How can poetry embrace morality through focusing on metaphrasts? What is the relation between an allummette and the alpha rhythm? Why is it that money has turned into a metonym of goodness and success? And above all, is it still possible to think of the human subject as a viable category in late modernity? These are some of the questions that J. H. Prynne's poetry addresses. Levity of Design voices a critique of present-day society very much from within, and seeks to demonstrate how Prynne has contrived to single-handedly overcome the impasse created by the legacy of poststructuralism. In a...

This book focuses on W. B. Yeats's critical writings, an aspect of his oeuvre which has been given limited treatment so far. It traces his critical work from his earliest articles, through to his occult treatises, and all the way to his last pamphlets, in which he sought to delineate the idea of a literary culture: a community of people willing to credit poetry with the central role in imagining and organising social praxis throughout society. The chapters of this study investigate the contexts in which Yeats's thought developed, his many disputes over the shape of Irish cultural politics,...