The Poetics of Scale

Since the start of the twentieth century, poets have been irresistibly drawn to the image of the poem as a kind of data-handling, a way of mediating between the divergent scales of aesthetics and infrastructure, language and technology. Conrad Steel shows how the history of poetry—with its particular formal affordances, and the particular hopes and fears we invest it with—has always been bound up with our changing logistics of macroscale representation.  The Poetics of Scale takes us b