Lives of the Poets: Poetry & Biography
Études anglaises 66.4 (2013)

Starting from the remark that poetry and biography have simultaneously undergone a comparative decline during the last century, this article proposes to investigate some of the common causes of this double phenomenon in the history of literature. Apart from the often evoked ideological reasons sustaining a doctrine of literary theory that radically turned its back on the biographic approaches of the nineteenth century, this paper dwells at greater length on the fact that poets themselves have concurred to promote a dogma of impersonality, which has developed essentially in American and French academic criticism, and may well have severely uprooted poetry itself. The following diachronic study is an apology for reconsidering biographic approaches to poetry and literature as a means towards renewed exchanges between literary science and other scientific disciplines.

Joanny Moulin
“Lives of the Poets”: Poetry and Biography

Jeremy Elprin
“[T]he Life which was, as it were, already written”: Biographizing Epistolary Keats

Laurent Folliot
“Points have we all of us where all stand single”: Wordsworth’s Impersonal Autobiography

Stéphanie Noirard
Iain Crichton Smith’s A Life: The Poeisis of a Self in “Differance

Neil J. Roberts
What Is Literary Biography For? Reflections of a Biographer and Critic

Carle Bonafous-Murat
Autobiography or Case Study? Rethinking Ciaran Carson’s Poetry in the Light of Hypermnesia

Cyril Vettorato
Transubstantiating the Intimate: The Role of Autobiographical Elements in the Poetry of Kamau Brathwaite

Marc Porée
Poets’ Lives in Motion (Pictures)

Joanny Moulin
Bibliography