Inscription and Modernity

Book excerpt: Inscription and Modernity charts the vicissitudes of inscriptive poetry produced in the midst of the great and catastrophic political, social, and intellectual upheavals of the late 18th to mid 20th centuries. Drawing on the ideas of Geoffrey Hartman, Perry Anderson, Fredric Jameson, and Jacques Rancià ̈re among others, John MacKay shows how a wide range of Romantic and post-Romantic poets (including Wordsworth, Clare, Shelley, Hölderlin, Lamartine, Baudelaire, Blok, Khlebnikov, Mandelstam, and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann) employ the generic resources of inscription both to justify their writing and to attract a readership, during a complex historical phase when the rationale for poetry and the identity of audiences were matters of intense yet productive doubt.