The Title to the Poem

The Title to the Poem is a theoretical, critical, and historical exploration of the traditions for titling shorter poems by British and American poets from the beginnings of printing to the present. The first six chapters are distinguished according to the nature of the question a reader might ask about the poem, which the title purports to answer. Who gives the title? Who has the title? Who "says" the poem? Who "hears" the poem? What genre does the poem belong to? What is the poem "about"? There are complex relationships between what titles purport to tell and what they actually tell, and this is true not only of titles so worded that they demand interpretation, but also of those that appear straightforward. Though the choice of examples aims at range and variety, certain British and American poets have been exceptionally influential in their contributions to the course of titling in English, so their work receives special and repeated attention here. These poets have not only been unusually innovative in modifying traditional title forms or inventing new ones, but have brought into focus fundamental issues of titling by the nature of their experiments. They are Jonson, Wordsworth, Browning, Whitman, Hardy, Frost, Williams, Stevens, Auden, and, in our time, Ashbery.