poetry & commons: postwar and romantic lyric in times of enclosure

Winner of the ASLE-UKI Book Prize 2023.

The commons and enclosure are among the most vital ways of thinking about poetry today, posing urgent ecological and political questions about land and resource ownership and use. Poetry & Commons is the first study to read postwar and contemporary poetry through this lens, by putting it in dialogue with the Romantic experience of agrarian dispossession. Employing an innovative transhistorical structure, the bookdemonstrates how radical Anglophone poetries since 1960 have returned to the ’enclosure of the commons’ in response to political and ecological crises. It identifies a ’commons turn’ in contemporary lyric that contests the new enclosures of globalized capital and resource extraction. In lucid close readings of a rich field of experimental poetries associated with the ’British Poetry Revival’, as well as from Canada and the United States, it analyses a landscape poetics of enclosure in relationship with Romantic verse. Canonical Romantic poetry by Wordsworth and Clare is understood through the fine-grain textures of the period’s vernacular and radical verse and discourse around enclosure, which the book demonstrates contain the seeds of neoliberal political economy. Engaging with the work of Anne-Lise François and Anna Tsing, Poetry & Commons theorizes commoning as marking out subsistence ’rhythms of resource’, which articulate plural, irregular, and tentative relations between human and nonhuman lifeworlds.

Daniel Eltringham is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English at the University of Sheffield.