Levity of Design: Man and Modernity in the Poetry of J. H. Prynne

How can poetry embrace morality through focusing on metaphrasts? What is the relation between an allummette and the alpha rhythm? Why is it that money has turned into a metonym of goodness and success? And above all, is it still possible to think of the human subject as a viable category in late modernity? These are some of the questions that J. H. Prynne’s poetry addresses. Levity of Design voices a critique of present-day society very much from within, and seeks to demonstrate how Prynne has contrived to single-handedly overcome the impasse created by the legacy of poststructuralism. In a milieu of avant-garde linguistic experiment developed from the modernist techniques of Pound and Olson, but also from the early Eliot as well as Velimir Khlebnikov, and against the background of the writings of Heidegger and Adorno, these poems develop a language in which the notion of man can be restituted.