How do poems remember? What kinds of memory do poems register that factual, chronological accounts of the past are oblivious to? What is the self created by such practices of memory? To answer these questions, Uta Gosmann introduces a general theory of poetic memory, a manner of thinking that eschews simple-minded notions of linearity and accuracy in order to uncover the human subject s intricate relationship to a past that it cannot fully know. Gosmann explores poetic memory in the work of Sylvia Plath, Susan Howe, Ellen Hinsey, and Louise Gluck, four American poets writing in a wide range...