My Silver Planet Hopkins Studies in Modernism

the long version

"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." -- Publisher's description.