The Defective Art of Poetry

Treating the work of Sappho, Goethe, Blake, Hoelderlin, Verlaine, George, Moerike, and Yeats in detail, Bennett makes the provocative argument that the nature of lyric poetry in the West has an element of defectiveness. This study delves into the irresolvable conflict between a poem's guise as quasi-architectural stasis and quasi-musical kinesis.