Poetry's Media

Anglophone modernist poetics set out to construct poems that were things just like the other things of the world. It was a project of recapturing solidity and objectivity for poetry. In consequence, it confronted with new urgency the question of poetry's media: it was forced to clarify what the raw material of a poem actually was. Because English exists in more than one material mode—it is "verbivocovisual"—most poets understood poetry to be a mixed art, and located the poetic principle at the intersection of language's discrete material substrata. This paper examines the answers given to the question of poetry's media by Charles Olson and William Wordsworth—answers framed, in both cases, in atmospheric, respiratory terms. From these two cases it sketches a media history of poetry as an aerial technology involving the transmission of breath. And it asks what implications our contemporary changing climate might have for this tradition of atmospheric poetics.