Dr. Luke Carson

Luke Carson teaches modern and contemporary American poetry, which is also his main area of research. He is an Associate Director of the editorial board of the Marianne Moore Digital Archive and the Series Editor for the datebooks of Marianne Moore.

Selected Faculty publications

“‘Possible Meaning’: Marianne Moore’s Anagogical Reading of Rilke, Herbert, La Fontaine, and Hölderlin,” in Marianne Moore and the Archives, eds. Jeff Westover and Alison Fraser (forthcoming at Clemson UP).

“‘La plénitude du grand songe’: Ashbery, Rimbaud et la ‘vision’ de l’inconnu.” Parade sauvage: revue d’études rimbaldiennes 32 (2021): 213–251.

“‘The gods are never quite forgotten’: John Ashbery’s Heidegger.” The Poets and Heidegger, eds. Florian Grosser and Nassima Sahraoui (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021): 157–167. 

“‘The Malady of Ideality’: Mallarmé’s Igitur in John Ashbery’s ‘Fragment.’” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 59.1 (2017): 28-56.

"Learning to Read"
Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 45.1 (Spring 2012)
Co-edited with Heather Cass White, this special issue brings together essays on poets and poetry by Robert Baker, Bonnie Costello, Roger Gilbert, Fiona Green, Ellen Levy, Cristanne Miller, Susan Rosenbaum, Emily Setina, and Vernon Shetley.

(with Heather Cass White) "A Variety of Hero: Marianne Moore's Romance." Journal of Modern Literature 34.4 (Summer 2011): 63-83.

(with Heather Cass White) "Difficult Ground: Poetic Renunciation in Marianne Moore's 'Walking-Sticks and Paperweights and Watermarks.'" Twentieth-Century Literature 55.3 (Fall 2010): 1-30.

"'Your Majesty's Self is But a Ceremony': Laura (Riding) Jackson, Emerson, and the Conduct of Life." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 52.1 (Spring 2010): 1-30.
 
"'Render unto Caesura': Late Ashbery, Hoelderlin, and the Tragic." Contemporary Literature 49.2 (Summer 2008): 180-208.
 
"John Ashbery's Elizabeth Bishop." Twentieth-Century Literature 54.4 (Winter 2008): 448-471.
 
"James Merrill's Manners and Elizabeth Bishop's Dismay." Twentieth-Century Literature 50:2 (Summer 2004): 167-91.
 
"Dreams of Decorum: John Ashbery's Manners." Genre 36:1-2 (Spring-Summer 2003): 163-87.
 
"Republicanism and Leisure in Marianne Moore's Depression." MLQ 63:3 (September 2002): 315-42.
 
Hoelderlin and the Question of the Father

by Jean Laplanche, edited and translated by Luke Carson (ELS Editions 2007)

"First published in French in 1961, Jean Laplanche's Hoelderlin and the Question of the Father remains the single most important study of the relationship between the poet's literary production and the profound psychic distress to which he eventually succumbed. By following Lacan's hypothesis concerning the etiology of psychotic illness the theory of the foreclosure of the paternal signifier Laplanche is able to situate Hoelderlin's poetry at the place where in modernity the writer is compelled to struggle in new ways with fundamental questions concerning tradition, authorization, autonomy, originality, and the vitality or deadness of a language that is never simply one's own. Laplanche's study is finely tuned to the distinctive patterns of Hoelderlin's psychic life, above all in the period from 1794 to 1800 when his singular poetic voice was in the process of emerging. One must be grateful to Luke Carson for making this volume available to a new audience of readers." (Eric Santner, Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies, University of Chicago)

Consumption and Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound

New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.

The career of Ezra Pound has come to represent the political tendencies which, it has been claimed, are inherent to modernist aesthetics. But the political impulses of the modernists cannot be adequately represented by Pound's extreme positions; Pound's own political activities and commitments do not adequately articulate the contradictory attitudes and beliefs that made them possible. By contrasting Pound's politics to the political values and beliefs of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky during the Depression, this book argues that these three very different writers share a complex set of attitudes and beliefs which are grounded in a collective social fantasy corresponding to the rise of mass consumption and the emergence of corporate social forms.