Poetry and the Built Environment

Abstract

This new approach to criticism recognizes poetry as one among the many arts of the built environment. The premise is that poems are—like sculptures, paintings, gardens, and architecture—cultural artifacts designed for human bodies. The phrase “the flesh of art” signifies the sphere of interaction between our bodies and such artifacts; it signals the phenomenological nature of the approach. Providing models for the practical criticism of poems that are both phenomenologically alert and comparative across media, Poetry and the Built Environment: A Theory of the Flesh of Art demonstrates art’s ability to illuminate and alter our understandings and practices of spatiality, movement, sensation, emotion, genre, relation, and presence. A series of case studies explores a range of works by poets from Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton to Seamus Heaney and Tracy K. Smith and by sculptors and architects from Jean de Touyl and Nicholas Stone to Antonin Mercié and Kara Walker, discovering how art strives to develop the habitus of those who encounter it—how it offers to enflesh, acculturate, and orient us within social space. This book about poetics takes place, in short, at the juncture between aesthetics and politics. It concludes with 43 theses in manifesto. It includes 35 images and many whole poems. In poetry, it is argued, we see how, especially when the transparency and sensibleness of the world is under stress, art equips us with strategies for transformation.