Taming the chaos

What is the nature of poetic language? This topic has been the subject of debate among scholars, poets, and critics for centuries, and continues to be a notoriously thorny issue today. Taming the Chaos traces this subject, for the first time, from the Renaissance through the present in chapters on Elizabethan times, Neoclassicism, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Romantic and Victorian periods, Matthew Arnold, Pater, Eliot, and others. In an effort to define the mysterious and attractive power of poetic discourse, Emerson R. Marks undertakes a comparative evaluative exposition of successive attempts to explain the phenomenon. He presents these attempts chronologically, and then distills crucial and therefore recurrent themes.