Cook demonstrates how to read poetry, how to go beyond an elementary approach to recover the sheer pleasure of good poems and how poems address and express historical, ethical and aesthetic questions, including matters of culture, identity and feminism. The focus is on modern poetry, although Milton, Wordsworth and Aristophanes are also covered.

The inertia of language, declares Geoffrey Hill, is also the coercive force of language. Good poets write against coercion, and Against Coercion is essentially about the power of words. Looking at our most highly organized form of words, poems, and how they work, it observes how that work speaks always indirectly to historical, ethical, and aesthetic questions, including matters of culture, identity, and feminism. It also demonstrates how to read poetry how to go beyond an elementary (and usually boring) approach, thereby recovering the sheer pleasure of good poems and resisting the coercion of language, that power of words to do ill. A study in advanced poetics, Against Coercion pays close attention to the intricate workings of poems, building larger claims on specific evidence and enjoying the praxis of master writers. The focus is on modern poets, from the early moderns (Stevens, Eliot) through to mid-century (Bishop) and recent (Merrill, Hill). Some chapters reach back to Milton, Wordsworth, and Aristophanes, however, while two even widen to encompass prose fiction.

Foreword
Introduction
Part I. Empire, War, Nation: 1. Eliot, Keynes, and Empire: The Waste Land
2. Schemes against coercion: Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Bishop, and others
3. Fables of war in Elizabeth Bishop
4. Faulkner, typology and black history in Go Down, Moses
5. A seeing and unseeing in the eye: Canadian literature and the sense of place
Part II. Culture and the Uses of memory: Allusion: 6. Questions of allusion
7. The language of scripture in Wordsworth's Prelude
8. The senses of Eliot's salvages
9. Wallace Stevens and the King James bible
10. Birds in paradise: revisions of a topos in Milton, Keats, Whitman, Stevens, and Ammons
Part III. Poetry at Play: 11. Melos versus logos, or, why doesn't God sing? Some thoughts on Milton's wisdom
12. The poetics of modern punning
Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and others
13. Riddles, charms, and fictions in Wallace Stevens
14. The function of riddles at the present time
15. The flying griphos: in pursuit of enigma from Aristophanes to Tournesol, with stops in Carroll, Ariosto, and Dante
Part IV. Practice: 16. Ghost rhymes and how they work
17. Methought as dream formula in Shakespeare
Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, and others
18. Reading a poem: on John Hollander's 'owl' 19. Teaching poetry: accurate songs, or thinking-in-poetry
Appendix
Notes
Indices
Acknowledgments.