Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism

Book excerpt: What is the political potential of poetry in the contemporary era? Exploring an often overlooked history of Marxist-Feminist poetics in post-war Britain – including such poets as Denise Riley, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Wendy Mulford and Nat Raha – this book confronts this central question to debates about the value of humanities education today. Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism demonstrates how ideas of social reproduction have been central both to the forms of post-1945 British poetry and the educational institutions where poetry is overwhelmingly encountered and produced. Combining new archival research with close readings of key poets of the period, the book charts the interrelated crises both of poetry itself and literary education more widely. Paradoxically, the very marginalisation of poetry in contemporary culture serves to offer the form new opportunities as an agent of social transformation.