Eldridge succeeds in demonstrating how poetry works and why it matters today, and she is convincing in arguing that a widely interdisciplinary approach, including psychological and neurological studies, is indicated.
Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge is Associate Professor of German in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She works on German literature from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, especially lyric poetry, philosophy, and prosody. Her first book, Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community appeared with Cornell University Press in 2015 and a co-edited volume (with Luke Fischer), Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus: Critical and Philosophical Perspectives, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. She has published articles on Hölderlin, Rilke, Cavell, Wittgenstein, Klopstock, Nietzsche, and Grünbein.