Bakhtin and the social moorings of poetry

"Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895-1975) is very likely the most influential theorist of human communication in the past century. Bakhtin is also one of our best defenders of the novel as a literary form. His strong reservation about the single voice of lyric poetry, by comparison with the polyphonic novel, cannot be denied. But his reasons for thinking this can be explained, and his own productive terms (utterance, dialogue, heteroglossia) can be used to reach a more accurate account of the social moorings of poetry."

"This book rescues Bakhtin from his overstatements concerning poetry, and gives the theoretical and practical basis for reading poems with the help of Bakhtin's categories of utterance, heteroglossia, and dialogue. In addition, through this rescue, the book offers a modest but strong foundation for a reading of poetry, and indeed of all literary texts, where a clash of social positions is fought out on the territory of the utterance. To find a believable poetics of social forms is the order of the day, and Donald Wesling's admiring and yet skeptical revision of Bakhtin will be part of the explanation we need."--Jacket.