Back to Results
Cover image of My Silver Planet
Cover image of My Silver Planet
Share this Title:

My Silver Planet

A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch

Daniel Tiffany

Publication Date
Binding Type

Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century.

Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of...

Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century.

Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries.

Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist "paradise" inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and "plastic" art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.

Reviews

Reviews

Tiffany is persuasive in arguing that the now ubiquitous idea of 'kitsch' originates in poetry, poetic language, and the articulated views of many players in the greater culture... The value of the book lies in application: understanding the origins of poetic 'kitsch' allows one to understand elite culture better and to use that knowledge as a link between elite culture and vernacular culture.

My Silver Planet offers a thrilling new way to read poetry from the past two hundred years.

A strength of Tiffany’s book as a whole is that its history of the relationship of lyric poetry and kitsch from graveyard gothic to Pound reveals the pleasures and anxieties of an art forever seeking to justify its artifices in a natural authority, whether in the rhythms of labor, the rhythms of the sexual body, an essentialism of blood or land, or a totalitarian politics.

Written with great verve, this lively successor to Infidel Poetics explores kitsch as a bridge between elite and vernacular poetics, exposing the historical role of poetry in the thinking of kitsch, from the ballad revival and forgeries of the eighteenth century to Pound and New York School poets. Tiffany’s irreverent challenge to modernist critique of kitsch generates a new story about the development of modern poetry.

Daniel Tiffany’s My Silver Planet is the most exciting and original book on poetry, indeed one of the most exciting scholarly books on anything, I have read in years. Tiffany’s energy, innovation, ambition, and eloquence are exemplary, as are his vertiginous powers of explication and his negative capability. The book is both convincing and startling.

See All Reviews
About

Book Details

Table of Contents

1. Arresting Poetry
Unpopular Pop
Missing Verses
Bogus
Twice Made
Mass Ornament
2. Poetic Diction and the Substance of Kitsch
Dreams, Mottos, Gossip
Chatter and Virtuosity
Phraseology
Morbid Animation
3

1. Arresting Poetry
Unpopular Pop
Missing Verses
Bogus
Twice Made
Mass Ornament
2. Poetic Diction and the Substance of Kitsch
Dreams, Mottos, Gossip
Chatter and Virtuosity
Phraseology
Morbid Animation
3. Miscreant
Doppelgänger
Synthetic Vernaculars
Poetry vs. Literature
Commonplace
Lyric Fatality
Thieves' Latin
4. The Spurious Progeny of Bare Nature
Balladry and the Burden of Popular Culture
Exploded Beings and After-Poets
Live Burial
5. Illiterature
Refrain
Lullaby Logic
The Cult of Simplicity
Pets, Trifles, Toys
Gothic Verse and Melodrama
Silver Proxy
6. Queer Idylls
Topologies of Privacy
Reliques
Poetaster
Kitsch, Camp, and Homo-fascism
1800 Words
Poison
7. Kitsching the Cantos
Vortex and Cream Puff
Contraband
The Kitsch of Apocalypse
Epic, Rhapsody, Seizure
Bad Infinity
Ethnofascist Souvenirs
8. Junk
Thermofax
Dada Kitsch
After After-Poets
Coterie and Melodrama
The Metaphysics of Kitsch
9. Inventing Clichés
Plastic Poetry
Liar, Liar
Afterword
In the Poisonous Candy Factory
Counterfeit Capital
Notes
Index

Author Bio
Daniel Tiffany
Featured Contributor

Daniel Tiffany

Daniel Tiffany is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of nine books of poetry and literary theory, including Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance and Neptune Park. He has also published translations of texts by Sophocles and the Italian poet Cesare Pavese, as well as Georges Bataille’s pornographic tale, Madame...