Objects Observed explores the central place given to the object by a number of poets in France and in America in the twentieth century. John C. Stout provides comprehensive examinations of Pierre Reverdy, Francis Ponge, Jean Follain, Guillevic, and Jean Tortel. Stout argues that the object furnishes these poets with a catalyst for creating a new poetics and for reflecting on lyric as a genre. In France, the object has been central to a broad range of aesthetic practices, from the era of Cubism and Surrealism to the 1990s. In the heyday of American Modernism, several major poets foregrounded the object in their work; however, in postwar twentieth-century America, poets moved away from a focus on the object. Objects Observed illuminates the variety of aesthetic practices and positions in French and American poets from the years of high Modernism (1909–1930) to the 1990s.

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"The focus of Stout’s analysis of modern poetry and the object is on the lyrical dimensions to the various types of elucubration written on both sides of the Atlantic, and with good English translations from the French in parallel, Objects Observed examines how poets envision the object, not least the human (and specifically male) body."