Kirjahaku

In Echo and Critique, Florian Gargaillo skillfully charts the ways that poets have responded to the clichés of public speech from the start of the Second World War to the present. Beginning around 1939, many public intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic lamented that the political lexicon had become saturated with bureaucratic stock phrases such as "the fight for freedom," "revenue enhancement," and "service the target," designed for the mass media and used to euphemize, obfuscate, and evade. Instead of ridding their writing of such language, many poets parroted these tropes as a means of exploring the implications of such expressions, weighing their effects, and identifying the realities they distort and suppress. With its attentiveness to linguistic particulars, poetry proved especially well-suited to this innovative mode of close listening and intertextual commentary. At the same time, postwar poets recognized their own susceptibility to dead language, so that co-opting political clichés obliged them to scrutinize their writing and accept the inevitability of cant while simultaneously pushing against it.This innovative study blends close readings with historical context as it traces the development of echo and critique in the work of seven poets who expertly deployed the method throughout their careers: W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Robert Lowell, Josephine Miles, and Seamus Heaney. Gargaillo's analysis reveals that poetry can encourage us to listen diligently and critically to the insincerity ubiquitous in public discourse.

Queer Allusion uncovers the crucial but underexamined role played by literary allusion in shaping queer poetry on both sides of the Atlantic, from the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 to the Stonewall Riots of 1969. In this wide-ranging, erudite study of influence and personal expression, Florian Gargaillo identifies three major functions of allusion for LGBTQ poets. First, allusion enabled writers to process their experiences through literary antecedents, and thus shape their identities in writing. Second, allusion provided a means to establish connections with other authors at a time when LGBTQ communities were often isolated and clandestine. Finally, establishing links across multiple works helped build a queer literary canon running parallel to the traditional contours of English-language verse. Gargaillo shows that allusion's particular appeal for queer poets lay in its blend of secrecy and openness. LGBTQ poets employed allusion to understand themselves, connect with others, and establish an alternative, underground poetic tradition. Queer Allusion thus provides an innovative framework for studying LGBTQ poetry, tracing lineages from figures like Wilde to A. E. Housman and Countee Cullen, who are rarely considered together due to differences in style, period, or movement. Through incisive close readings and contextual analysis, this book offers a new map of LGBTQ literary history and a new way to view the relationship between queer poets and the poetic past.