ABSTRACT
Poets have always been professional observers. Surveillance, as both a physical practice and a philosophical concept, now occupies a fully fledged disciplinary field of its own. Not all poets responded to the growing ubiquity of surveillance in precisely the same ways. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book draws attention to the fact that the two share a central modus operandi: the human subject. It explains how the key to unlocking the meaning of suspicious poetic works was frequently contrived by the Bureau to suit specific political and ideological agendas. The book also discusses how the social, political and technological dimensions of modern American culture can be read together with the lyric as it evolved over the course of the twentieth century.
