ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes the conditions under which a poetics of surveillance can be said to have emerged. It provides two distinct yet interdependent histories: first, a history of the relationship between surveillance, poetry and subjectivity from the early modern period to the present and, second, a history of the technological, administrative and ideological development of American surveillance from the end of World War I to the mid-1960s. It establishes three key points necessary for understanding the technical and conceptual overlapping of lyric poetry and surveillance: both centre on visualisation, intensify subjectivity and resist direct identification. It then moves into a more detailed discussion of the poetry itself, focusing on key themes that characterise the relationship between lyric poetry and surveillance in the twentieth century in America.
