American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens

Mark Noble is Assistant Professor of English at Georgia State University, where he teaches American literature and critical theory. He received his PhD from The Johns Hopkins University in 2009. Noble's essays have been published in American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Literature.

'… Mark Noble offers an impressive reading of the materialist imaginations of Walt Whitman (1819–92), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), George Santayana (1863–1952), Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), and other poets, philosophers, and scientists. … Noble's work represents a serious engagement and wrestling with materialist philosophies and American poetics … Noble presents a history of complex and fluid materialisms. Noble traces a complex subject, but he presents his argument with clarity - often previewing and re-summarizing his claims, and with humor … I recommend American Poetic Materialism to a range of scholars - from those interested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry to historians of physics and modern science to anyone engaged in the emerging critical conversations about materialism.' James M. Cochran, Nineteenth Century Studies Association

• 1. Intimate atomisms: toward a history of aporetic materialism; 2. Whitman's atom: sex and death in the 'wide flat space' of Leaves of Grass; 3. Emerson's atom: the matter of suffering; 4. Santayana's Lucretius: the chance for an ethical atomism; 5. Matter at the end of the mind: Stevens and the call for quantum poetics.