In this Book

buy this book Buy This Book in Print
summary
Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century.Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries.Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.

Table of Contents

restricted access Download Full Book
  1. Cover
  2. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Title Page, Copyright
  2. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Contents
  2. pp. v-vii
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 1. Arresting Poetry: Kitsch, Totality, Expression
  2. pp. 1-17
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 2. Poetic Diction and the Substance of Kitsch
  2. pp. 18-39
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 3. Miscreant: Dialectics and the Persistence of the Commonplace
  2. pp. 40-61
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 4. The Spurious Progeny of Bare Nature
  2. pp. 62-72
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 5. Illiterature
  2. pp. 73-107
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 6. Queer Idylls: Imposture, Inversion, Unknowing
  2. pp. 108-133
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 7. Kitsching the Cantos: Totality, Fascism, and les Paradis Artificiels
  2. pp. 134-168
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 8. Junk: A Shopper’s Guide to Poetic Language (and the New York School)
  2. pp. 169-209
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 9. Inventing Clichés: The Lost Legacy of Baudelaire’s Muddy Halo
  2. pp. 210-230
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Afterword
  2. pp. 231-242
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Notes
  2. pp. 243-288
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Index
  2. pp. 289-301
  3. restricted access
    • PDF icon Download
Back To Top