After completing his AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2012, Peter Riley was appointed Early Career Fellow in American Literature at the University of Oxford (2012-2014), and then Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Exeter (2014-Present). He has also held Fellowships at the Rothermere American Institute and Linacre College, Oxford. He is a co-founder of BrANCA (British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists), and co-organised the inaugural BrANCA symposium 'Aesthetics/Politics' (2013), as well as the third biennial symposium 'The Not Yet of the Nineteenth-Century U.S' (2017). He also organised the International Walt Whitman Week at Exeter in 2016.

Riley's thought-provoking study focuses on poets who "invert (and in Melville's case challenge) the idea that a poet requires a vocationally secure space or frame of mind in which to 'create'" (p.177). ... Summing up: Recommended.

• Introduction: Whitman's Wallpaper and Poetry's Archives of Distraction Part I: Walt Whitman, Brooklyn Property Speculator 1: Leaves of Grass and Real Estate 2: Whitman and the Transformations of Labor Part II: Herman Melville, Deputy Customs Inspector 3: Moby-Dick and the Shadows of The Poet 4: Billy Budd and Melville's Retirement Part III: Hart Crane, Junior Copywriter 5: Classical Modernism and Impersonal Poetic Labor 6: Making Ends Meet: Hart Crane's Job Coda: Why I am not talking about Frank O'Hara

After completing his AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2012, Peter Riley was appointed Early Career Fellow in American Literature at the University of Oxford (2012-2014), and then Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Exeter (2014-Present). He has also held Fellowships at the Rothermere American Institute and Linacre College, Oxford. He is a co-founder of BrANCA (British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists), and co-organised the inaugural BrANCA symposium 'Aesthetics/Politics' (2013), as well as the third biennial symposium 'The Not Yet of the Nineteenth-Century U.S' (2017). He also organised the International Walt Whitman Week at Exeter in 2016.

Riley's thought-provoking study focuses on poets who "invert (and in Melville's case challenge) the idea that a poet requires a vocationally secure space or frame of mind in which to 'create'" (p.177). ... Summing up: Recommended.

• Introduction: Whitman's Wallpaper and Poetry's Archives of Distraction Part I: Walt Whitman, Brooklyn Property Speculator 1: Leaves of Grass and Real Estate 2: Whitman and the Transformations of Labor Part II: Herman Melville, Deputy Customs Inspector 3: Moby-Dick and the Shadows of The Poet 4: Billy Budd and Melville's Retirement Part III: Hart Crane, Junior Copywriter 5: Classical Modernism and Impersonal Poetic Labor 6: Making Ends Meet: Hart Crane's Job Coda: Why I am not talking about Frank O'Hara

After completing his AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2012, Peter Riley was appointed Early Career Fellow in American Literature at the University of Oxford (2012-2014), and then Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Exeter (2014-Present). He has also held Fellowships at the Rothermere American Institute and Linacre College, Oxford. He is a co-founder of BrANCA (British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists), and co-organised the inaugural BrANCA symposium 'Aesthetics/Politics' (2013), as well as the third biennial symposium 'The Not Yet of the Nineteenth-Century U.S' (2017). He also organised the International Walt Whitman Week at Exeter in 2016.

Riley's thought-provoking study focuses on poets who "invert (and in Melville's case challenge) the idea that a poet requires a vocationally secure space or frame of mind in which to 'create'" (p.177). ... Summing up: Recommended.

• Introduction: Whitman's Wallpaper and Poetry's Archives of Distraction Part I: Walt Whitman, Brooklyn Property Speculator 1: Leaves of Grass and Real Estate 2: Whitman and the Transformations of Labor Part II: Herman Melville, Deputy Customs Inspector 3: Moby-Dick and the Shadows of The Poet 4: Billy Budd and Melville's Retirement Part III: Hart Crane, Junior Copywriter 5: Classical Modernism and Impersonal Poetic Labor 6: Making Ends Meet: Hart Crane's Job Coda: Why I am not talking about Frank O'Hara