ABSTRACT
The introduction to this study provides a discussion of the general thesis of this book: that the idea of aesthetic autonomy, far from being apolitical, emerges from political crises and is posed as a solution to those crises. Poets whose work is informed by the idea of autonomy have used it as a way of addressing the challenges posed by their particular circumstances, whether those be challenges of class, of the status of writers, of evolving legal and commercial circumstances for writing, of the political demands of decolonization, of the representation of queer sexuality, or of the writer’s relation to the demands of productive labor in industrial and postindustrial society.
