Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (E L S MONOGRAPH SERIES)

In pursuing Susan Howe s own writing through words of her literary predecessors, Collis ranges deep in and beyond the American archive s wilderness, catching sight of various elusive quarry: Charles Olson and Herman Melville; Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, and Margaret Fuller; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, James Clarence Mangan and William Shakespeare. At the heart of this are the simple literary exchanges embodied here in a selection of correspondence between Howe and Olson editor George Butterick that remind us that poets invariably find their poetry in other poets poetry, that the future is waiting for us in the past, and that no original or origin is ultimately possible.