Steven Corcoran is the editor and translator of Alain Badiou's Polemics (Verso, 2006) and Jacques Ranciere's Hatred of Democracy (Verso, 2007). He is currently completing his doctoral studies in Continental Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Jacques Ranciere taught at the University of Paris VIII, France, from 1969 to 2000, occupying the Chair of Aesthetics and Politics from 1990 until his retirement.

‘[The author] seeks—through several intricate, close readings—to reinterpret the poet as one whose complexity lent light and lightness to a civilization deprived of spiritual and monarchic anchors.'—Choice Magazine

• Foreword; 1. The Foam of Verse; i. The White Preoccupation; 2. The Poetics of Mystery; i. The Terms of Mystery; ii. The Scene of Dream; iii. From Nothingness to Nothing; iv. Method of Fiction; v. The Fan's Poem; 3. Hymns of the Spiritual Chorus; i. The Religion of the Century; ii. Two Theses on Divinity; iii. The Poet and the Worker; iv. Musical Religion; v. Wagner the God: Poem, Music and Politics; 4. The Duty of the Book; i. The Poem as Thought: A Secular History; ii. Music, Dance, Poem: The Circle of 'Mimesis'; iii. The Authentic Page; Selection of Texts; Index.