Daniel Tiffany's "My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch"

The subtitle delivers what it promises: a secret history of poetry and kitsch. We look at kitsch differently when we see it as originating from controversies and scandals about poetry during the rise of popular culture in the eighteenth century, and not just with reference to the visual arts and material culture in the twentieth century. We also look at poetry differently when we see how entangled with kitsch elite poetry was, and still is, despite Wordsworthian attempts to purify the language of tribe, and Modernist efforts to denounce kitsch and switch attention from diction to form. As a poet, I'm rather more interested in looking at poetry differently, and this volume casts new light on, finds a thread through many apparently different lots of poets: the renovators and falsifiers of the ballad revival in the eighteenth century, the Shenstone and the Walpole sets, Baudelaire, Ezra Pound, the first and second generations of the New York School, and five twentieth-century American poets who worked the poetics of kitsch critically, John Wieners, Barbara Guest, Frederick Seidel, Djuna Barnes, and Jack Spicer. My Silver Planet is a scintillating work of literary scholarship and cultural criticism.