My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch

Hopkins Studies in Modernism

by Daniel Tiffany

Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century. 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. Tiffany argues that the ballad revival―the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture―sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.

312 pages, Hardcover

First published November 23, 2013

About the author

Daniel Tiffany is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, including Privado (Action Books, 2010), Neptune Park (Omnidawn, 2013), and his most recent volume, Cry Baby Mystic, along with chapbooks from Oystercatcher Press and Noemi. In addition, Tiffany has been instrumental in the projects of BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP, including its celebrated first book, The Work-Shy, published in the Wesleyan Poetry Series in 2016. His poems have also appeared in journals such as Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, jubilat, Lana Turner, Fence, Bomb, Chicago Review, Brooklyn Rail, and many others. In addition, five volumes of his literary criticism—Toy Medium and Infidel Poetics, among them--have been published by presses including Harvard and Johns Hopkins, as well as the University of Chicago and the University of California. Tiffany is the author of the entry on “Lyric Poetry” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature. Apart from his own writing, he has published translations from French, Greek, and Italian writers. He is a recipient of the Berlin Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Berlin.

Reviews

[Jee Koh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subtitle delivers what it promises: a secret history of poetry and kitsch. We look at kitsch differently when we see it as originating from controversies and scandals about poetry during the rise of popular culture in the eighteenth century, and not just with reference to the visual arts and material culture in the twentieth century. We also look at poetry differently when we see how entangled with kitsch elite poetry was, and still is, despite Wordsworthian attempts to purify the language of tribe, and Modernist efforts to denounce kitsch and switch attention from diction to form. As a poet, I'm rather more interested in looking at poetry differently, and this volume casts new light on, finds a thread through many apparently different lots of poets: the renovators and falsifiers of the ballad revival in the eighteenth century, the Shenstone and the Walpole sets, Baudelaire, Ezra Pound, the first and second generations of the New York School, and five twentieth-century American poets who worked the poetics of kitsch critically, John Wieners, Barbara Guest, Frederick Seidel, Djuna Barnes, and Jack Spicer. My Silver Planet is a scintillating work of literary scholarship and cultural criticism.

[M · Rating 2 out of 5]

read for class, nothing in the book convinced me that this is worth writing