The Defective Art of Poetry: Sappho to Yeats

Treating the work of Sappho, Goethe, Blake, Hölderlin, Verlaine, George, Mörike, and Yeats in detail, Benjamin Bennett makes the provocative argument that the nature of lyric poetry in the West has an element of defectiveness. The book sets out to prove that using the idea of perfection, which is applied routinely as a criterion of excellence in lyric poems, is fundamentally misguided. Once poetry in the Western tradition is established as fundamentally imperfect, Bennett reveals it to be as deeply exposed to problems in the social and political environment as any other form of literature.