The Poet's Freedom

The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making
by Susan Stewart

University of Chicago Press
Published November 2011
Cloth $75.00
ISBN: 9780226773865
Paper $22.50
ISBN: 9780226773872
E-book $7.00 to $22.50

Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making? And why is the artist, and particularly the poet, a figure of freedom in Western culture? The MacArthur Award–winning poet and critic Susan Stewart ponders these questions in The Poet’s Freedom. Through a series of evocative essays, she not only argues that freedom is necessary to making and is itself something made, but also shows how artists give rules to their practices and model a self-determination that might serve in other spheres of work.

Stewart traces the ideas of freedom and making through insightful readings of an array of Western philosophers and poets—Plato, Homer, Marx, Heidegger, Arendt, Dante, and Coleridge are among her key sources.