western tradition is established as fundamentally imperfect, Bennett reveals it to be as deeply exposed to problems in the social and political environment as any other form of literature.

Benjamin Bennett is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Virginia, USA. His recent books include All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater (2005), The Dark Side of Literacy: Literature and Learning Not to Read (2008), and Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism: Its Trail from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler (2013).

Introduction
PART I: ELEMENTAL POETRY
1. Sappho and the Wordsworth Problem
2. The Poem as Hieroglyph: Goethe's 'Über allen Gipfeln'
PART II: METER AND MEANING
3. The Voices of Experience in Blake
4. Meter and Metaphysics: Hölderlin's 'Hyperions Schicksalslied'
PART III: THE SYMBOLIST MOVE
5. A Song to Worry about: Verlaine's 'Chanson d'automne'
6. Stefan George and the Construction of a Poetic Idiom
PART IV: THE POLITICAL DIMENSION
7. Criticism as Wager: The Politics of the Mörike-Debate and Its Object
8. The Things on Yeats's Desk
Bibliography